What the hyperlink?!
I like to collect quotes from the things I read and the people I talk to. Some of these quotes are unattributed, some may link to their source, and other links will lead you astray.
Quotes from around the web and life
October 6, 2026
Find Your Specific Knowledge Through Action
I ultimately think that everyone should be figuring out what it is that they uniquely do best—that aligns with who they are fundamentally, and that gives them authenticity, that brings them specific knowledge, that gives them competitive advantage, that makes them irreplaceable. And they should just lean into that. And sometimes you don’t know what that is until you do it.
Jack Butcher
Build distribution, then build whatever you want.
James Clear
You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
At this point in our history it should be possible for an individual to build a self that is not simply the outcome of biological drives and cultural habits, but a conscious, personal creation.
How to launch
what gets you started isn’t what keeps you going.
October 5, 2026
There is an internet that is mine
Like any society, it is not only architects, builders, or engineers that move us towards this collective consciousness. We need people to bring themselves and assume new identities—perhaps where the role of ‘technologist’ is fluid and all-encompassing. Where ‘technologist’ is everyone and anyone concerned with the role of technology, empowered to use it to shape their experience in our pervasive digital world
Design Multiple Means of Representation
there is not one means of representation that will be optimal for every learner
Anyone can learn
the only person who can actually teach you a subject to proficiency is yourself.
Donella Meadows
There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.
The narrative fallacy
But swearing? Who gives a shit? Is that really going to be the difference between a good book and a bad book? Why on earth would you hear that you’ve got someone interested in writing a book whose writing is doing millions of hits that very week and then immediately tell them that you know what will sell better than they will? In fact, the only other book they’ve got that’s well-known enough for me to recognize it has swearing in it, so I know it isn’t even a principled brand stance. A midwit just went “I am slightly self-conscious about how I appear to my boss” and that was enough to tank the whole thing.
Social Animus
The first technologist was Prometheus who took fire from the gods and gave it away to humanity. The gods did not believe that humans deserved to cook their food, so they tortured him forever for doing it. This is a story that has repeated itself throughout history. My favorite movie is Stand and Deliver, which is about a group of young kids from the ghetto who learned calculus and aced the AP exam, only to have their scores revoked and were forced to take the test again. Any time a group gains knowledge which other people feel like they shouldn’t have, there is always an unfair cost that must be paid, otherwise society is incapable of accepting it.
Latin phrase
Abusus non tollit usum.
Back to the Future 3, paraphrased
Jeb: “If everybody’s got one of these auto-whatsits, does anybody code anymore?”
Doc Brown: “Of course we code. But for recreation. For fun.”
Jeb: “Code for fun? What the hell kind of fun is that?”
Enjoying the Requisite Amount of Misery
A life that makes a good story tends to be a life that was awful to live. The chapters people want to read about in biographies tend to be the ones the person would have skipped if they could.
latexr
Would you invest in a person with limited knowledge and expertise just because they’re enthusiastic? Might as well hire a literal clown; all the enthusiasm you might want and way cheaper.
Daniel Fraga
Today, technology allows us a new form of design: one that designs subjects, not objects; people, not things. By designing the information someone consumes, we can frame their opinions. By designing the interactions they have with digital devices, we can frame their thinking. This is known by not only tech giants but by military intelligence. And now, it is time that it becomes known by designers - especially those at the vanguard of dying paradigms. Our environments, our tools and even our ideas are extensions of ourselves. Our clothes extend our skin’s ability to keep our body warm, and our glasses improve our eye’s ability to see. This is simple enough. But what about language, or the internet? What does it do to us? How do they extend our humanity? More importantly: can we design that extension? In this century, algorithmically powered ontological design will radically reinvent what “human” means. It will not only be used to create “better” humans, but to redesign the very concepts of “better” itself, disrupting the values of the old world order and kickstarting a struggle for the new. Creatively terrifying designs are becoming possible
Against usefulness
I know what it looks like when someone is optimizing an existing paradigm. This was someone asking whether the desktop metaphor, the screen, the cubicle, the solitary body hunched toward a rectangle, was a fifty year detour rather than a destination.
AGI isn’t for happy people
Given the same resources, people generally choose either a happy life or an interesting life.
On The Measure Of Intelligence
Reasoning is a term that’s like the term intelligence in that it’s highly complex and much less well defined than we’d like it to be, especially as we’re trying to compare algorithms to human behaviors. To begin to explore this we have to imagine a reasoning oracle, that when presented with a question that can be reasoned will immediately present a correct answer. Immediately from this definition we can see that humans are not perfect reasoning oracles. Also with definition of reasoning, any agent with generalized capabilities would quickly reach some kind of singularity or solution to the universe as much as is possible within this universe. We’ve established that we are imperfect reasoners, the next question ends up being how do you measure reasoning capabilities? This comes with a second question of when does following an algorithm become reasoning? Animals for example have a large amount of instinctual reasoning as an inherit part of their architecture that self trains when presented with the correct environment. What does the gradient between low level reasoning and high level reasoning look like? Coming back to humans, we know of countless example of where human reasoning was right for the wrong reasons. We also have seen many different paths to the same solution. For the egotistical it would be easy to say “well if you didn’t do it they way I did, you are wrong”, but that’s not very scientific. Defining the topology of the problem is a more scientific way of looking at it, but quickly runs into P=NP and Kolmogorov complexity issues. The last thing I’ll touch on is why did human society begin to rapidly change after we started following the scientific method. Looking at the method in hindsight, it seems like a pattern that a reasoning agent should have been able to distil and follow around the time it reaches what we consider higher level reasoning. Therefore I’m highly resistant to consider human reasoning “real” reasoning versus any other possible path to reasoning. Human reasoning is simply what we are comfortable with. This also leads me to consider the worrying possibility there are far more efficient and faster means of reasoning that I as a human will be very uncomfortable with.
used to get money to teach students, now we teach students to get money
I studied biochem in undergrad and my classes were full of premed students. I loved the subject and nerded out about the course material - I spent my time designing my own experiments around gene cloning that took several semesters to run. They were sharing last year’s tests with their frat buddies and laughing at us nerds. I’ve never looked at doctors the same way again after college. I looked up to them as a child, yet after seeing how the sausages were made, I started to doubt everything. I frequently ask doctors, who spend all of ten minutes with me while the nurses do all the work, about the molecular specifics of what they’re talking about. They talk down to me as if they’re explaining to a child, yet they’re frequently quite wrong. I’m not trying to sound superior to them, but I’m shocked they seem to care so little about the subject. It doesn’t give me much hope about what they know and their abilities or competency. I suspect surgeons and specialists are a different breed and aren’t like this at all. And to be clear, this isn’t everyone. But it does seem to be the majority I’ve interacted with throughout my life. When they act disgruntled at patient interaction, I detest that their profession tries to cap the number of med students per year. We should be letting in as many med students as we can take. We should let doctors from overseas immigrate and easily become practicing doctors here in the US. We should provide easy paths for nurses to become doctors. The premed students in my university were chiefly concerned about money and prestige. They drove BMWs gifted to them by their parents and laughed at what I drove and how hard I studied. I had to put up with their bullying for years. I know not everyone who studies to become a doctor is like that, but it permanently skewed my view of their profession.
statement
How incredible that the smartest humans are showing their limits of comprehension. How human that their smugness still gets in their way, in the presence of actual brilliance (i.e. the LLM writes so correctly that humans cannot understand the depth, only seeing “horrendous” until confirmed).
All models are wrong, some are useful – but how can you tell?
Most valuable thinking is done at the margins, where you don’t have much capacity to emphasize with a diverse and unknown audience. all models are wrong, some models are useful, etc.
Embrace moral uncertainty
Humans are dangerously incompetent beings. Being more careful is fine.
Welfares uncertainty principle
Well yes, it is propaganda. They really think that. I think it would be foolish not to debate it. I remember a time in my life where the majority of people around me found the idea of farm animals being capable of fear or pain laughable, while having no trouble thinking of dogs that way.
The crooked timber of AI
It is complicated but not complex. Overwhelming, but not mystifying. The complexity and mystery of AI do not dwell at these machinic levels.
Exists only when you look for it
Funny thing about vision, inside our heads, in our consciousness, it feels like we are seeing a picture. As in, we have pictures ‘inside our heads’. But they can’t actually be pictures, they must be data structures. When our vision centres have analysed the incoming signals from the retina and processed it into information about edges, lines, colours, objects - does that then get reassembled somewhere to make the image we see in our heads? Its a very intuitive idea but that can’t be possible. Because if your brain is recreating the ‘image’ inside your head somewhere, something then needs to look at it (and process it and break it down again to information about edges, lines, colours). But you’ve already done that! You already have the data, no need to make it back into an image and then re-analyse it again (see Dennett, cartesian theatre, inner observer, homunculus etc). imagine rendering a frame of a 3D game, Doom or something. The game has information about the 3D structure of the room, where the walls are, where the entities are. Then it goes to the rendering pipeline and that data is used to draw on a 2D screen, creating a 2d image. The light from that image then hits your retina and your vision processing centres break the image down into data again - the 3d structure of the room as far as you can see it, where the entities are, colours. That data is then in your head (obviously not exactly the same data that the game had, but some analogous data structure in whatever weird internal format the brain uses). And thats it! That data is you seeing it! (But no, you think, surely that data is used to recreate the image in my head somewhere…) Things like the necker cube gives us a peep behind the curtain maybe.
Why influence is deeply human
facts and evidence alone are usually not enough to change someone’s mind
The systems that no one will test
There is a problem you might not have considered. There is a proof that guard-rails will always be bypassable it’s roots go back to the 1930’s and becomes brutally clear with the 1940’s work of Claude Shannon that says in effect, “Redundancy is necessary for information transfer.” And later work by Gus Simmons that shows that where ever there is redundancy a covert channel can be formed within the information channel. Thus guard-rails will always allow prompt and similar attacks to happen. This happens irrespective of if the guard-rail is on the input to the AI system or it’s output. You can extend this proof to show that sandboxes will likewise fail, but this time it’s the AI not a human getting around the security. Now consider, I can publish the proofs in sufficient detail to have it clear to all, but that also means that it will end up in AI training… Thus a variation on “catch 22”.
Alessandro Scali, Doppiozero
The loop is the infinite repetition of a very short portion of an image… a Dantean ‘contrappasso’: we isolate an action and force the subjects to repeat it endlessly, unable to ever free themselves from the terrible, fascinating spell.
thedankoe
It’s a creative challenge to live a life that very few people live, but I’ve found that growth (and therefore meaning/fulfillment) does not come from following the herd. Leonardo Da Vinci walked into Verrocchio’s workshop to learn painting and left knowing anatomy, engineering, optics, and bronze casting. During Industrialization, the factory model wasn’t meant to destroy education, critical thinking, individual agency, and taste, but that’s exactly what it did. It steered us away from the Renaissance ideal. Education became training instead of discovery. People are so worried that AI will ruin our thinking and make us more like machines, when they’ve already been living like machines for the whole of their lives. AI is simply that, artificial intelligence. Like a bag of water that you must mold.
That’s all for now folks…