Daniel da Rocha

I’ve come to believe that developing taste is not so unlike going to therapy; it’s an inefficient, time-consuming process that mostly entails looking inward and identifying whatever already moves you.

One thing I’ve thought for a long time is that people building startups are building complicated machines. They carry out a bunch of functions, maybe they proofread your documents or produce widgets, or whatever, but the machine also has a button on it that says “make money.” And everything kind of relates to that button as you’re building it, but... See more

But I can only imagine the paralytic terror that must seize my friends with families as they lie awake calculating mortgage payments and college funds and realize that they are locked into their present lives for farther into the future than the mind’s eye can see. Judging from the unanimity with which parents preface any gripe about children with... See more

So you end up chatting for eight hours, typically getting angrier and angrier, and using a lot of tokens. This would be great for business in theory, but in practice it doesn’t work for obvious reasons: people like to pay for results, not the process. Vibe-coding is a tough industry - it’s simultaneously one of the most expensive products to run,... See more

Looking closely is valuable at every scale. From looking closely at a sentence, a photograph, a building, a government. It scales and it cascades — one cognizant detail begets another and then another. Suddenly you’ve traveled very far from that first little: Huh.

I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh... See more

I know that disembodiment is a real and pervasive mental issue afflicting cerebral people. The phrase “stuck in your head” isn’t metaphorical, it refers to the arbitrary sense that your perceptual home base is a golfball-sized hole in the middle of your head. I used to have it, and it is a massive downgrade versus correctly perceiving your... See more