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themarginalian.org
How to Promise and How to Keep Promises from Breaking

Even the most sincere promise is but a tenuous handshake — not between us and others, but between our present selves and our future selves. Nothing is more discomposing to our self-image than watching ourselves break a true promise on the edge of the awful recognition that our future selves are only ever a fantasy of who we would like to be, not a prediction of who we will become.

— Maria Popova
4h ago

The sailor does not control the sea, nor does the saint control his conscience. They are what they are; and for that very reason there is a wall between them and the things they move through, which can never be dissolved while they live.

8h ago

Risk means more things can happen than will happen. The gap between those two things is where most investment mistakes are made — not from bad analysis, but from assuming the future is narrower than it actually is.

12h ago

The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more. But the vast majority of what gets taught in school is not actionable — it's meant to signal that you're educated, not to help you think. The moment you realize school is mostly about certification, not education, you can start actually learning.

14h ago

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.

14h ago
ai-supremacy.com
A Guide to Grok Bot 2026

Meta's Muse and SpaceX's Grok Bot make chatbots a bit less relevant in that these are about AI as a utility, helper and assistant in accomplishing tasks. We're still seemingly a far way away from the kind of AI companion that is truly capable even four years after ChatGPT first launched which is astounding to me.

1d ago
themarginalian.org
J.R.R. Tolkien on How to Fall in Love with Life

Enchantment — wherever we may find it (as in nature, poetry, music), or wherever it might find us (as in love) — is not escapism but a truer realism than cynicism, pessimism, or optimism. In allowing us to touch the extraordinary, enchantment — which asks of the courage of the encounter — returns us to our lives more in love with the so-called ordinary world, which, we must also not forget, is itself an extraordinary triumph against probability.

1d ago
noahpinion.blog
The anti-American Right

It doesn't matter whether you assimilate or not. Yes, if you speak a foreign language or build a Hindu temple or wear traditional Indian clothing, the New Right will scream their heads off about it. But if you put on a University of Texas sweater and go to football games, they'll still scream "Alien invaders!!" when they see you in a photo. It's who you are that bothers them, not what you do.

1d ago

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.

1d ago

The biggest investing errors come not from factors that are informational or analytical, but from those that are psychological. Investors with no knowledge of (or interest in) a company's merits buy because the price is rising.

1d ago

Invert, always invert. Many hard problems are best solved only when they are addressed backwards. The way complex adaptive systems work and the way mental constructs overlap, problems frequently become easier to solve if you turn them around in reverse.

1d ago

The universe is wider than our views of it. Yet we should oftener look over the taffrail of our craft, like curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors picking oakum.

1d ago
whyisthisinteresting
The OSS Playbook Edition

Research published by the Australian Army describes changes in Ukraine's drone warfare methods happening over weeks, compared with the many years Western militaries often take to develop and buy new equipment. It is a tight feedback loop, and being able to change it quickly can matter more than getting it perfect in the first place.

1d ago
lennysnewsletter.com
60+ new creative growth ideas

Attention always goes to what people don't see coming. The unexpected gets shared for free, remembered for months, and usually costs less than one week of ad spend.

2d ago
themarginalian.org
Seneca on True and False Friendship

He who begins to be your friend because it pays will also cease because it pays. A man will be attracted by some reward offered in exchange for his friendship, if he be attracted by aught in friendship other than friendship itself.

2d ago

The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.

2d ago

The job of the CEO is not to make good decisions. It's to make a small number of decisions, make them slowly, and make them well. Speed is irrelevant if you're going in the wrong direction.

2d ago

Most people think that finding a hot stock is investing. Finding a stock that is cheap is not enough; you also need a catalyst — something that will actually cause the price to reflect the value. Without a catalyst, you can be right and still lose money for years.

2d ago

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.

2d ago
lennysnewsletter.com
🎙️ How I AI: How two SpaceXAI designers use Grok Bot to do their jobs

AI is making previously inaccessible creative skills available to more people. Claire could not illustrate. John wanted to create motion he could only describe with his hands. Peng wanted to produce 3D renders. In the past, each of those gaps would have required a specialist or years of practice. Now they can begin with a prompt.

2d ago

We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not even as random as that, for we are each the result of one particular egg meeting one particular sperm, when so easily it might have been another.

3d ago

It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles.

3d ago

The record of the past is used to justify the present, but the future is where the real money is made. Most investors spend 95% of their time studying history and 5% imagining what the world could become — and then wonder why they keep buying things that have already happened.

