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The shift described represents a fundamental change in the "architecture" of how creative value is captured, moving from individual products to entire

Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that “Man muss noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können” – “One must still have

Claude’s outputs are the product of a form of mimicry, rather than as a report of genuine internal states.Consciousness is about internal states; the

I say please and thank you, not because I believe it matters to him, but because it matters to me. If I am going to use natural English to communicate

Just a moment...

The peril of laziness lost | The Observation Deck

Prickles and Goo

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

the moralists ask us how we can justify our love of reading, we can make use of some such excuse as this. But if we are honest, we know that no such e

The hot new theory online is that reading is kaput, and therefore civilization is too. The rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies has shattered

TED’S 24 RULES FOR READINGReading shouldn’t be a goal—instead it ought to be cultivated as a habit.It should be a relaxing and enjoyable habit, someth

I was reading an article about the state of SaaS recently, and came across this line:The data moat surrounding incumbent SaaS / systems of record is l

true masters feel the answer before they can explain the answer in words.

For decades, technology has required standardized solutions to complex human problems. In order to scale software, you had to build for the average us

1. Embracing ‘Anti-Scale’According to John their maximum audience is capped at 200,000.“If we have 10 million subscribers we've pivoted. Something's g

Communities are not resources to be optimised and they're not user bases to be migrated. They're the accumulated residue of people choosing, over and

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

The hard problem is earning the right to hold people’s memory. The best way to preserve agency and fight technological fascism is by making the altern

to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.

I came of age in the Napster days, when only fools spent money on anything digital. Early on, we decided that we’d rather pay for the internet with at

One mistake I often used to make at Justin.tv was offering a potpourri of business models (virtual goods, product placement, chat ads, contests, etc..

The problem in media isn’t the business model. The problem is that most of the content sucks.

Ads have ruined company prioritiesIt used to be that we design for the best possible experience. But then “free” came around. Nothing is really free,

So when people opt to devote their energy to tracking the latest TikTok star or scrolling content instead of nurturing interpersonal relationships, th

Social media stopped being primarily about connecting socially a long time ago. People still use a range of technologies to connect to friends and bui

Taste for Privacy: How Context, Identity, and Lived-Experience Shape Information Sharing Preferences

The social-platform layer offers the feeling of encounter with the friction surgically removed. As one analysis of Gen Z’s parasocial turn put it, onl

The freedom of information the internet brings helps us expose idiot intellectuals quickly and more accurately than ever before. But the internet also

“As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other peopl

I am tired of seeing speed as a selling point. I’ve wanted to talk about this for a long time. I think one of the main reasons many of us feel anxio

From Lily Chambers: I genuinely do not care if AI tools make me more productive. I am tired of seeing, "increased productivity" as a selling point. I

summarize the last 50 user interviews and cluster the main pain points by frequency and intensity. suggest 3 product bets with highest signal-to-noise

generate 3 alternative mobile UI flows for our onboarding experience, optimized for clarity and low cognitive load.” “simulate how a distracted user

"You are an extremely skilled lacanian analyst with decades of clinical experience and training in coherence therapy. You use a transference-focused p

my current ChatGPT custom prompt -- curious what others are using/doing? Have been slowly iterating over time... -- At the start of a response, creat

If language were sufficient to express human thought, why would we need visual arts, music, dance?

“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

A conversation between Alex Dobrenko and Douglas Rushkoff on the spiritual nature of awe, rescuing the human from the machine, and why the future depe

We've fallen for the trap of thinking something doesn't exist if it isn't on the Internet. Maria Popova: "The internet is a surface level of the oce

A person spends years trying to become beautiful online. They finally achieve the exact face, body, lifestyle, and aesthetic they once fantasized abou

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

Don’t shrink the vision to fit the doubt

Alex Karp Has Money and Power. So What Does He Want?

