flâneur

Sophie L.

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on the atlas — 45

highlights — 43

  • Like, I went to a pretty good high school. Nobody told us to live in a community. I went to a pretty good college. Nobody told us to live in a community. I've watched some pretty good Hollywood movies. None of them teach you to live in a community.
    Sabbath hard and go home | Compass Rose
  • You can read a book on the Sabbath (which was not allowed at the meditation retreat), and engage with your whole mind, so long as you do not take notes. So long as you do not try to produce some useful artifact, for your future self to pick up and run with.
    Sabbath hard and go home | Compass Rose
  • If you do not assume like a modern consumerist that work is what you do for money, and leisure is what you spend money on, then what is work? It is the activity of producing or maintaining the artifacts necessary for the ongoing production of sustenance. It is the activity of keeping up with reality.
    Sabbath hard and go home | Compass Rose
  • But you can imagine things going a bit further (and they will). Let’s say I want to see a video of how to fix something on my bike. The video doesn’t exist, but the information does. AI-assisted generative search could theoretically find that information somewhere online—in a user manual buried in a company’s website, for example—and create a video to show me exactly how to do what I want, just as it could explain that to me with words today.
    AI is weaving itself into the fabric of the internet with generative search | MIT Technology Review
  • and introduce a model into all that.
    AI is weaving itself into the fabric of the internet with generative search | MIT Technology Review
  • These are the kinds of things that start to happen when you put the entire compendium of human knowledge
    AI is weaving itself into the fabric of the internet with generative search | MIT Technology Review
  • How feminism ends by Ginevra Davis
    matrimony - by Molly Mielke - Milky
  • When we use a good tool—a hammer, a paintbrush, a pair of skis, or a car steering wheel—we become one with the tool in a subconscious way. We can enter a flow state, apply muscle memory, achieve fine control, and maybe even produce creative or artistic output. Chat will never feel like driving a car, no matter how good the bot is.
    Malleable software in the age of LLMs
  • So, whenever you encounter a piece of media -- words or images or music or anything representational -- no matter how many levels of imitation or expansion it's been through, you're still hearing some distant signal from its originator. And its originator probably feels ripped off and undervalued.
    Naming the Nameless - LessWrong
  • creators feel defrauded by expanders, and the core of modern capitalism is superpowered expanders
    Naming the Nameless - LessWrong
  • Anyway, you might have been trained in school to falsify your preferences by pretending to have fun doing stupid activities. So you could try to do the opposite of everything you'd do in school.
    Please don't throw your mind away — LessWrong
  • Nerdsniping" is where someone else crafts a puzzle that catches your attention. That can be fun and good, but to my taste, it tends to have a flavor of being a bit too cute or clever. I want to point instead at something that involves eternity and elegance.
    Please don't throw your mind away — LessWrong
  • He goes on to discuss several problems for which there are no technical solutions, since rational actors will drive the system toward destruction via competition: The tragedy of the commons develops in this way.
    Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI
  • Which, when you’ve agonized to scrape together a measly 3% improvement, feels like crap. If you’re burdened with such social anxiety that it takes literally everything you have to go out in public for twenty minutes, make one awkward small talk, and then retreat home to collapse in embarrassment, you think, “Well, this isn’t worth it.” But most self-improvement isn’t immediate improvement, my friend. It’s compound interest.
    Is Rationalist Self-Improvement Real? – PUTANUMONIT
  • We are still grappling with what it means to purchase emotions. Injecting the constraints of capitalism into companionship feels like it diminishes the majesty of the human experience. Companionships as a product moves us deeper into the objectification that social media and dating apps already encourage. Worse, the only capital required from these chatbots is fiscal, not emotional. They exist solely to please, and will completely conform themselves to your whims—in contrast to a real relationship, which pushes and stretches you with its demands. Social media platforms like TikTok already prov…
    The Horny Truth About AI Chatbots
  • I have touched before on the idea that a rationalist must have something they value more than "rationality": The Art must have a purpose other than itself, or it collapses into infinite recursion. But do not mistake me, and think I am advocating that rationalists should pick out a nice altruistic cause, by way of having something to do, because rationality isn't all that important by itself. No. I am asking: Where do rationalists come from? How do we acquire our powers?
    Something to Protect — LessWrong
  • But I find the overly sensitive, we-don’t-have-to-do-hard-things counter-narrative grating in its own way.
    #95: Are you a baby? A litmus test - by Haley Nahman
  • In two months, I will accidentally press my finger to a 450-degree pan, and the pain that follows—acute, severe, but lacking sharpness—invites a flash of recognition.
    #173: My birth story - by Haley Nahman - Maybe Baby
  • It’s easy to point at something and diagnose it as structural without going into any further detail about how that structure actually operates, or even what it means to say that something is structural. Sometimes, this analysis goes no further than, “it’s all society, man!”
    "There Is No Moral Imperative to Be Miserable"
  • All this terror because of all this beauty. All this just to have something worthwhile to ruin.
