5 Things I Consumed Last Week (🐻 in mind)

on sentience, AI, remembering, mind wandering and mystery

Hey y’all!

It was a long week but it was a cocktail of reading and listening. Some of them intense, others pragmatic. I know you can’t keep a track of everything that I share and hence the best way to save it for later is to click on the headings and save those links.

Bear in mind to read them later, okay?

Note: If my emails end up in the ‘promotions’ tab, please move them to the inbox so you don’t miss out.

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Duncan Trussell: Comedy, Sentient Robots, Suffering, Love & Burning Man | Lex Fridman Podcast

If you listen to one Lex Fridman podcast that should be enough listening for a week. In this podcast with Duncan Trussell, an OG podcast host himself, a comedian and an author. He also appears on the Netflix show ‘The Midnight Gospel’ which is going to be my next watch.

In this podcast they discuss about robots and AI, death, suffering, yoga, Bruce Springsteen’s ‘I am on Fire’ (finally someone), depression, therapy and so much more. It’s a wholesome, long and funny podcast.

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I learned a system for remembering everything| Matt D’Avella

I have binge watched Matt’s videos for a long time last year but it has been zilch this year. I came across this one and couldn’t stop myself from not gravitating towards the click bait. Reading and consuming a lot of content doesn’t give you the luxury of time to categorize and revise everything to retain things better, I need a system re-haul.

In this video, Matt discusses Ryan Holdiay’s method on how to remember what you read by adopting a system of categorization which was practical and suits my style. I think I will do a system revamp soon.

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Collective Wayfinding Through Mystery| The Summer of The Pause

I started listening to On Being podcast last year and when they launched this newsletter a few months ago, I was super excited. The Summer of The Pause is a 6 issue edition to celebrate stillness. It is a mix of mind bending quotes, probing questions to ask yourself, a playlist of their archives to listen to and an animated short film. Quite a pack!

There are probably other incredible souls who will change your sense of what’s possible and will change your life in such beautiful ways, that are still out there, that we have yet to meet. ~Ai-jen Poo

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What is Mind-Wandering and How To Use it To Your Advantage?| Ivaylo Durmonski

I am in a constant search of long-form reads, thank goodness I landed on Ivaylo’s website. If you feel like spending the weekend in bed with warm tea, use this website as the tunnel.

In this article he talks about our goldfish attention span and attention drifting.

Mind-wandering is the ability of the brain to generate thoughts that are unrelated, or somehow related to what we’re actually doing right now.

He digs into why our mind wanders, how it influences our lives and how to control it.

A very well written article that will require conscious effort to put things into practice but nevertheless like all self-help content is a great reminder to unplug.

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Beyond Hyperanthropomorphism| Ribbonfarm Studio

My first acquaintance with Venkatesh Rao was through his blog turned book Gervais Principle which I read & re-read & recommended to a lot of friends. It uses characters in the show ‘The Office’ to explain nuances about management hierarchy.

His blog Ribbonfarm has been equally popular and now the newsletter. This issue is about AI and what he thinks about the possibility of AI taking over humans.

Explained in a not so lucid format with swirling references from Ship of Theseus to Moore’s Law, I couldn’t understand half of it. Though I plan to pick it up again because I haven’t read/researched enough about AI but until then ‘Tum samjho to mujhe bhi samjhana’

I had to use it

See you next week🙆🏻‍♀️

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With love and gratitude,

The Hummingbird🌺

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