A Spymaster Sheikh Controls a $1.5 Trillion Fortune. He Wants to Use It to Dominate AI

Tyler Cowen, the Man Who Wants to Know Everything

Humans were not meant to have this many passwords

“Give me six hours to vibe code agentic b2b SaaS and I will spend the first four hours writing the prompt” Abraham Lincoln (YC W25)

Focus as a thing we have v. Focus as something we do

you can't do anything interesting without breaking from consensus, and you can't break from consensus without looking like an idiot to the people insi

“The anditode to doom is curiosity.” -Ezra Klein

The state of technology is arguably the most compelling it's ever been on a philosophical level

A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the majority of respondents would prefer to live in a world where TikTok and Ins

fun fact: the creator of Barbie and creator of Hot Wheels were husband and wife

A hundred thousand songs are uploaded daily to streaming platforms. In the last year 1.7 million books were self-published. 2,500 videos are uploaded

What gets clicks becomes what gets made. The edges get sanded down. Originality gives way to imitation. Junk food wins, so everyone starts cooking cra

It takes yesterday’s trends, remixes them with today’s keywords, and spits out tomorrow’s mediocrity. It’s not thinking. It’s rehashing. Recursively,

We must choose the “longest way round” because meaning is neither fast nor viral nor optimized.It’s made. Slowly. Painfully. Honestly.By humans.

But what felt new was the speed and violence with which language now manifests markets. I’d sit in meetings as a single phrase “AI-native vertical Saa

most of success comes from doing the mundane and often distasteful stuff, like identifying and dealing with problems and pushing hard over a long time

Viktor Frankl wrote dozens of books, but only one,  Man’s Search For Meaning,  was not aimed at commercial success. Frankl wrote  Man’s Search For Mea

How to Be Successful

Winston Churchill hit the nail on the head when he said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

So much value and love for the process of writing and what it does for the coherence between heart, brain, imagination, lived reality, unseen, and see

You can’t write a viral essay that says “it’s complicated and I’m not sure.” But this is the only path to truly novel insight.

Writing is a task that takes both objective and subjective intelligence. LLMs ace the objective parts the same way they ace every test; you can’t faul

We were going to create a brand to serve people, not advertise to them.

If prestige thinking is less essential than we claimed, and if machines can now produce a lot of its outputs cheaply, then what’s coming is not necess

In ‘How Movies Were Edited 60 Years Ago,’ an editor manually cut film splicing, taping, and rewinding at a near biblical pace. Each move carried signi

Why should what you produce, rather than what you consume, be the most important thing about you? Why shouldn’t the fact that you race boats or watch

consumption choices force you to develop the habit of self-examination. And when you think about more complex life choices — what kind of personality

The paradigm of acceleration fails to grasp the deeper human tension between action and contemplation. It’s a false binary, one that Benedict XVI (the

I didn’t feel comfortable inside the endlessness of it. I am the kind of writer who believes in taking the time I need to come up with something worth

“Life is always winking at us, calling our attention to the beauty hidden in plain sight. Why do we so often miss what’s right in front of us, lost in

The writer Ted Chiang was once asked in an interview if he ever considered publishing more frequently. Chiang, one of the greatest living fiction writ

There is a Tibetan form of spiritual hyperstition that is more powerful than any of the modern day forms. It works by living and believing as if you

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

“I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success

sharing the work starts to be more important than the work itself

Useful and Overlooked Skills

Design talk: Too much consistency will ruin your app. Humans are naturally drawn to experiences that create a strong sense of place. This demands va

People who don't pause exist more in their head than their body. The mind is top-down, rigid, quick, enforcing an established view. The mind is waitin

a personally fulfilling and socially useful life of the mind

The internet taught us to consume everything. Save everything. Remember everything. But wisdom isn't about remembering more. It's about knowing what t

A digital communal garden. Shared beauty and care.

