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That breaks my heart, because so much of my start on the web came from being able to see and easily make sense of any site I’d visit. I had view source, but each year that goes by, it becomes less and less helpful as a way to investigate other people’s work. Markup balloons in size and becomes illegible because computers are generating it without an eye for context. Styles become overly verbose and redundant to the point of confusion. Functionality gets obfuscated behind compressed Javascript.

In the best case scenario, we create routines to hypnotize ourselves into repetition. We have loved ones and mentors who tell us to keep going, and help us figure out when we’re on the wrong track. We look for signs that we’re getting better, but we also understand that the process of getting really, really good at something sometimes just feels like a incoherent slog. If we’re lucky and resourceful and creative, we’ll eventually break through the membrane and find ourselves on the other side we’ve been clawing towards for so long.

It’s not enough to tell one good story; you have to create an entire world that people can step into, familiarize themselves with, and spend time getting to know. Initially you’ll have to walk them around and show them what’s in your world, but your goal is to familiarize them with your world sufficiently, and motivate them to participate, to the point that they can spend time in your world and build stuff in it without you having to be there all the time.

Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it.

Listen, our story is about endurance. It’s about everything staying in flux all the time. It’s about how we want to eradicate space when we need to learn how to coexist with it. It’s about learning how to love and lose people without idealizing or demonizing them. Because people were not put on Earth to plug the void within us. We long to possess them and absorb them, but they remain fundamentally separate.

3 makers.1000 days. 1 awesome ride. 30+ MVPs. 100+ experiments. 4Cr (~600K USD) in revenue from trying things out.

The question of language was central to the making of Midnight’s Children. In a later novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, I used the acronym “Hug-me” to describe the language spoken in Bombay streets, a melange of Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi and English. In addition to those five “official” languages, there’s also the city’s unique slang, Bambaiyya, which nobody from anywhere else in India understands. Clearly, any novel aiming for readability could not be written in Hug-me or Bambaiyya.

For truly innovative innovation, the people who push it forward must be crazy enough to believe in something that no one else does, & patient enough to guard & foster it over a period of many years. Often, they must endure not just obscurity, but even defamation. Mainstream adoption is not for the mainstream.

MS received awards too numerous to list. But the greatest tribute may well have been to compose and sing for the Mahatma himself. After a performance by her in Delhi a few months before Nathuram Godse’s bullets killed him, he said: “To sing a bhajan is one thing; to sing it by losing oneself in God is quite different.” It was only fitting that in the aftermath of that event, AIR played MS’ hari tum haro, a composition in Raga Darbari that she learnt for the Mahatma’s last birthday.

Magnificent!

Earlier, Miyamoto, a bluegrass fanatic, had suggested that learning to play a game is like learning to play a musical instrument. “Take the guitar,” he said. “Some people, when they stumble over how to accurately place their fingers in an F chord, they actually give it up. But once you learn how to play an F chord you become more deeply absorbed in playing the guitar.” The F chord, as he sees it, is a kind of bridge between indifference and pleasure. “If the bridge is too easy to pass by, it’s called ‘entertainment.’ If it’s rather difficult, it can be called ‘hobby.’ ”

Nostalgic!

It was beguilingly simple: a customer would call a hotline, the phone would ring twice and automatically disconnect, and the system would reply within seconds with dynamic content, such as match scores, through a call or texts.

Courage is not the absence of fear but your ability to do things in the presence of fear. That is the highest virtue of a maker. Make your reality happen by pushing it a little past fear.

A great read about types of burnout and how to handle them.

Abundance is overwhelming. It is hard to keep up with so much content in a short period of time. I have no idea how many things I have hoarded in this period. Even good things in moderation helps.

People are astoundingly good at adapting. When contemplating change it’s tempting to draw a straight line and assume a change in circumstances leads to an equal change in how you feel. But it’s never like that. When faced with a change people quickly say, “OK, this is the new baseline. Our expectations now begin there.” It’s part of why we are so bad at forecasting.

"When I think about it, having the kind of body that easily puts on weight is perhaps a blessing in disguise. In other words, if I don’t want to gain weight I have to work out hard every day, watch what I eat, and cut down on indulgences. People who naturally keep the weight off don’t need to exercise or watch their diet. Which is why, in many cases, their physical strength deteriorates as they age. Those of us who have a tendency to gain weight should consider ourselves lucky that the red light is so clearly visible. Of course, it’s not always easy to see things this way."

