“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.”

In other words, the hard part isn’t writing, or coding, or speaking.

It’s determining what to write, what to code, and what to say.

In a lot of ways people can be split into aimless and not-aimless like this. I think humans are at their best when they are reaching towards something. It doesn't have to be practical or noble necessarily, but something about the reaching itself seems to be required for people to flourish.

Kurt Vonnegut on picking a lane:

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way—although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, p... See more

What man actually needs is not some tension-less state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.

Curators filter signal from noise in an increasingly noisy world. As the barriers to being a creator decrease, the internet gets even noisier and the need for credible curators increases. Algorithms will continue to play a role in aggregation, indexing, and personalization. But the best curation requires a human touch. You’re more likely to have an... See more

Our bias is to always add more. More rules, more procedures, more code, more features, more stuff. Interdependencies proliferate, and gradually strangle us. Systems want to grow and grow, but without pruning, they collapse. Slowly, then spectacularly.

When a piece of trash drifts across the beach, it is our duty to pick it up so the next person can ... See more

A phrase that’s been showing up recently is, “no pressure.” It usually comes in a pitch letter of some sort, written by someone who isn’t in a position to exert any pressure.

So why say it?

It’s a bit like, “while supplies last.” And “to be honest…” which is perhaps the most self-negating of the three.

It’s throat-clearing, a word salad designed to so... See more

Human curation might reemerge...

The internet is overflowing with content, making the search for specific topics (especially niche or less popular ones) a daunting task.

This challenge isn't new—it dates back decades. Initially, we turned to trusted human curators for guidance, with platforms like fark.com serving as go-to sources for discovering wo... See more