Presence

when people match their crazy to the right outlet, they become terrifyingly powerful.

don’t mean you’re crazy in the sense that you have a mental illness, although maybe you do. I mean crazy in the sense that you are far outside the norm in at least one way, and perhaps in many ways.

When people have a hard time figuring out what to do with their lives, it’s often because they haven’t unpacked.

Importantly, if writing is thinking, are we not then reading the ‘thoughts’ of the LLM rather than those of the researchers behind the paper?

The impact of an essay is how much it changes readers' thinking multiplied by the importance of the topic. But it's hard to do well at both. It's hard to have big new ideas about important topics. So in practice there's a tradeoff: you can change readers' thinking a lot about moderately important things, or change it a little about very important o... See more

Whatever you say should also be at least somewhat novel to you, however old you are. It's not an essay otherwise, because an essay is something you write to figure something out. But whatever you figure out will presumably be more of a surprise to younger readers than it is to you.

with few exceptions, anything that becomes commoditized and ubiquitous - from shoes and clothing to watches and cars - spurs demand for a more scarce and meaning-infused version (often with brand/story and quality driving the premium).

this is now happening to content.

If you want to sound smart at parties, and make good decisions about SEO, you only need to know two things:

1. Google isn’t good at understanding content. When Google crawls your website, it’s creating a summary of what it’s about based on keywords, metadata, and links. But it doesn’t read and evaluate how good it is like a human.


2. Google learns what’s

... See more

It’s way easier to rank for 100 low volume searches than a handful of lucrative, popular ones, especially early on.

Here’s an example:

• We recently published a tutorial on setting up analytics for Electron apps.


• There’s an estimated 30 searches a month for “electron analytics”. That’s tiny.


• Ahrefs gives every search a keyword difficulty score out of 1

... See more