We’re a long way off from being able to create a single human-equivalent A.I., let alone billions of them. For the foreseeable future, the ongoing technological explosion will be driven by humans using previously invented tools to invent new ones; there won’t be a “last invention that man need ever make.” In one respect, this is reassuring, because, contrary to Good’s claim, human intelligence will never be “left far behind.” But, in the same way that we needn’t worry about a superhumanly intelligent A.I. destroying civilization, we shouldn’t look forward to a superhumanly intelligent A.I. saving us in spite of ourselves. For better or worse, the fate of our species will depend on human decision-making.

After all, deep readers at least may know what they don't know, and hence are better able to deploy shields of skepticism against all forms of advertising, including the political kind that enchants populist mobs into being. Those who lack a reading habit may be locked in perpetual intellectual adolescence, but they can still gather in the street, shout, and even shoot.

A gentle reminder to self

I try not to overstimulate my brain: I pick 2-3 big things to accomplish a day. After that, I focus on little things that don’t require as much energy.

“Almost everybody who's talking about the future of AI is just repeating other people's conclusions. You need to sit and do your own thinking and update your thinking, otherwise you're going to have no idea what's going to come.”

"You must struggle with your own beliefs if you are to make any progress in understanding the possibilities, limitations of computers in this intellectual area."

A set identity serves as a grounding force, but it also leaves a lot of people stuck living in half of themselves. You keep yourself within the parameters you’ve already established in order to control how you’re perceived. But you’re also a dynamic person with lots of qualities that conflict with how you present with your peer group. This is why people have mid-life crises and secret lives—they crave certain kinds of expression that they’re not “allowed” in their day-to-day existence.

Glorious!

“Books don’t set limits; they set us free. They don’t mutilate; they restore. Reading helps me think positively, chase away negative ideas. And that’s what we need most right now.”

War is destructive. It transforms men, kills emotions and fears. When you’re at war, you see the world differently. Reading is a diversion, it keeps us alive. Reading reminds us that we’re human.”

People grow up strongly wedded to their narratives, but crumble when life diverges from them. We all know overachievers in high school who become depressed in college, or people in grad school who’ve put enormous energy into pursuing a particular path only to realize it doesn’t make them happy. Even if you don’t want to live a completely unstoried life, it’s important to able to separate identity and narrative: you’re more resilient if you realize you have value separate of your story. Going back to Didion—telling stories to cope with chaos works up to a certain point, but there are things that will happen in your life that render every story redundant.

Back in 2010, Carr argued that the internet was changing how we thought, and not necessarily for the better. “My brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting,” he wrote in The Shallows. “It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the same way the net fed it — and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became.”

It's necessary to review content consumptions.

PS: Thanks @manas_saloi

'The Silicon Valley view of the mind'

I used to find it hard to relax in relationships because I hated the idea of being seen in all my hideous imperfection, my anxiety and neediness. I think one of the most helpful things I’ve realized over time is that I don’t need to be perfect to be loved. That what I actually need is to allow myself to be known, to let someone see as much of me as possible. That what binds two people together is seeing all the ugliness and still miraculously, improbably, choosing each other.

GPT-3 can help to cure writer's block and also generate click-bait headlines and content.

PS: Is GPT-3 Set To Replace Your Job? 10 Crazy Examples Of What GPT-3 Can Do

This tool is a bit scary as you can immediately see how GPT3 can be used for evil. Out of a sentence, it generates a clickbait title. Then adds more text and I think it would not have a problem to generate the whole article. Quite amazing.

But, whether through side projects, blogging, or building a portfolio, I do think that finding a way to publish your learnings is valuable. The nice thing about publishing and shipping smaller things on the side is that you do end up building a signal to employers that you have “passion”. This also allows you to ratchet your perceived learnings more sustainably than always trying to be at 100% learning mode.

Psychological safety helps you establish a solid identity. When you’re around people who love you, you learn to see yourself through their eyes: as someone who’s worthy of time and attention, worthy of forgiveness, interesting and valuable. You believe that you deserve love. You’re more willing to take risks, because you’re not fixated on the judgment of your acquaintances: you have people who love and believe in you, and you know their opinion matters more. I know we live in a society that fetishizes individualism, but nobody exists in a vacuum. We are all the products of our environment. No one is unaffected by the people around them—if they think they’re impervious they’re probably not that self-aware.