Basement Whatever

Escape the algorithm

action aging ai algorithm aliens Art builder capitalism Chicago cities community consciousness dnd enshittification focus future games good tech governance happiness information Internet learning magic management media movie music organization parenting perspective philosophy privacy project reading reality Rome social social media symbols technology travel ttrpg USA work

about

  • Turn a pile of tabs into a book you’ll actually read

    Turn a pile of tabs into a book you’ll actually read

    Have you ever wanted to research something, so you bookmark a dozen articles, get distracted by everything on the internet, take notes, try to find the common links between the articles, get distracted again – and a project takes way longer than it should? A well-built prompt can fix that, save you time, and return you to the days when reading meant calm focus.

    A way to restore the calm of reading a book without ads everywhere

    The key is asking an AI to synthesize all your sources into a single, cohesive e-book that you can read on your own time, without distractions. Even better, you can make this ebook tailored to how you learn.

    The example below uses this approach to upgrade a Magic: The Gathering deck, but the technique will work for any area where you want to synthesize multiple approaches. Whether you want to learn investing basics, a new programming language, estate planning, parenting research, this approach will create an ebook that you can read calmly and quietly, the way books and research were intended to work.

    How you can create an ebook from multiple links

    First, collect all the links you want to research. Then create a variation of this prompt by switching out the bracketed sections to meet your needs. Then paste that prompt into an AI and get started. (I’m not sure where this prompt came from, I think I read it somewhere on Twitter).

    I have 6 articles/sources saved on upgrading the [Quick Draw MTG precon]. I want to turn them into a cohesive, interactive e-book that fits my learning style and actually helps me retain what I read. About me (the reader): [I know magic the gathering and have played extensively. I have a lot of experience with the Commander format, and I want to upgrade the Quick Draw deck to maximize my chances of winning. I do not want a deck that wins just with creatures. I want an alternate win condition, and I want a deck that feels like I’m a wizard, casting all sorts of spells each round].
    What I want from the e-book: Written for someone at my level: no talking down, no assuming too much

    – Explains concepts from first principles when needed tight, focused guide
    – Tone: practical and actionable
    – Designed to be read cover-to-cover, not just referenced
    What makes it “interactive”:
    – Include reflection questions, thought exercises, or mini-scenarios throughout
    – Prompt me to connect ideas to my own experience or goals
    – Surface tensions or open questions worth sitting with
    What “good” looks like:
    – Synthesizes the best insights across all sources, don’t just summarize each one separately
    – Explains the “why” and “how,” not just the “what”
    – Explains the different approaches in the various guides so I can choose which one [best fits my playstyle]
    – [Gives me a shopping list that contains more cards than I need, so I can experiment]
    – Uses concrete examples and analogies to make abstract ideas tangible
    – Builds logically, earlier sections lay groundwork for later ones
    Process:
    – First, read through all the sources I provide
    – Ask me clarifying questions about scope, emphasis, and structure before writing
    – Propose an outline for my approval
    Then write the e-book
    Links:
    https://mtg.cardsrealm.com/en-us/articles/upgrading-commander-precon-quick-draw-stella-lee-wild-card
    https://www.coolstuffinc.com/a/paigesmith-04172024-how-should-i-upgrade-the-quick-draw-commander-precon https://draftsim.com/quick-draw-upgrade-guide/
    https://cardgamebase.com/quick-draw-upgrade-guide/
    https://edhrec.com/articles/quick-draw-thunder-junction-precon-upgrade-guide
    https://www.tcgplayer.com/content/article/Quick-Draw-MTG-Commander-Upgrade-Precon-Guide/5bb39fcf-9e41-4e9e-bc07-bf1f60813e33/
    https://blog.cardkingdom.com/quick-draw-commander-precon-upgrade-guide/“

    Here’s what makes the approach work

    • The prompt synthesizes – it doesn’t summarize. By synthesizing all the arguments, the AI prompt gives you an overview that you can read and compare. You can also tweak the prompt to include more direct comparisons, if that is important.
    • The prompt is interactive. You can vary this prompt to create study questions or mini-scenarios to help you learn the target material and retain information.
    • Customized to you. We didn’t ask for books customized to us, but we now have the capability for them. Whatever your experience level, adapt the prompt to get you an ebook that is unique to you.

    Quiet, calm focus is the payoff

    The payoff is the format itself. An e-book is calm. The internet is filled with ads, flashing popups, links to other sources, and easy ways to access a million distractions. I like to think that this approach is recovering quiet reading back from the carnival of capitalism that the internet has become – except now that quiet reading is customized to you on any topic that interests you.

