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The poets make all the words, and therefore language is the indelible record of mankind's being.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series (1844)
5h ago

The best thing a human can do is to help another human being know more. It's even better than making money.

9h ago

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, we feel a responsibility for the actions of those men.

9h ago

The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.

9h ago
dwarkesh.com
I’m glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

Once the technical capacity for mass surveillance and political suppression exists, the only thing standing between us and an authoritarian surveillance state is the political expectation that this is not something we do here.

13h ago
themarginalian.org
Necessary Losses: The Life-Shaping Art of Letting Go

As a sculpture is shaped by what is chiseled off from the block of stone, so too are we shaped by what we lose — by choice, with all the complexities and difficulties of letting go, or by the scythe of chance, which takes away as impartially as it gives.

17h ago
ai-supremacy.com
What is Advanced Machine Intelligence or AMI Labs?

AI agents need world models that allow them to predict the consequences of their actions before they take them. This is key to enabling agents that can plan, remember, and reason about complex observations.

21h ago
longreads.com
The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Julian Brave NoiseCat

I grew up in a very Indian California, and it was under almost constant siege by a society habituated to extraction, displacement, and dispossession. The Native Bay Area and California that raised me was pocked with these invisible enclaves of Indian community: filled with love and holding on by a thread.

23h ago
3quarksdaily.com
Why is mercury a liquid?

Mercury's liquid state results almost entirely from relativistic effects, said Peter Schwerdtfeger, a quantum physicist at Massey University in New Zealand. Toward the bottom of the periodic table, the electrons in the heaviest elements experience such strong attraction to the atomic nucleus that they move close to the speed of light. At this point, they no longer obey the laws of classical physics, and the resulting quantum phenomena — known as relativistic effects — lead to surprising physical properties.

1d ago

The great object of life is sensation—to feel that we exist—even if in pain; it is this craving void which drives us to gambling, to battle, to travel, to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.

1d ago

The discoverer of a new scientific truth does not gradually win over his opponents by converting them... What does happen is that his opponents gradually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with the idea from the beginning.

1d ago

We do not live in order to think, but we think in order to act. Yet thought detached from action becomes a kind of beautiful sickness of the mind.

1d ago

The paradox only disappears when we recognize that the contradictions of life are not errors to be eliminated but the very substance from which meaning emerges.

1d ago
noahpinion.blog
Are we in the foothills of World War 3?

Although World War 2 officially began when Germany invaded Poland, conflicts that either foreshadowed the final conflagration or eventually merged with it began years earlier, in the mid-1930s. WW2 had foothills.

1d ago
lennysnewsletter.com
A guide to advanced B2B positioning

As AI makes it trivial to build and launch products (and, soon, even come up with product ideas), the biggest challenge for product teams is quickly becoming distribution: getting people to pay attention to your product in the increasing cacophony of launches.

1d ago
upstartsmedia.com
Meet The AI Ring Startup Taking On OpenAI And Meta In Wearables

The thing that gets me excited is the promise of technology as an augmentation of the individual, that places the human in control, makes the human more capable, more free. And I really don't see any other product making that the center of all of their design choices.

1d ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Havana Syndrome Edition

For nearly a decade, the U.S. government has been running two parallel tracks on this issue: what it privately considered plausible and what it was willing to say out loud. The official Intelligence Community Assessment, issued in 2023 and reaffirmed in 2025, concluded it was "very unlikely" that a foreign adversary was responsible. It used carefully calibrated and lawyerly language that seemed designed to close a door without closing the deadbolt. Meanwhile, Biden administration officials were privately telling victims at a White House meeting in late 2024: we believe you.

1d ago
lennysnewsletter.com
A guide to advanced B2B positioning

It's never been easier to launch products, which means the biggest challenge product teams are facing is quickly becoming distribution.

1d ago
longreads.com
The Shooting of Two Cornell Freshmen, 42 Years Later

In the past few months, I asked several of my friends if they had heard of this tragedy. Almost every person I asked knew next to nothing. They had either never heard of it or were only vaguely aware of the details.

1d ago
3quarksdaily.com
Morgan Meis on The Sublime

It is a bad movie, and upon further reflection I'm not even sure if we should call it a movie at all, since it is constructed so sloppily.

2d ago

It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunnings achievements of science. The divorce of the two produces politicians without ideas and scientists without conscience.

2d ago

The particular has no power without the universal, and the universal has no meaning without the particular. We cannot live only by bread, nor only by beauty; we need both, and in the right proportion.

2d ago

The big money is not in the buying and selling, but in the waiting. Investors often mistake activity for accomplishment.

2d ago

The best investment you can make is in yourself. But very few people do it, because it's unglamorous and requires a lot of discipline.

2d ago

a position which directly incentivizes insider trading. That in turn creates a long list of very predictable problems.

2d ago
ai-supremacy.com
The U.S. Labor Market and its AI problem

The deeper problem appears to be that the tech is not a meaningful job creator or increasing productivity outside of a few roles even in technology companies.

2d ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Monday Media Diet with Tom Junod

one of the ironies of writing a book is that your publisher asks to you sharpen your Instagram skills so that you can sell it on a platform that is wildly post-literate and is the same time the home of many writers dancing as fast as they can to create attention for the product of all that sweat and toil.

2d ago
3quarksdaily.com
Finland Is Designing Europe’s Sovereignty

For more than a century, Finnish architecture and design has functioned as an instrument of nation-building. It supported the country's independence process, then its consolidation as a highly functioning trust society, and finally the development of its comprehensive defense strategy.

3d ago

The mind is an iceberg, it floats with only a seventh of its bulk above water.

3d ago

The best way to get what you want is to deserve what you want. It's as simple as that. You deserve to get what you want if you can argue for it.

3d ago

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

3d ago

The one thing we ask is that the man who is not thinking should get out of the way of the man who is. The world wants to move forward, and if you're not moving with it, you're holding it back.

3d ago

The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

4d ago
stratechery.com
2026.10: Higher Powers and Lower Macs

I find myself exhausted by the way everyone processes political controversies these days, including warnings about a dire American future that are now a daily occurrence online.

4d ago

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

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