Felipe Paiva

[Anish Giri @anishgiri]

The Myth of “Love Learning”

People often ask me how to get better at chess. My answer is almost the opposite of what people expect.

You don’t have to love learning.

In fact, if you wait until you love the process, you’ll probably never become very good.

We romanticize improvement. We imagine great players waking up excited to study endgames, analyze losses, or memorize opening lines. Sometimes that’s true. Most of the time it isn’t.

Improvement is often boring.

The difference between an amateur and a professional isn’t that the professional enjoys every minute. It’s that they keep going when they don’t.

People say children are fearless learners. I’m not so sure.

Children quit things constantly. Piano. Swimming. Languages. Football. Chess. They usually continue only because someone else insists they do. Parents. Teachers. Coaches.

Discipline often comes before passion, not after.

The same is true for adults.

We tell people to “follow your curiosity.” That’s wonderful advice if curiosity happens to last. Usually it doesn’t.

Every meaningful skill has a point where curiosity runs out and routine takes over.

That’s where improvement actually begins.

Chess certainly did not always feel like play to me.

There were tournaments where the last thing I wanted to do after six hours of defending a miserable endgame was analyze another five hours.

There were openings I studied not because they fascinated me, but because my opponents forced me to.

There were positions I analyzed simply because they were objectively important.

Not because they were fun.

Because they needed to be done.

People often criticize schools for asking the wrong questions.

But there’s another side to that story.

If everyone only studied the questions they found interesting, most people would develop huge blind spots.

Sometimes someone else knows what you need to learn before you do.

Nobody is naturally curious about tax law before becoming an accountant. Or anatomy before becoming a surgeon. Or rook endings before losing enough of them.

External structure isn’t always the enemy of learning.

Often it’s the bridge that gets you to the point where genuine curiosity develops.

The biggest obstacle isn’t fear of looking stupid.

It’s our addiction to doing only what feels rewarding today.

Modern life gives us endless opportunities to switch the moment something becomes difficult.

A new opening.

A new productivity system.

A new app.

A new hobby.

Very few people simply keep doing the same useful thing for years.

That’s the superpower.

So when people ask how to improve at chess, I don’t tell them to fall in love with learning.

Love helps.

Curiosity helps.

Being willing to fail helps.

But none of those are reliable.

Build habits that survive the days when none of those feelings are there.

Because mastery isn’t built on motivation.

It’s built on showing up after motivation has left the room.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Alpha!

[Felipe Paiva @paivafb]

@EduardoLeite_ Povo venezuelano em lágrimas

[Inevitable West @Inevitablewest]

🚨BREAKING: Thousands of Venezuelans are waking up and celebrating the news of Communist dictator Maduro being captured by US forces

The Legacy Media won't show you this.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Powerful words

[Curiosity @CuriosityonX]

The Moon is 1/400th the size of the Sun but also 1/400th the distance from Earth, resulting in the Moon and the Sun being the same size in the sky, a coincidence not shared by any other known planet-moon combination.

[Soleio @soleio]

I now fully accept the genius of Banksy.

[Santiago Peña @SantiPenap]

Una buena noticia para el empleo y el desarrollo de Paraguay 🇵🇾

Recibí a Joao Pimenta Camargo, CEO de REM Industries, con quien hablamos de la instalación de una fábrica de ferrosilicio en nuestro país con una inversión inicial de 35 millones de dólares y que llegará a los 100 millones de dólares, generando cientos de empleos para nuestros compatriotas.

Seguimos trabajando en la creación de las mejores condiciones para el desarrollo económico y la generación de empleos formales con el objetivo de que más paraguayos puedan salir adelante a partir de nuevas oportunidades.

[Felipe Paiva @paivafb]

@SantiPenap 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

[Felipe Paiva @paivafb]

@natemcgrady Aesthetic

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

All government spending is taxation.

This point really needs to be hammered home.

Whatever is not directly taxed is taxed in the form of inflation, as the government prints more money.

Inflation is the worst tax of all, as it punishes those who are just barely making ends meet or have gathered some savings.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Agency > Intelligence

I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency?

Grok explanation is ~close:

“Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive—someone with high agency doesn’t just let life happen to them; they shape it. Think of it as a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path.

People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. They’re the type to say, “I’ll figure it out,” and then actually do it. On the flip side, someone low in agency might feel more like a passenger in their own life, waiting for external forces—like luck, other people, or circumstances—to dictate what happens next.

It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you *can* act, paired with the will to follow through. Psychologists often tie it to concepts like locus of control: high-agency folks lean toward an internal locus, feeling they steer their fate, while low-agency folks might lean external, seeing life as something that happens *to* them.”

[Learn Latin @latinedisce]

Viam faciam aut inveniam.

[Free_Ross @Free_Ross]

FREEDOM!!!!

[Felipe Paiva @paivafb]

@NewsLiberdade Que vergonha!

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Humans vs ants' problem solving

[🎞️ Wizeman Institute of Science]
https://t.co/aRBve00cC7

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Everything is just a quarks & leptons remix

[François Chollet @fchollet]

Today OpenAI announced o3, its next-gen reasoning model. We've worked with OpenAI to test it on ARC-AGI, and we believe it represents a significant breakthrough in getting AI to adapt to novel tasks.

It scores 75.7% on the semi-private eval in low-compute mode (for $20 per task in compute ) and 87.5% in high-compute mode (thousands of $ per task). It's very expensive, but it's not just brute -- these capabilities are new territory and they demand serious scientific attention.

[Felipe Paiva @paivafb]

@elonmusk Elon libertarian is the best 👊🏼

[Lex Fridman @lexfridman]

I recorded a 3+ hour podcast on the history of Marxism and Communism. It's an intense & terrifying study of human nature and the destructive power of ideologies. Out tomorrow or Friday.

[X @X]

power to the people

in 🇧🇷 & everywhere else