flâneur

Agustín Covarrubias

16 followers · 16 following · 518 views

on the atlas — 15

highlights — 54

  • In this same vein, I too have reaffirmed that the Church “does not claim to possess a monopoly on truth,” [17] because truth is not a territory to be defended, but a good to be shared. For his part, Pope Francis expressed this same perspective in his striking phrase, “time is greater than space.” [18] What matters most is not occupying positions of power or defending cultural strongholds, but initiating good processes and enabling them to mature.
    Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)
  • If we focus only on contingencies, we risk letting the succession of emergencies dictate the direction of our path. We are living through a rapid phase of transition, a “change of era,” in which — while some are vying for the future of new technologies and others dedicate themselves to reflecting on the matter — most people are watching and waiting, observing from afar and merely hoping for the best. For this very reason, crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should…
    Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)
  • I know that almost nobody hears too many sincere compliments. Compliment them to their face. Then, compliment them behind their back. Practice naming pleasant feelings you have about people, as soon as they bubble up, in the moment: “It’s always fun to see you.” Lower the resistance around this to zero.
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • I know that, if you can pull it off, you should continuously have mentors, and be offering mentorship. This can be as formal or informal as you want.
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • I know that silence is an underused conversational tactic. It makes people more interesting and builds intimacy.
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • I know that intelligent people who are not emotionally or socially aware can be easily fooled and driven insane. You just have to hand them an unsolvable Rubik’s cube and convince them that it is the most important thing in the world. This will trigger their desire to be special, or their fear of being useless or bad, and they will not know this is happening, they’ll just tear their hair out trying to solve the unsolvable Rubik’s cube. Entire social groups and movements are built on this.
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • I know how to handle a day when you feel extremely lazy. Decide that, given that you’re a lazy person, you will work diligently for only 30 entirely focused minutes on the most important thing, and then take the rest of the day off. You will do your best work on these days.
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • I know how to instantly calm yourself, and, in social situations, ground your energy, thus making you more charismatic. Without effort, include the bottom of your feet in your conscious awareness.
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • I know that it is powerful to state your weaknesses and limitations. Try this on for size: “I’m abandoning this debate because you are more qualified to have an opinion.” “I’d like to finish this project quickly because I don’t like to work hard.” “I realize that I don’t believe what’s coming out of my mouth.” “I’m worried that I’m taking this decision too seriously and I’m not adding value by fretting over it.”
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • I know how to throw a good party. Get everyone in large rooms, ideally one large room. Make it feel almost overcrowded, to increase social optionality and accidental touch. It should spill outside a little bit, weather permitting. Have good food and drink in abundance. The ideal volume level creates pockets of intimacy via noise but doesn’t require shouting. The ideal light level is dim-bright. Invite a variety of archetypes—too many high-achievers and it will feel tediously networky, too many slouchy hippies and it will feel like an inert cuddle puddle.
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • I know that you are almost always not the only one experiencing a person’s challenging attributes. Is your boss being privately abusive to you? They are likely doing it to someone else, or have before. Can’t believe that person is always monopolizing the meeting? Someone else is also annoyed. Now, solving these collective action problems is tricky — but realizing that you’re not alone is the first step.
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • I know that there are two modes of experience: appreciative, and evaluative. Concrete example: let’s say you’re listening to a piece of music. Are you sinking into it, awash in emotions? You’re in the appreciative mode. Are you the mixing engineer, listening to the snare hits to make sure they’re consistent? You’re in the evaluative mode. Much of sanity, and happiness, consists of finding the right mode for the right moment. The appreciative mode is terrible for debugging your business plan. But the evaluative mode is terrible for having a first date. A lot of capable, intelligent people suffe…
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • I know that the legal profession does a great job of identifying competence and rewarding it financially. Cheap lawyers are expensive.
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • I know that it’s easy to observe when people are feeling insecure. Notice how much they are mentioning their positive attributes, material possessions, or important friends, when there’s no conversational reason for this to be occurring other than a status claim. It is harder to spot yourself doing this, but it is worth the effort — you are likely doing it occasionally. I certainly do.
