Knowledge Base
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Articles, notes from books, quotes, and videos I've found worthwhile. This is my personalized knowledge database. Filter by tag, type, or search to find what you're looking for.
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Article
The New Yorker · Kyle Chayka · Read April 2025What really stood out to me was that only 7% on the time spent on Instagram was used viewing content by 'friends'. This clearly explains and indicates the shift social media has made in the last decase - the platforms have transformed from, in my opinion, social media to social marketing. It is now a place to market yourself, become an influencer of sorts, and sell consumer goods. This has me thinking deeper about the larger macroeconomic environment that rewards and incentives this. I ran a test and 14 out of the first 20 posts in my IG newsfeed were either sponsored content or someone I did not know (and this was after unfollowing and being meticulous about who and what I subscribed to). I personally miss the old school social media sites where it was about connection.
"Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by 'friends' ” has declined in the past two years, from 22% cent to 17% on Facebook, and from 11% to 7% on Instagram"
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Quote
"The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts"
Marcus Aurelius · Roman Emperor & PhilosopherYou would never talk to others the way you talk to yourself. Give yourself grace and focus on what's directly in your control. Release the rest. -
Video
Alex Becker · YouTube · Watched circa 2023I watched this videos years ago and it really made me rethink my own relationship with alcohol. It made me realize and question the deeper reasons as to why and how a weekend drink became commonplace. I am not a teetotaler, but my relationship with alcohol is now vastly different.
[11:42] "You're destroying your brain so much that a boring experience or a person that you don't have anything in common with and wouldn't normally like becomes extremely entertaining with you."
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Quote
"The more we value things outside of our control, the less control we have."
Epictetus · Stoic PhilosopherEpictetus was born a slave. In those conditions, there's no choice but to focus internally and on the things that you can directly impact. Everything else is a waste - any additional effort will yield no results. -
Book
Ethan Mollick · Introduction · p. xvii
“AI works, in many ways, as a co-intelligence. It augments, or potentially replaces, human thinking to dramatic results.”
AI automates the boring, repetitive stuff and augments our creativity and ability to produce at scale. I do not like to believe that AI can or will ever replace human thought. There are certain things I believe should remain 100% human. -
Book
Ethan Mollick · Creating Alien Minds · p. 13
“AI can also learn biases, errors, and falsehoods from data it sees.”
LLMs are autoregressive, next token prediction machines and respond based on their training data. This highlights the importance of having clean, accurate data for training - or else your model will provide incorrect information (hallucinations). -
Book
Ethan Mollick · Four Rules For Co-Intelligence · p. 48
“Workers who figure out how to make AI useful for their jobs will have a large impact.”
I have personally experienced this over the last 2 years. I believe AI is here to stay and those who learn how to solve real business problems with it will have an advantage in the workplace. -
Book
Ethan Mollick · Four Rules For Co-Intelligence · p. 59
“The key is to give the LLM some guidance and direction on how to generate outputs that match your expectations and needs, to put it in the right 'headspace' to give you interesting and unique answers.”
There are various methods of prompt engineering. I've learned that garbage in = garbage out and that context is king (but not too much) due to the context window. -
Book
Ethan Mollick · Four Rules For Co-Intelligence · p. 61
“Whatever AI you are using right now is going to be the worst AI you will ever use.”
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Book
Ethan Mollick · AI As A Person · p. 90
“Soon, companies will start to deploy LLMs that are built specifically to optimize 'engagement' in the same way that social media timelines are fine-tuned to increase the amount of time you spend on your favorite site.”
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Book
Ethan Mollick · AI As A Person · p. 92
“If we remember that AI is not human, but often works in the way that we would expect humans to act, it helps us avoid getting too bogged down in arguments about ill-defined concepts like sentience.”
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Book
Ethan Mollick · AI As A Creative · p. 98
“We need to be realistic about a major weakness which means AI cannot easily be used for mission-critical tasks requiring precision or accuracy.”
