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The great works of Victorian England were erected by engineers who could not be sure of the properties of the materials they were using. In particular

Worry is like a rocking horse. It’ll keep you entertained, but you’ll fucking get nowhere.

If you’re looking to create a timeless sense of purpose and to shape the overall mission of your life, then you should use principles. Establishing a

A strategy—whether in companies or in life—is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about how you spend your time, energy, and money. With ev

What do you wish Strategists would do more of?“Find opportunities for action, and not just diagnostics.”“Choices. Most planning presentations open up

This shift came because of what Nintendo called its “blue ocean” strategy. The idea was that the increasing technological complexity of games was actu

“You’re probably wondering what we’re trying to do. It’s hard to say. We hope that we have something here... We’ve been working quite hard at it. We h

'In my experience,' he told me, 'if you run away from a thing just because you don't like it, you don't like what you find either. Now, running to a t

WHAT IS A FLIP A flip is a sort of a CAPTCHA that helps to determine whether a user is human. In contrast to a CAPTCHA, which stands for "Completely A

a bunch of everything apps vying for customers feels less like a race for innovation and more like empires warring over territory. Tech companies are

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

Swelter is in his best uniform, a habit of exceptional splendour, the high cap and tunic being of virgin silk. Doubling his body he opens the door the

Some Notes Concerning Technique Long have I thought that I should write a book on technique, as I have learned much over the years that may aid others

'In my experience,' he told me, 'if you run away from a thing just because you don't like it, you don't like what you find either. Now, running to a t

Some Notes Concerning Technique Long have I thought that I should write a book on technique, as I have learned much over the years that may aid others

The left has tended to lead the way in mastering new media, aided by its generally younger, tech-savvy supporters. Barack Obama harnessed Facebook in

'In my experience,' he told me, 'if you run away from a thing just because you don't like it, you don't like what you find either. Now, running to a t

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

I’m increasingly convinced, then, that the next big vector for inequality is around this most fundamental of human capabilities. The elites are going

Heilmer told me that BMW's characteristic orange-red hue is generated by light at a wavelength of 605 nanometers. The color was chosen to allow the dr

⁠⁠Luxury spending in China has been crimped by the combination of a housing crisis and a government campaign against showy displays of wealth. Rather

Watch streams and playthroughs: Ashley Bardhan recently argued that watching a video game isn’t so different from playing it. I agree. This guidance w

An almost-funny tragedy is decimating basically every artistic industry: there are too many things. Too many movies, too many shows, way too many song

52 Things I Learned in 2024

Arthur de Villemandy, co-founder of  Capsule, during which I inquired about the tricks employed by his curators. He responded with remarkable clarity,

honestly people are starving for more collective experiences, not more siloed hyper-personalized things

To meet these challenges and increase the impact of foresight work, we need to rethink our approach from the very beginning of a project.

When it comes to gambling, the big argument used to be about state lotteries. These lotteries are taxes on the poor—a way for the government to raise

Then, when I put a pair on for myself, the situation suddenly changed. As a potential target of recording, I’d been hesitant, worried I might be photo

In the late 1970s, Jef Raskin, a pioneering technologist who was one of Apple’s earliest employees, sketched out a radical vision for the future of co

I’m increasingly convinced, then, that the next big vector for inequality is around this most fundamental of human capabilities. The elites are going

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.

What we’re not noticing enough is the fact that algorithms have flattened our cultural landscape and induced a sense of passivity and numbness, challe

This theme isn’t just confined to bookstores; it sprawls throughout our urban fabric, notably into the realm of generic coffee shops. Both scenarios –

This shift towards a global sameness, driven by digital platforms' algorithms, challenges the very notion of personal taste. As these platforms priori

"In Typography Essentials (Rockport Publishers, 2009), designer Ina Saltz identifies six necessary typefaces to have in your repertoire: Caslon, Garam

Paul Valéry, the twentieth-century French philosopher, said, “Un fait mal observé est plus pernicieux qu’un mauvais raisonnement.” (A fact poorly obse

“Problems don’t impede progress. Problems are the conduit of progress. No problems, no progress. That is why I reject utopia, because there are no pro

Loneliness isn’t just making us unhappy, it’s silently killing us: Social isolation is as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. If the situation is

As many lonely people discover far too late, the reliance of children on their parents and, subsequently, of parents on their children, and the relian

We believe that what makes a fantastic workplace isn’t a great office or free meals and massages — although we have some nice perks. It’s the people.

