Tony Ennis

• Took long notes on this and closed the tab and lost them 😩 - will attempt to re-do.
• General theme - very relevant to everything we're thinking about at the minute.
• "the individual lifestyle that the creator economy spawns ignores the science of human psychology"
• "tools that create new, digitally native formats for small groups of people to create wealth and form strong social bonds"
• "We live in the world of my money and your money. Our money isn’t quite here yet"
• "Pacaso is a platform that enables co-ownership" <- Groupbuy
• "I don’t want to create a podcast on my own but it’d be fun to record a season with a few friends. I don’t want to deal with the tax mess, but it’d be fun to start an investment club with the Jacuzzi crew or collaborate on a merch line with fellow TypeHouse writers"

• Really like this - feel like I could have written the article - this guy's worldview is very similar to mine.
• "half the war is won by showing up every day, maintaining momentum and staying motivated."
• "divest my time, money and attention from anything that I did not want to do"
• "work with my crew on stuff that feels like play" - very close to my "Build cool shit with friends" mission.
• "Chaotic exploration is where I do my best work, and where magic usually appears"
• "Building in public is the anti-startup playbook."
• "Building in public — or more simply, documenting as you go — is marketing in its purest form"
• There are two kinds of micro-angels:
• 1) An operator who buys to work on the product. Usually just one.
• 2) An investor who buys to hold a portfolio. Usually many products.
• They’re completely different paths if you want them to be, but they can re-converge at your whim
• "Sandwiched between the micro-angels building and buying, and the indie hackers building and selling rests incredibly fertile land upon which a single individual could build a fortune doing something they are truly passionate about."

Over the last year I became the proud owner of The Furry Lisa, among several other one-of-a-kind digital creations often referred to as “crypto art” or “NFTs” (non-fungible tokens — a special type of…

• Very interesting evaluation of what is gained and lost when oral culture is the dominant form of communication - one takeaway being that products like Clubhouse may reduce the quality of thinking, and make it easier to convince large numbers of people of mistruths - I think this is probably true but not too disconcerting as it doesn't look as though Clubhouse will &displace written mediums, just offer an alternative.
• "The encroachment of oral culture back into the public sphere"
• "African-American communities have remained close/closer to oral culture because of their particular historic experience"
• "The shift from orality—the basic human condition—to literacy changed everything about our epistemology and our culture"
• "The printing press replaced the natural, visceral human oral psychodynamics with those of literate and written one"
• "Europe and the United states are thoroughly dominated by the written culture even though oral culture is still with us because orality is deeply and intrinsically human"
• "his is particularly difficult to deal with for intellectuals who rely on their competence with, and dominance of, the written form as hallmark of their place in society"
• "Print culture is a way of thinking and knowing and holding power"
• "Writing, especially writing at length is a different modality of thought than talking and it also allows a different kind of exchange and discourse"
• "Typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively, and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; and abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response"

• Four elements of style • Your voice • Your presentation • Engaging the senses • Engaging the imagination
• "Talk vulnerably like you do with friends. "

• There are two approaches:
  • 1) The Operator approach buys and grows: you buy products with the intent to actively work on them and grow ARR over the lifetime of the investment. This assumes you’re buying back most of your time through portfolio cashflow, reinvesting it into growing ARR and driving your return through that ARR multiple; or -2. ) The Investor approach buys and holds: you buy products with the intent to passively maintain them, collect cashflows and recollect your original investment when you exit the investment. Your return is manifested in the cashflows you perceive, and any additional capital-gain when you exit is a pure bonus. You’re free to work on something else with your time (i.e. big startup idea).

• The goal of any analytics stack is to be able to answer questions about the business with data
• Where data comes from : production data stores, instrumentation, SaaS tools, and public data
• Where data goes : managed data warehouses and homegrown storage
• How data moves around : ETL tools, SaaS connectors, and streaming
• How data gets ready : modeling, testing, and documentation
• How data gets used

• Read to write

• Making things - 31%
• Plugging in - 27%
• Growing Things - 19%
• Getting Around - 16%
• Keeping warm & cool - 7%

• "It’s the best way to learn faster, build your resume, and find peers"
• "The Internet and technology have given individuals more reach than the biggest media companies."

• Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple
• Write short sentences. Avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence.

To have good instincts about what makes a product beloved, you generally have...
- Curiosity about how people think and behave
- Understanding of why various products are popular/unpopular
- A habit of analyzing new products
- An eye for seeing good/bad user experiences

• "It also seems absurd to build cities from scratch when there are so many towns that already have the basic infrastructure in place"
• "Starting a city from scratch ignores the needs and lifestyles of the vast majority of Americans and forces the tech community’s will upon them"
• "If you'd rather live in a more intellectually, financially, spiritually, and professionally varied community, Creator Towns are more your speed."

Over the past few months, I’ve become quite interested in learning about solopreneurship.

• "Squads are both a product of—and a response to—contemporary social atomization"
• "Whether bound together for survival or for lols, the squads formed by today's crisis will be resilient. Distance is no longer a barrier with the closeness of network space—soon vital culture will be predominantly enacted by fictive kin. Group collaboration is now the strong default, putting squads at the center of social, cultural, and economic life."
• "Millennials are healing from decades of irony poisoning, rediscovering what it's like to have generative, exploratory relationships with one another."
• "The ideal squad count is no more than 12. How can you really be present with more than a dozen people"
• "A greater network may surround the squad, making it appear big and fuzzy from the outside. But for the core crew, an invisible circle binds and protects a space of group identity."
• "One necessary condition of the squad is this sense of persistence: co-presence and continuous availability to one another."
• "After enough fire in the group DM, some squads begin to externalize their social products"
• "Podcasting is obviously a squad technology. Rapid publishing turns memes into whitepapers, quickly flooding the marketplace of ideas with locally-grown squad humor."
• "Once together the squad's potential for creative production is immeasurable"
• "The group is the basic user class for the tools we need today as a society, yet few pieces of software allow the squad as a whole to produce cooperatively and generate wealth together."
• "Contributions to the squad are positive sum. And in return for their contribution, members have access to an expanded set of opportunities, claims on future economic flows and guarantees backed by the group. By risking together, a scrappy group can gain access to multiplicative yields"
• "Squads will be as important as companies in the years to come. And as the micro-structure of our social and economic fabric changes, strong vibes and sustainability will become the new metric of success"

• "Not communes, not co-working places, but sort of intentional towns/villages"

• Essential vs accidental complexity
• We are asking more and more of our software
• The volume of software within companies is exploding

In this video, Alan Kay talks about his vision of object oriented programming and how to design scalable systems.

• A rebuttal to "The Bit Short" article posted earlier. Arguments:
  • Tether issuance has been rising at roughly the same pattern as USDC (Coinbase's alternative).

• Freemium & Powered By - "Once they launched freemium, more people used/published, clicks increased to 14k per week (3.5x!)."
• FB Groups - Lemlist puts lifecycle emails in their onboarding flows marketing their FB group, now 11k members strong. They convert members to paid subs, now $4m in revenues.

