alana goyal
46 followers · 31 following · 2765 views
on the atlas · 162
- The Next Era of Notion2 savers
- The Sane Asylum - Colossus21 savers
- The Evolving Landscape of Venture Capital Mindsets1 savers
- The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 121 savers
- Towards securing the internet1 savers
- Some final words on Foursquare.2 savers
- Negotiation & Multi-Turn Games3 savers
- Everyone is talking about how profound this essay is rn. For the...1 savers
- Yea this is the most important result of the year, at the...1 savers
- Neural Networks Are Already Clean55 savers
- /dev/finance, Stripe founding documents, and USCIS O-1 evidence4 savers
- Human Frailty - xanthe's Substack2 savers
- How to be more ambitious: A tutorial for humans with models37 savers
- i love writing. i never let agents write for me. whether it's...1 savers
- spakhm.com5 savers
- [REPOST] Good conversations have lots of doorknobs3 savers
- Subject to Change2 savers
- Abstract Warfare: How TSMC Made Its Own Market12 savers
- Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy: • Companies...1 savers
- spakhm.com3 savers
- convergence to the mean — Ryo Lu4 savers
- 023. ThinkWeek - Hardcore Software by Steven Sinofsky2 savers
- Face it: you're a crazy person - by Adam Mastroianni28 savers
- Defensibility in AI Data: Lessons from Ads (Warning: LONG POST) Companies selling data /...3 savers
- During covid I played Go reasonably seriously for about a year (had...1 savers
- Crossings1 savers
- Here’s to the wanting. Here’s to the dreaming. Here’s to everyone. https://t.co/FHcmqU3fYf1 savers
- movies | christina chen2 savers
- Searching for outliers | benkuhn.net38 savers
- Mark Zuckerberg - Colossus14 savers
- Making Startups Powerful6 savers
- Line Switching2 savers
- Thrive’s Miles Grimshaw on Software’s Future, Impatient Patience, and New Adventures2 savers
- The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations19 savers
- Employee Equity: The Liquidation Overhang2 savers
- Yesterday, the founder of a well-known, successful company called me to reference...1 savers
- It's okay to be 'chalant | Alexandria3 savers
- san francisco - musings11 savers
- Current AIs seem pretty misaligned to me5 savers
- Where compute becomes2 savers
- What's going on here, with this human? - Graham Duncan Blog49 savers
- A Stargate for Data - by willdepue - Will DePue4 savers
- Why I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy8 savers
- Opinion | I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I.5 savers
- Speed Above All Else - Outlier’s Path14 savers
- Braindump on what made Stripe great (c. 2018):1 savers
- 4. intelligence and consciousness are independent axes and need not be conflated consciousness...1 savers
- Someone asked me recently why I’ve become interested in aesthetics after having...1 savers
- The future belongs to AI maniacs1 savers
- Theory lags practice2 savers
- The high-return activity of raising others' aspirations - Marginal REVOLUTION19 savers
- Sunday Thoughts: Seeing People Clearly1 savers
- Regine Weiss Ransohoff1 savers
- Scraping training data for your mind1 savers
- A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox - LessWrong3 savers
- Pick an audience that is into the illegible you of today, not your past achievements21 savers
- Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point Magazine12 savers
- Oliver Burkeman's last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life1 savers
- the best conversations help you hear yourself1 savers
- Why the “Math Mafia” is doing well3 savers
- The Task Economy2 savers
- the more you write, the more there is to find - by maja6 savers
- Hiring like the best2 savers
- India's Case of Mistaken Chaidentity1 savers
- The art of keeping in touch3 savers
- Why I Write | The Orwell Foundation14 savers
- The Market that Feeds New York1 savers
- Chip Off The Old Block4 savers
- How I Learned to Read Way, Way More1 savers
- you'll make worse decisions by thinking about them7 savers
- How not to forget what matters - by Henrik Karlsson10 savers
- principles - Nabeel S. Qureshi41 savers
- Good things come to those who write1 savers
- Paper at Config, Part 1: Swarming SF2 savers
- A lesson on fatherhood from Dale Carnegie1 savers
- you can't fake the core - by Ava - bookbear express9 savers
- Lessons from [DeepSeek, GLM, …]1 savers
- Machines People Love1 savers
- Leaving San Francisco (for now)5 savers
- Childhoods of exceptional people - by Henrik Karlsson70 savers
- You Are NOT Dumb, You Just Lack the Prerequisites15 savers
- Reality has a surprising amount of detail2 savers
- Putting Ideas into Words12 savers
- How to think in writing - by Henrik Karlsson29 savers
- Thoughts before my next ten years1 savers
- Historical facts I consistently forget9 savers
- What I Wish Someone Had Told Me - Sam Altman53 savers
- Deep Laziness3 savers
- Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born65 savers
- slop is a bad story1 savers
- If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you29 savers
- Jasmine Sun on memes, journalism, and writing in an automated world | Dialectc1 savers
- You don’t have to be perfect to be happy - by Vivian Loh2 savers
- The Oracle and the Firm1 savers
- What are you serving?1 savers
- Henrik Karlsson Returns to Dialectic1 savers
- 6.22 - inner power, Disney missives, our favorite PR advice & flickers of a new tech scene2 savers
- What a Young Paul McCartney Knew About Growing Old1 savers
- Sunday Thoughts: The Last 10%1 savers
- A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable3 savers
highlights · 857
it is an interesting perspective shift to view your thoughts as the output of an on device computer that is embedded within your experience, rather than as produced by you in real time. then the distinction between being and thinking becomes clear.
