The fact that machines will soon surpass human thinking will divide people into two groups: those with low consciousness and those with high consciousness. High-consciousness individuals will harness these tools to improve themselves and benefit those around them. In contrast, those with low consciousness will either use the technology to exploit others or be exploited by it. Navigating this future will require a deep presence of mind—an ability to discern what truly furthers one’s growth from what is merely convenient. This journey has already begun; what’s changing now is the speed. It’s about to accelerate—massively.

One day, an old donkey falls into a deep well.

The farmer tries to figure out what to do, but decides, given the age of the animal and the danger of the deep open well, that the best course of action is to fill the well and close it off.

He begins to shovel dirt into the well. After several hours of work, the farmer is nearly done filling the well, when suddenly, to his amazement, the old donkey leaps out from the dirt-filled well and trots off into the pasture.

The farmer realizes: Rather than resigning itself to its fate with each shovel of dirt that hit its back, the donkey had shaken the dirt off and stepped up on top of it.

As the farmer had continued to shovel dirt into the well, the clever donkey _used the dirt_ to get closer to its escape.

“He who seeks truth shall find beauty.
He who seeks beauty shall find vanity.
He who seeks order shall find gratification.
He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed.
He who considers himself the servant of his fellow beings shall find the joy of self-expression.
He who seeks self-expression shall fall into the pit of arrogance.
Arrogance is incompatible with nature.
Through nature, the nature of the universe and the nature of man, we shall seek truth.
If we seek truth, we shall find beauty.”

—Moshe Safdie, architect.

Have we created a weapon of mass destruction for that critical age where we’re developing self-awareness?

Bullying and abuse is nothing new, but we might have exponentially increased their incidence and impact with social media.

Not sure how to protect them. Limiting access is not a choice.

That was weird. The atmosphere was great, though. Great photography. That shot in the house, in the dark, in the home office, showing the depth of the kitchen.

In any case, one more unique character in the Nicolas Cage filmography that is now nothing short of legendary.

A well-known story, executed impeccably. Gothic horror crafted by someone who clearly loves the genre. The script is sharp, and every actor feels perfectly cast—Lily-Rose Depp, Ralph Ineson, and of course, Willem Dafoe.

And yet… something’s missing. It’s all stunning form, but lacks emotional depth.

If you stretch the story too much, you stop caring. At least the spectacle was magnificent. And Denzel… he’s like 3 notches above everything else.

Modern luxury is the ability to think clearly, sleep deeply, move slowly, and live quietly in a world designed to prevent all four.

—Justin Welsh

1. A hopeful actress from the provinces arrives in LA.
2. She loses a coveted role to a girl backed by the mafia.
3. Despite the rivalry, they begin working together and fall into a relationship.
4. The mafia girl starts flirting with the director.
5. Consumed by jealousy, the provincial actress kills her.
6. The mafia captures the actress, but they crash while taking her away.
7. She escapes and hides in a remote house where…
8. GOTO 1

The story is conventional, uninteresting. It’s the how that makes the picture relevant.

Natalie Goldberg writes in Writing Down the Bones that “if you can write down the real details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else.”

I think I understand now what details mean. Nothing new will be said, but the details will make the difference.

There’s a piece of advice I still struggle with, but that I’m more and more convinced lies at the heart of meaningful productivity, successful creative work, and a more vibrant life in general. That advice is: act fast. Move quickly. When you get a good idea, make it your default policy to put it into practice as soon as you reasonably can.

–Oliver Burkeman

—What do you have for breakfast to have all that energy?
—I have good news for breakfast. That’s what I have. Good news.

…that he is craving attention, a sucker for likes; that when one has tasted the sweet drug of admiration, one is trapped by it, and will forever seek the love of others and therefore will be a slave. And social media will catalyze the drug, and will have you posting and checking, and looking at the heart count, and posting and checking again, in a cycle that will administer the drug until it kills you.

Designed to minimize the time it takes to repair or adjust.

How does a system change when the priority is not to optimize its function but optimize the ability to be repaired?

Some times this is not a trade-off but some times it is.

Elisa Gabbert makes us doubt whether a memory failure is really a failure of the multiverse matrix, a loophole into an alternate reality that somehow you had access to, and now you access it randomly.

The Big Short is a great lesson of first principles thinking. Never assume anything just because it’s commonly understood to be that way. Ask why and how sufficient times do that your 10 year old kid can understand it. If you cannot explain to a 10 year old, you haven’t reached the first principles. Even then, if you haven’t seen it with your eyes, you might not understand it still. Always look at the source code.

