Peter Hagen

The key to spice trade is TINA - There is no alternative - in financial terms. The largest form of investment in Middle Ages had been farmland with average ROI of c.a. 7-8 percent but no guarantee (wars, diseases, crop failure). The ROI of spice trade was 200-300 percent over similar period.

So if you wanted double you capital it was either spice... See more

please take a moment to read Jeff Atwood's and Joel Spolsky's introductions of Stack Overflow.3 Did you notice what I did? Both describe Stack Overflow as the solution to a very specific problem: programming knowledge locked up in minds and forums whence it's difficult to retrieve. They also explain how they intend to solve the problem including... See more

Anyone who says X must be done in Y way is most absolutely wrong. Who is Tiago Forte to tell how I should organize my thoughts? Am I a robot to follow so simply in the footsteps of another? I would like a more general approach, please.

Any serious note taker eventually realizes that the way their brain works doesn't really fit into any PARA, ARPA or... See more

Constraints limit where you can apply your attention. With limitless time, money, and resources, your attention bleeds off in all sorts of directions, following costly hallways where you find nothing interesting. Even more likely, a lack of limits paralyzes your decision making while you try to assess the 100 possible paths. You're better off... See more

Altman said there had been “a brutal crunch” all year due to supply shortages of Nvidia’s $40,000-a-piece chips. He said his company had received H100s, and was expecting more soon, adding that “next year looks already like it’s going to be better.”

However, as other players such as Google, Microsoft, AMD and Intel prepare to release rival AI chips,... See more

That split between the big audience on Facebook and the influential audience on Twitter was instantly obvious to anyone in any newsroom who ever cared to look. Sicha is right to note that Twitter never sent any amount of meaningful traffic to any website — it was Facebook traffic that warped most digital media executives into futile aspirations of... See more

the goal of a book isn’t to get to the last page, it’s to expand your thinking.

On its surface, the iPhone didn’t have totally new killer apps when it launched. It had a mail client, a music player, a web browser, YouTube, etc. The multitouch paradigm didn’t substantively transform what you could do with those apps; it was important because it made those apps possible on the tiny display. The first iPhone was important not... See more