2025-01-30 17:53:42
Don’t get me wrong: If being rich meant having feckless parents, I accepted that. I loved being rich. The consolation prizes were many and outstanding.
2025-01-30 18:11:31
“The gods are bothering me, for some reason.” “Hey. They do that shit sometimes.”
2025-01-30 18:18:09
There was only one way of making a two or a twelve, but six ways to roll a seven. The maker of the world whispered that secret to me, and it changed everything.
2025-01-30 21:03:28
would give myself to the ocean, that wilderness that made the land seem an afterthought
2025-02-02 20:15:50
folded the sheet of injera and used it to scoop up the most delicious wat I’d ever tasted. Just yesterday, I was at the height of my powers. One of my companies was about to reveal a product that would rock the world. Life was beyond satisfying, beyond enjoyable, beyond good. And today, I had dementia with Lewy bodies.
2025-02-07 18:35:26
Reading left him untouchable on a raft in the middle of an ocean of bright words.
2025-02-08 03:54:38
The personal statement all but wrote itself: What is your favorite spot in all the world? He wrote of how he felt the first time he walked into the Taylor Street library—how everything in creation had its shelf somewhere in that building, and how he could travel anywhere in time and space simply by browsing the aisles. Maybe it’s cheating that my favorite spot contains so many others.
2025-02-08 04:13:06
A plume of beautiful, improvised insights poured out of him, after which he hunkered down into his desk trying to disappear.
2025-02-08 04:48:56
found him there, reading a book called Gödel, Escher, Bach. I’d never heard of it. I later tracked it down and read it from cover to cover three times. It changed my life.
2025-02-08 04:58:12
After programming, which I loved with my whole heart, chess was the closest thing to my religion.
2025-02-08 05:00:26
In short, I had a bit of a head start in what would become a long-running and multistage battle between Rafi Young and Todd Keane.
2025-02-08 05:20:24
“What’s it like?” Baptiste asked. And she had no words to tell her infirm and landlocked little brother. How could she say? While she was diving, all her senses were deranged. Distance, color, even shape: in the bent light beneath the waves, the simplest forms defied description.
2025-02-08 05:25:38
Taciturnity was just desire that hadn’t yet blossomed.
2025-02-08 05:27:54
Her ocean mania ripened into competence.
2025-02-08 05:38:30
She loved it all, even humans, for without the miracle of human consciousness, love for such a world would be just one more of a billion unnamed impulses.
2025-02-08 09:05:09
“Life philosophy?” The phrase felt like a contradiction in terms. “Words you live by.” She didn’t live by words. She lived by life. But the question was sweet, and she did her best. She fed him that classic bit of Quebecoise wisdom. “Attache ta tuque et lache pas la patate!” “Meaning?” “Put on your little beanie cap and don’t release the potato.” Bart Mannis laughed so hard he almost ran them off the highway. But the meaning was clear, wasn’t it? Hold on tight and keep going. Just keep going. Like any good creature of the tides.
2025-02-08 09:09:56
They brought sandwiches, cookies, and water in a huge thermos. They read out loud to each other from The Silent World, although they’d already read that book four and a half times between the two of them.
2025-02-08 16:45:28
truly loved Saint Ignatius. Rafi did, too—all those priests and smart lay teachers trying to fine-tune our brains the way Swiss watchmakers calibrated gears, balanced wheels, and fitted mainsprings. It
2025-02-08 16:48:56
in Before the Earth
2025-02-08 16:48:59
If every atom in the universe was a little universe that itself had as many atoms as the entire universe had, the total number of atoms would still be smaller than the number of possible Go game states. And I can teach you how to play in under three minutes.”
2025-02-13 22:53:46
his head like an ice-pack cure for a hangover and groaning, “ ‘The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’ William Blake.”
2025-02-13 22:57:36
“It’s unbelievable! I can get any book I want. If they don’t have it, they can get it from downstate. Twelve million volumes down there. Talk about firepower! And if they don’t have it downstate, they’ll get it from some other library in the system. I don’t care what you say, Keane. Life is good.”
2025-02-13 23:00:30
“It’s about evolution. About where evolution might be going. The way Fyodorov sees it, in the beginning, evolution stumbled around blindly looking for life, and half a billion years later, it found it. It fooled around trying to come up with consciousness, and a few hundred million more years after that, it hit on that. It experimented with intelligence, and soon enough, bingo. And now it’s up to us, evolution’s most intelligent children, to help it figure out how to engineer immortality. Defeat the design flaw of death: that’s the last and most important step of evolution, after which life will be complete. Which Fyodorov thinks shouldn’t be any more impossible than any of those other insane things.”
