jcinis

Improving and sustaining our shared substrate, the physical universe, is THE project for all of humanity. After all, the table we all sit at, is the thing that connects us. Without that, we have nothing, we are neurons in a void talking to ourselves.

... is the moat.

It turns out that markdown files were the killer app.

Make no mistake, this is who we are now.

Remember when no actual engineers wanted to call machine learning "AI"? We lost that battle.

"Ignorance is the most delightful science in the world because it is acquired without labor or pains and keeps the mind from melancholy." — Giordano Bruno (before being burned at the stake)

Am I being asked to play? Or am I being played?

Attention is all we have, and the length to which you can hold on to inspiration is directly correlated with it's ability to come forth into existence. Sparks of love and desire and brilliance mean nothing if you can not give them the fuel to reify.

Text messaging is, and will likely always be, The Killer App: slowing thought, and allowing individual connection across time, distance, and context.

Youthful energy tears things down. Elder energy builds things up. I’m working harder to become the elder: energized by change that moves slower, with steadier footing.

My thoughts on fashion: I want to wear things that are deeply considered for their actual aesthetic, and functional, and story qualities, not for a spreadsheet or ubiquitous signaling. I want comfortable armor, and beautiful poetry as visual cipher-text, only decipherable by those with my shared cultural key. All others should receive the sensual honeypot of an invasive flower too beautiful to weed out.

From now on, everyone will be an eschatologist.

These bones will rise again.

Luxury is a compression algorithm.

Self-obsession is the ultimate luxury good. And never forget that luxury is a compression algorithm. I am deeply grateful for what I have learned through the lives and outputs of these men--I’ve been introduced to many thinkers and concepts and modalities that have, and will continue to shape my onward journey in life. That said, I think just as with all things, we tend to mistake the menu for the meal, we turn so many lessons into aesthetics and identity, we hunt for belonging and status in a vacuum of actual social interaction. We listen to people we don't know in our headphones or alone in our cars, who we look at as successful, and then mimic their behaviors, alone in the gym, or writing our blogs, or practicing our guitar, so that we might be good enough that one day we might be able to share our bodies and music and lives with others. Even more than this cohort, I'm worried about a future being projected and mimicking the boring lives of those in silicon valley and austin and other american cities. Places where people live alone in big boxes, in new clean clothes, only to get in to their car (another box), to go to their office to work alone, or to the gym to be alone in their headphones, or to the sterile white clothed restaurant where you can look around at other people but never actually interact. The dream of designing a life of convenience where everything is delivered and done for you, where someone else is raising your children, and all so that you can 'change the world' with your optimization and 'purpose', which in the end is really just separation. The current American Dream is to achieve separateness and it is very easy to sell by these men and so many others.

Strange that the three podcast princes (Ferriss, Huberman, Friedman) who millions of young men turn to for advice on how to live and think are all single and childless, past the age of 40.

"I wish I had a dream. At least then I'd know what I was failing at."

Tickle my umwelt.

One of the better articles for making sense of the current state of our public discourse. astralcodexten.com/p/why-i-am-not…

"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." –Louis Brandeis

@phantomcolor I predict some soldering in my future. I was so excited to receive something today and the second I saw it had micro-usb I was ready to return it and felt a dark fog come over me.

@jcinis contemplating which road to take on this issue. 1: succumb to the consumerist, discarding and repurchasing, or 2: placating my inner techno nerd curiosity by allocating a day to attempt circuit surgery for all my legacy micro-usb devices... adafruit.com/product/5180?g…

There should be a special place in hell for people who still distribute electronics with micro-usb adaptors.