3d ago
noahpinion.blog
Two missing pieces in the AI safety discussion

A coordinated slowdown in AI progress would be bad for these companies' bottom line, because it would allow upstart competitors to catch up. So the fact that they're still calling for a slowdown, in defiance of their own financial interests, is a clear sign that their worry about human extinction is sincere.

3d ago

A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price. But what most people miss is the third lesson: the passage of time is the friend of the wonderful business and the enemy of the mediocre one. Patience isn't just a virtue in investing — it's a compounding force.

3d ago
readtheprofile.com
The Profile: The actor portraying Mark Zuckerberg & the NFL’s most cryptic quarterback

The twin towers still stand because we saw them, moved in and out of their long shadows, were lucky enough to know them for a time. They are a part of the city we carry around. It is hard to imagine that something will take their place, but at this very moment the people with the right credentials are considering how to fill the crater.

4d ago

The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.

4d ago

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and being aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. If you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

4d ago

The best business returns are usually achieved by companies that are doing something that it's relatively easy to do, but that has a moat around it — and the moat is usually not a patent, it's usually a network effect or a cost advantage or something that's very hard to replicate.

4d ago

We are always getting ready to live, but never living. And yet the secret of all life is enjoyment; it is just to notice what is happening, to see it, to taste it in its fullness, to find the curious savor of it.

4d ago
honest-broker.com
How a Healthy Society Falls Apart

"I sent my publisher a manuscript I had been working on for a year and thought I had secured myself by demanding immediate advance payment for ten thousand copies; by the time the check was remitted, it barely covered what it had cost to frank the package a week ago"

4d ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Saturday Selection, Vol. 120

If men are "monitoring the situation" as a hobby, there's less need to read a book. And of course books aren't as social as being online.

4d ago
noahpinion.blog
Get the Middle East out of my politics!

What the United States needs, now more than ever, is general disengagement from the Middle East — an end to military adventures, a dialing back of support for Middle Eastern 'allies' (including Israel), and a forceful rejection of Middle Eastern issues in American domestic politics.

5d ago

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. And yet it is precisely in the collision between our designs and reality's indifference that character is forged — not in triumph, but in the willingness to begin again.

5d ago

Most people think diversification means owning many things. But the real diversification that matters is diversification across time — being able to survive long enough that the math works in your favor. Staying power is the asset most investors forget to buy.

5d ago

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question. And to ask the right question is already to know the direction of the answer.

5d ago
stratechery.com
2026.37: Duo Threats

While OpenAI's tactics may in fact chill research in advanced mathematics, what Meta has assembled is free (to consumers) hardware and software that dramatically reduces the barrier to entry for ordinary people looking to harness the power of agents, making the AI upside a lot more accessible to the masses who don't want to buy a Mac Mini.

5d ago

The difference between a good business and a bad business is that good businesses throw up one easy decision after another. The bad ones give you horrible choices — decisions where every option has a serious downside.

5d ago
jefftweedy
Messi, Me and a Wild Connection

Being in Soldier Field packed to the rafters with a predominantly Hispanic audience at a time like this wasn't lost on me. It's hard not to look at it as something that does have a broader philosophical message.

5d ago
dwarkesh.com
AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement

There's this cycle that keeps repeating where a new model comes out and people are blown away and they're like, 'This is it. This is AGI.' But then they use it a bit, and it starts to feel dumb after a month or so. That cycle just might keep going.

5d ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Friday Interview with Charles Cumming

Some intelligence officers will never talk to a journalist, but they will talk to a novelist. In my experience that's an outlet for intelligence officers, a release valve if you like. They can tell me things that they know I will bend into fiction, thereby absolving them of any qualms they might have about revealing secrets.

5d ago
ftav
Nothing is certain except death and robotaxis

AI is thematic ZIRP. To any layperson, the AI boom is another case of infrastructure overbuild that ignores product commodification and falling barriers to entry. But long-dated binary outcomes of incalculable extremes are protecting a broad subset of investors from multiple compression.

6d ago
notboring.co
Weekly Dose of Optimism #210

He proposes that minds are patterns in a structured, nonphysical space, and that bodies provide interfaces through which those patterns enter the physical world. He argues that many things beyond humans and animals can be interfaces, including computers, which is the most compelling argument I've heard that AI might be able to become "conscious" or "alive."

6d ago
themarginalian.org
Albert Camus on the Source of Strength and How to Save Our Sanity in Trying Times

We know that we live in contradiction, but we also know that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century.

6d ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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