Week 4 of September
The deepest dive on mail ever done, the entrepreneurial state, and bio cores
Week 1 of October
Rabbit holes, parent traps, and superlinear returns
Week 2 August 2024 | Last Week I Learned
Hidden Tragedy in Cameroon, Serious Play, and Hold the Banner on My Cookies
I dig up the interesting stuff so you don’t have to
Week 4 of September
The deepest dive on mail ever done, the entrepreneurial state, and bio cores
Week 1 of October
Rabbit holes, parent traps, and superlinear returns
Week 2 August 2024 | Last Week I Learned
Hidden Tragedy in Cameroon, Serious Play, and Hold the Banner on My Cookies
I dig up the interesting stuff so you don’t have to

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People Literally Do Not Understand What Laws Are Or How They Work - Law is one of my many blind spots, though one of the larger ones. Alongside this, I recommend Why the Law and Suits for learning more. The latter is a TV show, but still gives you a feel for the basics of law.
That’s often a serious liberal blind spot on gun control: it’s easy to think that harsher penalties for gun possession sound desirable. But because of the way policing works, those laws will end up stopping, searching, and prosecution of more young black men. To be clear this is not a fantasy, this is what actually happened when stricter gun laws began to come into effect.
Build tools around workflows, not workflows around tools - In this article, I got to see a preview of my life if I keep tinkering with search for my own personal use. I find his idea of building tools that fit just right fascinating. More and more, I'm digging craft as a north star and this is the epitome of it for software.
When we resort to having other people build tools for us, the tools they build might never quite perfectly fit our workflows, because they’re not built for our individual minds.
What is partnership for? - This author's thoughts on relationships appeal to my romantic sensibilities without seeming out of touch. I love their ability to speak with great frankness yet still keep the magic that is a relationship intact.
My working theory is that maybe marriage is fundamentally about being able to monopolize someone in certain ways while encouraging them still to have an expansive, generative life in other ways. And so the question of who to marry, to me, is maybe about: who do you want to have a claim over? And what is the nature of the claim?
Oh the Humanity - How you got here is not how you get there is the theme of this article. You will never get the iPhone the way you got the MacBook or the Apple Watch. Just as important, you can't get the AirPods without the iPhone. The founders of Humane proved this out in real time.
For all we know, maybe they did build prototypes but convinced themselves it would be solved. These are certain types of problems you can solve at the scale of Apple, but intractable at this startup. Scaling a startup is about deferring those moonshot bets until your company has the momentum to compete at that scale
Money Stuff: A Meme Stock for Private Companies - The shift in returns from the public to the private markerts is a disturbing trend. Also disturbing is the weird bifurcation that exists around crypto. Is it a plaything for degens or is it a serious tool for the market?
I am just saying that you could resolve those disagreements by letting everyone go their separate ways. Have Nice Crypto — probably the bulk of it? — where manipulation is disfavored and government intervention is, at least in theory, welcomed. And have Fun Crypto for the applied game theorists to play their games against each other. Have a market that makes it explicit, in advance, on the web page, “Anything that you can do on our platform is allowed, and if the results are absurd then that is fun for you and bad for someone else, you’re on notice!”
People Literally Do Not Understand What Laws Are Or How They Work - Law is one of my many blind spots, though one of the larger ones. Alongside this, I recommend Why the Law and Suits for learning more. The latter is a TV show, but still gives you a feel for the basics of law.
That’s often a serious liberal blind spot on gun control: it’s easy to think that harsher penalties for gun possession sound desirable. But because of the way policing works, those laws will end up stopping, searching, and prosecution of more young black men. To be clear this is not a fantasy, this is what actually happened when stricter gun laws began to come into effect.
Build tools around workflows, not workflows around tools - In this article, I got to see a preview of my life if I keep tinkering with search for my own personal use. I find his idea of building tools that fit just right fascinating. More and more, I'm digging craft as a north star and this is the epitome of it for software.
When we resort to having other people build tools for us, the tools they build might never quite perfectly fit our workflows, because they’re not built for our individual minds.
What is partnership for? - This author's thoughts on relationships appeal to my romantic sensibilities without seeming out of touch. I love their ability to speak with great frankness yet still keep the magic that is a relationship intact.
My working theory is that maybe marriage is fundamentally about being able to monopolize someone in certain ways while encouraging them still to have an expansive, generative life in other ways. And so the question of who to marry, to me, is maybe about: who do you want to have a claim over? And what is the nature of the claim?
Oh the Humanity - How you got here is not how you get there is the theme of this article. You will never get the iPhone the way you got the MacBook or the Apple Watch. Just as important, you can't get the AirPods without the iPhone. The founders of Humane proved this out in real time.
For all we know, maybe they did build prototypes but convinced themselves it would be solved. These are certain types of problems you can solve at the scale of Apple, but intractable at this startup. Scaling a startup is about deferring those moonshot bets until your company has the momentum to compete at that scale
Money Stuff: A Meme Stock for Private Companies - The shift in returns from the public to the private markerts is a disturbing trend. Also disturbing is the weird bifurcation that exists around crypto. Is it a plaything for degens or is it a serious tool for the market?
I am just saying that you could resolve those disagreements by letting everyone go their separate ways. Have Nice Crypto — probably the bulk of it? — where manipulation is disfavored and government intervention is, at least in theory, welcomed. And have Fun Crypto for the applied game theorists to play their games against each other. Have a market that makes it explicit, in advance, on the web page, “Anything that you can do on our platform is allowed, and if the results are absurd then that is fun for you and bad for someone else, you’re on notice!”
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