Basement Whatever
Collecting and sharing cool things
Category: Post
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While you can always twist reality to soothe your ego, iron, with its uncompromising physical reality, won’t support your self-deception. It doesn’t give a shit how you feel. As Rollins wrote, two hundred pounds “is always two hundred pounds,” regardless of whether you slept well, had a breakup, want to lift, or want the weight…
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when I was much more active on Twitter than I am now, I’d find myself, e.g., washing dishes and, without wanting to, thinking about various mundane things in the form of tweets. Some nascent half-kernel of an idea would come to me and, like a hack comedian for whom every banal thing is material, I…
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Reading Wikipedia articles from other countries is a good way to escape local propaganda and myth making, because other countries lack the incentives that your country does to prop up narratives. Just go to a foreign language Wikipedia site, use an automated translation service on it, and read it. Common examples are foreign countries’ perceptions…
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The comic book writer Grant Morrison understood that if you get to tell a Superman story, you’ve been entrusted with global symbols of justice and kindness and goodness which are important to people. He understood this power, and when he had the opportunity to write Superman, he bucked every existing trend (and his own ouevre),…
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As Scott Adams says, our brains were not built to understand reality, our brains evolved for reproduction. Human brains don’t innately understand statistics and are designed for storytelling. People with widely different views (a Catholic and a Buddhist, say) can hang out together with no problem. In short, we don’t have a strong model on…
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I’ve come to accept that we all live in information bubbles, that it’s hard to pierce those bubbles, and that it’s helpful when we get a chance to see outside our realities. But unfortunately, piercing through what we know is often a very painful experience. One obstacle is that people get judgmental about people not…
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Balaji Srinivasan outlines his ten predictions on the future and current state of AI in this article. Among his predictions, he states that AI isn’t taking jobs as much as allowing people to take on any job. I’ve seen this directly in my experiments at Heartwizard Games, where I’m leveraging AI to create engaging stories…
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In his essay “How I Read,” Rob Anderson offers advice on reading better and more deeply, which it’s important because “You can tell the difference between a smart person who reads and a smart person who doesn’t by how they express ideas, the references they make, and the chains of logic they follow.” How does…
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You should write, not because it makes you rich or brings you site traffic. You should write because it enriches you. When you write, you generate questions, you pursue interesting curiosities, and you engage with that information. This process makes you a different person: That’s the promise: you will live more curiously if you write.…
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Grognardia argues that nerd subcultures, which used to be hard to access, have been transformed into brands to be marketed and have thus lost their nerd appeal: Nerd subcultures were once genuinely weird – offputting, insular, and proudly obscure. They were difficult to access and defiantly uncool and that very inaccessibility acted as a crucible,…
Basement Whatever 