• Pretty compelling piece written just a few days ago that Bitcoin's surging price is in fact a bubble.
• TLDR:
  • Most new bitcoin being purchased is being purchased by Tether.
  • It seems that Tether is being given away nearly for free by large exchanges.
  • Tether is meant to be backed by real assets and should always be worth $1 USD - this means the company that issues tether should first be purchasing said assets, but it looks very unlikely that that's happening. It seems they're basically just minting new currency, giving it to people, who are then using it to purchase bitcoin, which in turn drives up the price.
• Tether and bitcoin price is highly correlated.

• "Imagine trying to clean utensils and cook food at the same time"
• "batching tasks by function"
  • "Writing code and reviewing code are now two separate functions within the same cognitive function", "Grouping/responding to all emails is an email function"

• On Tuesday mornings, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and the other members of The Inklings of Oxford met to read, discuss, and critique each other's work.
• If J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were alive today, they might join the Hype House, too.
• "The most important question we can ask of historians is ‘Why are some periods and places so astonishingly more productive than the rest?"
• Community, micro-scenius, and scenius represent three distinct phases that a group passes through
• Community: a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common; a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.
• Micro-scenius: a generative community that creates its own novel ways of thinking, doing, or creating.
• Scenius: a micro-scenius whose influence extends beyond the group itself and becomes foundational for a new way of thinking, doing, or creating.
• Historically, the scenia responsible for much of the world’s progress have been geographically constrained. The internet has the potential to break that constraint.
• I believe that historians will look back at the Coronavirus pandemic as the greatest catalyst for progress and creativity in human history.
• Until now, we have not experienced a global catalyzing event that has necessitated new modes of creating, communicating, and collaborating.

• Super thorough overview of Keo.
• Go easy on fruit
• Protein in the morning, protein in the evening
• Don't get all fats from meat
  • Nut butters
  • Eggs
  • Mayonaisse
• Nuts
  • Macadamia nuts - low carb and easier to digest
  • Avoid cashews
  • Brazil nuts, walnuts are good
• Alcohol - liver has to pause producing ketones to break down alcohol. Best is probably gin, vodka.
• Protein
  • Ratio of protein to fat is important
  • High protein is Not great but not the worst
• Supplements
  • Good quality omega 3
  • Fish or fish oil
  • Collagen

• Do not workout and then fast.

I’ll summarize everything up front. Might as well get on with it. Let’s do the numbers. THE NUMBERS PREDICTIONS Prediction last week: 14.3% positive rate on 9.7 million tests, and an average of 2,500 deaths, again with wide error bars. Results: 16.4% positive rate on 9.3 million tests, and an average of 2,657 deaths. The phase shift on 12/30, in the wake of Christmas, seems to have been real, giving us the clear holiday bump we did not see from previous holidays. That was both the very bad outcome for infections I was worried about, and also not high on my list of things to be concerned or furious about this week. For deaths, my estimate was lower than it should have been and I should have assumed a full reversion, so on reflection it’s my mistake rather than especially bad news. The new strain is not yet prevalent enough to be noticeably impacting the numbers. Prediction: 17.0% positive rate on 9.5 million tests, and an average of 2,800 deaths. The holidays are over, there will be some fallout, with things getting slightly worse, but with the main boost in deaths from Christmas mostly coming later. DEATHS DateWESTMIDWESTSOUTHNORTHEASTOct 29-Nov 495619772309613Nov 5-Nov 11108927122535 870Nov 12-Nov 181255293428181127Nov 19-Nov 251761416933961714Nov 26-Dec 21628 381427421939Dec 3-Dec 92437550842862744Dec 10-Dec 163278532443763541Dec 17-Dec 233826515851313772Dec 24-Dec 303363366841713640Dec 31-Jan 65320503660724986This is the one place it’s not as bad as it looks. The data source for these numbers is Wikipedia, which shows a relatively large amount of shifting of deaths from last week into this week. If we assume that a lot of this week’s deaths were actually last week, that explains much of the increase. It’s not good news or anything, it’s definitely bad news, but it is not full on terrifying like it would be if we didn’t know about Christmas. We still should expect further increases in the next few weeks before the tide likely temporarily turns. POSIT

The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together.

• Remote work may not save the American family, but it will provide it more freedom:
• Freedom to choose the status quo of a nuclear, city-bound model that works for those who can afford it; or the freedom to revert to the corporate, community-based model, which thrives in places where real-estate is cheap
• Where houses are large and where many hands surround children so parents can be productive workers

• The evidence is promising that in the next 5-10 years, we will start seeing robust evidence that aging can be therapeutically slowed or reversed in humans.
• The 'white mirror' of aging is a world in which biological age is halted at 20-30 years, and people maintain optimal health for a much longer or indefinite period of time.
• Negligible senescence - risk of disease doesn't change over time.
• "Aging is essentially damage that accumulates over time, which exponentially increases the risk of the diseases that kill most people."
• Hallmarks of aging
  • Genomic instability
  • Telomere attrition
  • Epigenetic alterations
  • Loss of proteostasis
  • Deregulated nutrient-sensing
  • Mitochondrial dysfunction
  • Cellular senescence
  • Stem cell exhaustion
  • Altered intercellular communication
• The 'damage' (hallmarks of aging) occurs as a by-product of normal metabolism.
• In the lab, we have demonstrated that various anti-aging approaches can extend healthy lifespan in many model organisms including yeast, worms, fish, flies, mice and rats.
• Life extension of model organisms using anti-aging approaches ranges from 30% to 1000%
• Senescent cells are a kind of 'zombie'-like cell that accumulate with age.
• Killing senescent cells with senolytics extends the median healthy lifespan by up to 27% in mice (below)

• The low energy density of batteries continues to force eVTOL makers to make significant design tradeoffs, resulting in performance that can only marginally meet customer mission requirements.
• The industry must also develop autonomy systems that significantly improve the safety of vertical-lift aircraft relative to human-piloted helicopters before they will make a significant difference in the daily commutes of millions of people.
• There are a lot of cooks in the kitchen — commercial R&D labs, government agencies, university engineering departments.
• Reliable Robotics, Merlin Labs, X-Wing, Near Earth Autonomy, Daedalean, Skydio, Ehang, Volocopter, Lilium, Cuberg, MagniX, Ampaire, and Verdego Aero.
• Skydio will then move to drones that can operate independently in public airspace, and then, ultimately, those passenger-carrying aircraft
• Simply keeping autonomous drones low to the ground and within 50 feet of structures will keep out of the way of other aircraft, while enabling the devices to be widely deployed.
• "Lilium just announced plans for an air taxi service that will launch in 2025 near Orlando."
• "Developing hydrogen-powered propulsion systems for electric aircraft."

Hunting, organic scams and buying a business for $0

An inspiring overview of what's to come in the next decade. Some highlights.
- Paraphrased: The Great Stagnation is over. The roaring twenties are just beginning.
- Energy
- "Batteries will never match fossil fuels’ energy density" - "Commercial aviation can’t electrify"
- Nuclear fusion possible but still a decade out.
- Geothermal seems most interesting.
- Transportation
- Urban air mobility - likely non-viable if pilot is required so automation (and regulation) will be key.
- Nationwide Hyperloop probably a decade out.
- Space
- "Trade (on Earth) is roughly inverse-linear in transport costs."
- SpaceX is incredibly impressive
- Starlink - won't serve cities - will serve 3% of market that's not currently served - still $72b market.
- Thesis - SpaceX uses Starlink revenue to accelerate Mars projects
- "The 2020s will be the decade that makes or breaks cryptocurrency"
- By the middle of the decade, augmented reality will be widely deployed, in the same way that smart watches are today.
- Glasses will be computing devices. Every big tech company has a glasses project at a relatively mature stage in the lab today.

