Stuff we're thinking about

we’ve turned everything in life into a giant popularity contest–everything you say, everything you experience, everything you see, and even everything you feel–is a product of a giant worldwide counter of likes and follows. It’s a planet-wide exercise in objective convergence, a giant narcissism amplifier that cynically assumes that competing for m... See more

AI will take all that digital garbage and multiply it by a thousand. Or ten thousand. Or maybe more.

Searching the internet should feel like navigating a grand library of knowledge, where you could weave insights across cultures, industries, and millenia.

Of course it doesn’t feel that way. Today, searching the internet feels more like navigating a landfill.

When you take a hike and you feel a sense of awe at everything that you're seeing, you're experiencing the sublime. In most of life, this sense of “smallness” is experienced as a humiliation. But the sense of smallness in the presence of the sublime has an oddly uplifting effect.

I love the idea of coming face to face with our cosmic insignificance ... See more

To me, the clearest example is Dropbox. I’ve used Dropbox since the earliest days, and I love it. Nothing has ever come close to providing the speed, reliability, and cross-platform compatibility for file synching of Dropbox. Even though I technically get iCloud File Storage “for free” as part of some broader package, I still pay for Dropbox with a... See more

People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in their brain. And I get the appeal of maximalism. But they’re counting on the wrong side of the ledger. Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt . Every link dou... See more

The point of these lines is clear. In the old days, craftsmen did not cut corners. They worked carefully, and they took care with every aspect of their work. Every part of the product was considered, and each was designed and made to be exactly as it should be. These craftsmen did not relax their thoughtful self-discipline even with respect to feat... See more

Quality is so rare generally that people are often surprised by it.

Quality rarely happens as an accident, it usually means someone is willing to go further building something that necessarily. At least, someone has to be motivated and allowed to do it, not forced to solely focus on some measurements.

Quality, brand and culture are some of those inta... See more