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.
"The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it
helps you neglect the right things."
Anon Book Review
4 months agoCourtesy of www.theintrinsicperspective.com
6 months ago"Old George Orwell got it backward.Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing
and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding
your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always
distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed.He's making sure your
imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making
sure your attention is always filled.And this being fed, it's worse than
being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about
what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will
ever be a threat to the world."
Chuck Pahalniuk
6 months ago"People are starting to feel the bullshit of dollars."
Ephraim Rinsky
7 months ago"Hope has two beautiful daughters - Anger and Courage. Anger at the way
things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are."
St. Augustine
7 months ago"I have led a toothless life,' he thought. 'A toothless life.
I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was
reserving myself for later on—and I have just noticed that
my teeth are all gone."
Jean Paul Sartre
7 months ago"You can predict the long term health of a relationship by whether each cut
heals to 99% or 101%."
mmay3r
7 months ago"Since filters don't look like faces, eventually faces look like filters."
Allie Clough
7 months ago"In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin."
Marshall McLuhan
7 months ago"There are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs."
Thomas Sowell
7 months ago"They hunted together in search of Truth, and huzzaed when they found her,
without caring who found her first, and indeed I have seen them both put
their able hands to the windlass to drag her up from the bottom of that
well in which she so strangely loves to dwell."
Maria Edgeworth on the dialogue between Ricardo and Malthus
6 months agoCourtesy of www.thetimes.com
6 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."
Andrej Karparhy
5 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
5 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
5 months ago"The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things."
Rilke
4 months agoOpenAI O1 rebuilt the code for a PhD thesis from the methods section
"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
4 months ago"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."
Simone Weil
4 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
4 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
4 months ago"Respect, understanding, and love are not technical problems."
Joseph Weizenbaum
4 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!
3 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
3 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
3 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
55 days agoCourtesy of www.henrikkarlsson.xyz
2 months ago"A little wisp of soul carrying a corpse."
Epictetus
54 days ago"Feeling split by a million different possibilities is an amazing waste of
time."
Sherry Ning
55 days ago"There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings."
Dostoevsky
43 days 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
42 days ago