• "You usually pay nothing for the growth potential"
• "there are businesses out there that have both boring, predictable profits today AND potential for substantial growth. Make sure you find one with both."
• "Paid $800k plus a bit of seller financing. 10x’ed the customer base in a few years."
• "One huge problem is they overindex on consistency of profits and underindex on growth potential and strategy"
• ""

• Will be following these guys closely

• Interesting thread - has keywords that piqued my interest but still feels a bit opaque - reached out to the author to see if he's interested in a call.

• Only applicable when at 50+ people, but is very well thought through, would've been handy to have read when First Circle was having growing pains and regular reorgs.
• Particularly liked the idea of the quarterly product launch.

• This is something Atlas would do

• Github CTO knows what's up. Coincidentally responded to this with my previous tweet on the topic and he followed me.

How to create a winning strategy on Pinterest

• Figma appears across most categories, is growing, and is by a long shot the tool people are "Most excited to try in 2021" - around 700% higher than the next tool, Sketch.
• "Miro grew from being used by 5% of respondents in 2019 to 33% in 2020."
• "66% of designers use Figma for UI design, as opposed to 37% in 2019"
• "The benefits of online tools: autosaving, link sharing, live collaboration"
• Invision stil steadily declining as the go-to prototyping tool.
• "Adobe XD grew 10x from being used by 1% of respondents in 2019 to 11% for managing a design system."

• Followers Don’t Matter; Engagement Does
• Think About Your Twitter Funnel
• Give More Than You Ask

• Tip that saves people time, effort, or money.
• Condense a big piece of content into a small tweet.
• Share a resource
• Vulnerability - failure, fear, twitter stats.
• Revealing - work in progress, inspiration, revealing story.
• Interactive - seek recommendations, ask a question, ask if anyone has questions.
• Helpful - offer to share your expertise.
• Recommend someone you follow.
• Create a space for others to promote their own stuff.
• Say thanks
• Share the most retweeted tweet from someone relevant to your audience.

• Questions to ask when exploring a new market:
• Are they searching for what you're thinking of building?
• How do you know? What evidence do you have?
• How motivated are they? How willing to pay?
• Are they already convinced they "need X," or do they still need convincing?

• Not sure how much of an agenda the tweet author had here as I don't know him, but it's an interesting way of explaining how dogmatic or black and white thinking can be improved by trying to solve the problem, rather than state it.

• Brilliant collection of technical essays

• The simple shapes of stories
  • Y-axis - Good & Bad fortune
  • X Axis - Time
• U Curve
  • Somebody gets into trouble, gets out of trouble
• S Curve
  • "Finds something wonderful, Oh god dammit"
• The most popular story in Western Civilization. Every time its retold, someone makes a million dollars - Explains Cinderella

• Great list of launch inspiration from Lenny

The Grand Unification of Web Technologies Bence Meszaros, MSc.(bence.meszaros@icloud.com) November 24, 2020 Abstract After 30 years, developers are still struggling to build websites efficiently. Our hypothesis is that this is due to severe and acute design flaws...

I've analyzed all 490 Indie Hackers interviews and identified 34 acquisition channels that work consistently for founders (see Zero to Users for more de...

• Study in Guinea showing "There are places where kids are in school and just not learning to read or even recognize numbers, and that's an in principle fixable problem for ~$425/kid/year."

• Video from Supernuclear on buying houses with friends.

Many of the companies we meet are founded by technologists — either young, dynamic founders with a computer science background or seasoned product managers or executives that see a better, different…

• Pick an activity you enjoy
• Set realistic goals and aim to progress
• Aim for 150 minutes per week
• Add up the minutes however you can
• Be consistent
• Try intervals

• Author seems to be closely connected to medical profession.
• Contracted covid at the start of the year and has since been measuring his antibody levels with the help of Philippine General Hospital.
• IgM antibody - indicates new infection.
• IgG infection - indicates previous infection.
• Upshot of the post - antibody levels dropped sharply in September - 16% month on month. 50% decrease from May - this shows immunity is not long-term-guaranteed.
• Interestingly though they shot back up in an October 20 test by 47%. Specialists he consulted agreed it was probably as a result of re exposure.
• TLDR: Antibodies decline over time, can rise when exposed to virus again.

The Six Questions to Ask Yourself

• Developers over-optimise for the ergonomics of typing and not enough for the ergonomics of thinking.
• The 5 activities of effective software development: Talking, Listening, Reading, Writing, Thinking
  • AKA the three Ts - Talking, Typing, Thinking
  • Talking: When people are too busy or too shy to talk, the lack of high-bandwidth communication can make it hard to tease out requirements and unpack business problems.
  • Listening
  • Writing
  • Reading: "The vicious-reading-writing-cycle-feedback-loop. When people don’t update the commentary, people become trained to ignore it, so people don’t update it."
  • Thinking: "Modelling the domain, thinking through the edge cases, mentally playing with abstractions.". "we don’t need to be in front of anything to think effectively, and often I find it better not to be"
  • "Writing code is the brief part where I’m simply harvesting all the mental crop that I’ve sown from the talking and listening and reading and thinking."

Guest host Naomi Klein is joined by Movement Generation’s Gopal Dayaneni and Rutgers University professor Neil Maher.

Loved this - and believe it strongly too. Arrogance is overconfidence that negatively affects others, but it's possible (and should be encouraged) to be overconfident and self aware enough to not be a dick - people dismiss the latter because the two often go hand in hand.

• "The habits that prevent us from starting for fear of making something lame ... are not very deeply rooted."
• "In the past we didn't need customs for dealing with new ideas, because there were very few new ideas."

• On being dismissed by others

  • "We don't have enough experience with early versions of ambitious projects to know how to respond to them".
  • People dismiss new ideas because of zero-sum status psychology - "They worry that if you succeed, it will put you above them."
  • The right way to deal with new ideas is to switch polarity, from listing the reasons they won't work to trying to think of ways it could."
  • Silicon Valley is the exception in this regard - people have learned how dangerous it is to dismiss something that looks like a toy.
  • In the Valley, the psychology was closer to "A rising tide lifts all boats.", and has since become a force of habit.
  • "Silicon Valley shows that dismissing new ideas is not so deeply rooted that it can't be unlearnt."

• On dismissing your own ideas

  • Judging your own work too harshly will kill it too. Learning how to ignore that is a key skill.
  • Some strategies for this:
  • Being overconfident, even temporarily, can allow you to reach escape velocity - "if you look at something that's 20% of the way to a goal worth 100 and conclude that it's 10% of the way to a goal worth 200, your estimate of its expected value is correct even though both components are wrong."
  • Surrounding yourself with the right people. - "The people best able to do this are those working on similar projects of their own, which is why university departments and research labs work so well."
  • Discipline may work, but is the least reliable.
  • "Focus less on where you are and more on the rate of change."
  • Change the frame of a new project - "Start a new piece of software saying that it's just a quick hack"
  • Use your curiosity - tell yourself you're trying things "just to see how they'll turn out".
  • Study the history of people who've done great work.