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Book
Ethan Mollick · AI As A Creative · p. 119
“The implications of having AI write our first drafts (even if we do the work ourselves, which is not a given) are huge. One consequence is that we could lose our creativity and originality.”
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Book
Ethan Mollick · AI As A Creative · p. 122
“It will also remove the facade that previously disguised meaningless tasks.”
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Book
Primo Levi · A Good Day · p. 79
“For human nature is such that grief and pain — even if simultaneously suffered — do not add up as a whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the greater, according to the law of perspective.”
This has me reflecting on the idea of the hedonic treadmill. The idea that individual's level of happiness, after rising or falling in response to positive or negative life events, ultimately tends to move back toward where it was prior to these experiences. -
Book
Ray Bradbury · The Hearth and the Salamander · p. 52
“Whirl man's mind around so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!”
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Book
Ray Bradbury · The Hearth and the Salamander · p. 56
“Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?”
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Book
Ray Bradbury · The Sieve and the Sand · p. 80
“Off hours, yes. But time to think? If you're not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can't think of anything else but the danger, then you're playing some game or sitting in some room where you can't argue with the four-wall televisor.”
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Book
Ray Bradbury · The Sieve and the Sand · p. 81
“Only if the third necessary thing could be given to us. Number one, as I said, quality of information. Number two: leisure time to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.”
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Book
Ray Bradbury · The Sieve and the Sand · p. 83
“The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.”
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Book
Ray Bradbury · The Sieve and the Sand · p. 104
“The most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority.”
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Book
Ray Bradbury · Burning Bright · p. 144
“All of us have photographic memories, but spend a lifetime learning how to block off the things that are really in there.”
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Book
Ray Bradbury · Burning Bright · p. 150
“Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day everyday, sleeping its life away.”
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Book
Sophie Elmhirst · p. 116
“It is possible to write yourself out of loneliness. Possible, too, to write yourself into being.”
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Book
Sophie Elmhirst · p. 167
“I discover that men may be physically the stronger of the sexes but mentally women are tops.”
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Book
Sophie Elmhirst · p. 176
“Solitude, when chosen, can feel like such a gift.”
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Book
Sophie Elmhirst · p. 196
“Fame had taught Maurice one of its many questionable lessons: that it is possible to perform life for the sake of a good photograph.”
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Book
Sophie Elmhirst · p. 235
“It was work for its own sake. Not everything has to be seen.”
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Book
Sophie Elmhirst · p. 235
“Measure its success by the extent to which you have loved and been loved.”
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 4
"When we conflate productivity with worthiness, what we do is never enough."
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 7
"When we don't meet the high standard of productivity we set for ourselves, we feel bad — overlooking the fact that the benchmark was out of reach to begin with."
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 13
"The minutiae of our daily lives differ for each of us, yet we often compare ourselves with others."
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 25
"Instead of having a set routine from which they will inevitably slip, the day artist finds rhythms."
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 37
"We glorify routines, but we tend to judge being in a rut."
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 54
"The greater number of new memories we create, the longer an experience — a day — will seem in hindsight."
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 61
"When we worry about wasting time, we end up wasting our time worrying."
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 64
"On most days, three to four hours of high-quality, focused mental work is about our maximum."
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 66
"We label the space between an idea and action as laziness, procrastination, or wasting time when, more often than not, we're simply not ready yet."
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 100
"Maybe oscillating between abstaining and indulgence can be our version of balance. Great things can come from being someone who swings to different sides of the pendulum."
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 106
"What gives meaning or a sense of fulfillment to one person's day might be completely overlooked by another."
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 110
"The Latin root of the verb decide literally means 'to cut off' — and in the metaphorical sense 'to kill'."
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 113
"FOBO — fear of better options — leads to stress, dissatisfaction, and even regret over our decision. FOBO is an 'affliction of affluence.'"
