Ryan Li

@GetOutsideAdv @hidden_offs @teachrobotslove the hidden offs guy is AI

🙌 great response As it’s not a pedestal or some luck of the draw bs, it’s intentional and a journey and like all lives it has good and bad times The difference is how you move through those swings of life and how you show up even when it’s shit! As you accepted its all momentary and the now is the only true moment to live intentionally. I hope that makes sense!

Every once in a while you meet someone who seems more Alive than everyone else. It's like everyone else is pretending to exist, but they're actually consciousness manifest - they're dynamic, both funny and tragic, passionate, aware. They've got eyes that actually look at things instead of merely passing them over. It's like coming into contact with the kind of person reality was actually made for.

@WillManidis what is the holy war that the modern corporation can or should solve?

there’s a set of strange little fictions that tech has chosen to believe as some sort of basis set for the perceived morality of their work chief amongst these is the idea that the legal system doesn’t exist, and when it does, it’s a precise mechanistic process tech is “positive sum” and a “community” which means you pretend that the standard weapons that exist for the modern corporation-coercive litigation, ip blocking and trolling, standard white shoe law firm stuff- is “negative sum” or “something bad we don’t do here” this leads to a weirdly formalist view of the legal process. that we must avoid it at all costs, but if we must engage in it, then it’s a fair and repeatable process that must necessarily yield if not the truth, then at least the same outcome repeatedly and provably. it’s this instinct that gives you Anthropic’s odd contract formalism. this is how you end up thinking your best move is to show your cards at the forefront, and thinking you’ve won the hand. there’s incredible potential for outperformance available to you for betraying any of these silly norms that tech uses to feel good about itself. the modern corporation must avail itself of all possible edge, and holy wars require holy weapons, so get busy.

it’s obvious that the value of a business is no longer the present value of its future cash flows. good riddance! such a framework implied that human labor should be minimized ad infinitum, but is there not intrinsic value in meaningful labor? certainly the christian monastic and buddhists thought so… a business with zero future cashflows but that provides fulfilling work for thousands is no value-less business, no matter what a DCF model tells you

this is why my girlfriend and i are eloping in the woods this summer

@somewheresy you are a true poet

Teaching a seminar on how to get into stuff like this at Vibecamp this year. Use code “HEZBOLLAH” for 10% off your ticket

You only believe this because modern construction methods have not been questioned for decades. There are obvious improvements in both design and building that could dramatically simplify the construction process and put it within reach for millions

yes indeed....

why LLMs are mid lol

Despite its romantic appeal, agriculture alone cannot support a return to a more nature-filled life, not for large numbers at least. Beyond the economic infeasibility, there are also just other industries that are aligned with a nature-filled life

We’re hiring for the growth team @AmcaInc For us, growth involves everything that requires a combination of deep research and analysis, plus creativity and aesthetic taste All 0-to-1 projects flow through us. We work on everything from M&A strategy, business development, and government relations to visual design, architecture, and events and experiences If this sounds interesting, reach out ~~~

brian, i'm genuinely confused why you would write an article about craft with significant AI help. i know you've said that this isn't AI, but it obviously is, and I don't need an AI tool to tell me that. you clearly do care about craft on some level; otherwise you wouldn't be posting this. what am i missing?

very three body problem coded .. .. ...

tweets that show how far we’ve fallen from god:

@wrathofgnon your account speaks to me deeply

"But Wrath, I work in construction and terracotta is terribly expensive today." Yes we have geared the economy to favor the large scale, because we subsidize logistics, unemployment, waste, industrial toxins, outsourcing, global supply chains, landfills, and so on. Even without changing most of this we could easily make architectural terracotta cheaper with more demand, more competition, more production, more training, and so on. Meanwhile you can create architectural glazed terracotta in a 35m² workshop like this rammed earth one in Bali, and have space over for a zen garden, an office and a shop.

the new aesthetics grant is tech world's version of the teeny tiny start to spengler's second religiousness....but it will only be in full force when proposals and grants become passions and frenzies

@chthonic_youth big typos but whatever

so true bestie the late-stage western mind can’t help but organize the world into discrete objects and categories like “aesthetics” or “business” or what have you can only think this way when a new aesthetic can only emerge from something entirely foreign to this orientation toward the world ((and it necessarily has to begin with a radically different relationship to space and time))

i love the ambition behind projects like these that try to define “the next aesthetic.” it speaks to a hunger for coherence in a moment where culture feels extremely fragmented. the challenge is that aesthetics aren’t created by intention alone. they’re emergent properties of material conditions, technologies, social affect, and economic incentives. you can name them, influence them, or amplify them — but you can’t centrally plan them. in earlier eras, a small group could define a visual language because society was structured around shared constraints: limited media channels, unified production methods, fewer subcultures, slower cycles. today we operate in a massively multi-polar environment. the internet makes aesthetic formation bottom-up and swarm-driven. styles now emerge through countless micro-experiments, niche communities, algorithmic feedback loops, and shifting affective climates. culture is a complex system and aesthetics are emergent equilibria within it. to engineer a new aesthetic would be like engineering a new oceanic current or weather pattern — not to mention underestimating the vast intelligence of the Cultural Supercomputer. it’s like trying to centrally plan prices instead of letting the market arrive at an equilibrium. any aesthetic that actually becomes dominant will do so because it crystallizes something people already feel — exhaustion with overload, longing for solidity, fascination with the synthetic, whatever. it has to resonate affectively before it coheres visually. in my opinion, the more fruitful angle isn’t “what aesthetic should we choose next?” but rather “what pressures, desires, and constraints are already shaping what people create — and how might those be influenced?” i think that today, in a collectively created culture, aesthetics can only emerge bottom-up, not be prescribed top-down. they surface from lived conditions long before anyone names them. the real value of a project like this is helping us perceive those shifts -- not declaring the next style, but clarifying the forces that will eventually give rise to it.

lmao. the reason why Wittgenstein receives engagement from pedantic language analyzers and also strange mystics is that he, in his late work, was exclusively drawing boundaries around what could be spoken of and gesturing at what could not. the former group, whether they love or love to hate him, can't help but autistically fondle the contours of that boundary, which is the great tragicomedy of his writing. he is trying to help the people who would have wasted their lives playing with words see that life begins precisely where cold logic and language ends. but if you don't even believe that this side, in fact the only side, to life is even real, then yes, I agree, much of what he says probably does sound retarded, much like any Zen koan

@ryanli28 @apralky LOL. For example, he takes intuitionistic logic and makes a big deal out of it where it's a triviality for any true logician. He is basically the popular science author of his time.

I think one core lesson of Thiel, Soros, Freud, Hegel, etc. is that if you're a quirky Central European guy who simply keeps commenting on what's already happening with or without you, the Anglo in his parsimony will assume you're just quirky enough to plausibly be causal and declare you the Grand Architect of the Weltgeist

@willibossman @apralky you have no idea what Wittgenstein is really saying if you actually believe this

@apralky You forgot Wittgenstein, one of the most mediocre philosophers in history, praised by English readers allover.

Exciting news: Aerospace Control Products, a manufacturer for Boeing, Airbus, and defense programs for 45 years, is joining @AmcaInc. This is our third acquisition since we launched earlier this year and another step forward for our team. With it, we grow to 100+ people, add our first factory outside California, and expand our capacity to ship new hydraulic components for both old and new aircraft. I started Amca because I believed our country's aerospace and defense manufacturing base was fragile. Everything I've learned since then suggests it's even weaker than it looked. Our near-term goal is to reduce our customers' supply chain risk, so they can field new manned and unmanned systems at a speed we haven't seen in decades.