    So before you bookmark that next article, consider bookmarking the idea: gather up multiple sources, write the prompt, and let the AI hand you a book which you can read quietly.

  • Links of the Day

    Building an “AI Tribunal” for media verification

    Fun with fax machines

    50 greatest albums with headphones

    See how your phone tells everyone who you are

  • why ai obviously isn’t going to take all the jobs

    …my strong assumption is that most people who push or buy the idea that ‘AI is going to take all the jobs’ haven’t thought much about what ‘jobs’ are, in a fundamental sense.
    — Read on endsdontjustifythemeans.com/p/why-ai-obviously-isnt-going-to-take

  • The Message of the Medium

    Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible aeon of the gods. (James Joyce)
    — Read on www.secretorum.life/p/the-message-of-the-medium

  • Surrender as a non-stupid life strategy

    The proper end of introspection is not being filled with facts about oneself. Your introspection is successful if it is finite, if it leads you towards direct contact with experience. Get out of the way of your becoming.
    — Read on sashachapin.substack.com/p/should-you-be-in-charge-of-your-life

  • Why the Healthiest Generation Is the Loneliest

    At the layer of biology, the Enhanced Self incorporates the belief that the human body is akin to a single-issue hardware device, whose owner should obsessively seek to extend its operating life beyond its scheduled date of obsolescence through relentless work and eagle-eyed neuroticism. At the layer of sociology, the Enhanced Self is inseparable from the decline of socialization, which I have previously called the anti-social century.
    — Read on www.derekthompson.org/p/the-cult-of-the-enhanced-self

  • Fermented Foods

    Fermented Foods

    We tend to think of fermented foods as something humans invented and then chose to eat. But, increasingly, scientific evidence suggests the causality runs the other way. Fermented foods appear to have helped shape human biology itself, and our bodies may have been built, in part, to expect them….it raises an uncomfortable question about what happened when the Western food system, in the name of safety and efficiency, quietly removed these foods from our diets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
    — Read on www.asimov.press/p/culture-shift

  • Retrospective: Mage: The Ascension

    As presented in the game, Reality is not fixed, but rather the product of consensus. What humanity collectively accepts as possible becomes so; what it rejects becomes difficult or even impossible to achieve. The titular mages are those rare individuals who have awakened to this truth and, through force of will, can impose their own understanding of Reality upon the world.
    — Read on grognardia.blogspot.com/2026/04/retrospective-mage-ascension.html

  • why is asking so hard?

    The main difference in receiving openly is not that you will tangibly “have more”—it’s not about the gifts themselves, but about the feelings of worthiness, appreciation and gratitude they bring when you are open to them. Someone is trying to express love to you through a gift. Whether that gift is a compliment, experience, object, or anything else. By closing yourself off, you deny yourself of their love. You steal the moment of abundance from yourself. You also reduce their enjoyment.
    — Read on read.isabelunraveled.com/p/why-is-asking-so-hard

  • The Three Ages of Boss Rule

    Between roughly the Civil War and World War II, most American cities were at some point dominated by a boss and his machine. The term “boss” referred not only a powerful politician, but one who acquired, held and exercised power outside the channels dictated by law….

    All this is well known. What is less well known is that the entire history of bossism is contained in three films: Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (the origin), Preston Sturges’ The Great McGinty (the peak), and John Ford’s The Last Hurrah (decline).
    — Read on www.aaronrenn.com/p/the-three-ages-of-boss-rule

  • Rebuilding our world, with reference to strong AI

    We moderns are not used to having to rebuild our world.

    It is now the case that strong AI is here/coming, and we will have to rebuild our own world.  Many of us are terrified at this prospect, others are just extremely pessimistic.  It seems so impossible.  How are all the new pieces supposed to fit together?  Who amongst us can explain that process in a reassuring way?

    Yet we have done it many times before.
    — Read on marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/02/rebuilding-our-world-with-reference-to-strong-ai.html

  • Stumbling Toward the Cosmopolitan Christ – by A.M. Hickman

    For us moderns do appear to be, on the whole, disturbed and homeless creatures who’ve altogether lost anything resembling a ‘rudder’ or a ‘center’ or a ‘backbone’. In lieu of ultimate truth, we fumble and founder between the various “rushes” and temporary highs we can obtain by unlocking new esoteric knowledge, and for many of us — that appears to be as good as it ever gets.
    — Read on shagbark.substack.com/p/stumbling-toward-the-cosmopolitan

  • Why Can’t You Just Be Normal?

