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To my own children, I hope one day you will be proud of the work for which you have sacrificed so much time with your father. I love you more than wor

For Mom and Dad, who taught me to think for myself— and the AIs, robots, and machines that made me wonder if I really was.

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.

‘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

All That Is Solid Melts Into Information

Finding Meaning in Our Never Enough Culture

Being a mother makes me want to do things slower

Output down, page views up: Axios shifts from volume to value Axios output in Q1 was down 22% compared to a year earlier but

Working in tech should be more like filmmaking—artists jumping from project to project, collaborating with new creators across disciplines every few m

There’s this funny balance where some writers get way too purist about it and they’re like, I don’t want to have to package my work up for the masses

Let me assure you, as someone who has been publishing books for sixteen years, that no matter how much you think you’ve talked about your book, no mat

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

We're bad at creativity in our culture because we're obsessed with productivity. Creativity is slow and curious. Productivity considers every experime

Honestly: I don’t want AI to make me 10x more productive so that I can “crush it” and “stay ahead of everyone else.” I actually just want a calmer,

The whole corruption of aesthetic language is the application of financial jargon to artistic creativity. This is why instead of calling a work of art

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

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

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

Don’t shrink the vision to fit the doubt

I think about all the effort and energy that goes into finding references and doing research, and I think it’s a lost art form. I started my blog and

Work, family, or friends: pick two. You can have it all, just not all at once.

Live with Restream https://t.co/q1kgSnn1jN

The story of Sylvester Stallone in 1975 sitting down to write a screenplay and, three and a half days later, emerging with the full script for Rocky:

“You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.” Some things just take time: compounding, craftsmanship, and good judgment.

A great story about simplicity from Akio Morita, the instigator of the Walkman project at Sony: Engineers had the technology to add the recording func

Smaller and simpler software with one core feature always makes me more focused. Every time I want to write something I open a simple text editor inst

The file isn't the moat. The person is.

Now that we’ve seen how successful “Boytoy” was, how do you think you’ll approach your next project, now that the bar is so high? E In my art and crea

Very often, I will check out three or four or five books on a writer or artist I admire; spend several hours reading, skimming, scanning, printing, an

Our modest goal with Substack is to help accelerate and amplify the advent of the culture future through a better media system. Culture is not just ab

Our goal here is pretty simple: we want to make our site something worth coming back to over and over again. We want to be worth your time, every day.

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

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.

When i search my heart I find that there’s a rather strange complex of anger and frustration... at the world... for its dogged insistence on changing

So what makes us human? Here’s the analogy I would give. If you think about all of our ancestors from hundreds or thousands of years ago—what would

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

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

I finally understood, in some exquisite way, the cost of all these years spent dividing myself in two: little whore or Jack’s baby girl. Needy slut or

I’m looking for a sharp, hungry, and highly creative person to help me launch my next book—and build what comes after. This is a rare opportunity to

Feed Me is hiring a social media intern. This will be paid. You need to know how to use Photoshop and how to edit videos. And you have to be hysterica

PirateWires JD: Friends, Romans, countrymen, I’m hiring a new writer. Could be you, could be a friend or acquaintance. Please take a look and pass t

I mostly just kind of move stuff around until it looks right.

We’re not coders who learned about creativity—we’re creatives who learned to code. Our mission is to keep people in the creative equation, and our pro

This is Mackenzie and this is my substack where I WILL DO WHATEVER I WANT. I could say that I’m a writer, or a diarist, or a former viral stuntress, o

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

“leverage points.” These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in on

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

Similarly, I think people need to ask themselves – and it might be easier if we ask each other – What do you really want to be doing? How did you fall

"I learned this from Schwarzman. People don't give money to the investors they think are going to make the most money, they allocate to people they li

"The way I think about coaching is very much how I think about parenting. Your ability to drive change is down to the quality of your relationship, no

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.

