Youssef (locked in)

I usually retweet software, philosophy, and everything interesting in between.

[Hardeep @hardeep_gambhir]

i have been a big article and essay enjoyer for 7 years.

i have probably read more than 10,000+ essays online

below is a thread of my favourite essays or articles of all time (that i remember)

pls drop your favourite ones below.

[corsaren @corsaren]

When people talk about how Gen Z dating discourse is bizarrely antagonistic, I tend to think that this is the root cause. As is often the case, the problem is the fucking phones.

Love and sex are risky enterprises for the ego, and a lot of locker room talk ime is a sort of ingroup ritual to shield said egos via performative bravado and shaming of the other: they can't hurt you if they don't matter. The rest, of course, is intrasexual competition, which only further encourages disparagement, objectification, and a general treatment of romance as a game to be won rather than a journey to be taken.

These sorts of rituals are bad even in isolation to the extent that they reinforce toxic behaviors within the ingroup audience. But they are even more disastrous imo when they break containment, which social media naturally facilitates. Because when overheard by the outgroup, these displays do not come across as the feigned tenacity of a fearful cub; they just sound cruel. And that cruelty creates further fear, and that fear leads to escalation.

To the extent love is a game, it is positive-sum, cooperative, and thrives off of courage. But being made aware of the darkest patterns of behavior in our counterparty is an anathema to said courage and cooperation. We were not meant to be privy to such thoughts. These words were not meant for the enemy.

[Vivid Void @vividvoid]

This is why spirituality is useless unless you put it into practice, btw. You do not actually hold any beliefs that haven't been tested

[Youssef (locked in) @JoseAmroo]

@MyKidIsWeird1 @Rheamund_ How dare you…

[Tovi @wardinpal]

Weird as it may sound, THIS might be one of the best articles you can read in order to digestibly understand Israeli society. It touches on everything: The post-90s hippie aesthetic, the made up "PTSD" bullshit, the Israeli delusion that the world thinks they're (cont)

[Electra @Electrarythm]

You will never outperform your self-image, this is one of the most important things ever said about human behavior and almost nobody understands what it really means, your self-image is the picture you carry inside your head of who you are, what you're capable of, what you deserve, and what's possible for you, and your entire life is just your nervous system executing the orders of that picture, you don't behave according to what you want, you don't behave according to what you say, you don't behave according to your goals, you behave according to who you secretly believe you are, and the gap between where you are and where you want to be is almost always the exact gap between your real self-image and the one you keep trying to talk yourself into.

The plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz figured this out in the 1950s when he noticed that some patients, even after he fixed their face perfectly, still walked out of his office feeling ugly, and others with minor cosmetic changes walked out feeling brand new, the surgery didn't matter, what mattered was whether the internal picture had changed, and he wrote a book called Psycho-Cybernetics in 1960 that became the foundation of basically every self-development book that came after it, his point was simple, the brain operates like a guided missile that locks onto whatever self-image you've installed, and it will steer you, sabotage you, and bring you home to that image no matter how hard your conscious mind fights, you can win the lottery and end up broke again in two years if your self-image is "poor person," you can lose 50 pounds and gain it back if your self-image is "fat person," you can land your dream job and quietly destroy it if your self-image is "not good enough," because the brain experiences any mismatch between reality and self-image as a problem to be corrected, and it always corrects toward the image.

This is why goal-setting, willpower, motivation, and discipline almost always fail in the long run, they're all happening at the level of behavior while the self-image underneath stays exactly the same, you can't out-discipline a self-image, you can't motivate yourself past it for more than a few weeks before it pulls you back, the only real way to change your life is to change the picture first, and the picture changes through repeated vivid imagination, especially in the relaxed state right before sleep and right after waking, when the critical part of your mind goes quiet and the subconscious actually listens, you spend ten or fifteen minutes a day living inside the version of you you want to become, with full sensory detail, with the feeling of it already being true, you do that consistently for a few months and the internal picture genuinely shifts, and once the picture shifts the behavior follows by itself, no daily battle required, because now your subconscious is steering you toward a different home.

[시 읽어주는 남자 @tirol70]

1. 가장 중요한 일 전에는 다른 일을 하지 말 것.
2. 집중 안 될 때는 10~15분 벽 응시.
3. 가능하면 종이와 펜을 쓸 것.
4. 이메일, SNS, 유튜브 같은 입력은 최대한 늦은 시간으로 미룰 것.

[Dan Hollick @DanHollick]

Did you know that the .png format was created out of spite? Or that .jpeg just discards like half of the colours in your image because you won't notice?

To celebrate last week's launch, I published a chapter on image compression.

https://t.co/IwwPF9l1LK

[Electra @Electrarythm]

If you want to train your memory and your focus together in only a few seconds a day, try this exercise daily. It was developed in the early 1900s by William Walker Atkinson in his book The Power of Concentration. The exercise is called the Sentence Drill.

Read one short sentence from any book, then close it and try to write the sentence down word for word from memory. Once you can do that reliably, move up to two sentences. Then three. Then a small paragraph.

The first time you try it you'll realize how loose your reading actually is. You'll get the gist, but you'll miss exact words, change "and" to "the," skip a comma, swap an order.

This exercise forces you to actually see the words, not just glide over them. Your mind has to hold the exact shape of a sentence long enough to reproduce it.

Do this once or twice a day. Within two weeks you'll feel a significant difference, as it strengthens your attention span, strengthens your memory, and makes you pay more attention to detail, a very rare skill nowadays.

[JP @jpbrammer]

https://t.co/GaaNZwBiWA

[Electra @Electrarythm]

lesson in there

[philogy @real_philogy]

@tlbtlbtlb i know the above was meant as a joke but for all we know this could be the case
(credit: https://t.co/QrJSsq6PX1)

[Freddy🇩🇪 @FreddyLA7]

Currently tubing down Chattahoochee River🌊

[Gayest Tone @gayest_tone]

There’s basically two stories about the World Cup right now, it’s either

“US Customs hooks Tajik team up to the BallGrabber 7000 as they exit bus”

or

“59 year old man in Bentonville excitedly invites entire Congolese team to have breakfast with him at Waffle House”

[Mariana Alfaro @marianaa_alfaro]

I am so hype for this World Cup bc we’re going to hear sentences like this that have never been uttered before

[T_p_tio 🎈 @Txp_RBI_Xctuxl]

"A man doesn't ask the mountain to be shorter"

[River Page @river_is_nice]

If people want to travel because they think it would be cool to see this or that thing, that’s fine, but the idea that people are learning anything novel or valuable from these experiences is absurd. In order to learn anything that isn’t already on Wikipedia or repeated on a thousand travel blogs you’d actually have to go some place that’s incredibly remote, dangerous or unpleasant and almost nobody is interested in doing that.

[Vineet Tiruvadi, MD PhD @vineettiruvadi]

@YounisJoseph Yup, wrote this with him in mind

https://t.co/cpiBoNX5Zt

[victory99 @countshelly]

@systematicls https://t.co/fgy5RABQzX

[kasra @kasratweets]

for anyone else who is still stuck on "the body is just a very complex machine", I recommend this essay by philip ball

people who continue to say this either don't know what they're talking about, or they use the word "machine" in such a broad sense that it's vacuous