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I have sat through enough screenings and Q+A’s for friends who’ve made movies to now identify a secret weapon that no amount of money or production pa

Yet when you have created a simulation-like environment that is immune to reality, this is what happens. You refuse to believe what everyone else can

Rob and I had to face the truth: Matter is a great product—3x App of the Day, with many thousands of passionate users—but it isn’t the next Duolingo.

When the institutions are optimized to fund the legible thing and the individuals are optimized to build the legible thing, the identity of the founde

If you don’t have time to clean up, you don’t have time to cook Professionals understand that the project is the whole project, not simply the fun

Hindsight is 2020I don’t mean “hindsight is 20/20.” I’m talking about the year 2020.See, early in 2023, I wrote an article about starting and growing

A solid foundation requires a robust team structure. Hiring individuals who not only have the requisite skills but also align with the company’s cultu

What people think are winning backgrounds: - Ivy League grad - good grades - after school activities Actual winning backgrounds: - compet

How the Greatest Entrepreneurs Hire (h/t David Senra) Steve Jobs stated that each new hire became a percentage of the company, so why wouldn’t you tak

What is “talent?” Well, I suppose it’s the ability to do that which is excellent (that which astounds, amazes, and so on). It’s a bit circular, real

The stages of CEO & how to evolve as your company does:

People who don’t take themselves too seriously. They have to be able to laugh at themselves to succeed. What to look for: This is usually very easy to

The #1 thing I look for when hiring people is FIO. "Figure It Out" You can get pretty damn far just by being: - Resourceful - Reliable - Results or

@mckaywrigley I have a bunch of questions I ask. What would you build for yourself? What did previous companies you've worked for need? What are you a

THEN Almitra spoke again and said, And what of Marriage, master? And he answered saying: You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore

And yet, as is often the case, those of us who need love so badly at a particular moment can be off-putting to those who want to love us, and to those

Two loves hold reality and make our universe unique to the rest: tetrahedron → “hollywood love” hypertetrahedron/pentachoron/5-cell → “real love“ —88

And as Emily Edlynn, a psychologist and the author of Autonomy-Supportive Parenting, told me, kids who feel like they have control over their life exp

What’s more, another study establishes that knowing that their parents value kindness above achievement protects kids’ well-being.

Children who feel valued in this way, and who believe that what they do adds value, generally come to understand that they matter. And a sense of matt

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

from Ashley Zhang: the longer I spent seeking answers on how to flourish, the more I recognized that the challenges we face are both systemic and p

Human scale institutions strive for optimum scale. Not mega scale. The point at which maximum quality can be attained. Their purpose is not to maximiz

There are a lot of organizational structures and lived practices embedded in our bodies that we just enact by default. But through explicit facilitati

Slack is the opposite of organizational memory

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

Lots of theories have been tried, and lots of them have been given up because of something that looks like contradictory evidence. But the evidence mi

If you have a theory that’s been working pretty well for a while — it made good predictions, it solved real problems, it explained a lot of mysteries

Real explanations will sometimes sound weird, crazy, or too complicated because reality itself is often weird, crazy, or too complicated. It’s unfortu

Things change as contradictory evidence piles up, but even then, it doesn’t mean you should scrap the theory you started out with. Everyone back in th

www.simonstalenhag.se

The text actually moves back and forth between all of these. Few novels pay less attention to the rules of fiction than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

surprise may be a better proxy for creativity than quality. A polished output is not necessarily creative, but a surprising one might be. Yet even sur

If you have a theory that’s been working pretty well for a while — it made good predictions, it solved real problems, it explained a lot of mysteries

Real explanations will sometimes sound weird, crazy, or too complicated because reality itself is often weird, crazy, or too complicated. It’s unfortu

Things change as contradictory evidence piles up, but even then, it doesn’t mean you should scrap the theory you started out with. Everyone back in th

The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism

And there’s a lot of positive evidence. It’s not that there’s some metaphysical concept of beauty that rules the world — beauty is a human experience.

It is that the attribute we call beauty is of two kinds. One is a parochial kind of attractiveness, local to a species, to a culture or to an individu

Aesthetics are your problem and mine. Nobody else’s. The fact of the matter is I want everything we do, that I do personally, that our office does, to

Ever tried uncollapsing a wavefunction?

Could We Ever Really Build a Dyson Sphere? This megastructure for gathering solar energy would fill any conceivable future energy desires. But can it

Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony on JSTOR

Just a moment...

The Pall Of Our Unrest

The Great Creator Arbitrage Opportunity | #200 🥳

When pursuing a 1-of-1 vision, you aren’t going to be the most popular or celebrated person. You’re going to be an oddity that the most in-the-know pe

It’s possible for other projects to be sexier, more lucrative, and more attention getting, however their purposes are less unique than yours.

I appreciated Nvidia’s founder talking the other week about what it means to work in a zero billion dollar industry. It means really believing in some

No one talks about the way in which the world, in all of its bewildering capability, is, at every second, offering some detail that might lead to a ne

“to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certai

hello, i'm v good at asking questions. it's one of the things i get most complimented on i think what i do is simple & easy for anyone to do: 1.

Intelligence is a form of friendship with the world. It can’t be cultivated out of fear of it.

Advice I would give to a college freshman: These next four years, one of your main goals should be to figure out how not to have the rest of your lif

Similarly, I wonder whether the creator economy, as it matures, will resemble less of its original promise (a way for people to do the things they lov

We should be skeptical of both utopian and dystopian technology predictions. New tools will amplify both our virtues and our vices, just like every pr

We see something that works, and then we understand it “We see something that works, and then we understand it.” (Thomas Dullien) It is a deeper

My friends and I founded a university over the summer and...it's going great?! And it's been surprisingly painless to start and run?! It's a "networ

pretty clear that collecting cultural ephemera is a new consumer behavior that’s going to become a core part of life on the internet

Books you read are sending you input. Your friends modeling behaviors for you. Newspapers. Tools. People you follow on Twitter. The architecture of a

The dream isn’t just to show all of ourselves unfiltered to the world. It’s to find a character that we feel comfortable being, that we deeply resonat

insight from Gurwinder Bhogal: People want to belong to a tribe, and one way that people belong to a tribe is by having the same beliefs as the member

We still instinctively long for this kind of belonging, as our sacrifices to sports teams, fraternities, or churches demonstrate.

creating conditions for collective intelligence to thrive.

I, Pencil by Leonard E. Read - Foundation for Economic Education

the desire to connect things together

Fulfillment... is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal... It has an end. It comes to the end and has to star

it’s so easy to derail our own joy by looking around at someone else’s life or worse — the imaginary life we think we should have by now

That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rathe

Traumatisation is most usually presented as anunassailable, concrete fact, and this is where I need to be respectful. If someone brings a firmconvicti

when the trauma label has been appliedby outside mores – when an event like an explosion, an assault or a sexual event has taken place andour culture

globalization and the internet may be flattening the world’s once spiky terrain of mental disorders

after several conversations with happiness experts and psychologists, I’ve cobbled together a tentative theory. We’re seeing the international transmi

“Song of the summer” is a much-contested term, more of a cultural myth or a shared hallucination than a hard-and-fast label.

Even if, for a while, I feigned hatred of rock and roll, that only made sense on the presumption of its continued reign. Much the same could be said a

To be honest, my appetite for this sort of online blowup diminishes hourly. Though I’m as prone to schadenfreude as any other media professional tryin

We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; onl

She was imprisoned by two words: what if. What if I’d known she was dying? What if I’d known I was about to lose her? But what-ifs don’t empower us. T

Parents often say, “I’d die for my child.” I heard a few of the parents in the grief group express the wish to trade places with their deceased childr

Tzutijil-initiated shaman Martín Prechtel correctly tells us that grief -for a person, for a country, for an ideal- is praise because it is the natura

A trend is a fad whose demand is not satisfied. A fad is a trend whose demand is satisfied too quickly. The lesson? If you experience success, do not

This is silly simplified but people who work in “Brand” are typically valued for their taste and ability to forecast and predict trends. They see the

One of the surprising and counter-cultural truths about modern-day marketing, which I suspect drives many efficiency-minded people practically insane,

By yielding a generational wealth creation opportunity that was a strange hybrid of a lottery jackpot and self-made fortune, crypto created an ideolog

For example, it was 30 years after the invention of film that someone first tried telling stories with it — before that, film was mainly used as a dem

Just a moment...

How do you explain the web to people who have never used it? You make it as simple and as accessible as possible.

Pandora was founded in 2000 with about $2m in funding. However in 2001 the company ran out of money. Unwilling to giving up, Westergren had to figure

“People with very high expectations have very low resilience.” – Jensen Huang

When startups start taking off, the founders usually can't tell what's changed. It's some combination of all the random things they did to make it ta

To a certain extent we are wasting our time. We have a perfect model of the world—it is the world! But it is too complicated. Rohan Alexander, Telling

Whenever you’re learning a new tool, for a long time, you’re going to suck… But the good news is that is typical; that’s something that happens to eve

Writing is a critical skill — perhaps the most important — of all the skills required to analyze data. The only way to get better at writing is to wri

People need to be more thoughtful building products on top of LLMs. The fact that they generate text is not the point.