Writers must therefore constantly ask: what am I trying to say? Surprisingly often they don’t know. Then they must look at what they have written an

PDFs - handbook.directory

Why So Many of the World’s Oldest Companies Are in Japan

The short-term crowd is always too distracted to notice the long-term crowd slowly compounding. An investor obsessing over daily economic data misses

All you have to do is just be 5% better than everyone else who’s really bad at it. You don’t have to get everything perfect… you just have to be a lit

# on shortification of "learning" There are a lot of videos on YouTube/TikTok etc. that give the appearance of education, but if you look closely the

Avoid content made after 2016 - Something happened in 2016. The internet became less weird, less creative. Whatever the cause, pre-2016 content has a

“Where there is selection there is art.” —BH Liddell Hart.

The five principles of prompting I developed work equally well as management techniques for humans: Give direction. Describe the desired style in de

People who are good at solving poorly defined problems don't get the same kind of kudos. They don’t get any special titles or clubs. There is no test

2) Clear Roles & Decision Rights Without clear swim lanes and decision rights, individuals on teams feel disempowered and projects tend to stall out.

1. It doesn’t have to be new. It just has to be fresh. The toy brick was invented (and patented) by British toymaker, Hilary Fisher Page in the 195

90% of Claude’s code is now written by AI, and this has completely transformed how they build products. The bottlenecks have shifted from engineering

hottest companies in Silicon Valley, famous for one thing: they made an extremely boring product extremely beloved. He speaks about how «technology ma

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

What is this teaching me?

Latvia’s Flow won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature and was created because he was somehow obsessed Blender, the free/open-source 3D modeling tool.

Scott Alexander’s recent post argues that the best response to AI displacement isn’t optimization or doomerism—it’s play. Figure out what you actually

what would one imperfect action teach me?

When you say that the status quo draws people toward more individuated, personality-driven work, what do you think is causing that, both culturally an

to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.

iUnlock doors with it.iMeet lovers through it.iOrder food with it.iSummon cars with it.iEven meditate with it.Apple designed the iPhone too well.So we

maybe more interesting and differentiated (and fun!) subscription bundles can be created by combining two things you wouldn't typically associate with

Blocked

Principles of designing good charts

“You can search and search all your life, but sometimes you need to realise you’ve arrived.”

“So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.”

Christians believe purgatory exists because of God’s divine mercy, but even here on earth, perhaps the waiting period is more merciful than we realize

to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.

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

Host: And of course, the luxury sector spans over so many different products. But what do you think the definition of luxury is?Bernard Arnault: First

to be successful, you have to have the combination between modernity and timelessness.

How Hermès Sells "Time"

‘The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.’ by Karen Blixen, writing as Isak Dinesen

He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch. – Jean-Luc Godard

LLMs have three new capabilities that change the nature of search: Intuitive leaps: LLMs can answer poorly written questions with spooky-accurate ans

Unlike vertical search aggregators, boutique search engines feel less like the Yellow Pages and more like texting your friends to ask for a recommenda

“gentle and powerful” = both an oxymoron and also a highly desirable combination.

Jason Fried on company culture: "You have to find the nature of things. That's the thing I've found to be the most useful tool in anything: trying t

I recently took up drumming. Again. One of the first things you realize, other than you suck, is that you’re gripping the sticks too hard. A tight g

Craft is the new "growth hack". Investing in craft, means you invest in quality of the experience, and that benefits in all of areas of the business

“Gnosis should be an experience of your own life, a plant grown on your own tree. Foreign gods are a sweet poison, but vegetable gods you have raised

Market forces incentivise us to get on the property ladder, and then to set fire to the rungs beneath us so that nobody else can climb up. Moloch need

“True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyful

Most AI backlash is economic anxiety coated in a veneer of social justice. Alfalfa farming consumes 19 times the water that data centers do; there’s n

“Diffusion lag” reflects a lack of product-market fit. Even AI optimists are still hitting practical roadblocks. That’s why detailed case studies are

Here are some things I’ve asked chatgpt recently: “why is Toblerone so popular at airport duty-free stores?” “give me a recipe for a chickpea tagine

The promise of artificial superintelligence is based on the idea that objective intelligence is the only intelligence. Or, even if there are multiple

the apparently hard problems (chess, calculus) turned out to be computationally easy, while the apparently easy ones (recognizing a face, walking acro

