Collecting these little ideas has become a major focus. Here’s this month’s installment.
- Calm people live, panicked people die.
- Emotions are the barometer of mental health.
- Belief is a way to remove the irritation of doubt.
- The Internet amplifies variance.
- We’ve lost and need to go back to the drawing board and start over is one of the hardest things for people to say to themselves.
- Let the bullets fly for awhile.
- Approach everything like a curious idiot, rather than a know-it-all genius.
- New words are addresses to previously unused embeddings in concept space.
- Selling is part of life.
- Do not prize originality. It’s easy enough to be original when you stay on the same bus long enough.—cf. Helsinki Bus Station Theory
- There is power in mystery.
- Widen the limits of what is or is perceived to be possible, and it will come with the cost of lowering your ability, real or imaginary, to discern the probable.
- There are no shortcuts; there are no miracles.
- A schedule is more important than a to-do list.
- Generation, degeneration, regeneration.
- Life is a read, eval, and print loop (REPL) process.
- Surprise enables seeing with different eyes.
- Do not look for a successful personality to duplicate.—Bruce Lee
- Do not rule over imaginary kingdoms.
- Whenever the law falls short, people find a way.
- A fish doesn’t know what water is, until it is beached.—Marshall McLuhan
- No risk it, no biscuit.
- The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.—Brian Kernighan
- Arguing with someone who doesn’t care about the truth is a waste of time. Most people care more about fitting in than truth.
- Don’t mind what happens.
- Many people’s presentation of self are masks hiding secret pain.
- It’s better to whole-ass one thing than to half-ass many.—Kelly Shortridge
- Unix-philosophy: (1) design for creativity, not tasks, (2) embrace constraints, and (3) self-host and iterate.
- Technology is the art of arranging the world so that you don’t have to experience it.—Heidegger
- Where is the taser for the reader’s balls?
- The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.—William Blake
- Everything’s a flyer for the show.
- The world is full of wonder. What are you doing to experience more of it?
- What you see is all there is.
- Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.—Mary Oliver
- Look beyond the default options.
- It’s only integrity when it hurts.
- Our failure to reach our perceived ideal ultimately defines us and makes us unique.
- If force could solve a complex problem, wouldn’t it have done so already?
- Real praise is specific.
- Stopping the bad is easier than starting the good.
- Foster self-realization.
- Try to escape the darkness outside and within.
- Detailed models and graphics more often explain imagined possibilities than reality.
- Marketing of innovation is selling the ideas of five years ago to those stuck 10 years in the past.
- If you don’t save your own history, no one else will or they’ll do it badly.
- The enemy also gets a vote.
- Just another dot in a galaxy of uses.
- The difference between water and ice is one degree.
- Augment and magnify different types of culture.
- If you want to take a good shit, you’re going to have to eat well.—Milos Forman
- Instant feedback encourages experimentation.
- Nature is not a temple but humanity’s ruin.
- A.I. is a technology of extraction not of intelligence.
- Forget individualism; life is a collaboration.
- Fear fame, wealth and power as a pig fears getting fat.
- Some entropies are measurements of ignorance.
- The only people who get upset at you having boundaries are the people who benefited by you having none.
- Start small. One change at a time. Process over results. Be grateful.
- Sometimes the expression of an idea is more important than the idea.
- What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.—Jane Goodall
- Labeling the past is propaganda, not history.
- If you want wilder, curiouser thoughts, you have to avoid the Aunties, or recommendation algorithms.
- Reject all mass movements.
- “[T]he politican is powerless against government bureaucracy; society cannot be changed through political action.”—Jacques Ellul
- Nothing escapes technique, broadly defined as methods of efficiency.
- The master shapes tools and is, in turn, shaped by them.
- Society is made up of countless conflicting forces that don’t cancel each other out but continually give rise to new situations.
- Feed your head.
- Disposable work, disposable lives.
- Don’t let a cop live in your head. Don’t be a cop.
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