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If you're able to tuck in a healthy, peacefully sleeping child into a warm bed in a safe home, you've won the lottery of life.
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I wonder if we'll see a renaissance in <$50 desktop software?
You could sic an agent on a fun app like this, but eventually your time and tokens are worth more.
People want to patronize small creators.
HT @studio__aaa
You could sic an agent on a fun app like this, but eventually your time and tokens are worth more.
People want to patronize small creators.
HT @studio__aaa
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This is goofy and pointless, but also more fun than any depiction of tech in a TV show or movie in the last 10 years.
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Maybe this is the way to get people to read long-form texts in the era of short-form video?
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If a city lost its electrical grid, or even just grocery stores, traffic lights, and POS systems, how long before riots would break out?
Supermarket freezers in Belgium and Sweden hit by cyber-attack bbc.in/4zilPiF
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Based on the content quality, Threads feels like 95% bots, but then I see people I know IRL posting there, and a sense of foreboding washes over me.
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Great post, but I'd broaden it to studying any period in history.
Learning to appreciate the improbable contingencies that brought us to today helps you understand/appreciate the present in profound ways.
And it's never been easier!
Books are great, but The Rest is History is a fun survey; The Great Courses are an amazing resource; and YouTube has a 101-level micro-documentary on almost any subject.
Learning to appreciate the improbable contingencies that brought us to today helps you understand/appreciate the present in profound ways.
And it's never been easier!
Books are great, but The Rest is History is a fun survey; The Great Courses are an amazing resource; and YouTube has a 101-level micro-documentary on almost any subject.
I've been trying to write a post on why everyone should study early American history but I kept getting stuck, maybe because the premise is too presumptuous. So instead here's a post on why *I* am obsessed with it myself:
1/ it's a portal into many other histories. People naively think early America sits to the side, unconnected to anything else. It's the opposite! The founders (Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin) spent ten years (!!) in Paris working to secure French support against the English, so you get to learn all about France of Louis XVI. Franklin spent a decade in London so you learn about England of George III. Adams was raising funds for the revolution in the Netherlands so you get to learn about the Dutch. John Quincy (Adam's son and later the 6th president) was an ambassador to Russia and an eyewitness to Napoleon's invasion!
2/ it's a portal into the past. The founders were extremely well-read and steeped in the history of classic European civilization. You just cannot get them to shut up about Greece and Rome, so you absorb tons of info about those and go on the trail of Cicero, Thucydides, Tacitus, Plutarch, Homer, Horace, Terence, and so on. Jefferson was also obsessed with English civil war so you learn about Charles I, Cromwell, the English republic, and how it's all connected to American declaration of independence 120 years later
3/ the Enlightenment! America's independence happens during peak Enlightenment era and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Everything is brimming with new ideas and boundless optimism. People believe in their bones that nature is knowable and there is no ceiling to progress. You meet all the characters and their ideas-- Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke (Franklin was friends with all of them). Electricity gets discovered, hot air balloons get invented, we start getting modern chemistry. Edward Gibbon writes his Decline and Fall and causes a furor by lampooning early Christian saints. Franklin even meets Voltaire!
4/ the Founders! JFK once joked at a dinner for Nobel Prize winners "this is the most extraordinary collection of talent that has ever been gathered at the White House, except when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." This is only a slight exaggeration. The founders were all *very* different, and all equally impressive in their own way. Between them they were educated, civic-minded, grounded in tradition but not bound by it, full of ideas but not ideological, entrepreneurial, tenacious, prudent, brave. You will not find a more remarkable cast in all of history! The more you get to know them the more you want to spend time with them, reach for their counsel, and appreciate how much of America's success (compared to e.g. French or Russian or Cuban or Iranian revolutions) is that America was founded by better men
5/ the correspondence! The founders were fantastic writers. Letters from John Adams, his wife Abigail, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Rush are some of my favorite writing, not just as historical documents, but in *any* genre. "Some people must have time to look around them, before, behind, on the right hand, and on the left, and then to think, and after all this to resolve. Others see at one intuitive glance into the past and the future, and judge with precision at once," writes John Adams. Is this not a marvelous passage?!
