reading, watching & listening to
sharing a selection of things I'm reading and find thought provoking
reading, watching & listening to
Selling Out to the Digital Era
open.substack.com
As I will use the term, then, a sermon is any message designed to change or reinforce what a group of people value. It might take the form of explicit exhortation, full of shoulds and shouldn'ts , oughts and mustn'ts . Or it may be entirely implicit, like the story of a selfless act that saves the day, huzzah! Commencement speeches, TED talks,... See more
Kevin Simler • Here Be Sermons | Melting Asphalt
Letter #199: Trae Stephens (2024)
open.substack.com
222. Automating Processes With Software Is HARD
Steven Sinofskyhardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.comOn Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales
The document explores how scalability, the ability to expand without changing the framework, has shaped modern projects, economies, and knowledge, leading to a loss of transformative diversity.
asletaiwan.org
When I started writing a newsletter in 2019, I remember thinking there were too many newsletters. That was before Substack had made a meaningful dent on the Internet and only a handful of writers were seriously using it. The coolest things do not yet exist. You are not late.
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.