Don’t use skepticism as a thinly veiled excuse for inaction or remaining in your comfort zone.

— Tim Ferriss

Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains rather than do an immoral act. And never suppose that in any possible situation or under any circumstances that it is best for you to do a dishonourable thing however slightly so it may appear to you. Whenever you are to do a thing tho’ it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world looking at you, and act accordingly…

It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual, he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions…

Never think of taking a book with you. The object of walking is to relax the mind. You should therefore not permit yourself even to think while you walk. But divert your attention by the objects surrounding you. Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far.

Our purpose should be to go and do something that has never been done before, that is insanely hard to do, that if you achieve it could make a real contribution... If that's the case, the market is probably zero billion dollars in size because it's never been done before. I'd rather be a market creator than a market taker...

It's a gut call in the sense that your intuition says something as a starting thesis. But then you have to reason through it and the reasoning of it is much much more important to me than a spreadsheet. I hate spreadsheets because you can make spreadsheets do whatever you want. You can make any chart you want out of a spreadsheet - you just got to type in some numbers - and so I don't love spreadsheets.

For that reason I love words. Words are reasoning. Tell me how did you reason through this. What's our intuition? Why do we be believe that matters?

Maggie Harrison Dupré writes in Futurism about AdVon, a company that places AI-generated writing with AI-generated author photos and bios on reputable sites.

There's a pattern in declining industries where companies try to monetize their brand at the cost of rapidly degrading it: in the short term, putting the Sports Illustrated logo on this content makes the content more valuable, but in the long run it makes SI worthless. That happens faster when the content provider is misleading companies about how it writes its content — the article has some fun examples of reviews for lifting belts suddenly veering into talking about Gucci, and reviews for microwave ovens that accidentally describe real ovens by reassuring customers that they can indeed use them to heat items wrapped in foil.

And there turns out to be another layer to the grift, where the same company that's getting paid to produce AI-generated reviews is also getting paid to insert particular companies' products into those reviews.

— Byrne Hobart

I attended that meeting; I think it was my second meeting held at the Joslyn…

A year before this meeting, Warren said to me in his office that he measures his success as a manager by how few shares trade. To this he added, in passing, that that is not a view shared by his fellow CEOs, or on Wall Street. Not splitting the shares was one significant means of nurturing long-term ownership. Indeed, years later the specialist for Berkshire trading confirmed that the lack of trading meant shares could trade with a hundred dollar spread on a 10,000+ price, which amounted to 10 cents on a 10 dollar trade, less than the then 12.5 cent minimum spread. The reason? He didn’t need a higher spread to cover the risk of a sudden large trade.

Related to this is one of my favorite memories — not from a meeting. In the early ‘80s one day I walked through Grand Central in NY. Merrill Lynch had a booth there with two Quotrons, with two lines of people, which I ignored. I approached the desk and easily got the attention of a nice woman who was eager to help:

“May I help you?”

Yes, could you give me a quote for Berkshire Hathaway?

Sure, she replied, “I’ve never heard of it”; and proceeded to leaf through a 2” volume of listings.

— Arthur Clarke