Great books, prompt engineering and spycraft.
Weekly Ink #13
A weekly newsletter with findings, practical wisdom, and interesting conversations from across the web, curated by yours truly.
Contemplations
Meditations, practical philosophy, and the occasional restless thought.
This was a hectic week— there is a lot to knock out in the next 14 days, and then I’ll be getting married and on my honeymoon. But! I wanted to have something to share that I hope you find interesting and thought provoking. For the last few years, I have collected snippets— quotes, ideas, and paragraphs from books, the web, movies, etc. These run from philosophy and leadership or business advice to Science Fiction and Fantasy. Today, I will share five quotes from 5 books that I enjoyed. Perhaps you will find one that resonates with you and discover something new to read.
Utopia for Realists: Radical ideas for a better world.
”my advice is to cultivate a thicker skin. Don’t let anyone tell you what’s what. If we want to change the world, we need to be unrealistic, unreasonable, and impossible. Remember: those who called for the abolition of slavery, for suffrage for women, and for same-sex marriage were also once branded lunatics. Until history proved them right."
Best Served Cold: Revenge story in a morally indifferent world.
”Cosca grinned sideways at him. 'Some date all the way back to the New Empire, centuries old. The greatest families compete to build the tallest ones. It is a point of pride. I remember when I was a boy, one fell before it was finished, not three streets from where I lived. A dozen poor dwellings were destroyed in the collapse. It’s always the poor who are crushed under rich men’s ambitions. And yet they rarely complain, because… well…' 'They dream of having towers o’ their own?' Cosca chuckled. 'Why, yes, I suppose they do. They don’t see that the higher you climb, the further you have to fall.' 'Men rarely see that ’til the ground’s rushing at ’em.'"
Stoic Wisdom: Applying Stoic principles to modern life.
“(writing of stoicism) Its pivotal idea is not to get rid of self, as Zen Buddhism teaches, but to strengthen self-mastery, while still recognizing its limits. Practicing Stoicism was for the ancients, and is now for so many moderns, a way to build resilience. Its methods are psychological but also philosophical and normative, tied to living a life of virtue and character. The goal is inner strength, woven through and through with goodness rooted in reason. The merger is unbeatable: ancient virtue ethics meets modern life-management skills."
Altered Carbon: Sci-fi noir thriller on consciousness.
The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here—it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way you stand a far better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous, marks the difference—the only difference in their eyes—between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life, and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal."
Move by Move: Life lessons from chess mastery.
”Elite performers constantly look for ways to cultivate the beginner’s mindset. There’s a famous anecdote about the eighth world chess champion, Mikhail Tal, visiting beginners’ classes in order to get a fresh perspective on chess principles."
Insights
Curated stories and ideas.
How to Sketchnote (with no artistic ability at all): Stretching yourself is an excellent habit to get into, even more so as you get older and it becomes easier to get locked into crystallized and rigid thinking. I am not much of an artist, so as I have been trying to go more analog lately, I’ve wanted to combine it with learning new ways to take notes. I’ve always had trouble organizing information in a way that makes it referencable later; this has been a fun(at times frustrating, but that's just part of learning, too) thing to practice.
Prompt Engineering: Anthropic, the company behind my favored LLM to work within a business context, developed a course on prompt engineering. While I don’t believe AGI is around the corner, and I think the productivity gains from these LLMs will not be as substantial as initially hyped, for those who do knowledge work, there is a tremendous upside to striving to master how to leverage these agents. But remember to treat them more like eager interns than irrefutable subject matter experts.
Spycraft and Statecraft: Great read about how the CIA is working to transform itself in the new age of multi-polar competition. However, I want to zero in on a specific piece here (but recommend you read it in its entirety if you find this stuff interesting): Burns, the current CIA Director, positions Ukraine as holding a similar place in Putin’s mythology of Russia, as Taiwan does to Xi/CCP, and that Ukraine’s challenge is to:”…puncture Putin’s arrogance and demonstrate the high cost for Russia of continued conflict, not just by making progress on the frontlines but also by launching deeper strikes behind them and making steady gains in the Black Sea.” I agree with this sentiment, but the White House and Pentagon must stop being churlish and give Ukraine greater latitude in how the weapons it delivers are permitted to be used. Nations, particularly underdogs, can’t win wars with a hand tied behind their backs— an ongoing requirement from the Biden administration.
Dialogue
Voices, perspectives, and conversations from our community and across the web.
I’ve only seen a handful of Hayao Miyazaki works, the most recent being “the boy and the heron,” which I can heartily recommend. However, this looks like one worth watching, particularly with the return and rise of populist/authoritarian impulses. Also, Accented Cinema is great, and worth supporting if you enjoy foreign(asian specifically) cinema.
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