flâneur

Ben Cuan

1 followers · 1 following · 934 views

on the atlas — 45

highlights — 61

  • There’s this design heuristic that if people cut across the grass, you should pave the shortcut they make. This gives the path a lovely human fit. But sometimes you want to do the opposite. You want to design ways to get people to take a longer path, a longcut, so they can see or do things they’d miss otherwise.
    On shortcuts and longcuts - by Henrik Karlsson
  • Against these pressures, the act of walking might indeed prove revolutionary because it will afford us an experience of an alternative way of being in the world, one that honors the properly human scale of our experience.
    The Ambling Mind - by L. M. Sacasas - The Convivial Society
  • There’s this design heuristic that if people cut across the grass, you should pave the shortcut they make. This gives the path a lovely human fit. But sometimes you want to do the opposite. You want to design ways to get people to take a longer path, a longcut, so they can see or do things they’d miss otherwise.
    On shortcuts and longcuts - by Henrik Karlsson
  • Regardless of how we learn, the point is to never stop. Never stop moving, never stop learning. Matthew Dicks calls it incrementalism: “the understanding that small changes, repeated over time, will yield enormous results.”2 “Pick something and start moving in that direction because it’s way easier to change direction when you’re moving than when you’re static.” Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
    The Quest for Endogenous Growth - by Iris - Midday Musings
  • While that is true, an equally, if not more, important market is the HENRY—“high earners, not yet rich.” These are often younger people in their twenties and early thirties who are earning six figures, but don’t yet have much in accumulated savings, nor many financial responsibilities and investments
    Making Sense of Irrational Consumerism - by Iris
  • Social media has increased our ability to signal and our exposure to signaling. It’s a positive feedback loop: other people signaling causes us to be more insecure, which encourages us to purchase more loud luxury goods and show it off, which makes other people insecure.
    Making Sense of Irrational Consumerism - by Iris
  • However, there is the reality that we’re all busy and it’s hard to keep up social engagements and all things indie while living in a capitalist society.
    The case against convenience - by Iris - Midday Musings
  • First, a caveat: I believe that not all ventures are worth scaling. Especially when it has to do with relationships, which should not be viewed as transactional. There’s value in intimacy and authenticity, like the backyard dinners that 222 started as.
    The case against convenience - by Iris - Midday Musings
  • When I write, I push myself to make definite positive claims. Ambiguity allows thought to remain fluid on the page, floating into a different meaning when put under pressure. This makes it harder to push your thinking deeper. By making clear and sharp claims, I reveal my understanding so that I—or the person I’m writing to—can see the state of my knowledge and direct their feedback to the point where it will help my thinking improve.
    How to think in writing - by Henrik Karlsson
  • The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life, your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.
    Codus Operandi
  • life is just better when you can trace lines between the facets of your life and call them constellations.
    three hundred letters - by nikhil - Splash
  • Ah yes. Writing. Life. When? Where? How? That’s the problem. You can have a life or you can do some writing, but not both at once, because although life may be the subject of writing, it is also the enemy.
    “When? Where? How?” Margaret Atwood Considers the Burning Questions of the Writing Life ‹ Literary Hub
  • That respect for humanistic learning will return. But only after the humanities demonstrate their power and worth in the world. And the time for that to happen is right now.
    The Real Crisis in Humanities Isn't Happening at College
  • A job at a big company is like high fructose corn syrup: it has some of the qualities of things you're meant to like, but is disastrously lacking in others.
    You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
  • Somewhere in my mind I had, for a long time, the belief that earning money, particularly above and beyond what I needed to live, fundamentally involved scamming people.
    What I talk about when I talk about money – Autotranslucence
  • the boring daily process is actually so much more nourishing than the shiny yet unpredictable outcome.
    Show your work - by Rosie Spinks
  • Having a place where I can tie all these threads together makes me pay closer attention to the world as I move through it. It just makes life more interesting.
    Show your work - by Rosie Spinks
  • Having a place where I can tie all these threads together makes me pay closer attention to the world as I move through it. It just makes life more interesting.
