Wisereads Vol. 138 — The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, the cost of outsourcing curiosity, and more
Last week, we shared a preview of David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell. This week, we’re sharing a preview of The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, a collection of essays that look for the wonder in everyday life.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
The machines are fine. I'm worried about us.
Researcher Minas Karamanis illustrates how AI outsourcing quietly erodes the learning that credentials cannot measure. "We have built an entire evaluation system around counting things that can be counted, and it turns out that what actually matters is the one thing that can't be."
Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
Google engineer Lalit Maganti shares what actually works in AI-assisted development, from eight years of false starts. "The takeaway for me is simple: AI is an incredible force multiplier for implementation, but it’s a dangerous substitute for design."
Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?
In a deeply reported New Yorker piece, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz scrutinize whether Sam Altman is a trustworthy steward for AGI, drawing on insider accounts from OpenAI’s tumultuous past year. "Even people close to Altman find it difficult to know where his 'hope for humanity' ends and his ambition begins. His greatest strength has always been his ability to convince disparate groups that what he wants and what they need are one and the same."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
Can AI Actually Organize Your Files? (Claude Code + PARA)
Bestselling author Tiago Forte tests Claude Code's ability to organize files using the PARA productivity method he developed. "You can't just give them access to the entire file system. So you have to pick and choose which little bits of context, which folders you are going to make available to the AI. But then that raises the question, how are you going to organize that file system?"
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
LLM Knowledge Bases
OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy outlines a hands-on workflow for building a personal research wiki that an LLM maintains, queries, and continually improves. "Where things get interesting is that once your wiki is big enough ... you can ask your LLM agent all kinds of complex questions against the wiki, and it will go off, research the answers, etc."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
Industrial Policy For The Intelligence Age: Ideas To Keep People First
OpenAI sketches a policy blueprint for the transition to superintelligence, arguing for democratic governance, broad access, worker voice, and strong safeguards. "The transition to superintelligence is not a distant possibility—it's already underway, and the choices we make in the near term will shape how its benefits and risks are distributed for decades to come."
Hand-picked book of the week
The Book of Delights
Award-winning poet Ross Gay spends a year noticing small joys, from sidewalks to gardens, to show how attention can reorient a life. In brief, luminous entries, he blends tenderness, humor, and grief, inviting readers to practice delight as a daily ritual.
"The discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study."
If you enjoy the preview, you can grab the full ebook wherever ebooks are sold in the US and Canada for $2.99 through the end of April.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Fiction Matters
Sara Hildreth writes Fiction Matters, a Substack about books, reading habits, and what it means to write well. From Reading in Public No. 96: Is AI changing how we define what it means to write?: "Whether you hate the writing process or love it, whether you draft beautifully worded creative fiction or helpful advice for your readers, if you show up, think through the ideas, and struggle through the language, you are a writer. Defining yourself as such allows you to hold onto what only you can do as a human. Because the world doesn’t need more generated text. It doesn’t need more content created. It needs your humanity."