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Calling this done for now. I have one more variant planned, which I will hopefully complete by tomorrow.

@scriptnull Idk if Substack gives out rss feed. Most of my consumption is on substack these days but I don't want to open the app because it has also become like every other social media.

By default, when you click on a post to read it, Rho will mark it as read. If you wish to mark it as unread, you can do it via right-click.

I'm hacking on a new passion project! It is an @obsdmd plugin to encourage the "blog" reading habit. Meet: Rho Reader 🌸 🎉 github.com/scriptnull/rho… Made the first-ever (early) release of it last night before going to bed. Here is what is included 👇

@patrickc One thing I do know is that it will involve both physical and digital media. It could be “Steam Punk” or “Soulful utilitarianism”.

@patrickc Interesting. I was drafting a project called “objects of the future” just a couple of weeks ago. Maybe it is time for me to flesh it out. However, I feel there can be no unified aesthetic that will be adopted all over the world because cultural aesthetics vary a lot.

A Call for New Aesthetics: newaesthetics.art.

Extended AI use atrophies your imagination Say you want to think through a certain problem you are facing. You could immediately ask a chatbot to get some surface-level answers to your problems. If the problem is not urgent and you can put off the decision for a while to think it through, you can completely change your outlook on it. You may even realise that whatever was bothering you was not a problem in the first place, and that you can simply choose not to take any action. This type of wisdom comes only from the embodied experience of facing such situations repeatedly and failing. AI can not do this. It cannot embody an experience. It only has weights and a pre-defined decision-making tree. I watched an interview with Airbnb's founder a long time ago, where he explained how they come up with product ideas. They use storyboards to think through customer experience like a movie. This involves an incredible amount of imagination and visualisation. They also stretch the conventional norms of customer experience. What if an Airbnb booking experience is a 10-star experience? What would that look like? Maybe the customer would get an Uber Black pre-booked to wait for them at the airport, and the town's mayor would welcome them with a marching band. Of course, it is ridiculous, but that is the power of imagination. I enjoy the MOBA game genre, and I can think of many analogies between the game and running a business. What is the local market, and how can I reach a particular target with the resources I have? How can I gather the resources without running myself to the ground? Do I think about competition or change the game that I am playing? However, there are pros and cons to this method, and it may not work out if you choose the wrong idea. You'll need to choose the right analogy for your situation. We think the chatbots are somehow intelligent enough to know everything about our existence and to make decisions for us. In fact, the biggest problem right now is that they don’t have all the information about our existence. Reality is changing every day, every minute, and the chatbot doesn’t know it. Which means they cannot make the optimal decision for us. This is why people advocate for continual learning, in which AI agents learn as they gain more information. Then again, the problem is data-gathering. Gathering data in the digital realm is easy. But capturing what is happening in the real world requires sensors and cameras, raising significant privacy concerns. The hope of a personal, customised JARVIS is still a long way off. AI cannot embody a real-world experience, but we can. We gather so much data about our surroundings that influence our decisions. So do not offload your decision-making or creative process to these chatbots. Just like how the muscles in your body atrophy if you don’t use them, and how your competence in a third language quickly vanishes if you don’t speak it often, your ability to solve problems creatively will also atrophy if you don’t stretch your thinking regularly.

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The Eternal Tug Of War For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction - Newton’s Third Law of Motion. For every mainstream narrative, there is a counter-narrative. Democracy has a ruling party and an opposing party (however ineffective it may be) Everyone worked from home, stayed anonymous and enjoyed earning money online, but now IRL is considered the new URL. People sick of corporate culture oppose it by starting their own business. People who were perennially online switch to an entirely physical medium. Yanagi, Hamada and co. Started a counter-culture Mingei movement to oppose industrially produced wares. We, as humans, cannot help but create these opposing forces to keep our lives in balance. We get stuck arguing over partial truths. A cylinder can be observed as a circle or a rectangle. Neither is right nor wrong. Every idea or ideology has its strengths and weaknesses. If both sides do not acknowledge each other, is synthesis even possible? Our existence will always be in a state of flux.

@ThePrimeagen Maybe humanity has exhausted all possible stories.

Can we just create a completely different IP?