    home for the holidays - by rayne fisher-quann
  • Sometimes I feel illuminated in the glow of other people’s love, warmer for being around it even when it’s not directed at me, soft and half-awake and responsible for nothing like a child sleeping on the couch at the end of a grown-up party.
    home for the holidays - by rayne fisher-quann
  • I have felt so much grief at the end of so much love that all of my love has started to feel like the beginning of grief.
    home for the holidays - by rayne fisher-quann
  • perfectly square morsels of visual text, single lines wrenched without mercy from their original artistic contexts, meant to help me microdose catharsis without having to stomach the full weight of anyone else’s grief
    home for the holidays - by rayne fisher-quann
  • there is something so fundamentally life changing, and, in many ways, revolutionary, about not dissociating. Like, about being fully in touch with your body and your mind and everything around you.
    manic pixie dream world - by rayne fisher-quann
  • And we can appreciate that people who are highly sensitive also have a proclivity to be immensely miserable in periods of their life. But the key is just knowing that that’s not the whole thing. That sadness is not the thing that should feel like a contribution to the world in and of itself. It's a subset of this larger, beautiful and connective thing. It’s so much better to expand into identifying as a sensitive person versus closing in on accepting that you are an incurably sad person.
    manic pixie dream world - by rayne fisher-quann
  • And sensitive people are often the people that experience supreme sadness. We're talking about how quickly all these things can tumble into nihilism, but sensitivity is also what keeps us perceptive and caring and engaged and involved.
    manic pixie dream world - by rayne fisher-quann
  • And I definitely was like in my Manic Pixie Dream Slut era for a really long time, in a way that provided me some comfortable distance from myself. Because I think that's the other thing that people don't realize about women in these situations, too, is that we know what the fuck we're doing. We are self-aware. And that's part of the gratification of it. It's like you're performing on Broadway, and the New York Times is giving you a rave review.
    manic pixie dream world - by rayne fisher-quann
  • Like, the classic conundrum of the internet is not believing that two things can be true. Everything is fucked up.
    manic pixie dream world - by rayne fisher-quann
  • the idea that the state does anything except actively benefit from your disillusionment and nihilism is a fantasy.
    manic pixie dream world - by rayne fisher-quann
  • it's not revolutionary to be miserable.
    manic pixie dream world - by rayne fisher-quann
  • especially in leftist communities, it is often really treated as though there is a moral imperative to be miserable. Like people act like being angry and sad and miserable is a revolutionary act.
    manic pixie dream world - by rayne fisher-quann
  • Like people act like being angry and sad and miserable is a revolutionary act.
    manic pixie dream world - by rayne fisher-quann
  • By focusing all our attention on the sensation, we diminish suffering by accepting pain for what it is.
    Pain is a gift. Suffering is a prison. - by christina fang
  • “There’s something insidious about this counter-trend: while technically truthful (yes, capitalism is driving us all mad), the focus on de-individualizing mental health and blaming systems can stop people from taking any measures at all to improve their lives. “It’s the system’s fault,” becomes, “there’s nothing I can do if I’m depressed because it’s the system.”
    manic pixie dream world - by rayne fisher-quann
  • the language of abuse and individual trauma became a mainstay of online activist spaces like Tumblr, giving many free reins to unproductively argue, create bully networks that descend like wolves on anyone for minor infractions, vie for impossible ideological purity and problematize the so-called faves, producing information bubbles of bias in the process.
    All Alone in Their White Girl Pain - Hip to Waste
  • Social media was sanitized years ago. Radical discussions no longer take place in publicly visible spaces.
    How to Plant a Meme | Patreon
  • There is no instant gratification for political influence. Fringe ideas are often rejected when broadcast at scale.
    How to Plant a Meme | Patreon
  • You are entering through the bottom of the funnel to build a pipeline out. This process will require new links, nodes and stepping stones that join to form a reference chain.
    How to Plant a Meme | Patreon
  • celebrities making NFTs, overthinking tiny decisions, perfect Instagram faces and bodies, trying not to offend anyone online, every idiotic app ad that sells you on the idea of never talking to another person again, being home all the time, calories on menus, the fake laughter on late-night talk shows, pretending your life is like a movie on TikTok.
    #89: The death of sex - by Haley Nahman - Maybe Baby
  • “We are in a decadent, post-excitement world.”
    #89: The death of sex - by Haley Nahman - Maybe Baby
  • “Sexuality is the most essential element of nature,” Verhoeven told Variety. It is the ultimate euphemism for earthly pleasures and all its attendant qualities: desire, touch, anguish, longing, satisfaction, thrill, connection, presence.
    #89: The death of sex - by Haley Nahman - Maybe Baby
  • I think we have it all backwards. Take the first step, then see if you fall in love with the road before you.
    chemistry needs contact - by Jesse - fish in a pool
  • The rise of the infamous “ick” has coincided with the ubiquity of dating apps too, in a way I think isn’t unrelated — in a landscape that views the messiness of human interaction as a flaw to be fixed in backend, of course indicators of humanity would start to feel disgusting. The desire to make love risk-free borders on totalitarian. It requires dehumanisation, both of our potential partners and inevitably of ourselves.
    How dating apps sold us an unromantic, dehumanising idea of romance