    Show your work - by Rosie Spinks
  • We’ve come through 75 years where having neighbors was essentially optional: if you had a credit card, you could get everything you needed to survive dropped off at your front door. But the next 75 years aren’t going to be like that; we’re going to need to return to the basic human experience of relying on the people around you. We’re going to need to rediscover that we’re a social species, which for Americans will be hard.
    The friendship problem - by Rosie Spinks
  • We won’t be able to achieve the things we want on platforms run by dudes interested in VC money and endless growth. Or at least I won’t be able to. I guess it depends on what you want. If you want attention, you could get that. If you want money, you could even get that. But at this stage in the elite capture process Substack may never provide with you enough money to quit your day job, or enough attention to parlay subscribers into a book deal like Rayne Fisher-Quann. That said, the hope of achieving your goals is always higher if you know what they are, so ask yourself: What am I doing here?
    The elite capture of Substack - by Cydney Hayes
  • Building something new would be “a worldmaking project, aimed at building and rebuilding actual structures of social connection and movement, rather than the mere critique of ones we already have.” In other words, we can’t just rearrange the furniture inside rooms we don’t like the shape of; we have to build entirely new rooms in better shapes.
    The elite capture of Substack - by Cydney Hayes
  • People like to say that lives on social media look unattainable and perfect, but whenever I see something that’s beautifully curated all I can see is the sweat: the money expended, the surgery and fillers, the workouts, the interior designers, the carefully selected objects, the hours spent setting up and filming and taking photos. I think the effort is what’s most interesting.
    effort - by Ava - bookbear express
  • So many high-achieving people get trapped into obsessing about the external world and neglecting their internal world.
    not disappointing myself - by Ava - bookbear express
  • fact that any image or video could be AI-generated means that realism is no longer a marker of authenticity.
    AI safety is not a model property
  • that reminds me of a quotation by Ted Chiang—“Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us.”
    🍀 Dating Your (Potential) Executioner
  • My prediction may be too early, but I think it is directionally correct. The centrality of the internet in our lives will fade.
    The End of the Extremely Online Era - by Thomas J Bevan
  • This is the way it goes- things appear to stay static for years and years and then everything changes all at once
    The End of the Extremely Online Era - by Thomas J Bevan
  • A blog post is a search query. You write to find your tribe; you write so they will know what kind of fascinating things they should route to your inbox.
    A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox
  • We should try a lot of things and a lot of them will fail, but we shouldn’t not try just because some are going to, because we don’t know ahead of time which are going to work and which aren’t.
    Kernel | Editor’s Note
  • There’s almost nothing preventing us from creating online communities that are more firmly rooted in place. The same infrastructure that enables connection across oceans can connect people who live right next door to one another, and reap similar or magnified benefits for everyone by doing so. There’s no reason why these online communities can’t thrive at multiple scales simultaneously, either; how culture and politics evolve in San Francisco and Oakland can translate to Accra and Hong Kong. That balance (and tension) between the local and global is an essential theme of our modern world.
    Searching For My City - by Humphrey Obuobi - Reboot
  • I write like the 12 dollar desk salad, the bar that packs 20 grams of protein and plastic into one 200-calorie brick. But good writing, like a good meal, needs fat. It should indulge readers, is meant to be chewed and enjoyed, affording a generous escape from the prosaic and mundane.
    🌻 audience of one - half-baked futures | jasmine sun
  • Instead here's the thing they did: Passionately launch into an ambitious public-facing project.
    The Rabbit Hole 🕳🐇 issue no.45 - by Patricia
  • An ideal is emerging for me, a triad of types of work: The work you do to get paid, the life maintenance tasks like laundry, and the creative things you do for you. The economy-oriented work, the basic needs work, and the soul work, each of which brings something different to a full life.
    The Rabbit Hole 🕳🐇 issue no.45 - by Patricia
  • “In the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.”
    Opinion | The A.I. Economy Will Make Jobs More Human - The New York Times
  • POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like social media silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content.