6/ you learn what to discount and what to keep in sight. Had you been scrolling X in ~1778 you'd see ~20% of ppl opposing independence, an even bigger "uncommitted middle", opposition repressed by patriots, prospering weapons suppliers, smallpox epidemics, backstabbing officers and politicians, devastating losses, a destitute army, desertions, hyperinflation, meddling foreign powers, mutinies, atrocity episodes on both sides. If you had let these events consume your attention, you would have misjudged the moment completely!
7/ you see the bones of the republic. Adams was an English traditionalist and viewed freedom of religion as freedom among christian denominations. His Massachusetts constitution required a christian test and established tax-supported churches. Jefferson was a reformer who reasoned everything out from the ground up. He applied freedom of religion to all religions and thought much of christian theology was superstitious gobbledygook. Knowing that we often keep circling the same tensions makes it easier to get your bearings in the present. E.g. you can view the upcoming Michigan senatorial race as revenge of the federalists or revenge of the jeffersonians, depending on how it goes
8/ the history is tangled. At Mt. Vernon about 500 feet down the hill from George & Martha Washington's magnificent house there is a wooded area with a mass burial site for the slaves. The graves are unmarked and no one knows exactly how many people are buried there. There are modern burial symbols; the curators did a good job balancing honoring the deceased and maintaining the original bare condition of the site. If you go on a good day there are many middle school group trips visiting. You see large groups of ~11yo kids at the site, mostly laughing, messing with each other, taking selfies (as 11yo kids do)
9/ perspective of the losers. How could Britain win almost every battle and still lose? What did that do to the empire, politically and psychologically? What were Howe and Clinton thinking?! How did the British political situation play out during the war? What was the thinking and ultimate fate of British loyalists? Should Britain's defeat have been obvious at the time? All this is fascinating and helpful to orient yourself in today's world. From the diary of a British officer: "nothing remains but to fight it out against a set of the most determined hypocrites and demagogues, compiled of the refuse of the colonies, that ever were permitted by Providence to be the scourge of a country."
10/ inspiration. From Jefferson's triumphant political return after humiliation as governor of Virginia and the deaths of his wife and four children, to Washington's superhuman tenacity at Valley Forge, it is difficult to find more inspiring stories in all of history. The Declaration of Independence was written for all humanity. Anyone who wishes can become its spiritual successor. It can be read on town squares of Philadelphia and on slavers’ plantation fields, as it once was, and on the streets of Tehran and Moscow, as it one day will be:
"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
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PS. the gateway drug is McCullough's John Adams, don't look at the reviews, don't research alternatives, just click buy and read the first page
PPS. buy a physical book and destroy the margins with your notes, don't dishonor this adventure with some pristine copy or a kindle
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Deeply skeptical of the "humans as pets" vision of the future. It would be lovely, however...
1) People will rebel just to feel alive.
2) It presupposes that whoever is making decisions values human life and thinks devoting resources to it is a worthy long-term project.
1) People will rebel just to feel alive.
2) It presupposes that whoever is making decisions values human life and thinks devoting resources to it is a worthy long-term project.
马斯克在最新的访谈里聊到 AI 抢走所有工作时，用了一个极其温柔、但也极其残酷的比喻。
他说：未来人类的工作，大概率会变成园艺。
你根本不需要自己在后院种番茄和土豆，超市里买到的永远比你自己种的更快、更便宜、品相更稳定。
甚至花一整个下午为朋友做一顿自己种出来的晚餐。
这件事在纯粹的工业效率上毫无意义，但它带着一种人类之间独有的温度。
很多人聊到 AI 替代人类，第一反应永远是恐慌、失业、降薪、社会阶层崩塌。
但马斯克推演到了一个完全反直觉的终局：
当 AI 和具身智能把人类在生产力上的最后一滴汗水都彻底碾压之后，劳动的定义本身被击碎了。
过去几千年，人类是通过有用性来确立自我价值的。
你能搬砖、能算账、能写代码、能做报表，你被按月支付薪水，你的尊严建立在社会需要你干活的基础上。
但当 AI 在任何一项具体任务上都比人类做得更好、成本更低时，有用性就不再是稀缺品了。
这时候人类不会灭绝，人类会集体进入一种被迫的退休状态。
就像那些退了休却过得极度充实的老人一样，他们每天早起练字、下棋、养花、钓鱼，没有一件事情是在给社会创造 GDP，但每个人都活得自得其乐。
未来所有的实用性工作，都会被自动化彻底吃掉。
而那些效率最低、最耗时间、最不划算的非标动作，反而会成为人类精神生活里最后的奢侈品。
写一封手写信、亲手烤一块面包、花三个月陪孩子搭一个歪歪扭扭的树屋，这些事情的价值恰恰在于它们是低效的、笨拙的，并且充满了人类自己的真实痕迹。
机器负责解决生存的效率，人类退回生命本身的体验。
所以这里有一个很重要的问题值得我们思考，如果未来你做任何事情都不再能换来超越机器的报酬，你今天真正该想清楚的是：
剥离掉靠打工换来的社会身份之后，你到底靠什么让自己感到快乐？
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This is how leading human technocrat Ezekiel Emmanuel spoke about the lives of idle people past their intellectual prime!