• Other quotes

  • Realize that our attitudes toward early work are themselves early work.
  • This is smart and unintuitive -> "in a field where the new ideas are risky those who dismiss them are more likely to be right. Just not when their predictions are weighted by outcome."
  • I like this -> "Good work is not done by "humble" men. It is one of the first duties of a professor to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his importance in it."

• Have seen this pop up several times now - but this is the best overview.
• Disagree with the closing line: "Paraphrasing is like magic pixie dust you can sprinkle onto any conversation to make it more positive and productive." My experience is when you start doing this, even with the right tone, it seems disingenuous. But this can be overcome by being up front.
• "If your roommate says, “I feel like I’ve been doing all the chores lately,” you might object internally with, “That’s not true! I did the dishes this morning!”
• "These reactions happen imperceptibly, and we move towards feeling uncomfortable or defensive without knowing how we got there."
• Benefit of parahrasing: allows for full understanding on both sides & helps speaker feel understood.
• On the need to be understood: "The unconscious fear is that if we aren’t understood it will be as if we never existed."
• "Time required to reach conflict resolution is cut in half when each negotiator agrees to accurately repeat what the previous speaker had said"
• When to paraphrase: After receiving a request, After receiving feedback, When the speaker is sharing something vulnerable, If you’re unsure of what the speaker meant.
• Avoid declarative tone.

• "We can improve the output of a team or an organization by limiting work in progress."
• "Small batches is favorable compared to large projects that are taken over into the next round."
• Obvious, but "The larger an organization is, the more likely large projects become"
• Good way to find the optimal WIP number - start at 1 and increase incrementally.
• Article was useful for sparking ideas but not much real insight as the title promised.

Growth Ranker lists startups based on their revenue and traffic growth. Discover high growth startups before they become name brands.

A growing database of creators, makers, and indie hackers building in public.

• Similar to the kinds of profiles on the "Built to sell" podcast.

• Classic definition of media: "Outlets or tools used to store and deliver information or data".
• "Technology not only enables content categories, it defines their business models and shapes the content, too"
• Advent of the record in 1850s - "after centuries of variability, music suddenly had a defined run-time. "
• Subsequently, as limitations were relieved by the cassette & CD, song lengths still remained 3 to 4 minutes - "Technology might have relaxed its grip on music’s length, but it had strengthened its hold on business models."
• iTunes - business model moves from albums to individual songs. Spotify - "Matching revenue with usage and paying talent as and to the degree consumers listened to their works"
• Because spotify classifies a listen as min 30 seconds, incentive to longer is decreased, leading to shorter song lengths. - Billboard hot 100 songs less than 2:30 has increased 600% between 2017 & today.
• Interesting point on human vs algorithmic discrimination - a lot of consternation about the latter but "N***az4life was the second biggest album in the country by units purchased, but 21st in its own genre when it came to what was “selling” and “hottest.”

• Not an article about blockchain or cryptocurrencies, but its central point makes a strong argument in favour of both. While blockchain detractors point out its non-suitability for doing old things better, they miss the new things blockchains can unlock.
• New technologies enable activities that fall into one of two categories:
  • 1) Doing things you could already do but can now do better because they are faster, cheaper, easier, higher quality, etc.
  • 2) Doing brand new things that you simply couldn’t do before
• "The early electrical grid delivered light better than gas and candles. It took decades before we got an electricity “app store” — a rich ecosystem of appliances that connected to the grid"
• "When evaluating the potential of blockchains, people sometimes focus on things like cheaper and faster global payments" - these are in the "doing old things better" category. They don't consider the crypto-native category, such as "services that are owned and operated by their users", among others.

• Using the conservative multiple of the breakout companies, the overall return multiple will be =~ 3.67
• Using the realistic multiple the overall return multiple will be =~ 6.86.

• Todo: Look up Bretton Woods.
• "Allow the CB's to circumvent the banking and fiscal system and give or take money (tax or transfer payments) directly."
• "Central Banks will now be able to manage fiscal policy, outside of governments balance sheets"

• "We judge people in our industrialized society by adherence to standards, and legible reliable output."
• If we admitted that the weirdos we exclude are the instruments of progress, our position is threatened, so we creatively identify ourselves with past heretics.
• "It's too dangerous to let people run around being wrong 90% of the time and still get taken seriously. But maybe we're just missing some key social technology."

• Not great notes, but makes me want to read the book.
• "In 1959, the world’s first purpose-built container crane went into operation - one 40,000-pound box every three minutes - a 40x productivity improvement."
• "Malcom McLean’s fundamental insight was that the shipping industry’s business was moving cargo, not sailing ships"
• "Economic benefits arise not from innovation itself, but from the entrepreneurs who eventually discover ways to put innovations to practical use, and from the organizational changes through which businesses reshape themselves to take advantage of the new technology."

• "DO repeat yourself until you are 100% sure, that repetition comes from missing."

• Agree with notes on how to do this well, although I think the PR process is outdated & inefficient. Everything below is important long term, but I would take a review that brings the functionality & UX up to par over one that makes code more readable. With advent of PR apps (Heroku & Netlify), it'd be cool to see UX/usability also becoming part of code review.
• Code reviews purpose:
  • Coaching opportunity.
  • Strengthen readability & system understanding.
• Read code deeply to get a good understanding.
• "avoid using “you” or “your."
• "prefix nitpicks with “nit.”
• "I approve when and only when the PR is good enough."

• Elon would like Atlas 😁
• "they don’t know how to outline their information in a way that leads to further revelation."
• "it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details"
• Rules:
  • Make sure you’re building a tree of knowledge
  • You can't remember what you can't connect.

• Covid flying seems safe

There are currently 483 founder interviews on Indie Hackers. I've read and analyzed all of them and identified the top 30 acquisition channels mentioned...

My competitors are using this, I'll use it too.

Demoing products is Rob Falcone's bread and butter. Now he wants to pass the wisdom of his experience along so others can demo better.

- Be a creator, not just a consumer

• "Banking model --> kids are like piggy banks: empty till you fill them with knowledge that you're the expert in."
• "Our scholarly understanding of how learning happens is like astronomy 2000 years ago. "
• "Before the late 19th century, no human society had ever attempted to formally educate the entire populace"
• We use "the elite “Lyceum” style of instruction even though it’s ineffectual with most kids."
• Homework doesn't really help, especially younger kids.
• Students don't learn a thing from testing. Most teachers don't either (it's supposed to help them tweak instruction, but that rarely happens).

Let's explore the history and role of each of the components that make up the URL!

Power classes are a useful typology for players in an empire, because each group is subject to consistent incentives. As a result, there are consistent patterns of interaction between these groups…

• Covers history of the keyboard
• Most words have tons of redundancy. See also: The Bit Player.
• Vasili's hack - create a large library of shortcuts. E.g "wd" instead of "would".
• Seems to be working for him. I'm very interested to try it out.