    POSSE - IndieWeb
  • Having the key principles that govern your site in one place means that any user who visits does not need to read through the archives of your site or speak with you to understand what mattered most to you when you constructed your site.
    colophon - IndieWeb
  • While we typically scroll in isolation through context-collapsing timelines, the Chinese handscroll was social media in a different sense. It was meant to be viewed collectively in small groups, perhaps during an evening of drinking and discussion. Viewers would experience the painting like a panorama, unspooling from right to left. If you’ve ever encountered a handscroll painting in a museum, you’ve likely seen it laid out in full, but this completely defies the way they were designed to be seen: unrolled slowly, one section coming into view at a time and then disappearing, akin to a tracking…
    There’s an Alternative to the Infinite Scroll | WIRED
  • It is the redirection of energy from inefficient stagnating systems towards new, informed, intelligent, coordinated, growing, changing, mutually-beneficial positive-sum and efficient systems
    [non-paywalled issue] The Rabbit Hole 🕳🐇 issue no.34
  • The computer of the future is not a product, but a place.
    Dynamicland
  • ‘‘Passion for the road,’ as I’ve come to understand it, is a unique mood or motivation with which one approaches being ‘on the road’ and the specific style that they bring. For my father, it has everything to do with freedom, also possibility; who you might meet and what you might find out there.
    Notes on Roadtrips
  • I think when we talk about “networked communities” that’s one of the ideas we’re getting at: that we can be part of multiple communities at once, with shared, partially overlapping sets of interests.
    Weaving a public web, or, why don’t I blog more? – Brendan Schlagel
  • It strikes me there are a few flavors of epistemic uncertainty for the blogger. Roughly, these might be: Uncertainty of purpose: what is this even about? Am I writing for me or for others? Will I achieve anything by writing this? Uncertainty of effort: how much commitment required? How much time, thought, energy? Blogging can seen unbounded, intimidating… Uncertainty of reception: will anyone read or care? Will it resonate, or endure in any perceivable way? Barring that, might it even start an interesting conversation?
    Weaving a public web, or, why don’t I blog more? – Brendan Schlagel
  • Technology is a human act. There is no secret software or innovation that will move us there. Just a history of how we exist, evolve, and occupy space.
    There is an internet that is mine & I would like you to live in it with me - Chia's Blog
  • It was in this time that the internet felt closest to a medium for connection, rather than the sole place where connection was transacted in itself.
    There is an internet that is mine & I would like you to live in it with me - Chia's Blog
  • History is how you debug our broken society. Many billions of dollars are spent on history in the engineering world. We don’t think about it that way, though. We call it doing a post-mortem, looking over the log files, maybe running a so-called time-travel debugger to get a reproducible bug.
    Prologue | The Network State
  • The Network State in One Sentence In one informal sentence: A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.
    The Network State in One Sentence | The Network State
  • I want to build a world where psychological and emotional well-being are just as important as our physical well-being. I want to catalyze cultures of introspection and agency, normalizing turning towards our suffering with loving kindness as the answer to setting ourselves free. I want to empower ambitious people to fuel their greatest aspirations from a foundation of wholeness and security. I want to shift our relationship with work from an exercise in wealth and status accumulation to acts of self-expression. I want to reimagine what human progress looks like.
    More Myself is getting a glow up - by Cissy Hu
  • But sometimes life is entirely impartial to what you want to learn, or what you identify as a student of. It teaches you what you need to learn.
    life as a classroom - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • At that instant, everything changed. Mac users no longer had to forfeit the ability to collaborate with the Windows users, who accounted for 95 percent of the computing world, as a condition of using an Apple product. Instead, they attained seamless interoperability—their files Just Worked for Windows users, and Windows users’ files Just Worked for them.
    How Big Tech Got So Damn Big | WIRED
  • None of this prose is good, none of it is really socially useful, but there’s demand for it. Ironically, the more bullshit there is, the more bullshit filters there are, and this requires still more bullshit to overcome it.
    Pluralistic: How plausible sentence generators are changing the bullshit wars (07 Sept 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow