List of phrases from lives of high agency people:

you can just do things you need to be more delusional it’s time to build don’t ask for permission move fast and break things the quick shall inherit the earth live players go direct founder mode man in the arena don’t die ¹ —- does it defy the laws of physics? there's no unsolvable problem everything is a skill issue adults don't exist there's no way all normal behaviour is forgotten. only weird behaviour survives. one giant game of Roy optimise for the best story the amygdala is outdated hardware experiments > decisions end of day > end of week what have you got done this week? what is ignored by the media that will be studied by historians? questions are the answers you might need have you tried just doing the thing 100 times? specific ambition gives direction. general ambition gives anxiety. modern schooling is the low agency industrial complex everyone too busy worried what u think of them to notice u ²

“In a world where the cost of intelligence will continue to drop rapidly, more value will accrues back into the app layer." - Aaron Levie, Box¹

“The App Layer is the only durable category. Intelligence is going to continue to compress at unprecedented levels.” - Suhail, Playground, Mixpanel²

-- 2025-01-29T06:30:05.350Z

"open source everything" ~ Jack, via X

-- 2025-01-28T15:00:03.002Z

Genuinely think the race to A.G.I. needs the rivalry of this ilk and yes it has begun.

https://x.com/LiangWenfeng_/status/1884080875450818754

Ok this account is not the official wenfeng lmao -- 2025-01-28T14:03:42.890Z

listening to marc andreessen on lex fridman...

https://x.com/TnvMadhav/status/1862128639531499725 -- 2025-01-28T13:30:02.882Z

"...and oh yes almost forgot that deepseek was a side project"

https://x.com/karpathy/status/1872362712958906460 -- 2025-01-27T14:00:24.691Z

me waiting for filmbuff to upload that one much awaited review and analysis episode. -- 🏞️ Context #1 -- 2025-01-26T04:01:46.221Z

Cal Newport on TikTok¹

When I sign in for the first time, TikTok asks me to choose my interests from a long list illustrated by cheerful emojis. I select “Life Hacks,” “Science and Education,” and “Sports.” Then I’m off. The first video shows the Clemson University baseball team playing an exhibition game against the Savannah Bananas, a professional touring squad. The Clemson infield, for some inscrutable reason, starts dancing. I swipe up. A new video begins, showing someone selecting shoes at a store. The video is only ten seconds long; by the time I’ve finished jotting down some notes, it has already started replaying. I hastily swipe again. The next video plays tranquil music while a car slowly drives toward Yosemite National Park. The algorithm must have noticed that I lingered on the wintry scene: the next video shows someone sweeping snow off a porch with some kind of rotating broom contraption. Then the feed takes a darker turn, which makes me want to scroll even faster. I see a news story about a person being pushed onto subway tracks in Manhattan—swipe—a Trump video set to ominous music—swipe—“Top 15 Most Ghetto High Schools in New Jersey”—swipe—and someone making fun of a server’s accent in a restaurant. I shut down the app.

But if he were to again, I really hope he doesn't come across "brain rot" ever but a part of me wants him to go down that rabbit hole (and write about how he felt).

majority of dopamine rush in software engineering comes from being able to reproduce bugs that couldn't be easily before. -- 2025-01-24T11:43:23.105Z

"LLMs are awesome and limited"

LLMs are great at things that require relatively lesser effort than generating the input itself¹.

NOTE: This feed is a sliding window. One can find a significant portion of a feed archive on my website.

All credits of this idea to Simon Willison.