• An essay an athletic training.
“The main idea of my training program was that you will become good at whatever it is that you train.”
“My training program was very simple and therefore very robust. It was cheap and reliable. Not fancy nor extraordinary. I tried not to involve things that I could not control. I did not become reliant on equipment that I could not easily access. I did not make plans that I did
not understand.”
“We use cost-benefit analysis when we are operating in a prosaic frame of mind. But I don’t think anything great was ever accomplished in a prosaic frame of mind. People commit to great projects, they endure hard challenges, because they are entranced, enchanted. Some notion or activity has grabbed them, set its hooks inside them, aroused some possibility, fired the imagination.”
• A video essay on elite cubing.
“Elite cubers solve multiple cubies simultaneously, combining or condensing steps and taking advantage of random lucky breaks in patterns encountered from one turn to the next.”
“We must consider a fateful question, which is whether figures like Trump and Musk will fall for A.I. lovers, and what that might mean for them and for the world. If this sounds improbable, or satirical, look at what happened to these men on social media. Before social media, the two had vastly different personalities: Trump, the socialite; Musk, the nerd. After, they converged on similar behaviors. Social media makes us into irritable toddlers. Musk already asks followers on X to vote on what he should do, in order to experience desire as democracy and democracy as adoration. Real people, no matter how well motivated, cannot flatter or comfort as well as an adaptive, optimized A.I. Will A.I. lovers free the public from having to please autocrats, or will autocrats lose the shred of accountability that arises from the need for reactions from real people?”
“We don’t know how much of a bubble A.I. is eternally trapped in. Maybe there is something magical about reality, something beyond interpolation and extrapolation. Maybe reality can be creative in a way that A.I. cannot. Maybe romance is the way we reach for that thing.”
brettworks 
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