4. intelligence and consciousness are independent axes and need not be conflated consciousness...Also, excellent people want to do great work because it is intrinsically satisfying. Explicitly allowing aesthetic considerations to carry weight avoids having to justify every assessment with some kind of torturous empiricism.
Someone asked me recently why I’ve become interested in aesthetics after having...We've always tried to do things well at Stripe. I've come to see that attempting to do them beautifully is often a helpful way to break out of standard practices and to do something with greater novelty and in a way that might have other benefits besides.
Someone asked me recently why I’ve become interested in aesthetics after having...It just seems that the Germans are stuck in an objectively worse market equilibrium than their neighbors: the food is bad and they’ve gotten used to it.
Someone asked me recently why I’ve become interested in aesthetics after having...It’s clearly the case that changes in the aesthetic domain can at least inspire progress in other places. Petrarch helped set some of the preconditions for the Renaissance which in turn fostered the scientific revolution and Enlightenment.
Someone asked me recently why I’ve become interested in aesthetics after having...Many things today are ugly and far uglier than they used to be or need to be.
Someone asked me recently why I’ve become interested in aesthetics after having...If you wish to learn how to manipulate AI tools, Harvard and Yale are not the places to go. You need to teach yourself, with assistance from other AI maniacs and also with help from the AI tools themselves.
The future belongs to AI maniacsStripe, the payments company, recently issued customer data showing that the number of single-person companies earning $10 million or more has doubled in the past two years.
The future belongs to AI maniacsAn AI maniac is someone who is obsessed with working with the latest AI models. They try out new models as soon as they can, they spend hours and hours trying to master them, and they use them to regulate both their workflows and their personal lives.
The future belongs to AI maniacsThere is an important practical implication to my claim: if you want to invent something new, you need to be willing to go where our theory no longer applies.
Theory lags practiceDon’t ever make the mistake [of thinking] that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence much too much credit. (Linus Torvalds)
Theory lags practiceHowever, clean principles only emerge after the fact.
Theory lags practiceAt critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous.
The high-return activity of raising others' aspirations - Marginal REVOLUTIONSupported by the expectations of my core readers, which I have found by writing online, I have been able to unfold what is different in me. I’ve grown more comfortable in my strangeness, and more fond of the provinces I inhabit.
Pick an audience that is into the illegible you of today, not your past achievementsSome friends, communities, and employers limit your personal unfolding. Others support it.
Pick an audience that is into the illegible you of today, not your past achievementsI needed those years to familiarize myself with where my thoughts wanted to go when free from the expectations of others. I had to learn to write for myself, using the paper as a vehicle to expand my thought. I couldn’t do that with an audience.
Pick an audience that is into the illegible you of today, not your past achievementsFed up with these useless references, I have been asking for a person's worst reference and why since Zappos.
Sunday Thoughts: Seeing People ClearlyWhen you can see people clearly, you are better at appreciating them, helping them grow, and putting them in a position to succeed.
Sunday Thoughts: Seeing People ClearlyShe read “War and Peace” every 10 years, starting at age 16, and for the last time at age 86.
Regine Weiss RansohoffSo identifying good influences is not enough. You also need to create space for deep introspection, a space where you can figure out how you and the world can fit each other.
Scraping training data for your mindWhat you get from deep engagement with important papers is more significant than any single fact or technique: you get a sense for what a powerful result in the field looks like.
Scraping training data for your mindWhy start by looking at the highest achievements in a field? Because it allows you to shape your taste to match them.
Scraping training data for your mindIn other words: the quest for greatness can be reframed as a search problem. In a world of information abundance, how do you find good influences?
Scraping training data for your mindBut to get good at something—parenting, writing code, doing research—you also need to internalize examples of prime achievements in that field. Knowing how to find these examples is upstream of the tasks you need to master.
Scraping training data for your mindThis is quite common for writers. Reading something powerful, the voice infects them. Sometimes this is a weakness, if the influence has not been transformed into something personal. But there is also no way around it: finding good influences is a prerequisite for writing well.
