reading, watching & listening to

Ten blue links isn’t the answer for search, but neither is an all-purpose text box. Search is everything, and everything is search. It’s going to take a lot more than a chatbot to kill Google.

an honest reflection from Yancey Strickler on stepping out of the crypto rabbit hole. 

Absolutely excellent piece.

Throughout history, new technologies have opened new fields of expression and expanded what's possible. Every time a new technology came in, at least half were left behind loving the old craft or worrying about the future. Those who embrace the discomfort, understand how the tool can be wielded will continue to create novel ideas and change culture, With the printing press, those who mastered textual literacy created profound societal impact. In those early days, this literacy was an essential differentiator.

Just as the printing press democratized knowledge creation, AI is commoditizing access to intelligence and with it redefining technical execution. This is now widely accepted. AI can generate endless ‘perfect’ outputs, and its reasoning capabilities will only expand. Design’s tools will change but design’s essence remains distinctly human: creation guided by feeling & relationships rather than pure logic, and the judgment to know what’s worth creating.

Design literacy—combining curiosity, studied curation, personal conviction, and craft—will become as vital as verbal literacy.

This way of seeing and thinking becomes a new differentiator. It’s a new type of intelligence and design that will separate those who thrive from those who fade into the noise. I see this type of design everywhere in my work with founders, engineers, salespeople, and investors—they are all designers in their own right. It is innate—it just needs to be unlocked.

The best founders already understand this. In a world where anyone can build, they know what to build, who it’s for, and why it must exist.

fascinating historical perspective.

our ancestors experienced day-to-day unpredictability (you could die from childbirth, starvation was a constant threat, etc…) but global stability (if your parents were peasants, you’d prob be a peasant).

modern humans inverted that - routine defines us but there is global instability (the world is constantly changing - technology, climate, politics)

other weird things about modern life:

• children teach their parents how to use tools that are critical to thriving in modern society, a complete inversion of the transmission of knowledge through generations.

• non-local social comparison - we compare ourselves to billions of people, not a few hundred in close proximity to us.

• we are distanced from nature, whereas for generations before survival was tied to understanding the natural world.

AI will enable people with imagination more than it will enable people with money

a really well done ELI5 explainer on AI training models. read this closely and you’ll learn a lot about how the incentives of the commercial web impact the quality of the training data.