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • I know that sometimes people unfairly collapse reality via cliche. Your money management issue might be described as a “first world problem,” or your changing desires a “midlife crisis,” by yourself or others. This is a way of dismissing your complexity.
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • I know that sometimes, persistence is not a virtue. I would trade my other abilities to be an exceptional songwriter. I gave it a serious enough try to know that I don’t have the knack, for years, and I’m not interested in being publicly mediocre at the performing arts. My life is incalculably better for having let the dream go. The world will be happiest with a certain range of behaviors from you—life will be easier if you find a place in that range where you’re content. David Whyte calls this the conversational nature of reality, and he is correct about the importance of this concept.
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • I know that travel is valuable because most knowledge can’t be written down. The most crucial info about a society is how it feels to be there—the rhythms of street life, where and when people eat meals, how gender works. You can read a million things about Japan without knowing the bodily experience of walking around in a truly high-trust society, for example.
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • I know that the people who will make you feel warm and fuzzy when you’re sad, and the people who will give you brutally honest feedback, are usually different people. Ideally you want to have relationships with both kinds, and reward them for their strengths, rather than getting mad at them for failing to do what they’re bad at.
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • No matter how hard you try, you will always look back with a certain remove and wonder what the hell you were thinking.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • You should pay special attention to the thoughts that gnaw at you despite them being against your self-interest to think.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • If you can train yourself to ask “is there a better way to do this?” at random intervals ten times a day, you will become unstoppable.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • The most important thing to hire for is deeply giving a fuck, and no amount of money will get someone who doesn’t care to care. This means you should pay people enough that it’s easy for them to say yes, but not enough that it’s hard for them to say no.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • You can save yourself a lot of grief when dealing with someone who’s upset by leading with: “Are you in venting mode or solutions mode?”
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • Agency is a morally neutral trait, and amoral people have more natural talent at it because they never learned the rules in the first place.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • Many social dynamics are paradoxical — social acts that seem weak from the inside, when undertaken without apology, actually read as very strong. For example, being willing to say “I’m wrong” or “I don’t know.”
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • It’s possible for someone to have a motivational system very different from your own and still be a force for good in the world. I’m turned off when people are motivated primarily by prestige, but many great works have been produced at the altar of social status.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • A lot of experiences that you might be inclined to interpret as metaphors when other people describe them are literally real. This will seem extremely funny once you experience them yourself.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • There are huge quality of life improvements downstream of “let me take this off future me’s plate.” You don’t just shift work earlier, you also save yourself all the mental friction between now and when you do it. Psychic cost is the integral of cognitive load over time — so do the things you most want to avoid first.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • Writing defensively is a loser’s game. It lets people who won’t like your writing anyway win in advance.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • You can go through a lot of relationships and experience a lot of flavors of admiration and obsession and limerence — in other words, lots of things that kind of feel like love — without experiencing real love. (This is either terrifying or reassuring, depending on your perspective.)
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • The most dangerous people have an exquisitely tuned sense of just how much they can get away with when it comes to how they treat different people, so pay special attention when others have sharply diverging experiences of someone’s character. Lots of variance in opinion about whether an idea is good means there’s a good chance the idea is good; lots of variance in opinion about whether a person is good is a warning sign.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • Crore (/krɔːr/; Hindi: करोड़; abbreviated cr) denotes the quantity ten million (107) and is equal to 100 lakh in the Indian numbering system.
    Crore - Wikipedia