I bought Pedro Paramo in Mexico, as one does. I started reading it with a Mexican voice. Slowly faded in a Spanish one when I came back home. What a pity that I couldn’t hold it for longer. Maybe I should read it again when I’m back in Mexico.

They are all dead, or maybe not, maybe it’s all a dream, maybe it’s just my imagination. I don’t know what I’m reading anymore. So blurry, so entangled. But I stay for the images. The images are powerful. Remind me of my childhood, in father’s village. The water drops, the long rainy days, the light of the sun in el patio. My mind wandered back to those days of my past. Or is it my future? Or is it where I’ll go when I’m dead?

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke. It’s a comic but it’s a documentary or a visual essay or… I don’t know what it is. But it’s good. It looks at loneliness from all angles, the emotional, the biological, the cultural, the personal. It’s an inspiration in form and in approach. An example to follow. Austin Kleon books are books with pictures. This is a comic that reads like an essay. Remarkable.

A question and a blank space can trigger you or can block you.

A question and a sample answer can inspire you or can limit you.

To act compulsively is to be driven by impulse.
To act rationally is to weigh each step.
To act consciously is to align with what the moment demands.

Just watched the documentary The Greatest Night in Pop about the making of the song We are the World.

I noticed how some of the most talented singers during that night didn’t make it to supernova stardom while others, without such musical or vocal gifts, did.

People shine because of their inner energy, they project a vibe that you connect with. Then you cannot get enough of it. Some talent is necessary, but it’s the energy projected that you want.

The only way to radiate that energy is to remove all layers of expectations, fears and self-awareness, and expose yourself fully.

I don’t think everybody carries that energy, but if you do, then only full abandon will work.

And now I should start singing ‘Let it go, let it gooo 🎵’

It’s a meh for me. Loved the first act. Stylistically remarkable. The message doesn’t hit. A bit childish.

Sometimes you have an idea. You explore some ramifications. You go on a detour. Some paths lead you nowhere. Some others open new ideas. After those explorations, you might end up in the same place, together with your original idea. You might think it was all a waste of time. But in reality you are a different person even if you returned to the same place. You gained depth. Depth is hard to define but we all recognize it.

After years, I’ve been unable to type Dvorak unconsciously. I still need to think about the keypresses. After even more years, I’ve been unable to type Querty consciously, I mean, not look at the keyboard and know exactly where the keys are. But because I can type Querty unconsciously, I actually type faster in Querty.

So that’s my dichotomy: Dvorak is more satisfying but taxing; Querty is faster but more frustrating.

The algorithm has offered me this. I think I’m in the next level now. Will keep you posted.

You can design the best canvas for the content, or you can design the best canvas for the receiver. We naturally do the former, but we should actually do the latter.

When you build a presentation, you naturally follow the content, so the presentation gets shaped according to it. What I argue is that the presentation should be shaped according to the receiver, so that, given a receiver, all presentations should have the same canvas, and then you cram the content within it.

Finding this use case of ChatGPT very useful: choosing music to pair with what I’m reading.

Last ones:

• The White Book by Han Kang with Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt.
• Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo with Async by Ryuichi Sakamoto

Oh, wow. I was done with the printing on my DZines and the I saw this

I’m certainly back to trying a printed media.

It is that neat office that gets into my head. Everything in it’s right place. Not a single item out of place. 4 hangers for 4 employees. Zero waste as a design principle. And yet… all that space. So much empty space. Whitespace. Is it peaceful or is it eerie?

Your blog post is a fascinating blend of personal creativity and tech innovation, how do you see this approach scaling within a banking environment?

Self-expression happens in specific conditions between slack and tension. Just like a guitar string—too tight, it’s out of tune and might snap. Too loose, it won’t make a sound. Get it just right, and it will sing.

A banking environment (or any other public company of a certain size, for that matter), is a difficult environment to cultivate this condition for a couple of reasons.

First, it’s subject to the pressure of having to compete against others to become the preferred option of our clients, while delivering the expected returns to shareholders. These tensions tighten the string.

Second, the string is built of many different individuals with very different breaking points and resonance frequencies. Getting all of them to sing under the same string tension is very difficult.

Besides, the adaptive nature of these conditions makes it impossible to articulate recipes that one can apply and expect the same results. Fostering innovation and personal creativity becomes, for all we know right now, the art of surfing waves that are not fully in our control but we can aim to perceive, interpret and respond to.

Perhaps one day our understanding of the human condition will allow us to read the patterns of the water and apply well known formulas.

I dread that day.

1. When managing IT, this LTS frame is always helpful:
   1. People
   2. Service
   3. Risk/Audit
   4. Finances
   5. Projects
2. You transform by “including and transcending”, not by “replacing the existing”.
3. When you accept your limitations, you start appreciating team work, you seek collaborators that complement you, you truly appreciate diversity.

