▲ friendly ambitious nerds ▲

focus on what you want to see more of. practice good reply game. do 100 thing. inhabit questions. introduce the best people you know to each other. 🔥

[▲ friendly ambitious nerds ▲ @FANswitchboard]

FAN reviews thread

[Visa is doing marketing consults (see pinned!) @visakanv]

28. "it is his way of approaching life, his attitude towards others and his ability to make absurdly simple authentic philosophical headaches that I love about him."

"this is the first book that I think I would recommend to everyone, as everyone would flourish reading it"

[Matt Bateman @mbateman]

Sourdough #1 (top) vs. sourdough #100 (bottom)

Do 100 things

[shani 🌱 (sf) @sha_zng]

storytime!!!

a friend sent me a reel a few weeks ago, with hundreds of thousands of likes, and I realize it has a photo from my sketchbook that i showed a stranger 6 years ago

it was a loose sketch of a dad and daughter by a lake. his daughter complimented my hair, and i showed them my drawing of them

the video blew up. i've gotten so many messages from strangers asking for paintings because of this, and i can't help but think, the best things i've done for my career have not been the obvious things, the ads and the marketing campaigns, it has been the art i've made with no expectation or specific purpose attached, because in the end, the decision to create what we're uniquely called to create is the most powerful thing we can do

[maja 🔭🍒 @majamediaco]

i read somewhere once that ~99% of people online are lurkers who never post

which is interesting, because posting can completely change your experience of the internet, and sometimes your whole life. it has changed my relationships, career, and sense of what is possible, and i’ve watched the same thing happen for many of my friends

these platforms can be antisocial or deeply social depending on how you use them. every post is a small bid for connection

i like thinking of social media less as a place to consume or “build a brand”, and more as a personal web of interest, a place to think out loud and leave little signals for the people looking for the same things you are

[mahlen @mahlenr]

I’ve done this non-stop for a whole year now and it has completely changed my life and the lives of many people around me.

It works and it works really quickly.

My social life is completely unrecognisable from a year ago.

[Adele Bloch @adele_bloch]

you're not making new friends because you

> leave every conversation at surface level
> rarely get vulnerable or real
> assume they're too busy
> unwilling to try new experiences
> forget about your own agency
> rarely smile at strangers
> accidentally give out unfriendly energy
> expect it to just happen naturally
> stopped saying yes to random things
> cancel when you're tired

we're in a loneliness crisis

we need to remember real friendship takes time and effort

put in those reps to start living a social life that feels FULL!

you got this!!!

[Ed Matthews @edmtthws]

The purpose of lectures is to furnish your mind with beautiful, unforgettable experiences from which you generate intuition for the rest of your life.

[Tenobrus @tenobrus]

@segyges there is incredible incredible alpha in re-explaining things that are blatantly obvious to you and which you feel certain others have already sufficiently expressed

[funplings (is going to vibecamp!) @funplings]

New blog post! Wrote a review of @visakanv's excellent essay collection e-book, "FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD". If that title sounds like it describes you even a little bit, I would highly recommend it! (Link in replies)

[QC @QiaochuYuan]

this whole thread is highly relevant re: the extent to which thinking is not about some lone supergenius in their shed but takes place in a social context, as a social interaction, that has lineages

https://t.co/LwFbD3lu3U

[Lady Nimby @LadyNimby]

Told a grumpy gym employee who never smiles that i liked his shaved head. He said “thanks, I shave it every year to honor my son who died of cancer”

Normally this would throw me off and I would awkwardly apologize for bringing it up, but I thought of the grieving parents on here who have said over and over that they enjoy talking about their kids, so I asked about his son.

He absolutely lit up and told me all about what a wonderful man he grew into, obviously just happy to share his memory. So thanks, everyone, for sharing. It makes a difference irl

[Victoria @Vicky]

Neuroplasticity as a spiritual discipline

[Yishan @yishan]

In 1929, Albert Hofmann published his doctoral thesis outlining a discovery that chitin is chemically analogous to cellulose. I wanted to read it (primarily because he used the gastric stomach acids of a snail to enzymatically decompose chitin, so I was curious how that was done) but the thesis is written in German, so I found a scan and had my AI OCR it and translate it to English.

Albert Hofmann is otherwise known as the creator of LSD.

This thesis has no relation to LSD but it is an interesting and surprisingly accessible read: it also shows how scientific papers used to be written: like narrative documentation of a scientific investigation, with enough details for another practitioner to reproduce the steps.

This is definitely one of those "I don't know who needs to hear this" posts, i.e. I have no idea who would be interested in this obscure thing, but I trust the algorithm and search indexes will surface it to the people who care.

Anyhow, here is a link to the English translation of Albert Hofmann's 1929 doctoral thesis - for whoever the next person who thinks "oh hey, that thesis sounds cool, I wonder if I can find it somewhere to read [in English]" - here it is:

https://t.co/IZYpArj8WB

[PoIiMath @politicalmath]

I'm very much with @GPrime85 on this. If you have too much money, FIND SOME ART YOU LIKE AND FUND IT

James Joyce was able to write like he did b/c he had a patron and we are culturally richer because of it

Pay for art, you philistines!

[Forth ❤️‍🔥 @forthrighter]

Never write for the general public, their interests and tastes are too varied and you’d have to lowest common denominator it. Write for your best nerdy crew of 15 homies

[anu @anuatluru]

Who do you want to encourage to keep doing what they’re doing because it quietly matters a lot?

[Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean]

3 Steps for Empowered Dialogue, explained all in one breath standing on one foot

link to text: https://t.co/MqaL5opPjb
https://t.co/ynnPXzXukf

[Matt Kramer 🔪 @kramerposts]

When I see things like this, it makes me realize that we are living in a Golden Age of linguistic mass ownership. Everyone can create new words, new ideas, new expressions of them. And we're all becoming fluent together in this rapidly shapeshifting dialect of a global language.

[Kristin M. Collier, MD @HSRdirector]

at an event and someone just read this quote by Merton in their remarks. I had never heard it before and it’s great

[Aleks Jakulin @aleksj]

“Open” and “no borders” sounds noble—but it’s one of the fastest ways to lose anything worth having.
Every system has territory. Not just land, but norms, attention, institutions, and standards. If you don’t actively defend these, you don’t stay “good”—you get displaced by those who are willing to push harder.

Bad actors don’t wait for permission. They test boundaries, escalate when unchecked, and expand into whatever space is left undefended.
The common failure mode of “good guys” is predictable: avoid conflict, tolerate small violations, assume things will self-correct. They don’t. Exploitation compounds.

Defense is often mistaken for aggression. It’s not.
Defense is maintenance. It’s the ongoing work required to preserve something functional in a world where pressure, incentives, and opportunism never go away.
Without it, openness doesn’t lead to cooperation—it leads to capture.

You can see the pattern everywhere:
* Platforms without moderation degrade.
* Institutions without boundaries get taken over.
* Shared resources without governance get abused.
Territory without defense isn’t generosity for those who are good—it’s an invitation for those who are evil.

Being “good” isn’t enough to keep something good.
At some point, you have to draw lines, enforce them, and accept the cost of doing so.
Because what isn’t defended doesn’t stay neutral—it gets taken, reshaped, and used by someone else.

(written in collaboration with @DefenderOfBasic)

[Jim O'Shaughnessy @jposhaughnessy]

“If people want to build an ambitious future, they need to look as far back into the past as they want to look into the future.”
~@costofglory