Adam Hamrick
https://kalverra.github.io/
that it was probably only in marriage (and a good marriage, not the decorous dance of loneliness he’d watched his mother and father do for seventeen years but rather true conjugal intimacy) that partners allowed each other to see below the
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DFW wrote happier things about crippling drug addiction than a lonely dude stalling on the white-collar corporate ladder.


“I start searching for one-way tickets and am surprised to discover that you can fly Spirit Airlines from Las Vegas to Chicago for under $74. Even manic me doesn’t really want to fly Spirit, though, so I choose a flight with an auspicious number, 2345, on American.”
― Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind
― Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Dune
― Dune

“Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.”
― Infinite Jest
― Infinite Jest
“Most intelligent beings lack a permanent physical form. Instead, they exist as software capable of instantly moving between computers and manifesting themselves in the physical world through robotic bodies. Because these minds can readily duplicate themselves or merge, the “population size” keeps changing. Being unfettered from their physical substrate gives such beings a rather different outlook on life: they feel less individualistic because they can trivially share knowledge and experience modules with others, and they feel subjectively immortal because they can readily make backup copies of themselves. In a sense, the central entities of life aren’t minds, but experiences: exceptionally amazing experiences live on because they get continually copied and re-enjoyed by other minds, while uninteresting experiences get deleted by their owners to free up storage space for better ones.”
― Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
― Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
“Roger Penrose discovered that if you launch the object at a clever angle and make it split into two pieces as figure 6.4 illustrates, then you can arrange for only one piece to get eaten while the other escapes the black hole with more energy than you started with. In other words, you’ve successfully converted some of the rotational energy of the black hole into useful energy that you can put to work. By repeating this process many times, you can milk the black hole of all its rotational energy so that it stops spinning and its ergosphere disappears.”
― Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
― Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
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