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 126
"Through our screens, we have a front-row seat to the burgeoning careers, declarations of love, and fancy-free getaways of countless strangers."
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 130
"Being curious about the people we are comparing ourselves with is one of the greatest salves to comparison."
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 205
"Delightful discipline can take a 'most days' approach, where we commit to the practice or skill over the long haul, stay attuned to our energy levels, and remember to start again tomorrow if we need to."
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 222
"It's far easier to scroll through the endless reels than it is to sit with our own boredom, loneliness, anxiety, or dread."
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 223
"It's the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception that is the product."
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 228
"We blame ourselves for not keeping up, but perhaps we're just not meant to be aware of what thousands of people are doing or thinking."
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 230
"It is this reclaiming of our choice in what we pay attention to that reconnects us with ourselves and our sense of agency."
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 270
"Interest begets interest — when you become interested in things, more things become interesting to you."
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Book
Madeleine Dore · p. 275
"It's not the big things like money and success that make us happy, but rather the simple, small things."
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Book
Narayanan & Kapoor · p. xiii
"The appeal of predictive AI is based on the collective delusion that AI is good at prediction."
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Book
Narayanan & Kapoor · p. 28
"That hype leads to overreliance, such as using AI as a replacement for human expertise instead of a way to augment it."
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Book
Narayanan & Kapoor · p. 33
"AI Snake Oil is appealing because those buying it are in broken institutions and are desperate for a quick fix."
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Book
Narayanan & Kapoor · p. 34
"Concerns about AI, especially in the labor market, are often really about capitalism. We must urgently figure out how to strengthen existing safety nets so that we can better absorb the shocks caused by rapid technological progress."
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Book
Narayanan & Kapoor · p. 57
"It all comes down to our inability to handle the uncertainty hanging over our lives... That somehow feels better than not knowing at all."
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Book
Narayanan & Kapoor · p. 58
"The discomfort we experience with randomness can lead to a search for patterns where none exist. This paves the way for biases."
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Book
Narayanan & Kapoor · p. 68
"We only care about how good a prediction is in relation to what can be done using that prediction."
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Book
Narayanan & Kapoor · p. 83
"The market for cultural products has rich-get-richer dynamics built into it. Most of us are strongly influenced by what others around us are reading or watching, so success breeds success."
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Book
Narayanan & Kapoor · p. 87
"It is that sliver of viral content that dominates our attention... Much of social media is a giant meme lottery."
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Book
Narayanan & Kapoor · p. 180
"Traumatic content moderation is work done by hundreds of thousands of invisible low-wage workers, mostly in less affluent countries, working for third-party outsourcing firms rather than directly for platform companies."
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Book
Narayanan & Kapoor · p. 197
"Authoritarian governments often use the boogeyman of harmful misinformation as an excuse to repress speech that challenges their power."
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Book
Narayanan & Kapoor · p. 226
"Failures and limitations of AI have less to do with AI and more to do with the institution adopting it."
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Book
Narayanan & Kapoor · p. 237
"Instead of scientific explanations for why AI works well, the community focuses primarily on improving the performance of AI on benchmark data sets."
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Book
Narayanan & Kapoor · p. 241
"Performance on benchmark datasets overestimates the usefulness of AI in the real world... Real world utility is different from good performance on a benchmark."
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Book
Narayanan & Kapoor · p. 251
"The rise of social media and click-driven journalism has led to a dramatic decrease in the ability to do in-depth research profitably."
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Book
Narayanan & Kapoor · p. 254
"The real impact of AI is likely to be subtler. AI will shift power away from workers and centralize it in the hands of a few companies."
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Book
Narayanan & Kapoor · p. 266
"When there are multiple valuable goals that can't be accurately quantified relative to each other, optimization can backfire badly."
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Book
Narayanan & Kapoor · p. 279
"Workers aren't afraid of technical advances themselves. Rather, they are afraid of how AI would be used by employers to reduce workers' power and agency in the workplace."