Scraping training data for your mindIt turns out that if you’ve written something that you find interesting, it is not unlikely that people you like will find it interesting too, and pass it on if you give them the chance.
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox - LessWrongThe way messages spread on the internet is by flowing up this order of streams, from people with smaller networks to those with larger, and then it spreads back down through the larger networks.
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox - LessWrongAlexey Guzey makes lists, half of which are made up of quotes, and they are incredibly useful and have been instrumental in reshaping his network so that he could start New Science. Most good Twitter accounts can be viewed in the same way.
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox - LessWrongIn other words, I have, to a degree, automated my obsessions now. I have summoned a milieu that pulls me where I want to go!
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox - LessWrongA 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 - LessWrongHaving idiosyncratic interests that grow in complexity means that if you pursue them too far you will end up obsessed with things that no one else around you cares about.
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox - LessWrongBut lurking behind it is a larger idea. Namely, that you can shape yourself by reshaping your relationships. By changing who you are addressing, and the responses you garner, you steer your development. You become more agentic.
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox - LessWrongHence my writing was a search query. It needed to be phrased in such a way that it found these people and, if necessary, filtered others.
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox - LessWrongThe more precise and niche the words I input, the better the internet would match me with people I could forge meaningful relationships with.
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox - LessWrongBut on the other hand, there’s a tremendously strong pressure to repeat yourself, to do more of that thing we all liked so much. I can’t do that - I don't have the enthusiasm to push through projects that seem familiar to me [...] but at the same time I do feel guilt for ‘deserting my audience’ by not doing the things they apparently wanted.
Pick an audience that is into the illegible you of today, not your past achievementsThe writing is a product of the social graph summoned by the writing.
Pick an audience that is into the illegible you of today, not your past achievementsMuch of what I write (including this) is prompted by questions that others ask me, and the input that feeds my creative process often comes from people I’ve met through the blog—book recommendations I get sent, friends I’ve made, comments, and critiques that forces me to sharpen my thinking.
Pick an audience that is into the illegible you of today, not your past achievementsIndeed, there are times when the poet’s power to confront what the rest of us turn away from marks such a dramatic escape from the confines of ordinary humanity that we find ourselves drawn to describing them with the language of “a divine spark.”
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point MagazineOn the simple theory, art and censorship go hand in hand: art takes up what life has censored.
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point MagazineThe lie is that art is a vehicle for personal moral edification or social progress, that art aims at empathy and happiness and world peace and justice and democracy and the brotherhood of man.
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point MagazineIn normal life, vision is burdened by positivity: we tend to be aiming, achieving, improving, appreciating and enjoying. There’s almost always something we’re up to, and that purpose skews our process of observation.
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point MagazineRecall that famous psychology experiment in which a man in a gorilla suit walks through a group of students passing around basketballs, and the experimental subjects don’t notice the gorilla because they are busy following the instruction to count the number of times the players in white pass the ball. Your whole life is like that.
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point MagazineHamlet is indeed about loneliness and doubt and dread and waste and dust and emptiness and the feeling of all good things slipping away.
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point MagazineI can name many works of fiction in which barely anything good happens (Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, José Saramago’s Blindness, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Jon Fosse’s Melancholy are recent reads that spring to mind), but I can’t imagine a novel in which barely anything bad happens.
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point MagazineI am using the word “evil” to encompass the whole range of negative human experience, from being wronged, to doing wrong, to sheer bad luck. “Evil” in this sense includes: hunger, fear, injury, pain, anxiety, injustice, loss, catastrophe, misunderstanding, failure, betrayal, cruelty, boredom, frustration, loneliness, despair, downfall, annihilation. This list of evils is also a list of the essential ingredients of narrative fiction.
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point MagazineMy theory is that art is for seeing evil.
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point MagazineMy goal in constructing my syllabus is neither to improve their moral character, nor to offer them literary entertainment. Rather, the situation is this: the topic of the course requires reference to something that doesn’t show up clearly outside the space of artistic fiction. My hand is forced, because without the novels my course omits something that I see as crucial to understanding death, or self-creation, or courage, or self-consciousness.
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point MagazineThe (non-philosophy) professors in whose classes I read Homer and Tolstoy claimed for those texts a kind of moral authority, presenting novels as sources of personal ethical guidance. Initially, I accepted this rationale, but over the years I have come to question it: I don’t feel that reading novels has helped me navigate difficult decisions, or made me more empathetic.
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point MagazineIt’s shocking to realise how readily we set aside even our greatest ambitions in life, merely to avoid easily tolerable levels of unpleasantness.
Oliver Burkeman's last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled lifeWe’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy: the question swiftly gets bogged down in our narrow preferences for security and control. But the enlargement question elicits a deeper, intuitive response.
Oliver Burkeman's last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life