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What if it were different? I used to think that what I liked consuming was what I enjoyed making. If I enjoyed reading fiction, I would attempt to write it, but I am not good at it and did not really enjoy the process. I used to think that to write a deeply transformative article, it had to be long. That seemed like a logical conclusion. But short, dense articles that pack information or insight are much more effective at communicating than long ones. I used to think that whatever I do has to fit into one unifying narrative. There are so many of these assumptions and biases that are not necessarily helping us be effective in our day-to-day lives. To sell my products successfully and make a living, I need to have a substantial social following. To be good at coding, I need to spend several weeks to learn and mastering one language. When writing and publishing blog posts, I always create a thumbnail image that has meaning. If X has to be done, then it is a foregone conclusion that Y is the way to achieve it. For every example, there is a counterexample. Someone has done it differently and better than most. Always question your biases and assumptions. Am I over-estimating or under-estimating the complexity of a project? Do not default to the first option. Always ask, What if it were different?

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Do interesting things first There is a reason why much of the material you consume is slop. It is because they lack depth. Any piece of work with depth has to be interesting. An interesting piece of work usually changes your perspective. Interesting ideas are typically orthogonal to your existing beliefs or even the complete opposite. An interesting encounter fires your imagination. It can create a spark, and that can turn into a flame and passion pretty quickly. To make interesting things, one has to expose oneself to interesting ideas and activities. To understand that you had an interesting encounter, you need to be open to receiving it. You are open to receiving new information if you are curious. Being curious means you are naturally interested in many things. Curiosity is the foundation of creativity. Only if you constantly keep exposing yourself to interesting ideas can you keep producing interesting work. This exposure will slowly start bleeding into your work. Nature is always interesting. Hence, it is an eternal source of inspiration to produce interesting work.

Things used to be simple. On YouTube you could select resolution with one tap. Now you have to do two. In safari mobile you could open new tab and browse tab with one taps. Now you need two. I think we have reached a point where we cannot optimise design further that we are making things worse!

@IWDominate I will definitely not watch the random Vietnamese guy stream the matches on YouTube.

We made it out of Groups at Kespa Cup with the win last night over BNK FearX. We play 2 Bo3s to see if we can advance to semifinals vs DK/HLE/T1. Unfortunately though there is no way to watch the game in NA, and I'd be personally very upset if you went on youtube and watched a random Vietnamese guy who was streaming the games live on that platform, so do not do it. Wish us luck!

@kmr_dilip It looks like this kid can do the math.

Met a 10 yo boy who wants to be a farmer when he grows up. He’s been in the top 100 twice in the Math Olympiad. Father is a physicist and mother a music teacher. None of them have any confusion about his future and they are confident that farming is the pursuit. The family is moving back to their village to live closer to agriculture. Sometimes it just takes clarity to chase the unconventional and walk towards what matters most. We spend so much time pushing kids towards things that sound impressive on paper, but never let them wander. Wish this could be taught. But it has to be lived.

Will my account be shadow-banned if I post a Substack link? :P

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Why you can ignore 99% of what you read online In my last post, I mentioned the claim that if reading is a superpower, then writing can make you a god. However, since writing is cheap and everyone has a megaphone (on the internet), you are also exposed to a lot of slop. Most of the content is regurgitation. Someone said this, I read that, Research says. People take a quote from a celebrity or entrepreneur and remix it with their own perspective. This is fundamental to our nature and creativity, but it also means most of the material you read is going to be of no value and boring. The real creativity happens when a piece of content completely turns your perspective on something you already know. This is extremely rare. Take the case of AI, for example. 98.9% of what you read online is regurgitation. AI bad, AI good, AI doomsday already here. 0.1% are people building the tool and hyping it. Only 1% or less than 1% take the difficult step of spending enough time with these tools to make a product, and then come to a completely different conclusion than others. These kinds of people tend to first believe in something, go the distance, explore it thoroughly and then come back to report what they found. These are the people who have opinions on subject matters before they are considered cool. These people ultimately drive the culture. It is not difficult to identify them. If you are scrolling and reading about a particular subject, notice what or who is often cited in these posts. It is usually someone who has done deep work on that specific topic. If you do this enough times, you will have a curation of people who change culture. You can notice the wave much before others can. Instead of being a passive consumer of slop, if you can actively connect the dots, it will be a substantial competitive advantage in this era. This has been the case for a long time, but I have only come to this realisation now.

@dravishakatoch Do a long read immediately after waking up. Sets the tone for the day. Carry that momentum.

Fellow people with mild ADHD: I haven’t ever got diagnosed but I struggle to finish long reads. I have to constantly remind myself to not get distracted and most of the times music helps but it’s still not enough. What has worked for you?

You can safely ignore 99% of opinions of AI you read.