2025-02-13 23:07:37
When he spoke again, both his skinny shoulders were up near his neck. “You don’t know, man. You don’t even know how free you are, because it’s just like breathing, for you. I . . . can get free. Sometimes. But only when reading. When I read . . . the other place is more real than this one. If the book is wild enough, I can forget that I’m living in a murderer’s house.
2025-02-14 22:58:36
didn’t even bother arguing. Right before the holidays, we wished each other good luck and happy trails. It was a relief to us both, to escape our first relationship free and clear without any bloodshed. It all seemed very mature. We were still too young to know how maturity played out, in real life
2025-02-14 23:05:04
couldn’t shake my sense of betrayal, and I wanted to retaliate. I chose my point of attack for maximum irritation.
2025-02-17 22:43:27
Evelyne had learned, years ago, to convey such news to her husband with her euphoria converted into contrition.
2025-02-19 22:40:29
Above each desk, two shelves were drilled into the green cinder block. Mine bore fat and expensive texts: Bayesian Analysis, Decision Trees, Introduction to Graph Theory, Practical Programming in C++. From where I lay in bed, Rafi’s looked so much more exotic: The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
2025-02-19 22:47:49
Machines were shouting at me from down the corridors: Do something! Make fine things with me! Change the world! A guy might do anything.
2025-02-19 22:53:59
tried to read them, but my brain had reached its limits of poetry comprehension back at Saint Ignatius. All the separate words made sense, but I couldn’t figure out what they meant when you put them all together. I got him to explain them to me
2025-02-22 23:12:49
Wen Lai said, “Decisions are rarely made by reason but almost always by temperament, and that doesn’t change much as people get older.”
2025-02-24 22:23:05
She slugged his bicep. “Wake up, mister. Don’t you get it? From my little apartment on Daniels, on my dinky little Amiga, I could go to any museum in the world.” She didn’t get it, either. I didn’t get it. None of us had the faintest idea what was coming.
2025-02-25 22:12:22
Rafi, at twenty-two, bent over the paper, fixing the deficient words, changing and changing, even after reading their perfection to us. He edited them as patiently as he’d edited himself. He spoke head bowed, addressing the page.
2025-02-27 20:35:41
can’t believe my golden age lasted only thirty months. Thirty months of constant work that felt like an endless holiday
2025-02-27 20:36:43
woke up in the morning with multidimensional arrays dancing in my head. I couldn’t wait to get coding, sometimes cranking out scores of lines of subroutine before breakfast.
2025-02-27 20:38:39
Find the moves that the rules forgot to outlaw.
2025-02-27 20:43:01
Now and then he would mail me an original sentence that he liked, or even a whole paragraph—words that managed to escape the relentless editor that he’d become.
2025-02-27 22:33:42
Not his mother, not his lifelong friend, not even the beautiful woman sleeping in the next room, whose love had taught him a new kind of liberty. He was happy. More than happy. He was utterly fulfilled,
2025-02-27 22:44:04
“Aristotle said that happiness is the settling of the soul into its most appropriate spot.”
2025-02-27 22:45:37
But my father had told me once that a man’s worth was measured by how much money other people were willing to let him lose.
2025-02-28 22:43:18
Each answer the machine gave made the question of the referendum more intractable.
2025-03-01 18:25:19
“So letting this thing do the work and making a biased summary is somehow better than me going through the pages myself?”
2025-03-01 18:31:11
Of course, that increased my payroll, as I now had to pay moderators to spot-check the thousands of texts and replies getting posted every few hours. I dreamed of training a machine to do that for the cost of electricity.
2025-03-01 18:32:10
“They’ll click on ACCEPT without a second glance if it means being able to use the site for free. There’s no other choice, except not to play.”
2025-03-01 18:33:27
If giving away your data was the benchmark, maybe artificial general intelligence was going to be easier to achieve than we thought.
2025-03-01 18:43:26
Every time users posted anything, they gave away all kinds of information about who they were, how they behaved, and what they valued. That mass of human messiness held the key to the company’s future.
2025-03-01 18:45:41
They learned these things the way a child would, by weighing the evidence and adjusting the strengths of the connections in their networks of neurons until their brains began to generalize solutions.
2025-03-02 15:39:46
“Will you help me with the words?”
2025-03-02 15:40:50
Arthur C. Clarke has observed: ‘How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.’ ” Evie frowned. “Clearly It Is Ocean? That’s my title?” “Clearly.
2025-03-02 15:42:52
For Dora and Daniel So you might know me.
2025-03-02 15:51:58
She struggled to capture creatures that seemed designed by a committee of excitable children, creatures with four-, five-, six-, and eightfold symmetry, creatures that changed their shape and colors as easily as the wind shifted off a rocky headland.
2025-03-02 15:58:02
Every page revealed the flaws in her attempts to write in a language she’d never mastered.
2025-03-02 19:38:51
added that to the long list of things that people said could never be automated