New lecture series at @airHQ 💡 First session features Sari Azout, founder of @wwwsublimeapp, and her working theories on the future of digital archiving. RSVP:

I know that @nayafia's Antimimetics book is extremely powerful, because whatever I am in the middle of discussing, it comes to my mind 7 out of 10 times and I am compelled to bring it up. I think it is a generational book, a must read. Practice come self-care, and read it:

efficiency, productivity, speed we keep worshipping these words like they are what we live for ship faster merge more manage more agents compress every loop remove every pause turn every hour into output but what is the point of endless production if there is no time left to think deeply? not react not optimize not summarize not clear the queue think to sit with a question long enough that your real intention starts to appear to find the purpose underneath the motion to ask whether the thing being accelerated should exist at all ai could be a new canvas a way to make strange things personal things impossible things tools, worlds, poems, games, interfaces, films, languages, rituals things that let more people touch the shape of their own imagination but instead, so much of it is becoming slop factories more content more funnels more tickets more fake work pretending to be value you can merge 2000 prs you can manage 500 agents you can wake up to dashboards proving that the machine kept moving while you slept but what is the point if you only sleep 5 hours a day? what is the point if you stop talking to other humans? stop learning about the past? stop playing? stop wandering? stop being surprised? what is the point if your whole life becomes optimizing the system that is consuming you? speed is not meaning scale is not wisdom automation is not freedom if it only makes everyone run faster and where are we running? toward what? a world where every person becomes a manager of machines, and every machine produces more things no one had the time to truly want? the danger is not that ai makes us lazy the danger is that ai makes us endlessly busy that it gives us infinite production before we have found intention infinite execution before we have developed taste infinite motion before we have learned how to be still maybe the real frontier is not more speed maybe it is discernment knowing what not to make knowing when to stop knowing when the most productive thing is to sleep, read history, call a friend, play with a cat, walk without tracking it, or stare at the ceiling until the false urgency dissolves tools should give us more life not turn life into a tool if ai is going to matter, it should not just help us produce more it should help us become more human more imaginative more free otherwise, it’s the same old factory just without humans

Astra is basically AGI. And it is absolutely shocking to me how bottlenecked my life still is. By me. All of the things that are stopping me from moving forward are still only resolvable by me. I have more work than ever

Whenever someone tells me they're expecting their first baby and they're nervous, I tell them the following: 'Oh my goodness, that's wonderful. I am so happy for you. Listen, of course you're nervous but here's the deal: you're ready for all the bad stuff. You've been very tired before. You've been in pain before. You've been worried about money before. You've felt like an incapable moron before. So you'll be fine with the difficult parts! You're already a pro. What you're NOT ready for is the wonderful parts. NOTHING can prepare you for how amazing this will be. There is no practice for that. (via Rob Delaney, A Heart That Works)

This is probably controversial: I think using money to eliminate every minor inconvenience from your life is a negative in the long run. There's a certain level of inconvenience that's just an important part of the human experience. The smooth, textureless life is the forgotten life. Experiencing friction is part of being human. Some of your most memorable life experiences are so memorable precisely because they had friction. It's why you still laugh about the trip when your bags got lost by the airline and you had to wing it. When your flights got cancelled. When the hotel lost your reservation. When all your plans went awry. And friction builds tolerance for the inevitable chaos of life. I know so many people who have obsessively removed friction from their life and now seem to be utterly thrown by the tiniest thing. They've got private planes, private drivers, and private chefs. People managing and staffing their various houses. All the trappings of a friction-free life. But then get absolutely derailed by the smallest unexpected bump in the road. As with all things in life, when it comes to reducing friction, the dose makes the poison. A little bit of friction reduction is good. You reduce your stress. You improve your happiness. A medium bit is maybe even better. But a lot becomes toxic to your life. Not diminishing returns. Negative returns. Be wary of the blind pursuit of friction elimination. You may find that the friction was what made your life feel real.

so far today instinct has: -purchased movie tickets for my kids + their friends. when i needed to add one ticket it easily found the closest available. - ordered school photos for the kids on shutterfly - had it sign the waiver for a kids bday next week at one of those indoor adventure places - scheduled tomorrow's instacart order - and it is currently cleaning up my gmail and unsubscribing from a million junk things these are all pain in the ass things that would've taken me at least 3 hours and dampened the mood. the world has no idea what a working mom can do with three hours of her day back.

Who's right: @sariazout, who says the future of work "belongs to the heart" or @yash_tek, who says it's all going to come down to precision and knowing how to talk to a computer? Or is it...

so far today instinct has: -purchased movie tickets for my kids + their friends. when i needed to add one ticket it easily found the closest available. - ordered school photos for the kids on shutterfly - had it sign the waiver for a kids bday next week at one of those indoor adventure places - scheduled tomorrow's instacart order - and it is currently cleaning up my gmail and unsubscribing from a million junk things these are all pain in the ass things that would've taken me at least 3 hours and dampened the mood. the world has no idea what a working mom can do with three hours of her day back.