Bram Adams

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Key themes include:Challenging the Baseline: The creator critiques the common discourse around a "literacy crisis," arguing that instead of chasing a general reading baseline, individuals should focus on developing their own unique reading habits and systems (0:22 - 0:56).The Concept of the "Inner Book": Inspired by Pierre Bayard’s book How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, the creator explores the "inner book"—a personal, societal reference point we develop for the literature we consume…

Key Takeaways:Moving Beyond Moral Supremacy: The creator discusses how modern discourse often treats reading as a marker of high intellectual status or moral superiority. They argue that reading should be viewed as a personal system for curiosity rather than a way to signal status (0:00-3:00).The "Everyman" Reader: Rather than pressuring oneself to finish every book or read specific "intellectual" titles, the creator suggests that readers should develop a personal strategy that works for their…

If you are building a commonplace book, you must learn how to create an ontology that works across books. Unfortunately, developing this ontology is anything but trivial. We must be able to store ideas (entries) and find them later to use them in our essays or conversations.Even worse, storing entries and looking up entries have inverse cost functions, i.e. the more time you take to store something, the easier it is to find later. The less time you take to store an entry, the harder it is to…

Dear Reader,Please enjoy this conversation I had on the Design Systems House!I share a lot of new ideas I've had about reading as a system, and I get to look like a cool computer man as well!Best,Bram

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre BayardThe Tiv teach us about the internal books we have as a collective... The inner book is strived for as an individual, but only seen in fragments, and reworked the moment books are read by our imaginations...Every writer who has spoken to one of their readers has experienced an uncanny valley of what they meant by what they wrote, versus what they hear back about what they wrote according to the reader...The anxiety of the writer increases…

Dear Reader,Reading well is a system poorly stewarded by us, the supposedly blessed literate masses. Entire eras of written language wilt on the vines of time, but with a strategic mindset, we can make small steps to reclaim our practice.Reading is a SystemA static strategy library for reading, notes, videos, links, and research workflows.In Other NewsI made a business card!i have no mouth -- and yet i must scream

So for a while now, I've had a read-only Twitter account, which is basically a Twitter that I used to browse and to troll and to not engage directly under my own name, but in the past couple of months, I've watched the platform turn into a place where every time I open it, I can feel my cortisol rising in a way that feels like it can only drive towards a wounded form of existence.I always knew the website was heading in an unreliable and unuseful direction. Now, the 10% of memes that are pretty…

Extractor is a third-party tool that allows language-model-assisted coding using Claude code or Codex to contextually save smart blocks from projects. Basically, a library of sorts that people can reference and use features that have already been saved.I imagine that it would look something along the lines of a developer prompting a feature into reality, then saying something along the lines of, "I really like this modal architecture, or this database structure seems really good. Run…

In the mid-1960s a much greater proportion of Americans were college-educated than had been the case two decades earlier. Moreover, as Michael Schudson has noted, the nature of a college education had changed: it emphasized critical analysis and skepticism rather than reverence for the “accepted canons of high culture.”

I dont like books with a Molly in them

of the Republican Party

what do they ask us to marry them for if were so bad

there are no friends in objectivity

Instead of dutifully studying at home, they loitered all day in front of shops, chatted up members of the opposite sex, and squandered their fathers’ hard-earned money

and ive probably been all the others at some point too

x correction x

etc etc

and so do I

I made it up

The cornerstone is groundstrokes

bag of blood and corruption

the worse you are at interviews

very useful