He said these words, knowingly, to a journalist. You think a disembodied alien intelligence will have a more generous POV?
He said these words, knowingly, to a journalist. You think a disembodied alien intelligence will have a more generous POV?
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If you're a founder considering a seed round, @fcollective should be your first call!
One of the more challenging questions in designing this methodology was how to accomodate for firms with one big hit.
On one hand, you want to reward investors who consistently make good decisions, and eliminate luck from the equation as much as possible.
On the other hand, utlier business and tripling or quadrupling down on a major winner should also be rewarded.
So, the ranking uses a "consistency-adjusted" approach where 2/3 of the weighting is given to the portfolio performance with the biggest outcome, and 1/3 is given to the performance without that outcome.
With this in mind, there are a few firms that stand out:
@gigafund and @Pelion_VP are effectively 100% associated with one company each (SpaceX and Cloudflare), and @Lowercase is also highly concentrated (98% Uber). They maintain a high rank because of their relatively low capital at risk.
@usv, @GreylockVC, @sequoia, @IndexVentures and @khoslaventures are amongst the least concentrated, which speaks to a legacy of many large outcomes influencing their performance. They maintain a high rank despite their relatively high capital at risk.
More: top50.joinodin.com
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When factory jobs went overseas, 70,000-100,000 people – per year, for the next 30 years – drank and drugged themselves into early graves as their livelihoods evaporated.
I'm pro-AI and oppose this kind of emotional extortion, but it's important to recognize tech's blood tithe.
I'm pro-AI and oppose this kind of emotional extortion, but it's important to recognize tech's blood tithe.
she’s so tired of generative ai
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Property taxes remind me of cable bundles.
Everyone complained about paying for channels they never watched, then complained about having to pay for so many streaming services to recreate the experience.
I think there are limits to à la carte government.
Everyone complained about paying for channels they never watched, then complained about having to pay for so many streaming services to recreate the experience.
I think there are limits to à la carte government.
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If you're lonely or bored, just go to church.
Even if you're not the "church type," there's likely one near you that matches your political preferences and downplays the theology in favor of community service.
The doors of loneliness are locked from the inside.
Even if you're not the "church type," there's likely one near you that matches your political preferences and downplays the theology in favor of community service.
The doors of loneliness are locked from the inside.
Things my boomer parents did as adults to entertain themselves:
- played cards at friends' house
- had friend over to practice guitar
- had friend over to help with DIY projects
- bike rides
- potlucks
- socials in church basement
- club meetings
- sitting on the neighbor's porch talking
- reading library books
- walks
- classes at YMCA
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I'm surprised there aren't more humanities grad students who have built podcasts/YouTube channels.
I assume it largely comes down to the kinds of people who self-select (and are selected by) grad programs, but it seems like a natural way to demonstrate research/teaching skills.
I assume it largely comes down to the kinds of people who self-select (and are selected by) grad programs, but it seems like a natural way to demonstrate research/teaching skills.
Depends on the discipline but if you're in humanities or humanistic soc scis, on the whole I think "write a book instead of 3 articles" is the right advice. There are a billion articles out there. Recent PhDs with book contracts are rare. You stand out from the crowd.
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Raising capital is risky, and the more you raise, the riskier it becomes.
VCs have a portfolio, but you have only one career and a limited number of prime-earning years.
Invest them wisely!
VCs have a portfolio, but you have only one career and a limited number of prime-earning years.
Invest them wisely!
Foursquare was acquired last month. The outcome was disappointing. It's taken me a while to write this, but I think I'm finally done grieving it. Here are some thoughts on our final years, an effort to honor the team who helped build & maintain FSQ's legacy, and my attempt to finateendrama.substack.com/p/some-final-w…
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