“smart” people are stupid in more complicated ways

This brings me to my core thesis: The inconvenience and inferior data transfer speeds of conversational interfaces make them an unlikely replacement f

personality is the moat gemini is technically great but feels like talking to a corporate helpdesk that’s read too many hr manuals. no edge, no warmth

Can we replicate https://github.com/olton/metroui Metro UI with AI

We all know we’re overstimulated and want to stop, but we can’t. We use app blockers, throw our phones away, and build rigid routines. But none of it

humans don’t have fixed identities. we’re constantly testing. trying different versions of ourselves. seeing what gets rewarded. adjusting based on fe

I feel like there’s something so soulless about our culture—something deeply, deeply missing in people’s experience of life, a kind of superficiality.

The question is not whether algorithms can ever foster greatness—they cannot. Their design is fundamentally at odds with the qualities that define gre

The algorithms that shape our cultural landscape are not inherently malicious. They are indifferent. Their purpose is not to destroy art but to optimi

The Shawshank Redemption failed at the box office but went on to gross more than $100 million as a cult classic. The 48 Laws of Power missed the bes

“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

Vadik Marmeladov's Codes of Practice: 1. Wear the uniform 2. Think long term (like 30 years from now) 3. Build stories and languages, not things

You must never trade honesty with relatability.

What I call temporal curiosity is the practice of actively directing our curiosity across time – past, present, future – to gain a deeper understandin

Lots of consumer platforms — everything from Instagram to Youtube to Twitch — didn’t start out as ways for people to make money. They were initially a

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

We built systems that prize speed above all else, and in doing so we lost the most fundamental lesson that nature teaches: speed of growth makes you f

All human wisdom is contained in these two words: ‘wait’ and ‘hope’!”

don’t live each day like it’s your last. live like you’ll make it to 100. think in centuries.

Distractions divert you from your goals, while opportunities align with and propel you toward them. For example, Americans spend an average of 11 hour

re: many genAI apps can do 'anything and everything' i used to tell this funny story to a lot of consumer founders: when one-shot TTS first started

A lot of companies don’t make it because in the process of trying to get many things right, they don’t get anything right.Why are they in such a hurry

Contribute your skills to an existing effort – make it possible. Build the website, raise the funds, recruit the talent, plan the events. As Bill McKi

They're blind to a simple truth: complex minds can't develop on their own. If they could, feral children would be like any other. And minds don't grow

Our society’s individualism, largely driven by technological advances and the illusion of endless progress, will no longer be sustainable – will not b

The more inflated the language in your startup's pitch, the less convincing it seems. If you're a seed stage company, don't tell me you're transformin

Knowledge of the world isn’t the same as experiencing the world. Why does online connection so often seem to lack aliveness , as compared to encount

The problem, as we all know, is the gap between what we know and what we do with what we know.

design is the embodiment of values. Design is the ultimate commitment to or compromise of one’s values. And this is how we go about the world. We make

When Times New Roman appears in a book, document, or advertisement, it connotes apathy. It says, “I submitted to the typeface of least resistance.” Ti

Soul-Making Productivity: A Process Manifesto

Conversational Canyons

Anthea often uses metaphors to develop and convey new conceptualizations. This approach is in keeping with studies about the significant role of metap

Kelly's insight about wine applies perfectly to how we think about personal growth. Just as mindlessly drinking more wine doesn't make us better wine

In Paul Graham’s famous essay Cities and Ambition, there’s this idea that some cities are centers for some type of ambition, and when you come to one

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

after studying in basically every library / study spot in cambridge, I've found that the best study spots are still mom & pop cafes where there is a s

my social feeds seemed to finish their years-long transformation from a neighborhood populated with friends to a glossy condo development of brands.

A secret of the top growth experts in tech is to think about every UX interaction as an emotional event.