• Abiotic - physical, not biological
• Prebiotic - "occurring before the emergence of life."
• Biotic - "Pertaining to the emergence of life"
• Research tries to answer question - how does a thing transition from abiotic to biotic.
• We still don't know exactly how chemicals at the bottom of the ocean created life. But we know a lot of the rules about the different molecules we have now. So in theory if we plug the rules we know now into a computer program and get it to run lots of simulations, it should be able to reverse engineer some of the possible paths to where we are now.

• Most covid spread comes from super spread events.
• Response that most reflected that so far - Japan.
• Indian study - 70% of infected people (out of 500k) didn't infect anyone else.

• Not exactly sure what this means - but it seems to mean that we could theoretically create immortal low-power batteries out of graphene. They can harness the energy, but it's not clear whether the energy "runs out" or at what point (although title says "limitless").
• "A circuit capable of capturing graphene's thermal motion and converting it into an electrical current."
• "A theory that freestanding graphene—a single layer of carbon atoms—ripples and buckles in a way that holds promise for energy harvesting."
• "Refutes physicist Richard Feynman's well-known assertion that the thermal motion of atoms cannot do work."
• "The second law of thermodynamics is not violated"
• "The graphene and circuit are at the same temperature."
• "The next objective is to determine if the DC current can be stored in a capacitor. If millions of these tiny circuits could be built on a 1-millimeter by 1-millimeter chip, they could serve as a low-power battery replacement.

• If we consider that we need a re-bundling in order to see the promise of real productivity building crudware, this seems kind of big.

• Not super comprehensive - quick explanation of what PMF is, followed by real world examples.
• PMF is
  • You've made a product people want.
  • You can make a profit delivering it.
  • You can find & keep people sustainably.
• 3 signs
  • Sudden & significant pull from the market
  • Gradual but compounding pull
  • Hitting a milestone that proves it's working Sudden pull examples
• "Where before we were struggling to get traffic, all of sudden we couldn’t keep up. Engagement soared, churn went dramatically down. Everything started working!
• "Zero marketing budget and we were growing like a weed. Word of mouth was uncontrollable"
• "When we hit PMF, we started feeling 'pull' for the first time. We solved one problem for people... so they started asking us to solve a second, third, fourth, and fifth" Steady compounding examples
• "We've just been growing fairly consistently, and gradually the how-do-we-keep-up anxiety got bigger and bigger "
• "We found pockets of PMF with specific segments of founders, managers, executives and business development professional"
• "Initial signs of product-market fit feel a bit like a calm breeze, while true product-market fit feels like a powerful wind at your back, accelerating you forward and compounding over time"

• This seems... big.
• "Compact" - tennis court size as opposed to football pitch size.
• Researchers in MIT who are building it, released the papers about why they think it's viable. Very aggressive timeline of 3 to 4 years from construction (starting 2021).
• They are approaching Fusion in a different way to current approaches & hadn't told other scientists what their approach was. This paper expands on that and "distinguishes it totally from all of the start-ups, which are by definition more edgy and higher risk"
• Other effort in France targeting 2035 construction.
• Other researchers think papers prove viability, but timeline is too optimistic.
• "This high-field path still looks viable. If we can overcome the engineering challenges, this machine will perform as we predict"

• Value investing is different from speculation
  • An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative.
• Value investing depends on the intrinsic value
• Value investors seek a margin of safety
• Think in terms of years or decades, not weeks or months
• Value investing requires a contrarian mindset
• Avoiding losses is the first priority
• Know what you own and why you own it
• Think like a business owner, because you are.
• Seek an "adequate return"

• EPAI. Entrepreneur, Producer, Administrator, Integrator

• Emotions are not hard-wired. They are constructed by the brain as concepts to make sense of the world around you.
• "The body is just another part of the external world that it must explain."
• "Your muscles running low on energy might feel like “exhaustion.” Too little sleep might be interpreted as “overwhelm.” A lack of positive social interaction might be experienced as “loneliness.” These are concepts built by the mind out of pieces of sensory data, cultural knowledge, and a history of social interactions."
• "The range of emotions a person can experience is limited by their emotional granularity – the ability to construct and identify more precise emotional experiences."
• "When you experience an emotion without knowing the precise cause, you are more likely to treat that emotion as information about the world, rather than your experience of the world"
• "Once you understand body budgets and how they impact our emotions, it becomes apparent how much of modern culture seems engineered to disrupt them."
• "Depression can be thought of as a relentless feedback loop of negative thoughts and feelings. Each feeling drives the next thought, and vice versa. Since the body budget is chronically in debt, the body tries to cut spending. The easiest way to do that is to stop moving around and stop paying attention to the world."
• "The Theory of Constructed Emotion argues that every aspect of our emotions is malleable and flexible. You are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits buried deep inside some ancient part of your brain. You have more control over your emotions than you think."
• Things you can do:
  • Try on new perspectives
  • Recategorize what you're feeling
  • Move your body
  • Improve your vocabulary
  • Write about your experiences.

• Profile of Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose podcast on The Knowledge Project was one of the best I've listened to this week.

• *In Progress
• EDT is "A full spectrum theory of vertical growth and meaning making." it models how self-identity evolves over time.
  • Based on sentence completion tests from 1980 to 2000.
• Ego Transcendence is one thing (which very few people get to), but before then the ego can also mature over time.
• The ego is what makes sense of the world. Changes in it change how the world is viewed.
• Pre-conventional
  • Symbiotic
  • Babies
  • Impulsive
  • Other people seen as objects.
  • Views world in black and white
  • Opportunist
  • "What you might call 'uncivilized'"
  • Not capable of insight into self or others minds
  • Everything is zero sum
  • No planning - all short term. "Flying by the seats of their pants". Little consideration to consequences.
  • Sense of 2 selves - my real self and the one I put out into the world.
  • Rules recognised but not respected.
  • Self respect is whether you can controls others.
  • Others always to blame.
  • Actions only bad if caught. No shame or guilt.
• Conventional
• Post-conventional

• Loooong thread - 138 tweets ~8000 words.
• TLDR: 40 current vaccine candidates in progress across many different methods (lots experimental) in many different regions. Rollout will be very decentralized.
• Normal vaccine lifecycle: ~15 years
• Cov2 - many steps were done already e.g we already knew a lot about coronaviruses. "Fiddling around was skipped and antigen was plugged into existing tech."
• This acceleration shouldn't be expected to compromise safety.
• 40 vaccines currently in development, 10 in Phase 3 trials. And can be licensed under "Emergency Use Authorization."
• Several ways to make a vaccine
  • Classic: Grow virus in cell culture, isolate it, concentrate it, then kill it "chemically or physically". No EU/US companies currently using this approach.
  • Live attenuated - more advanced - genetically modifying live virus and infecting people so their body fights a weakened version and develops antibodies. Only 3 of 40 currently use this method & progress "far behind".
  • Modern - no live infectious disease involved - antigens are grown in cells. Well tested - used for flu, Hep B & HPV already. Novavax (Author's recommended candidate) using this method in UK.
  • Other methods: Replication Incompetent Viral Vectors (trigger strong t cell response but can be problematic for immunocompromised people).
  • Completely New Methods:
  • DNA ("Current progress seems slow").
  • RNA ("Absolute new kid on the block") - impressive technology. Two western frontrunners (Moderna & Pfizer) using this approach - won't work in lower income regions as they need to be stored frozen.
• Authors recommendation for which one to take: Pfizer or Novavax