编程这项工作非常适合 AI 增强或替代,原因如下:1/ 编码本质上要求工程师将问题分解成更小、更易管理的任务;2/ 有大量现有的训练数据;3/ 任务需要判断力和基于规则的工作相结合;4/ 解决方案利用可组合的模块(比如开源软件库等);5/ 在某些情况下,工作成果可以通过经验测试其正确性。这意味着可靠

AI is aggregated human intelligence. So it’s better to call it collective intelligence than artificial intelligence. Emphasizing the collectivity (som

What are WeChat Mini-Programs? A Simple Introduction

One cold email can completely change your life. Here’s how to write a great one:

my sense is that people who take a long time to respond to messages, or tend to go into shame spirals about them, often put a lot of pressure on thems

One cold email can completely change your life. Here’s how to write a great one:

One cold email can completely change your life. Here’s how to write a great one:

Figuring out what you want is the central task of adulthood, and it’s not an easy one. Once you leave formal schooling, you’re catapulted into a worl

Curation leads to expertise. Through curation, you better understand yourself, history, and unlikely connections across fields. Increasingly, we will

we’ve always been influenced in what we find beautiful or valuable or important, of course, but what’s new is the speed at which one is inundated with

You can use algorithms to surface new things. But algorithms are not nearly as good as human curators yet. Whatever pattern matching is going on insid

What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a t

In large part this is because education, like most social systems, is slow to adapt, iterate, and evolve to be relevant for changing times. The glacia

generative AI is but the latest in a line of innovations that draws attention to the flaws of the modern education system, leaving us to question how

The humanities, rightly understood, are the things that technology cannot take away or substitute for. Of course, I don’t mean ‘humanities’ in the way

What education does is provide a curated experience to help you learn. Done well, it sifts through the myriad resources, possible paths, and common e

Attention Required! | Cloudflare

I spent seven years building a kid/ed-tech product and one critical thing I learned about the industry is this... No matter what they signal, most pa

across many dimensions we have been acculturated to value the aggregated over the individual, and defaulting to the average consensus has become comfo

one of the reasons school fails to help people model success is that a series of tests introduces no randomness. Success in real life involves a grea

Why do we sit in a classroom at all? Why do we remove ourselves from the extraordinarily rich experience tapestries of living to place ourselves in ar

What education does is provide a curated experience to help you learn. Done well, it sifts through the myriad resources, possible paths, and common e

What education does is provide a curated experience to help you learn. Done well, it sifts through the myriad resources, possible paths, and common e

What education does is provide a curated experience to help you learn. Done well, it sifts through the myriad resources, possible paths, and common e

I have many friends who feel like they need a degree to do something they can already do without a degree MFA vs just write PsyD vs just coach PhD vs

Oliver Burkeman – Time Management for Mortals

Sometimes, earning less and bringing back time is just as precious as making more money.

Art critic Jonathan Crary’s book 24/7 explores how we entered a culture that battles against rest and time itself. A nonstop 24/7 culture that never t

Critical Atlas of Internet

Authenticity simply can’t survive this environment of constant performance – we become alienated from our own actions when every moment is filtered th

The Changing Face of Compute

The internet is already over

Bret Victor, beast of burden

The internet is already over

this quote from Jodi Kahn, Neiman Marcus’s vice president of luxury fashion: “Cores, or micro trends, often occur at the intersection of content creat

the online trend that links all of these disparate digi subcultures together: namecore, AKA the internet’s insatiable appetite for naming things.

This is pretty good, and strangely consistent with my own idea of good taste Tasteful people pursue stuff with purpose, have an appreciation and curi

On paper, taste = discernment. In practice, taste = your sense of self, made visible.

For Kant, judgment is the mental faculty that connects particulars to universals—the capacity to say “this thing is an instance of that category.” But

A system optimized for noise elimination is hostile to the genuinely new. It converges on what works, on what has worked. That convergence might produ

It’s rare for a member to convert from a lower tier to a higher tier. In most cases, it’s not worth it to have a way for people to pay you $2, $10, $5

To me, a membership is something you pay for to get access to a benefit you’re after. That benefit can be a community of your peers, but it doesn’t ha

We earn trust by stating our business model upfront – instead of ads, we monetize by charging directly. Directly charging creates high expectations fr

here are some posts about online communities that I find very good for one reason or another (Not a full list, no particular order, mostly from the r