  • On 16 August 2018, UPI 2.0 was launched, which enabled users to link their overdraft accounts to a UPI handle. Users were also able to pre-authorise transactions by issuing a mandate for a specific merchant. This version also included a feature to view and store an invoice for each transaction. An AutoPay facility for recurring payments was also added.
    Unified Payments Interface - Wikipedia
  • In December 2019, noting the success of UPI, Google suggested that the US Federal Reserve Board should follow UPI as an example in developing FedNow,[20] a real-time payment system for the United States.[21]
    Unified Payments Interface - Wikipedia
  • Furthermore, the successful execution of an instant payment system at such an enormous scale has made it a soft power tool for India[14] and is often cited as the most transformative and successful financial technology innovations India has developed.
    Unified Payments Interface - Wikipedia
  • As of 2025, 50% of world's digital transaction volume are conducted by India's UPI platform with over 250 billion annual transactions worth US$3.4 trillion.
    Unified Payments Interface - Wikipedia
  • Halfway through the trip, we had a wonderful conversation with Pramod Varma, the architect of India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI). It would be no exaggeration to say that UPI, which processes nearly half of the world’s real-time digital payments, has done more for financial inclusion than any technology in history.
    2025 letter | Zhengdong
  • At the risk of over-generalizing, I found India higher in guanxi but lower in mianzi compared to China.
    2025 letter | Zhengdong
  • Now I think I can contort my whole year into three, loosely Berlinian, themes. First, pluralism and its useful contradictions: the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time, a thought I got from John Gaddis who got it from Charles Hill who got it from F. Scott Fitzgerald. Second, marginalia: the footnotes, the minor characters behind the main characters. From Star Wars: Andor to the various government officials I ran into all around the world and in stories I read, this letter is dedicated to you. Pluralism’s lofty values stand because you bear the weight. Finally, third, unr…
    2025 letter | Zhengdong
  • In August, Harvey Lederman contemplated his role as a philosopher in a world where AI can do anything better than he can. He feels lucky to live in a time where he has a purpose, and dread at the thought of being “some of the last to enjoy this brief spell, before all exploration, all discovery, is done by fully automated sleds.” Games will be at both the beginning and the end of AI. For us personally, Jasha Sohl-Dickstein posted in September a great talk on “Advice for a (young) investigator in the first and last days of the Anthropocene.” He takes seriously the idea that AI will be a big dea…
    2025 letter | Zhengdong
  • A Congressman gave a sort of blessing at the end: “I pray that we may find success in alignment and alternative interpretability methods.”
    2025 letter | Zhengdong
  • But it turns out that if AI does take off, it doesn’t matter what chips you produce. What matters is global compute share at the moment of takeoff.
    2025 letter | Zhengdong
  • This year was a new step in revenue, investment, and talent (I saw a mass exodus from Jane Street to Anthropic)
    2025 letter | Zhengdong
  • Compute compounds, and its results confound.
    2025 letter | Zhengdong
  • The biggest mistake people make when they make the case for AI is that they say it’s different this time. It’s not different this time because it’s always been different.
    2025 letter | Zhengdong
  • At the end of this Matryoshka doll of scaling curves is progress itself. Progress is a smooth trend that obscures jagged details.
    2025 letter | Zhengdong
  • The bard of our time put it well in March: everything’s computer.
    2025 letter | Zhengdong
  • Moore’s Law, too, resists easy extrapolation. It’s weathered regime changes just like scaling laws, from purely shrinking transistors to running multiple cores in parallel, as Dennard scaling ended in the aughts. By its original definition, Moore’s Law was dead long ago. If you’ll allow me a more heretical redefinition, from transistors to total system compute, from the chip to the cluster, Moore’s Law is alive and well in today’s multi-rack data centers where power and interconnect are the bottleneck. This too gives us pause if Moore’s Law is really so strong a trend—every doubling, which loo…
    2025 letter | Zhengdong
  • One way to think about computation before computers is through the work of Herbert Simon, the only person to win both the Turing Award and the Nobel Prize in economics. He explained that firms, like computers, are information processing systems. Firms have hierarchy, limited cognitive power, and bounded rationality. Firms also have learning curves, where unit costs fall predictably with cumulative production. In a way, humans organized themselves to be better information processors long before computers. We might extrapolate the trend before Moore’s Law to 400 years ago, with the invention of …
    2025 letter | Zhengdong
  • AI is also moving history. That it will be a big deal will also be public information long before it is physically felt. It will reach some places before others. There was a day, in the past now, where the wave passed over high school homework, and completely upended that world. This year, the wave passed over software engineering. It’s just brushed research mathematics and molecular biology. I’ve got some anecdata, too, in two conversations I couldn’t have imagined before this year: a friend at a consulting firm got a new batch of hapless interns. His boss’s advice? “You gotta treat them like…
    2025 letter | Zhengdong