• A good one from the archives. Key points
  • Developers are now a big enough market to sell to (crazy that this was only 8 years ago considering how big that market is now).
  • Trends identified
  • Democratization of software development: I wonder would she think that this has progressed as fast as she predicted.
  • "Developer Components" - basically APIification
  • "Picks & Shovels" - Atlassian revenues were $100m then, now $1.6b

I don’t claim originality for any content here; people who’ve been influential on this include Nick Beckstead, Phil Trammell, Toby Ord, Aron Vallinder, Allan Dafoe, Matt Wage, and, especially, Holden Karnofsky and Carl Shulman. Everything tentative; errors all my own. INTRODUCTION Here are two distinct views: Strong Longtermism := The primary determinant of the value of our actions is the effects of those actions on the very long-run future.The Hinge of History Hypothesis (HoH) := We are living at the most influential time ever.It seems that, in the effective altruism community as it currently stands, those who believe longtermism generally also assign significant credence to HoH; I’ll precisify ‘significant’ as >10% when ‘time’ is used to refer to a period of a century, but my impression is that many longtermists I know would assign >30% credence to this view. It’s a pretty striking fact that these two views are so often held together — they are very different claims, and it’s not obvious why they should so often be jointly endorsed. This post is about separating out these two views and introducing a view I call outside-view longtermism, which endorses longtermism but finds HoH very unlikely. I won’t define outside-view longtermism here, but the spirit is that — as our best guess — we should expect the future to continue the trends of the past, and we should be sceptical of the idea that now is a particularly unusual time. I think that outside-view longtermism is currently a neglected position within EA and deserves some defense and exploration. Before we begin, I’ll note I’m not making any immediate claim about the actions that follow from outside-view longtermism. It’s plausible to me that whether we have 30% or just 0.1% credence in HoH, we should still be investing significant resources into the activities that would be best were HoH true. The most obvious implication, however, is regarding what proportion of resources longtermist EAs should be spending on

Didn't get proper notes because I was on the move. Interview was constructed as a series of elaborations on articles Flo has written. Made me want to read his blog.
Some random quotes I remember:
- "I’m bullish on the White collar gig economy"
- “Radical egalitarianism is eating the world?”
- "Peter Zeihan - no matter what American does in the next 20 to 30 years, they’re fine. We’re subsidising the global order."
- Thinking in public - People massively overestimate the downside and underestimate the upside.

Salary negotiation advice, mostly for engineers. Running total of raises negotiated due to this essay: $9M+.

• "Diagnostic signs" for emotions don't exist
• "We all think we know what emotions are but no-one can define them"
• "There's no one co-ordinated package for "anger" that looks the same every time"
• Often a certain emotion incents withdrawal, but sometimes the same emotion incents approaching it. See rollercoasters, scary movies, haunted houses, "disgust parties".
• I would define emotion how I define thinking - your brain is "conjuring" emotions in the exact same way
• "Anything which is learned is wired"
• "An infant brain is not a miniature adult brain". It's awaiting wiring instructions from the world.
  • The Muller Lyer illusion (where your brain perceives one line as longer than another because of the edges) doesn't work in some cultures, because their brains weren't exposed to the same shapes as those in the western world.

• "Silver diamine fluoride stops decay in 60 to 70 percent of cases with one application"
• "lost science is more common than you might think. Scurvy was “cured” as early as 1497, when Vasco de Gama’s crew discovered the power of citrus…but this cure was repeatedly lost, forgotten, rediscovered, misconstrued, confused."

• "If children can't write the scripts of the parents, if their access to ancestral culture is read-only, that culture won't be replicated."

• "It's wrong because your savings grow over time. If you change the return rate above to 5%, you can see that someone who has 500k in savings and spends 75k per year has a runway of 7 years. At 50k per year that extends to 13 years. But if they can cut their spending to 25k per year they have a runway of 62 years!"

• "Anytime a pathogen invades the body, the whole body reacts.” SARS-CoV-2 is no exception"
• "The researchers showed that 78 percent of people who had recovered from COVID-19 (including many who had never been hospitalized) still had some kind of heart abnormality that was detectable on MRI scans two months later"
• "Some long-haulers have been diagnosed with dysautonomia—a group of disorders that disrupt involuntary bodily functions, including heartbeats (which can become inexplicably fast) and blood pressure (which can suddenly crash)"

Stripe Atlas’ guide to understanding low-touch and high-touch SaaS businesses

Stripe Atlas’ guide to pricing and packaging for low-touch SaaS businesses

Before I proceed with a brief discussion of postmodernism and its contribution to the 20th century thought, a clarification: contrary to the common view, the “modernism” part of the word “postmodernism” does not denote “modernity.” Such an interpretation is wrong (and also raises the question of why postmodernism had not happened 200 years earlier). The “modernism” part of the word refers to the dominant literary and artistic movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In other words, postmodernism is not what came after the Renaissance, the industrial revolution, Voltaire and Descartes—it is what came after the cubists, the existentialists, Kafka and Joyce. This correction is important for reasons of formal accuracy—but it is also a reminder that postmodernism was neither the first, nor the most important movement to attack the values of Western civilisation. Mannerism did it in the 1520s, followed by baroque, then the gothics and romantics, and, finally, at the turn of the 20th century, the modernists. The latter rebelled on a truly grand scale, negating and annihilating everything that had …

• "Business building happens by a series of 1% improvement. But business domination comes with step functions"
• "If you want to build a $1 billion ARR business, you will need a step function along the way."
• "We tend to lean into constant 1% improvements is that it feels really good"

• "The specific closure date was set years ago as part of his long-term plan to make high-risk, high-impact donations by setting a hard deadline to give away all his money and close shop"

An Evolving Exploration into the Head, Heart and Hands of Energy Descent

• "buyouts of software firms, a sector with above-average multiples, rose from 6 to 17 percent of all deals over the past decade."

• Lacking family, we've become children:
• Politics is the incarnation of a toddler tantrum, complete w fingers in ears, ignoring adult conversation. Identity politics is prepolitics.
• "Adults don't make babies, babies make adults."
• "The consumerization of love has led to more discerning consumers in an area of life where heightened discernment appears inimical to long-term satisfaction."

• "The disease occasionally sends people’s immune system into a frenzy, wreaking havoc on their internal organs"
• "A March study found that 7 to 20 percent of sick patients showed heart damage associated with COVID-19."
• "Research from Italy found that roughly nine in 10 hospitalized patients said they still had symptoms after two months"
• "long-haulers” suffer from a diabolical grab bag of symptoms, including chronic fatigue, shortness of breath, unrelenting fevers, gastrointestinal problems, lost sense of smell, hallucinations, short-term-memory loss, bulging veins, bruising, gynecological problems, and an erratic heartbeat"
• "For men in their 30s, like me, about 1.2 percent of COVID-19 infections result in hospitalization".
• "a guy my age has one-in-100 chance of developing a long-term illness after contracting COVID-19"
• "We know that hepatitis C leads to liver cancer, we know that human papillomavirus leads to cervical cancer, we know that HIV leads to certain cancers,"
• " wouldn’t want my pandemic plan to be Let’s have hundreds of thousands of young people with lifelong illnesses"
• "Herd immunity is an inoperable plan, teetering on a false assumption of elderly-cocooning, which encourages young people to play craps with the long-term health of their internal organs. The choice is yours. You can listen to the scientists. Or you can roll the dice with your guts"

• Quotes/points
  • "Build more than a personal brand"
  • "Sell products, not attention"
  • "Drive higher CLV through repeat purchases"
  • "Choose a better business model"
• "For those who are just getting started, the most important thing to understand is that an audience is key. If you’re looking for step one on this massive journey it’s to get good at building an audience. "

• Quotes/points
  • "In our own century, digital media is fracturing our collective experience of clock time."
  • "Everything from the evening news to the 9 – 5 workday has been freed from the cage of industrial era timekeeping" "With nearly all of recorded history at their fingertips, they can cherry-pick interesting scraps of information from the archives and construct new grand narratives"

• Interesting take on long covid.