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

FOR PODCASTS: CONVERSATION > INTERVIEW Many people treat podcasts like interviews, and some podcasters think of themselves as interviewers. This isn’

It starts by sending guests a series of questions that can help bubble up interesting topics. Rachitsky has never shared these publicly before, but he

There are brilliant examples all over the place of people tweaking time subjectively. One of my favorites is the Uber map. It doesn’t change how long

I want them to take away from the book the same thing they would take from the concert. I want them to think, well, I feel better now. I feel upli

There's a feeling you get in the presence of beautiful buildings and bustling courtyards.

“you need to be main character-maxing. you need to live your heart out and pour love in everyone's cup. live in your delusion of how amazing the world

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

Why Tacit Knowledge Is More Important Than Deliberate Practice

The computer doesn’t know any of this. It can’t know any of this. It can only read the cookbook; it can’t taste the meal. Objective knowledge can make

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

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

interactive experiences for mindfulness and self-therapy to increase present-moment awareness and awaken creativity

I have always tried to take lots of notes, typically as snapshots of my mental state. What I’m thinking about, what my priorities are, where my attent

I want them to take away from the book the same thing they would take from the concert. I want them to think, well, I feel better now. I feel upli

Bubbling excitement for what the day holds. Novelty in the smallest of things. Unburdened by the clouds of worry that dim an adults life. Possibility

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

Every Resource I Use to Educate My Kids

The famous Anton Ego speech in Ratatouille: In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position of those who offer u

Kurt, Dave and Chris:First let me apologize for taking a couple of days to put this outline together. When I spoke to Kurt I was in the middle of maki

"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

In an overly digitized world, people embrace with intensity the few remaining ritualistic activities available to them. Halloween gets turned into som

‘only the new of which one tires. One never tires of the old.’

One of the saddest things to me is the cultural decay cycle in our new age of virality. Sub-cultures that took years to form through meaning are esse

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.

Today most algorithms that recommend or suppress content act purely on the basis of inferred popularity. They look at how much time people spend engag

as a network scales, it is inevitable that you need a way to sort & rank content. web 2.0 solved it by ranking for popularity but a better approach co

· Are we being reprogrammed by algorithms? In the last edition, I mentioned a recent tweet-er-xeet post by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Jack suggested

“One of the reasons the tech industry is so creatively bankrupt is that people just focus on attributes you can measure,” said Jony Ive, when told of

But ambiguity, taste, meaning, value, these remain hard to attain within the hierarchy of verifiability. “Intelligence” races ahead wherever the rewar

One of the most bizarre contradictions in modern software is that the people building these engagement systems don’t like them either! Ask anyone w

Interface > Data > Models While media still focuses on the “next best model” rat race, increasingly believe that the “interface” and “data” layers wi

App layer is where most of the value is. Nothing has changed. Humans like a well designed focused UX that deeply solves a problem as a first class cit

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s AI CEO, believes this is the primary way AI companies will differentiate their products. It all comes down to personalit

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

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

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

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

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 I hear people say things like “our goal is to be at 5mm ARR by 2024” I always get a little sad and uncomfortable. I don’t have quantifiable goals

even if you make something truly great, it will still take many years before society catches up and figures it out

AI favors experts. The more expertise you have, the better you can wield AI as a tool.

The Problem with BenchmarksBenchmarks are often designed for papers, not products. The result? We get IFEval – a test that measures whether AI can mak

When I think about editing images, a vast array of options come to mind: contrast, saturation, sharpen, blur, airbrush, clone stamp, etc. Even basic i

Reading is alluring. It has a nameless quality beyond satisfying desires for information and pleasure. Despite more colorful and interactive media, re

all serious intellectual work happens on the page, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. If you want to contribute to the world of ideas, if you want to

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

People shying away from having babies because they heard that it’s so hard are making one of those category errors that are inescapable in this rotten

The most important rewards of being a parent come from the moment-by-moment physical and psychological joy of being with this particular child, and in