Community is the most valuable currency of the new internet

Nas.io

people need many points of contact with the natural world to be happy and AC loses a few of them which might be OK but all the others have been lost

I think people would be better off if they learned to use the whole earth. All five senses. the world is a very sensual place you know. People joke by

It is helpful to imagine these roadblocks as questions: How do we rediscover ourselves anew? How do we right our collective rememory? Think of rememor

When we focus on building new models of moving through the world that do not rely on violence and genocide to function, that is abolition at work.

we do have the energy and the capacity to divest from these violent realities and to recalibrate by stepping through these access points.

we all have needs that need to be tended to. I always wonder, what if care is the work? What if caring for ourselves is the revolution, meaning, what

Environments are emotionally contagious, and if the environment you spend a lot of time in is hyper-competitive and performative, you’re going to feel

What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a t

The more upset I became, the more I felt that my sensitivity towards the paintings was the same sensitivity I held when I was the subject of the photo

To spot weird signals, you need to go down rabbit holes. Follow your intuition. And remember, pursuing rabbit holes is not always an act of procrastin

Gen AI  for music has captured ~$300M in funding so far this year across several high-profile deals, the majority of which either focus on  rights man

The job for any studio is to create a great story and exploit it across as many channels as possible—theme parks, merchandise, games, movies, TV, TikT

“So thinking is prior to language. What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them. This h

“His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the over

HEY Email

A good life doesn’t ask you to be good at everything. It asks you to find the small circle where you have unusual leverage, and to be peacefully avera

My father was a Sarkari Babu (government officer with basic salary) his entire life, he was at one job throughout his life. He drove a Bajaj scooter

Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress - by kyla scanlon

The game has shifted, and the winning strategy with it. It’s no longer about understanding specialized details; it’s about grasping the high-level glo

What we do with our freedomThe examples of the excruciating etiquette of the aristocratic courts, the marriage market Rhimes dramatised, the civil ass

If we give them the room to breathe, creative works can live multiple lives. The works will stay online for years, decades even. It will make someone

What they don’t see, and what we continue to experience, is that while collaborating can be hard, it’s also a more rewarding, fruitful, and uplifting

I’ve been thinking about the enduring, perhaps increasing currency of personal recommendations (practically artisanal craft now if you think about it!

Knowing where to go and what to do is the currency that, in the modern aspiration economy, makes curators more important than influencers. They guide

Create ownership in everything. Revenue shares in projects. Equity in micro-companies. Stakes in outcomes. The Old Game keeps you permanently renting

When individual entry is impossible, collective entry becomes optimal. When traditional financing fails, alternative structures win. The groups doing

We live in a world where movies aren’t considered art, but intellectual property. They’re “content,” little chunks of stuff that can be licensed, exte

Hope beyond individualism

Just a moment...

The Pall Of Our Unrest

The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully on all six

We need the right kind of climate optimism

We Need the Right Kind of Climate Optimism

Queer Ecology, a type of resistance ecology that has emerged to flip the script on mainstream ecological concepts by examining the relationships betwe

Seeing the country laid out in that way, its biodiversity charted on a menu, the place I had been living in or traveling around for eight years at tha

The role of a successful place is to provide a catalytic context for missions.

when we find the convergence of where we belong and where we are encouraged or at least allowed to make a contribution, the magic happens.

I am very affected by place. Actually I think everyone is. Probably more than they realize. Our surroundings act on us. Some foster chaos, others enco

‘As we work to reverse these long-term socio-economic and socio-political trends to foster more connections to others, stronger communities, more pro-

Maybe what we need is not an object to be known but a cause of wonder.

If you insist that anything too common, anything come by too cheaply, must be boring, then all the wonders of the Singularity cannot save you. You wil

Where do the power structures and agency of learning reside? Who has power: the learner, or the educator and the institutions that deliver education s

Understanding technologies requires also understanding power; it needs media literacy as well as technical literacy; incisive questioning as well as s

On Being Lost

The Science Finally Catches Up: New Research Confirms ADHD as an Evolutionary Advantage, Not a Disease

Every system young men touch today extracts value while promising creation. College extracts tuition while promising knowledge. Jobs extract time whil

Someone said “it’s a privilege to be exhausted doing something you love” and I told them “go to hell.” Our bodies are not built to be exhausted. We

Books and standup comedy are the rare mediums that are usually created by a single person. Because of this they can be more daring and go to more inte

“Truly showing belief in others will buy them a ticket to someplace they never knew.” -h/t sean feeney

I like thinking small. I like thinking of my reader as an individual.And even if I did this out of sheer stubbornness at first, I’ve come to think thi

Just a moment...