AI together
Today, using AI is almost always a solo endeavor. From the very start, forty years ago, the internet (inter + network) has amplified the exchange of information. But the first cycles of AI have bee…
The best year
Here’s an interesting thought experiment. Imagine that you would be reincarnated into the soul and body of someone on Earth, 25 years old, at random. You won’t know what you know now, y…
Trained equanimity and a bias toward action
Pay attention to what’s in front of you. Don’t let fear contaminate your understanding of the situation. Act with commitment. Notice the gap between event and reaction. Embrace the reso…
Just like me, but…
The actor, artist, mathematician, pianist, speaker, leader, tech nerd: Just like me, but talented. I’m not so sure. It might be more accurate to say “just like me, but dedicated.”…
Nostalgia can be fatal
For hundreds of years, nostalgia was seen as a serious disease, with doctors across Europe scrambling for a cure. Hundreds of thousands of people died from it. In the original understanding of the …
The Important Decision Document - ACM Queue
The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Elad Gil, Consigliere to Empire Builders — How to Spot Billion-Dollar Companies Before Everyone Else, The Misty AI Frontier, How Coke Beat Pepsi, When Consensus Pays, and Much More (#863) - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Elad Gil (@eladgil), CEO of Gil & Co, a multi-stage investment firm, holding company, and operating company working on the world’s most advanced technologies. Elad is a serial entrepreneur, operating executive, and investor or advisor to private companies, including AirBnB, Anduril, Coinbase, Figma, Instacart, OpenAI, SpaceX, and […]
The normal work of creating reliability
Here’s a recent comment on LinkedIn from John Allspaw, on a post by Gandhi Mathi Nathan Kumar about availability. Allspaw’s comment is a succinct description of a safety model proposed …
Warm pistachios
In terms of cost, serving a small ramekin of toasted pistachio nuts is a tiny portion of what an airline spends in transporting someone first class. In fact, it’s such a relatively small expe…
How Elon Musk Thinks, and Why It Is Killing Us
The software worldview applied to a domain that is not software.
How to Motivate Yourself to Do Anything - Scott H Young
Struggling to motivate yourself? It's probably one of these seven problems.
Courage vs. excuses
There are more available excuses now than ever before. In just two letters, “AI” is a simple, brand-new, all-purpose excuse for laying people off, averaging things down, closing things …
Bad money…
The expression “bad money crowds out the good” refers to Gresham’s Law. It means that once lesser-quality and counterfeit currency begins to be traded, people hoard the good stuff and o…
The second circle
What do your supporters tell their friends? That’s the unseen force behind every successful brand, movement or idea. Most people don’t care about you. They’re not listening to you…
The right sort of friction
If we remove impediments that are in the way of where our customers seek to go, they support us. But when we remove the friction that gives people traction on their journey, they flounder. Remove t…
John Battelle's Search Blog Options Destroyed
Running a startup means making hundreds of decisions a week – some of them simple – which brand of coffee to stock in the kitchen – and some of them impossibly complicated –…
Our Uncertain Uncertainties
Even the experts inventing AI don’t know what will happen next. Is artificial general intelligence even possible? Can scaling continue? Will we need massive compute centers to make AI, or can we do it with a mere 25 watts like … Continue reading →
The Wish That Distorts
The Western left's recurring failure to tell the difference between opponents of power and agents of it.
The geometry of rules (or how to "game the system")
The way players cheese games reveals how markets, networks, and other systems are exploited.
The banal djinni
Technology changes things. Sometimes better, sometimes worse. When a powerful new technology arrives, it offers us wishes. Too often, we waste them, asking it to take on simple chores or offer us t…
Consumers outnumber producers
New technology often upends the careers of experienced professionals. When the Mac offered typesetting to the masses, typographers were incensed. They had grown up with lead or photo composition, t…
Colorless, Shapeless Orb
Everybody’s best friend on the Internet, the relatable Elyse Myers (3.9 million followers on Instagram, with a New York Times best seller to boot),
Puddles
When there is motion, it creates an impact of the environment. First, the path is barely noticeable. But then, others see the hint of a path and walk on it, making it more clear. Finally, the path …
One thing at a time
Multi-tasking is mostly an illusion. What we’re actually doing is slicing our focus, jumping from one thing to another and then back again. All that jumping decreases our productivity and wor…
What do you own?
What does it mean for us to own something? If we own a piece of land and the rain washes the topsoil downstream, do we go and get the topsoil back? Do we own our reputation? We have influence over …
The most important question to ask yourself about your life’s purpose
Modern life has confused comfort and stimulation for genuine fulfillment. Could the Ancient Greek distinction between hedonia and eudaimonia help pull us out of this trap?
The reason you aren’t making $300k as a developer
Most engineers are excellent implementers but fail at architecture. Hayk (Senior Engineer) breaks down the one topic that defines the $300k gap.
Going Electric
Artists like to reinvent themselves. It’s what they do. Compare the Beatles’ music and the way they dressed between the early 1960s versus 1970. Or how
The Work Runs on Different Maps | Yusuf Aytas
The org chart shows formal accountability. It rarely shows how work actually moves. Expertise, decision paths, institutional memory, and boundary-spanning people shape execution far more than most plans admit.
Anthropic’s Economic Index Shows the AI Skills Gap Is Growing | Built In
Anthropic’s latest Economic Index report shows how AI is transforming work — and why those who don’t adapt risk falling behind.