• Great review of the book "Where’s my Flying Car"
• Points/quotes
  • Coupling between energy+power and technological paradigm shifts is surprisingly tight.
  • Machiavelli Effect - "There is nothing more difficult than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. To have for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders who may do well under the new."
  • R&D Funding may be anti-correlated with quality of life improvements.
  • Clarke's Law - "When a elder preeminent scientist says that something is impossible, he’s probably wrong. When a elder preeminent scientist says something might be possible, he’s probably right."
  • More phDs and more spending on education is probably not the solution.
  • "When people with dim views of the future have power bad things happen."
  • There's a potential correlation between decreasing process knowledge and risk aversion.

Content overload, "FOMO", in order to manage the plethora of data flowing across the web and not miss any of it, curation has emerged as a miracle solution. But are we actually good curators? Have we created the right tools, the right processes? And above all, what are we doing to make our curation actionable?

• Good overview on how to group buy
• Options
  • Everyone gets on the loan
  • One person on the loan
  • LLC with perosonal guarantor
  • Refinance later
  • Each person finances

• A very good primer on the different ways of thinking about business models, business plans, and business valuations. Lots of gems. The meta-models he lists are:
  • ROI vs Cost of Capital
  • Loops
  • Comparisons (Uber for X)
  • Supply chains and alternating commodities
  • Tam x Share x Margins
  • Company as an options trade (call vs put)
  • Multiparty negotiation (labor, capital, management, shareholders, govt)

• Good overview on using tasks/goals/needs based personas instead of fictional character representations with demographics.

• Could also be called "Against Facts" - makes a strong argument that the "metaphor of facts" in a social-psychological context is a force for harm, not good.
• Doesn't directly reference Wittgenstein. Doesn't mention that facts are made up of words and words can symbolize material or non-material things. Also doesn't touch on scale. Would have been good to preface both but maybe beside the point of the article.
• Quotes
  • All Facts require observation, context omission, and trust.
  • To establish a Fact, someone must decide what context is relevant to include, and what to exclude.
  • Problems with facts: 1. They don't actually persuade, 2. The idea is anti-science (all knowledge is tentative and uncertain), 3. They're incompatible with freedom of speech ("Ultimately we must decide what’s more important — freedom of speech, or the metaphor of Facts.").
• 100% agree with the argument against the idea that blockchainification of facts will solve any meaningful problems. Balaji talks about this a lot and I think it's nonsense.

• Very detailed. Allows you to finally be data-driven when considering whether or not to partake in activities. Gives you "This is a roughly 60-in-a-million (0.006%) chance of getting COVID from this activity with these people. Doing this activity once would use up 30% of your risk allocation for one week."

• Would need to read the study before taking the claims properly seriously. Some of the claims (disorders are not "something you're born with") align with my previous reading, but some (downplaying benefits of drugs) don't.
• "Good reasons to think of depression or PTSD as responses to adversity rather than chemical imbalances."
• "Medical science has never been able to prove that anxiety, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are inherited conditions." <- Interesting
• "PTSD may occur when trauma triggers the freeze response which helps animals disconnect from pain before they die."

• "By sitting down to make sense of their existing ideas instead of trying to invent new ones, writers at their computer mold the wet clay of experience into shape."
• "The punch that defines good communication, and by extension, good art"
• "To ship something excellent, you have to be willing to cut what may have taken weeks or months to produce."
• "The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience - Einstein"
• "The process of gathering ideas and distilling them into a smaller, more compressed form is the essence of creative excellence. "
• "People move towards compression progress not by following their rational mind, but by following their intuition for what’s interesting."
• You can't skip steps. Compression requires going through each step to get to the final output, otherwise the final output won't be accurate.
• "Compression can conjure the essence of an experience, but never the real thing."
  • "Whenever I’m nostalgic for that live show and long for something comforting, I’ll open my phone and re-watch the highlights. But no matter how many times I pray for a different outcome, that intense feeling is forever gone"
• "A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness"
• Good examples of compression:
  • Just do it - Nike
  • Antifragile - Taleb
  • E = mc²
• Disortion can be useful. E.g NY subway map. (Felt this was off-them and a weak ending)

Stripe is probably worth more than Goldman and it’s just getting started

• Ani is impressively well-read and polymathic.

• Highlights

  • Money and code are isomorphic forms of free speech.
  • Black elephant - huge monstrous problem staring us in the face but no one acknowledges it.
  • What’s lacking in biotech is "What is our mission?"
  • Population is the biggest engine of growth of technology and progress.
  • Crypto is the fastest growing antithesis to the cultural apathy we have. People are seeing you either own your own methods of production or no one will even look at you.
  • Bones of contention: Rise of social impact courses in Stanford tells us people hate atheism?

• Show Notes

  • Why people don’t crave scientific advancement.
  • What the postmodern solution to the desire to be part of religion might look like.
  • What “the iPhone moment for cities” might look like.
  • His thoughts on stagnation.
  • His analysis of Thiel’s idea that “every bubble is a commentary on capitalism.”
  • The state of biotech and the future of the FDA post-COVID.
  • Why COVID will be an accelerant for crypto.
  • His thoughts on the space industry.
  • Why he thinks that moreso than “it’s time to build,” it’s time to tinker.

• Slow start & slow speakers. Listen at 1.7x
• Didn't have notes out while listening, but from memory:
  • Covers the basics of how sleep works.
  • Affects of alcohol on sleep.
  • Authors thoughts on Covid-19 vaccine - when it'll come available and how it'll be rolled out.
  • Impact of sleep on vaccine uptake.
  • 5 tips for good sleep hygiene
  • Then covers issues with the book (Alexey Guzey wrote a long blog post on this)
  • 17 factual errors
  • Doubling of cancer risk claim is true of certain types of cancer (ovarian) but not true as a blanket statement.
  • Seemed to rescind the claim that there aren't any biological functions that do not benefit by a good night’s sleep, citing studies on depression.
  • 2nd edition coming out soon.

This was so good! The whole thing is worth reading.

