flâneur

Tanvi Reddy

17 followers · 13 following · 1204 views

on the atlas — 57

highlights — 188

  • The trick to finishing items is to decrease, and specifically define, the deliverable.
    Meditations for Mortals
  • It is a shame to lose even one year in a person's life, or one month, or one week. Because you never get them back. When you worry about the future, remember that the ground beneath your feet is vanishing. - Samuel Liu, “the monkey drawing its own cage”
    Meditations for Mortals
  • You have to develop the willingness to just do something, here and now, even if it’s not a part of a bigger system or routine.
    Meditations for Mortals
  • For most mortals, your real enemy is the number of days when you get nothing written. Getting "not enough" done each day is a lesser problem. ​- Tyler Cowen
    depression handbook | writing
  • I also decided that this was one of the worst feelings out there, because it was not only shitty in itself but also very, very scary.
    depression handbook | writing
  • Why doesn’t a person kill himself? Is it because of logic? … Or is it rather: my mom will pick up the phone and tell my little brother.
    depression handbook | writing
  • I also found it stressful navigating a huge decision space with incomplete information, where small choices with no right or wrong answers (like who to contact when) have an outsized impact. Frankly, I was stressed, miserable, and not functioning in other parts of my life for several months.
    Notes on the Industry Job Search
  • What I didn’t notice was Beelzebub eating my attention from the inside. The rebellion against structure left me rotting in a swarm of distractions I mistook for freedom.
    Why You Are Probably Working for the Devil - Octopusyarn
  • Finally, the traditionalist (Satan as purifier) sees Beelzebubian rot everywhere. Crumbling communities, a culture drowning in meaningless choice.
    Why You Are Probably Working for the Devil - Octopusyarn
  • Every norm she deconstructs forces her to negotiate reality from scratch.
    Why You Are Probably Working for the Devil - Octopusyarn
  • Under his influence, only that which can be articulated counts as real. What cannot be formalized cannot be seen. When deontology is taken too far, it gives rise to tyranny. I always knew bureaucracy was Satan. Now I know why.
    Why You Are Probably Working for the Devil - Octopusyarn
  • He makes you feel slightly, persistently inadequate. That’s enough to keep you compliant. He is the weight of every “should” that has nothing to do with flourishing, every rule that serves only its own perpetuation.
    Why You Are Probably Working for the Devil - Octopusyarn
  • The devil doesn’t need your soul if he has your attention.
    Why You Are Probably Working for the Devil - Octopusyarn
  • Were you going to work on something meaningful? Here’s a thirst trap, and your friend just posted this meme. Buzzing, demanding attention, because attention is all he eats. The inner swarm manifests as impulse unchained from intention, the accumulation of micro-surrenders slowly rotting attention spans. The result: You have access to all human knowledge, yet you find yourself watching a 12-second video of a hydraulic press crushing a rubber duck.
    Why You Are Probably Working for the Devil - Octopusyarn
  • He wants to build God, and in doing so, prove that God was only ever a dumb machine.
    Why You Are Probably Working for the Devil - Octopusyarn
  • He disguises himself as a liberator, fighting against unjust tyranny and seeking to overcome all limitations to human potential. The Luciferian promise: if we just know enough, we can fix everything. Poverty, disease, loneliness, and death itself are all merely engineering problems awaiting sufficient data. Our intelligence raises us above the crude patterns of evolution and nature. We must transcend our stinking flesh.
    Why You Are Probably Working for the Devil - Octopusyarn
  • Evil is darker: destroying the capacity to choose at all.
    Why You Are Probably Working for the Devil - Octopusyarn
  • No amount of rationalization could scrub away that foul feeling after an action I knew deep down was wrong. At first, I dismissed it as internalized social expectations, something to break free of. Then I tried the cosmic view: zoom out far enough, and everything is predetermined, serial killers are just generational trauma with legs. And isn’t the bad necessary for the good anyway? Yin requires yang. The Devil as God’s left hand. None of it worked. The feeling didn’t track social norms, and it didn’t dissolve into determinism either. Some accepted things felt deeply wrong. Some frowned-upon t…
    Why You Are Probably Working for the Devil - Octopusyarn
  • it is rumored that it can be suspended entirely at the further reaches of meditative attainment. From the absolute view, it’s all sparkling bliss-consciousness, all lives are equal, and no action is finally consequential. The recognition that there is no big Other, no final guarantor of meaning, is the deepest kind of freedom. But skillfully constructing one anyway can lead to richer meaning and a more enchanted life.
    Do it for the plot - Octopusyarn
  • Nihilism is a trap door out of paralysis. If nothing matters and you don’t really care what happens to you anymore, you suddenly find yourself free, despite the numbness in your stomach. Buckminster Fuller became Buckminster Fuller only after he wanted to kill himself and decided to run a few more experiments before that.
    Do it for the plot - Octopusyarn
  • This doesn’t mean detachment; you are fully invested in the story of your life, and so is the beholder. The stakes are high, and higher with each progressive shift in verticality. If we go too far too fast, we risk falling right back into paralysis.
    Do it for the plot - Octopusyarn
  • Imaginal beings have a real appetite for the transformation that heartbreak generates.
    Do it for the plot - Octopusyarn
  • If the deathbed feels too tame, upshift into the imaginal register and invoke the Daimon. That’s the bastard who is bullying me into disguising Soulmaking Dharma as film critique instead of making bank by selling automation to boomers.
    Do it for the plot - Octopusyarn
  • If your ancestors and descendants watch from outside your lifetime, consequence beats experience. Maybe working in AI safety is indeed the only thing that matters.
    Do it for the plot - Octopusyarn
