Hi I'm Greg. Occasionally I do things.
What's a Tumble?
It's a list of lots of things I've bookmarked. I've been keeping this for almost 15 years now. Over the years, I've used different services as an easy way to track interesting things I've found on the internet. It started with Digg and del.icio.us (if you remember that) but as systems died I found it useful to own the data. For awhile I used Tumblr and that name stuck. Today it's fed by a Google spreadsheet and updated via email. Here's some more detail, if you're interested.
One of the things I really like about this is that I can go back over time and see a history of the things I was reading or thinking about. It's easy to go back and quickly lookup things from a week or a month ago that would otherwise be lost to me. A Tumble a simple thing, but it's gotten a lot of use.
"Anybody who goes through life with open mind and open heart will encounter
these moments of revelation, moments that are saturated with meaning, but
whose meaning cannot be put into words. These moments are precious to us.
When they occur it is as though, on the winding ill-lit stairway of our
life, we suddenly come across a window, through which we catch sight of
another and brighter world – a world to which we belong but which we cannot
enter."
Roger Scruton
8 months ago"Learning is not supposed to be fun. The primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that “10 minute full body" workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating.”
The internet is searchable, so if this quote is unattributed, you should still be able to find it!
10 months ago"We are no longer comprehensible to each other, we inhabit different
systems of signifiers, and all the mediating fantasies have melted away,"
Sam Kriss
10 months ago"Quit playing it cool. Life is too short. Be intense and passionate and
mildly insane. Now, whoever's left hanging is your friend."
Nick Gray
9 months agoOpenAI O1 rebuilt the code for a PhD thesis from the methods section
"The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things."
Rilke
9 months ago"The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it
helps you neglect the right things."
Anon Book Review
8 months ago"Simply transferring work from the world to the screen entails deep changes
in perspective. Greater stress is placed on abstraction, less on
materiality. Calculative power grows; sensory engagement fails."
Nicholas Carr
8 months ago"AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires
‘thinking’ but has failed to do most of what people and animals do ‘without
thinking.'"
Donald Knuth
8 months ago"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."
Simone Weil
8 months ago"Respect, understanding, and love are not technical problems."
Joseph Weizenbaum
8 months ago"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!''
The internet is searchable, so if this quote is unattributed, you should still be able to find it!
8 months ago"I never pray and ask for God to be on my side, I pray and hope to be on
God's side and there is something about betting on deep learning that feels
like being on the side of the angels."
Sam Altman
7 months ago"The antidote to this abundance of information is distillation: figuring
out which information is important and discarding the rest. But
distillation is downstream of interrogation: if you ask the right
questions, the information filters itself."
Jack Raines
7 months agoCourtesy of www.henrikkarlsson.xyz
6 months ago"A little wisp of soul carrying a corpse."
Epictetus
6 months ago"Feeling split by a million different possibilities is an amazing waste of
time."
Sherry Ning
6 months ago"A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round."
Philip Larkin, Church Going
6 months ago"As typography once dictated the style of conducting politics, religion,
business, education, law, and other important social matters, television
now takes command. In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, boardrooms,
churches, and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other. They
entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas. They exchange images."
Neil postman
5 months ago"There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings."
Dostoevsky
5 months ago"National Socialism is nothing but applied biology."
Rudolf Hess
4 months ago"Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites by
keeping them both and keeping them both furious."
GK Chesterton
3 months ago"Pharmaceutical companies can make plenty of profit turning molecules into
medicines, but they can’t go looking into the mouths of gila monsters,
asking "Any good drugs in here?" Thats how we got GLP-1 agonists,
which are now used by millions of people."
Adam Mastroianni
3 months agoPerfidy is the act of betraying a trust or breaking a promise with
deliberate intent.
"We confess our small faults only to convince people that we have no
greater ones."
La Rouchefoucald
3 months ago"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."
Simone Weil
3 months ago"*The world offers you comfort, but you were not made for comfort, you were made for greatness."*
The internet is searchable, so if this quote is unattributed, you should still be able to find it!
3 months ago"Paraphrasing my co-founder Ilya, I don’t know what the meaning of life is,
but I am sure it has something to do with babies."
Sam Altman
2 months ago"How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words."
David Foster Wallace
3 months ago"When we lack the power to do anything, sensitivity becomes our main aim..
the aim is not so much to do anything, as to be judged."
Pascal Bruckner
3 months ago"The future belongs to those who scuttle the ships."
Nicholas Zamiska
3 months ago"Concern for man himself and his fate must always constitute the chief
objective of all technological endeavors...in order that the creations of
our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this
in the midst of your diagrams and equations."
Albert Einstein
2 months ago"If your whole business is just one prompt..."
Jack Butcher
2 months ago"Innovation without conversion is just iteration."
Luke Burgis
2 months ago"When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is
the electricity that surges between them."
Martin Buber
2 months ago"A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be
God."
Sidney Sheldon
2 months ago"Help me to journey beyond the familiar and into the unknown. Give me the
faith to leave old ways and break fresh ground with You."
Saint Brendan
2 months ago"The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased
efficiency."
Aldous Huxley to George Orwell
57 days ago"Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than
anyone else might reasonably expect."
Teller
46 days ago"The Internet is a cream that you rub on investors to get them all excited."
John Doerr
46 days ago"Law reflects, but in no sense determines the moral worth of a society…. The better the society, the less law there will be. In Heaven, there will be no law, and the lion will lie down with the lamb…. The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell, there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.
The internet is searchable, so if this quote is unattributed, you should still be able to find it!
53 days ago"Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each
generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not
fit this."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
29 days ago