But strictly speaking, ambivalent is precisely the word two years in, because my feelings on the experience of motherhood do not add up to a tidy conc

I’ve spent the last three years pregnant, breastfeeding, or trying to conceive. I want more children, and I want close age gaps, and I want to write a

i've noticed a weird aversion to using AI on the left. not sure if it's a climate or an IP thing or what, but it seems like a massive self-own to dedu

If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you're illiberal. If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you're a

If you believe Charlie Kirk deserved to die because he was “homophobic” and “transphobic”, are you going to be morally consistent, and also celebrate

A lot of people believe they’re “principled” when they’re actually just rigid. And the rigidity is making them boring as fuck.And I don’t mean boring

“If Tetris has taught me anything. It's that in life, errors pile up and accomplishments disappear.” -@GameModJr

The people who become legendary in their interests never feel they have arrived. Kevin Kelly

I perceive value, I confer value, I create value. I even create — or guarantee — existence. Hence, my compulsion to make ‘lists.’ The things (Beethove

“Every decision made about you and your opportunities is made in a room you’re not in.” — Joanna Bloor

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 More Exciting Life

“we maxed out intelligence but minimized wisdom”

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

it's weird that at a given age, 45 say, someone can't just write down the compressed/compiled topline notes on everything they've learned about life,

At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get b

You’re doomscrolling because you’re looking for something to transform you but you can’t stay with one thing for long enough to be transformed by it.

A book is, we know, an unrivaled technology for living more life. The contemporary internet-abetted image, on the other hand, is a highly potent yet f

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

pastagang

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.

There’s a phrase making the rounds online: “The more I heal, the less ambitious I become.” I’ve been wondering if its resonance reveals a quiet fatigu

I am not less capable because I refuse to live in constant activation. I’m just less exploitable.

My body was not an obstacle to ambition, but the barometer for what sustainable ambition could look like now.

# 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

how many people you touched > how many people you reached

To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to read and watch and say and do, and start to think of how to enjoy th

Mastery is the best goal because the rich can't buy it, the impatient can't rush it, the privileged can't inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can

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

If you find yourself in a culture of Tension, the best way to move that culture forward is to create a sense of clarity and opportunity. Show people w

in times of intense stress or adversity, future-oriented thinking such as hope may be more effective than mindfulness in sustaining positive mindsets

So many people say "I don't want to have kids because I don't want them to experience all the issues in the world today". What are they smoking? We l

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

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

“You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation” is still the best tagline I’ve ever seen

Cards Against Humanity Asked People to Give It $5 on Black Friday for Nothing in Return. The Stunt Worked.

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

completely crazy the extent that the world is bottlenecked by motivation

Moral clarity creates market opportunities. Notion thrives by enhancing users' ability to organize their thoughts rather than maximizing time-in-app—i

one thing LLMs have over social media is that you can't really use an llm without an intention you can't doomscroll an llm

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

I've been asked many times some variation of the question "how do you deal with the competition?" There are many answers to this question; in this ess

Mike Krieger (founder of Instagram) when Lenny asks him how he thinks about Claude vs. ChatGPT: “Look yourself in the mirror and embrace who you are a

NYC is the most hyper-social place I’ve ever lived. It’s the only place where going into hermit mode takes *active effort*; in most other places, herm

New York is a city that reminds me that wherever there is order, some disorder lies underneath, some energy had to be expended to bring that order abo

Novelist Charles Kingsley on happiness: “We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us hap

And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed hu

“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

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

This is also the blueprint for a happy co-existence with the machines. The machines handle the optimization, we take care of the meaning. They execute

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man ... It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, a

. I think we're living in a world now which is a little bit too led by the strategic inferential. And I think it's going to be felt. I think we're alr

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

“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

I did not make a single $ from 20VC for three years. 4 shows per week for 3 years and not $1. For the first 150 episodes, I did not get more than

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,

There is insane demand for people who can understand and explain technology in a compelling way.