  • For the lucky or oppressed who spend more time in real-world social interactions than on screens, the beholder is intuitively filled with their partner, family, or friends. While probably healthier, this version inherits a deeper problem. Your dad, your partner, and your friend group sit at the same level as you, and what they see isn’t really you. It’s you filtered through what their psyche needs you to be. Performing for that gaze means subtly contorting yourself to fit their expectations.
    Do it for the plot - Octopusyarn
  • Oscar is performing for the part of him that recognizes and appreciates beauty.
    Do it for the plot - Octopusyarn
  • The benefit is that interpreting these symbols gives you low willpower access to what your subconscious wants.
    the art of reading tea leaves
  • Without structure, nothing forces a decision, causing people to by default wait.
    the art of reading tea leaves
  • quantum technology, embodied AI, brain-computer interfaces, and 6G technology
    The 15th Five-Year Plan: China’s blueprint for a brighter future, and a list of opportunities for the world—Remarks by H.E. Ambassador Xie Feng at the “China in Springtime: China’s Development Opportunities for the World” Global Dialogue U.S. Session_Embassy of the People's Republic of China in the United States of America
  • because who the hell has time to work at something, to give time to craft, to create with their own minds, to spend years being mediocre.
    Please Use AI - by Shawn Smucker - The Courage to Live It
  • Dress, Dima Ayad. Photography: Manbutte. Styling: Claire Carruthers
    Naika Embraces her Layered Identity and Looks to New Horizons | Vogue Arabia
  • In some stores the wall is gone and relegated to a small rack that has six books on it, three of which are about ChatGPT.
    Nobody Cracks Open a Programming Book Anymore · unix.foo
  • which the reader had to retype
    Nobody Cracks Open a Programming Book Anymore · unix.foo
  • It smells faintly of basement.
    Nobody Cracks Open a Programming Book Anymore · unix.foo
  • That kid is a different programmer. They are, in some ways I don’t fully understand, working at a higher level of abstraction than I ever did at that age, and the things they will build with that abstraction will surprise me.
    Nobody Cracks Open a Programming Book Anymore · unix.foo
  • It will explain idempotency in the precise number of words you require
    Nobody Cracks Open a Programming Book Anymore · unix.foo
  • was forcing both the writer and the reader to be slow
    Nobody Cracks Open a Programming Book Anymore · unix.foo
  • I loved doing this and they remain some of my very fondest childhood memories.
    Nobody Cracks Open a Programming Book Anymore · unix.foo
  • Stack Overflow is receiving about 3,800 questions a month, which is what it was getting in 2008
    Nobody Cracks Open a Programming Book Anymore · unix.foo
  • She said that one reason she liked having us was that we'd been interesting to talk to. That took me by surprise when I had kids. You don't just love them. They become your friends too. They're really interesting.
    Having Kids
  • i caged the disconcerting emotions that persisted.
    the final act of love is remembering - by loise yves
  • i refused to, because i knew that what dwelled in between wasn’t mine to begin with. i looked at you, at how you looked at me, and saw what held me back. it wasn’t the fear of you knowing, or ruining the delicate connection we shared. it was knowing that you are a poet, a romantic that loved profoundly, a lover who loves that way i do, and you belonged to someone else
    the final act of love is remembering - by loise yves
  • writing about you meant what i felt was real. consent to such peril meant i had to confront the inevitable. but i didn’t. instead, we talked in whispers. the late-night drives home alone together were a reminder that you once shared things about yourself only i knew of. times we shared a single pod and the nicotine filled our lungs while rationalizing lectures and discussing the human anatomy remained a thing only we had. i ache. i quiver. i long to write and purge. i didn’t. even when your eyes lingered when i started hovering hesitantly, contemplating whether it was morally right to stake cl…
    the final act of love is remembering - by loise yves
  • and yet. with you, i mellowed down. for the first time in my existence, impotence outweighed tenacity. incertitude and trepidation shook my core, considering that a fragile thing existed between us that kept us tethered. ruin the friendship, they said. take the leap. risk it all. don’t be afraid to fall. i stopped writing.
    the final act of love is remembering - by loise yves
  • It’s also from a fear of being left behind by my peers. My mom used to always tell me that people will respect you and care about you insofar as you are someone worthy of that to them — and while I’ve now learned this is never fully that true, it’s stuck with me more than I’d like to admit. Especially as I meet more and more cool people, the more this feeling resurfaces, where the things I had previously thought were good and interesting for me feel… suddenly, not enough? In some ways, I am still too easily influenced by the optimizations made by the people around me.6 This ‘panic’ is not easy…
    i think about it all the time - by Claire Wang
  • Ordinary heaven is completely illegible to external observers. No one can measure how much you loved someone. Yet, it is the only thing you can optimize for, and I think we’ve spent too long thinking that it’s impossible to achieve.
    i think about it all the time - by Claire Wang
  • I kept treating these two like opposites, as if ambition and ordinary heaven were directly opposed to each other. But what if they’re not? What if the “wheels fall off” thing IS about protecting the ability to witness someone dance around an apartment?
    i think about it all the time - by Claire Wang
  • They respected each other because of how each other showed up, not because of what they’d built or whatever they worked on.
    i think about it all the time - by Claire Wang
  • People around me seemed to be doing so much — creating these beautiful systems, doing impactful research, raising rounds, “saving the world.” How can these words compare?
    i think about it all the time - by Claire Wang
  • But often enough that I’d think about it later and wonder at how respect is gained. And at events, guys who I thought wanted to ‘talk shop’ with me would pivot to something else — suddenly I was someone to date, someone to only talk about feelings with, not someone to go deep on the work with.
    i think about it all the time - by Claire Wang