Tools, methods and artifacts should be limited to the span of the human attention, to the cognitive bandwidth of our minds.

There’s no point in having 400 different components eligible to assemble a new application. A human will not be able to hold them in her mind.

But interestingly, AI can assist curating and sifting through the complexity.

When you start a wave, you ride it till the end, then you paddle up to catch a new one.

You don’t stop in the middle of a wave just because you saw a better one coming.

Driving on ice. Try. Try again. You can think of the physics, but it’s the body who learns, not the mind. Try again. I see it now. Yes, I’m starting to get it. Try again. Yes. I got this.

At that point, you are on to the next level. Basic moves are internalized and new concerns become visible, available. Everything works through this type of composition. Notes, melodies, chords, chord progressions. You level up to higher levels of abstraction, integrating the lower ones as you internalize them as second nature.

There’s an arrow of development, and it’s that of assembling components into higher and higher levels, for which you need to integrate the lower ones, and only repetition does it, not thought.

A human being has a lifespan of 80 years ≈ 1.000 months.
It takes 9 months to build one.
Build time is % of lifespan.

Through a patchwork of images of the past and the present we assemble the picture of grief and confusion and discovery and connection.

The book is very brief but reads slowly. So much whitespace give the words a mythical aura of poetry, of private journals, of intimacy.

As you let yourself get drawn into the images and the thoughts and memories evoked, it feels like a prayer.

I loved the heartfelt portrayal of Warsaw.

I read it listening to Arvo Pärt, specially Spiegel im spiegel.

Two tools can help internalize an idea:

• Images
• Stories

When communicating an idea, always use at least one of the two.

“One of the techniques they teach to get rid of a resentment toward somebody is to pray for him or her to get everything that you want for yourself in life—to be loved, to be successful, to be healthy, to be rich, to be wonderful, to be happy, to be alive with the light and the love of the universe. It’s a paradox, but it works.”

— Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue

43 reading tips from Naval Ravikant

1) Read what you love until you love to read.
6) The smarter you get, the slower you read.
14) Most books should just be summaries so I leave most books unfinished and only make it all the way through a few. The best ones can’t be easily summarized.
8) If they wrote it to make money, don’t read it.
9) Read books, avoid news.

It the beginning was the personal page. Think Geocities for those that were online back then.

Then was the blog, a simpler form of publishing, restricting the user to a chronological sequence of entries.

Then was the social network, where the social graph allowed the Feed to exist: a chronological sequence of entries of everyone you followed.

Then came the social media, where platforms started introducing algorithmically curated content in your feed, trying to hook you in the screen for longer.

Today, there’s just digital media an algorithmic feed of content with unclear chronology and unrelated to your social network.

Austin Kleon regularly uses 4 notebooks:

• Pocket notebook for random annotations on the go.
• Logbook for recording everything he does in a day.
• Commonplace book for capturing quotes.
• Diary where he writes daily at least 3 pages, in a more creative fashion (collages, new designs, etc).

This technique of interviewing yourself as a way to structure ideas and get them out of your head.

You need to really step out of yourself to ask the relevant question. What would an audience be more interested in knowing?

You really need to step out of yourself to feel that someone else is asking you the question. Imagine yourself in a stage.

Train your body as you want your mind to be.

Want to be more flexible? Train flexibility.
Want to be more mentally strong? Train strength.
Want to be more resilient? Train resistance.
Want to have a faster mind? Train speed.

If someone would have arrived at my wedding, someone vaguely known, a face that is barely recognizable, an old friend of my father, perhaps, he would have come and said: you see the suspenders you are wearing now, the ones you bought for the wedding because you had none? Those very same suspenders will hold your son’s overpants when he does his motorcycle test, when he is 15 years old. If someone would have said that, it would have blown my mind away.

What happens when she decides to regress into a plant?

One responds with shame. The shame that comes from the fear of not fitting, of not following the established course.

One responds with lust. The lust that comes from craving the new, the different, the unique. Something that will brought us from anonimity.

The last responds with love and compassion. The compassion that comes from not understanding and not caring about it anymore. From understanding that some things are beyond reason and probably within those there are truths that are deeper than the ones we’re fed with.

I read this book listening to Metamorphosis, by Philip Glass.

Excluding others is (perceived as) the most accessible way to belong to a group one is desperate to fit into.

Those who fear exclusion are often the ones who exercise it most aggressively.

Vicious cycle fueled by basic survival instincts, rooted in fear.

How to break this?

Philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche on enjoying the process: 

“The end of a melody is not its goal.”