last modified April 19, 2024
This is a living page that I’ll occasionally update with my favorite bits of the internet.
- The Tail End — you’ve spent 93% of your in-person time with your parents by the time you graduate High School. We’re in The Tail End.
- Pain is not the unit of effort — you’re not doing your best work if you’re unhappy; instead, you’re probably doing it wrong.
- Dear Bear: I got everything I wanted, but I’m still unhappy — “When I was 8, I wanted to be an author… By the time I was 16 I wanted to work at a hedge fund. How does that happen? How do you forget who you are?”
- People like us (do things like this) — an intro to the ideas of mimetic desire and “hero licensing”.
- The Sudden Obliteration of Expectation — Wuthering (adj, /ˈwəT͟HəriNG/): The feeling that follows the sudden obliteration of future expectations.
- Umeshisms — if you’ve never missed a plane, you’ve spent too much time at airports; if you haven’t burned out, have you worked as hard as you are capable of?
- Meditations on Moloch — why does a society of rational agents result in suboptimal outcomes for the population? Alexander proposes Egregore, an occult concept representing a non-physical entity that arises from the collective thoughts of a distinct group of people.
- 80, 000 hours — a summary of a 600 page book on optimizing The Thing you’ll spend 80k hours of your life doing: your career.
- Ugh fields — the psychology of why we avoid things that we know we shouldn’t be avoiding.
- The Curse of Smart People — “People have… an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything.”
- Should you reverse any advice you hear? — self explanatory.
- Brain Crack — I’ll write something about this more long-form at some point, but alerted me to my own tendency of stashing ideas and potential.
- I’m a Yappie — a role-model Asian-American experience on being in tech. contains one of few quotes I can recall from the top of my head: “When you’re striving for a milestone and not a mission, you can feel lost when you achieve it.”