• Individual: A single person makes the decision with no input. This could be the “leader” or a self-appointed individual. We’ll talk about who this person is in the next section.
• Individual with input: A single person hears other people out, but still makes the decision themselves.
• Sub-group: A portion of the group makes the decision, e.g. “Fred and Suzie, you two decide”
• Sub-group with input: Same as above except they also solicit input from rest of the group.
• Majority: Here’s the ole democracy we know and sometimes love. Put it to a vote. Majority decides.
• Consensus: Everyone votes. No one is opposed to the decision
• Alignment: Everyone votes. Everyone is in complete affirmative agreement with the decision (note: stronger than simply not opposing)

• There is a difference between solving problems for the world as it is and solving problems for the world as it will be.
• If you’re solving a problem that doesn’t require you “to live in the future”, that’s an indication that you’re operating with less market risk.
• Organic vs inorganic ideas
• The challenge of pursuing an organic idea is that you have no control over how long it may take to find.
• If you want to start a startup because you want to pursue the adventure of starting a company, start an inorganic idea
• Inorganic strategies:
  • What are things you used to need
  • Broken companies.
  • Customer segments underappreciated by the big companies
  • Riding a wave
• Your work doesn’t need to be sacred for it to matter. The sport of building something and beating competitors and working with great people is sufficient reward

I've spent the last 15 years building web sites and web software of

Understanding possible directions and choosing one.

GHP = Great Horizontal Product I just returned from a trip to America where a last minute cancellation led to a flying visit to SF. I ended up having several discussions to harden the idea I've been incubating for the past while, and I found myself making the same points and

Github recently launched their new Github codespaces service - an online, in-browser Integrated Development Environment powered by Visual Studio Code. This environment allows someone to quickly load a virtual machine and a complete code editing interface, that is all accessible within the browser without having to install anything on the users machine. If you are familiar with products like Amazon Web Services’s Cloud 9 IDE or its predecessor C9.io this will probably feel very familiar.

• "We’ve spent 40 years wandering in the desert, and we think that it’s an enchanted forest. If we’re to find a way out of this desert and into the future, the first step is to see that we’ve been in a desert."
• We've had this narrow cone of progress around the world of bits—around software & IT — but not atoms.
• Economic growth is the only thing sustaining the planet. Without it, we go into a malthusian war.
• Since the 1970s, the rate of economic growth has declined. Thiel's arguement: too much horizontal progress, at the expense of true innovation, or vertical progress
• Horizontal progress: Taking the typewriter and copying it all over the world. Vertical progress: turning the typewriter into a word processor (Zero to One).
• Thiel thinks 1. Over Regulation in the world of atoms, and 2. Culture are to blame.
• 3 Possible frontiers to innovate: Cyberspace, Outerspace, Seasteading.
• Asides/Other Signals
  • Tech portrayed as dystopian in pretty much all movies.
  • People are making money betting against progress. For example, Warren Buffet’s single best investment is in the railroad industry

• Ego Development

• One of the best podcasts I listened to this week - good example of how to talk about important things without having the conversation devolve or get heated.
• Vincent seems smart but overly cynical. One of those people who has important insights but whose disdain dampens the credibility of his claims. He can be irritatingly condescending.
• Courtland and Vincent clearly have very different opinions on the Tech vs Media debate, and you can tell neither is holding back. But because there's trust between them, the conversation remains a conversation.

• Strategy: The reason for the product, application or the site, why we create it, who are we doing this for, why people are willing to use it, why they need it
• Scope: Functional and content requirements. What are the features, and content contained in the application or product.
• Structure: How user interact with the product, how system behave when user interact, how it’s organized, prioritized, and how much of it. Two components:
  • Interaction Design
  • Information Architecture - arrangement of content elements, how they are organized.
• Skeleton - The visual form on the screen, presentation and arrangement of all elements. 3 components:
  • Interface design
  • Navigation design
  • Information design
• Surface - sum total of all the work and decisions we have made. Visual Design(Sensory Design) - concerned about the visual appearance of content, controls, which gives a clue of what user can do, and how to interact with them.

• Multipolar Trap
  • Game theoretic scenario - see also Tragedy of the commons, race to the bottom etc.
  • If anyone defects on some type of agreement that would create a better global optimum for the whole, it creates an incentive for others to defect.
  • Simplified - The first person to gain near term advantage by violating the rules, creates a race to the bottom where the others have to do the same to not lose.
  • Examples: Arms races, nukes, cyber weaponry, autonomous weapons. Amazon rainforest - touches 9 countries - no country can prevent its destruction, all countries can benefit economically from its destruction.
• Tragedy of the commons - not just environmental. Also epistemic & emotional. E.g news outlets hijacking reptile brains.
  • Kinds of AI that optimize newsfeeds are smarter than the AI that beat Kasparov at Chess.

01:47:42 - My guest today is Balaji Srinivasan, an angel investor and entrepreneur. When it comes to the future, he's the single most creative person I know be…

Startup founders: Here's why you should improve writing skills and practical advice for how to become a better writer.

The “divine discontent” critique

Part two in our series on B2B growth strategy

• Life isn't a sprint, or a marathon. It's a relay race
• Loneliness doesn't go away by spending time with other people.

• Relevant to earlier reports re: antibodies fading over time.
• Posit: 1% of antibodies are neutralizing antibodies. These are more important than other antibodies

• Luxury goods much more attainable than before.
• Elites use luxury beliefs to signal status.
• Cycle: Elites adopt luxury belief, non-elites copy. Elites drop belief.
• Sad because elites have better safety net to experiment with potentially harmful luxury beliefs. Non-elites don't, so disproportionate harm can be caused.

I was bewildered when I encountered a new social class at Yale four years ago: the luxury belief class. My confusion wasn’t surprising given my unusual background. When I was two years old, my mother was addicted to drugs and my father abandoned us. I grew up in multiple foster homes, was then adopted into a series of broken homes, and then experienced a series of family tragedies. Later, after a few years in the military, I went to Yale on the GI Bill. On campus, I realized that luxury beliefs have become fashionable status symbols. Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class. In the past, people displayed their membership of the upper class with their material accoutrements. But today, luxury goods are more affordable than before. And people are less likely to receive validation for the material items they display. This is a problem for the affluent, who still want to broadcast their high social position. But …

Strategy’s most famous theory could be wrong

A new tool that blends your everyday work apps into one. It's the all-in-one workspace for you and your team

Paid groups, bespoke social networks, and the meaning of community for internet-native businesses.

DEAR READERS — We’ve moved this blog to Substack! Find the complete set of posts at supernuclear.substack.com.* This is part of an ongoing series of deep dives on coliving spaces. To see others…

• Civilizations right & left arm - Achievment problems & Practice problems.
• Left Arm - Achievment problems - things to be "checked off" e.g. paying taxes
• Right Arm - Practice problems - things that we want to make into ongoing practices and parts of our lives. For instance, I want to practice playing music. I want to practice loving people in a way that really embraces our development together.

• Left arm is over-developed, right arm is underdeveloped.

• The 19ᵗʰ and 20ᵗʰ Centuries saw the rise of Science. But these developments ignored a kind of knowledge that’s more important to human beings: knowledge of how to live well.
  "There is technical knowledge, which is knowledge about achievement-problems. And there is wisdom, which is knowledge about practice-problems."

A simple tip to communicate clearer and faster with clients, teams and lovers. Use in emails, project management, phone calls and more.

The title of this essay should disturb you. We have been brought up to believe that tolerating other people is one of the things you do if you’re a nice person — whether we learned this in…