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.

I think a lot about how we don’t have anything in software in the category of luxury.

You must mourn the loss of your younger self, the person who has gotten you this far but who is no longer equipped to carry you onward.

I often think of the Noah Smith quote: “Fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the i

ideas only become clear once you begin to work on them

The friction between idea and ability that AI evangelists promise to eradicate is not a problem suffered by a disadvantaged few. It’s the fundamental

the choice humanity faces in every age is between the idea of power and the power of ideas

“I would make sushi in my dreams. I would jump out of bed at night with ideas.” Leonardo Da Vinci, Michael Ferrero, and Colin Chapman all did the s

I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and th

The distinctive feature of imagination, therefore, rests on its capacity of creating new mental images by combining and modifying stored perceptual in

the imagination is a neurological reality, that it is lodged in specific parts of the brain, that it consists of an identifiable set of components and

the default network consists of regions that, in the absence of exteroceptive [externally oriented] attention or narrowly focused mental effort, suppo

The precuneus is involved in mental imagery concerning the self, episodic memory, and modeling other people’s views—all of which are main components o

Architecture without philosophy would become engineering. Architecture without aesthetics is engineering.

John Pawson - Homepage

"A key challenge of (LLMs) is that they do not come with a manual! They come with a “Twitter influencer manual” instead, where lots of people online l

Meta AI released LLaMA ... and they included a paper which described exactly what it was trained on. It was 5TB of data. 2/3 of it was from Common Cr

Weird GPT token for Reddit user davidjl123 , “a keen member of the /r/counting subreddit. He’s posted incremented numbers there well over 163,000 time

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

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

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

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

Hellman & Friedman's majority stake in Global Music Rights marks a watershed moment — private equity firms now control three major PROs (alo

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

mac.are.na

"what i want is to live in a way that suits me" via korean film on the beach at night alone (2017) dir. hong sang-soo

I aspire to Isak Dinesen’s way: work a little every day, without hope and without despair. What a way to live! To make! To be!

Practice the “dream behind the complaint” technique: When you catch yourself complaining, use it as an opportunity to uncover what you truly desire. E

Addictions are attempts to attain bliss without releasing defensive patterns.

I don’t think back on those days too often, but with Matthew Perry’s death, the memories have coiled around me because of how honest he was about his

Paul Valéry, the twentieth-century French philosopher, said, “Un fait mal observé est plus pernicieux qu’un mauvais raisonnement.” (A fact poorly obse

Consumer behavior is never done or satisfied. One of the great things about brands is that magical products or platforms or experiences can delight cu

Consumer founders today are solving for abundance. Too much food, pollution, stimulation, and connections leads to obesity, climate change, mental hea

Your competitive advantage is not that your designs are secret, but that you have a strong relationship with your community of customers.

“At both Viaweb and YC, every minute I spent thinking about competitors was, in retrospect, a minute wasted... It's exceptionally rare for startups to

"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

Just because the computations are happening under the hood and they're vast and complex, it doesn't mean they're guaranteed to be correct. Intuition i

many of the quant-ities related to suffering are based on perceptions and similar uncertain infer-ences. The uncertainty will necessarily increase fru

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

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

The region-beta paradox describes the phenomenon whereby, sometimes, a person may benefit from being worse off versus just mildly off, because being w

Burnout is not what it presents: it’s not about working too hard for too long, burnout is about working in the face of a goal that seems too far out,

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

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