    Here’s an idea: just be normal. Just embrace the fact that you’re nine hundred thousand out of one million instead of one. There’s fifty-five of you walking around in your home town. You’re a dime a dozen, just like me. What a relief, what a weight off your shoulders. You can just… be free, be normal. Finally, no more forcing yourself into the archetype of a struggling artist by refusing to do the bare minimum to make life easier. No more hating yourself for having to take a part-time job to afford rent. You can finally embrace your true nature as one of the millions of people who recognized the value of being normal, and get to ride off into the sunset knowing that they’ve done pretty well, all things considered.
    — Read on drunkwisconsin.substack.com/p/why-cant-you-just-be-normal

  • How to Earn a Billion Dollars

    Starting a successful startup is the most common way to become a billionaire, so in effect I’ve spent the last 21 years training people to become billionaires. So far about 30 of them have, but there are many more in the pipeline.

    So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it’s impossible to do a triple axel. Of course it’s possible. It’s hard, but it’s possible
    — Read on paulgraham.com/earn.html

  • “Late Stage Capitalism” is annoying and cringe

    The phrase “late stage capitalism” is getting thrown around more and more lately in ways that are cringe and annoying. I’m starting to shut out people who use it.

    Consider:

    • Many of the ills of “late stage capitalism” have been features from the beginning
    • What evidence is there that “late stage capitalism” is even a thing? Some accelerationists even think that AI is the evolution of capitalism. I’m not sure what the signs are that “late stage capitalism” is here, but I am very sure there are equally valid countersigns that capitalism continues its forward momentum, such as the continued absence of any meaningful alternatives, the comparison in price between goods highly exposed to capitalism (price goes down) and the goods shielded from capitalism (price goes up), and the growing exposure to markets everywhere
    • Speaking of worldwide markets, I’m more convinced “late stage capitalism” is just capitalism introduced to world markets without adequate domestic safeguards, leading to all sorts of distortions and pain. Instead of “late stage capitalism” that’s more “unwise state execution of capitalism” – doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, though
    • Lots of “late stage capitalism” claims are better suited to “late stage republic,” not “late stage capitalism”

    I regret to say that this phrase has moved into the mainstream so much that it’s time to start rolling your eyes whenever you hear it and asking for evidence of the claim.

  • How does AI analyze human personality?

    The robots think you are a slightly anxious wreck. They also think they are an extraordinarily open, agreeable, low-drama universalist who would rather read than party. Then their own next release shows up and disagrees with them.
    — Read on persona.earthpilot.ai/

  • Playing to Win Overview

    Playing to Win Overview

    …of course the experts will absolutely destroy the scrubs with any number of tactics they’ve either never seen, or never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with restricting, unwritten rules. The actual game really should be more fun if it’s not degenerate.

    — Read on www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win

  • What the University Is Now For

    The university has told one story to its trustees, its accreditors, and the public, which is the story of the holistic education, the formation of citizens, the cultivation of judgment, the well-rounded life of the mind. It has told a different story to its students and their families and the labor market, which is the story of the credential, the ticket, the signal, the return on investment. The two stories were never quite compatible. They were held in suspension by an institution wealthy enough, slow enough, and culturally trusted enough that no one had to choose.
    — Read on amardashehu.substack.com/p/what-the-university-is-now-for

  • “Seriousness is the maniacal belief in a project greater than oneself”

    If you’re pinpointing a time when America became less serious, it’s around the same time when America began sacrificing communal responsibility in favor of individual pursuits. Though it’s unfair to pin everything on the Boomers, the concept of finding oneself did not exist during the German Blitz. As the sociologist and Freud scholar Philip Rieff wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, “the psychological man” emerged as the dominant moral type in the Western world in late 1960s, replacing tradition and community with the idea of “himself and his own emotions.”
    — Read on boyle.substack.com/p/on-seriousness

  • How the Rich Manipulate the Hollywood System

    I like to call this “poorface” – performing a hardscrabble origin you didn’t have. The problem becomes when actual poor people, who do not have huge amounts of resources, try to imitate the path of people who do poorface. Hollywood’s talent pipeline increasingly rewards narratives of marginalization while paying less attention to class, creating incentives for affluent artists to emphasize hardship and understate resources.
    — Read on hollywoodgadfly.substack.com/p/survival-of-the-richest-hollywoods