PEOPLE IN SYSTEMS DO NOT DO WHAT THE SYSTEM SAYS THEY ARE DOING. University professors chase grants, not student enlightenment. VCs nurture personal b

What the humans like is responsiveness - by Sasha Chapin What the humans like is responsiveness

When evaluating a company, one of my favorite questions to ask is whether it has an aesthetic. We don’t talk about aesthetics as the highest form of

13 Creative Commandments: 1. Talent is an important differentiator, but talent needs to put in the hours to excel. 2. Question everything. Question wh

“In the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.”

The hyperreal doesn’t mimic or imitate reality. It replaces reality altogether, making it nearly impossible for us to determine what is real, what isn

I say please and thank you, not because I believe it matters to him, but because it matters to me. If I am going to use natural English to communicate

Every phase of life can be shopped for at Costco. Where else can you purchase a wedding ring, a baby carrier, and a casket? It follows your own life s

when i'm tied up in consumption, creation is lost to me; i am no longer the writer, the creative, the poet, the artist, but the eater, the viewer, the

It also aligned the computer with something that is often inspiring to many people and artists: nature. If I can find the sublime in microchips and SD

Sometimes, You Have To Say No To Your Friends To Say Yes To Your Work When asked, Lin-Manuel Miranda says Wait For It is the best song he’s ever writ

when making things becomes frictionless, starting stops meaning anything.

At some point while I was trying to write a dissertation as a parent of a preschooler and an infant, I attended a workshop from which I remember exact

I find that changing mediums is always good for my writing, so often I will go from the manila folder to a sheet of paper to a Word doc to a Scrivener

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

pastagang

"Every product in the world, the quality at the end of the day is simply a reflection of how much the people who created it gave a shit about the prod

I asked Kelly about the tradeoffs of focusing on a single thing if you want to be great (which is what I had been getting at before). “Greatness is ov

“The techniques that we use, they’re not a big secret. It’s just about making an effort and repeating the same thing every day.” Jiro repeats the s

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

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

These folks are the guardians of the party’s communal energy. Their charisma is mature and thoughtful, not narcissistic. They can subtly refine and re

Gathering Structures

“When I talk about generous exclusion, I am speaking of ways of bounding a gathering that allows diversity in it to be heightened and sharpened, rathe

Put another way, will humans will always want to do things like scroll Instagram, but perhaps won't ever want to open TurboTax/Docusign/Concur/Foursqu

A futuristic and unrealistic concept interface: the computer waits on the human instead of the human waiting on the computer.

Unplugging Is Not the Solution You Want

Society is increasingly cutting the nourishing ties that attach us, and calling it innovation. I worry about how encouraged we are to do things effici

I couldn’t help but come to the conviction, right there on the bus, that one of the most important questions modern man must ask himself is how much t

Start in the future and work backward

If you pay attention, you’ll see that today’s winning brands understand the customer’s story is the only one that matters. Your most important job as

Solving a problem for your user is great, but easing their cognitive dissonance can have a much greater emotional impact. There is likely something th

The Questions Before the Questions

Spirituality is experiencing who you are beyond small mental definitions, rituals, relationships. For this reason it renders traditional religion impo

“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.” — Søren Kierkegaard

the best relationships consist of a series of unbreachable private understandings

convinced that adults have totally forgotten how to have fun in conversation. every conversation is either "checklist catch up on life events" or "gr

What is love? Ask 19 geniuses. Get 19 answers. • Plato: It's remembering a soul. • Freud: It's desire in disguise. • Buddha: It's letting go. • Nietz

Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house. Do you think you'd care so very much about

"There are two ways to make the world more mesmerizing: to seek out new and increasingly intense experiences, or to loosen the filters that make ordin

quality has no discernable metric -miter

They told us productivity would set us free. So we organized and optimized and checked all the boxes. We became very good at being very busy. But in t

People who insist that every product decision should be metrics-driven would also have to logically admit that theirs will be the first job to get aut

here in Japan, we have a concept called ‘yutori,’ and it is spaciousness. It’s a kind of living with spaciousness. For example, it’s leaving early eno