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[yourheadison-fire]

Consider two extreme examples of uninteresting, unsurprising, boring data: A visionbased agent that always stays in the dark will experience an extremely compressible, soon totally predictable history of unchanging visual inputs. In front of a screen full of white noise conveying a lot of information and “novelty” and “surprise” in the traditional sense of Boltzmann and Shannon , however, it will experience highly unpredictable and fundamentally incompressible data. In both cases the data is boring  as it does not allow for further compression progress. Therefore we reject the traditional notion of surprise. Neither the arbitrary nor the fully predictable is truly novel or surprising—only data with still unknown algorithmic regularities are

Juergen Schmidhuber - Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes

[philosophybits]

Silence is true wisdom’s best reply.

Euripides, Unidentified Plays, Fragment 977 (via philosophybits)

[philosophybits]

The weaker the body, the more imperious its demands; the stronger it is, the better it obeys.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education (via philosophybits)

[philosophybits]

It is difficult for the isolated individual to work himself out of the immaturity which has become almost natural for him. He has even become fond of it and for the time being is incapable of employing his own intelligence, because he has never been allowed to make the attempt.

Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment? (via philosophybits)

[yourheadison-fire]

A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They'll love you forever.

Billy Wilder's Rules of Good Filmmaking

[philosophybits]

“Moralities and religions are the principal means by which one can make whatever one wishes out of man, provided one possesses a superfluity of creative forces and can assert one’s will over long periods of time — in the form of legislation and customs.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

[philosophybits]

“Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims

[philosophybits]

“The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately.”

— Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

[yourheadison-fire]

The thing about video games is that, everything you see on the screen was made from scratch. You know it didn't just magically appear, there is no just a common stock library that every developer picks and chooses things from. Everything is just constructed from nothing, so there is something that happens when you have basically one brain just creating every single stupid detail in the world, and you know you're basically just creating this entire universe all from one brain, so there is just a cohesiveness that I feel it's so much easier to achieve when your team is so much smaller

Brendon Chung - Blendo games

[yourheadison-fire]

It is true, I suppose, that nobody finds it exactly pleasant to be criticized or shouted at, but I see in the face of the human being raging at me a wild animal in its true colors, one more horrible than any lion, crocodile or dragon. People normally seem to be hiding this true nature, but an occasion will arise (as when an ox sedately ensconced in a grassy meadow suddenly lashes out with its tail to kill the horsefly on its flank) when anger makes them reveal in a flash human nature in all its horror. Seeing this happen has always induced in me a fear great enough to make my hair stand on end, and at the thought that this nature might be one of the prerequisites for survival as a human being, I have come close to despairing of myself.

No longer human. Osamu Dazai

[chrisengel]

“I’ve lived so little that I tend to imagine I’m not going to die; it seems improbable that human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself, that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just as well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor memory; and then all of a sudden they stop.”

— Michel Houellebecq (via wordswithinyou)

[dailynietzsche]

“I teach that there are higher and lower men, and that a single individual can, under certain circumstances, justify the existence of whole millennia: that is, a whole, rich, great, whole human being in relation to countless incomplete fragmentary men.”

—F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §997.

[sect7]

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[simplenikit]

[shyhermit]

“The acceptance of what is–a sign of strength? No, this is where servitude resides. But the acceptance of what has been. In the present, the struggle.”

— Albert Camus, from Notebooks (1951-1959)

[zenmister]

Nothing To Lose

There is no greater security than having nothing to lose. That is the only way to be truly secure. That is why we are all ultimately secure. None of us has anything to lose. Unfortunately, we don’t always see it that way. Really, we hardly ever see it that way. Without straining ourselves we can rattle off all sorts of important things that we can lose. We can lose our health, happiness, loved ones, or our lives. Those would all be significant losses. The thought of losing any of that stuff could be devastating. Conversely, if we actually have those things, we are extremely fortunate.

Health, happiness, loved ones, and life are not something that we have. They are not ours to lose. Those things are essential to our being. We might have poor health, we might be estranged and apart from those we love, we will surely become sad, and without exception we will die. Those things are also integral parts of us. Try as we might, we can’t lose them either.

The best way to assure your security is to become comfortable with insecurity. Everything changes. If you are scared, be scared. If you’re happy be happy. If you’re sad, be sad. If you have loved ones, love them. If you’re alive, live. If you can do all that, you can do anything. When things change they are not lost. Nothing is lost. There is nothing to lose.