Everything I share — writing, short curated lists, and links. You can also find me on Threads.
Because you realize the stickers were never about earning. They were about noticing. They were about someone stopping long enough to say: This mattered. This was good. This is worth mentioning. You matter. I see you. I celebrate you.
The best revenge is to refuse their values. To embody the kind of living — free, colorful, open — they want to snuff out.
Work becomes great when curiosity drives it beyond obligation.
Product recommendations, deals, and gift guides currently comprise a healthy chunk of many publishers’ businesses; chatbots appear poised to swallow much of that business for themselves. And to make a more obvious point, nearly all of these use cases were formerly queries that began on Google; it’s no wonder that the company is working to transform itself before it loses any more market share to the upstarts.
Time is extremely limited and goes by fast. Do what makes you happy and fulfilled—few people get remembered hundreds of years after they die anyway. Don’t do stuff that doesn’t make you happy (this happens most often when other people want you to do something). Don’t spend time trying to maintain relationships with people you don’t like, and cut negative people out of your life. Negativity is really bad. Don’t let yourself make excuses for not doing the things you want to do.
If you want to understand someone, figure out the narrative they tell themselves about themself.
“I think we have to stop talking about, ‘Everything we do is climate change,’ because it’s almost like there’s a visceral reaction to those words,” Holmgren says. “This isn’t a good time to put a red flag in front of the bull.”
On navigating contradictory impulses and finding clarity through action, not analysis.
It's very, very hard to narrow this down to ten, but I'm going to do my best.
Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis. The Apple that commissioned the futuristic “Knowledge Navigator” concept video in 1987 was the Apple that was on a course to near-bankruptcy a decade later. Modern Apple — the post-NeXT-reunification Apple of the last quarter century — does not publish concept videos. They only demonstrate actual working products and features.
Maybe someday, “you can do AI with it” will be a selling point for gadgets. In the interim phase, it feels like we’re wasting an entire generation of hardware while we wait for the software to catch up. And there are so many other interesting problems to solve! What if, instead of hand-wavey promises about AI, we got smartphones that lasted twice as long or didn’t break so easily? What if startups focused less on AI and more on the millions of people looking for devices that are less addictive and more attuned to a specific purpose? What if Amazon and Apple stopped waiting for some magical technological overhaul and spent time making their existing devices easier to use?
*Bikeshedding*, also known as Parkinson’s law of triviality, describes our tendency to devote a disproportionate amount of our time to menial and trivial matters while leaving important matters unattended.
First, understand that you’re feeling lost for a reason.
While Tesla sales dropped, sales of non-Tesla EVs continued to climb. Americans bought a record 1.3 million electric cars, an increase of 7.3 percent year over year, according to Cox Automotive’s Kelley Blue Book. EVs now claim 8.1 percent of the market in the US.
three different models of curiosity:
The idea of the personal infinity bottle seems to have caught on with whiskey aficionados around 2012, after a video by YouTuber Ralphy Mitchell. The basic idea is to find an empty vessel — like a blending bottle or decanter — then pour in a dram of any new whisky that you buy. That said, you can also fill your infinity bottle with the ends of various whiskies that you haven't got around to finishing.
I see the personal website as being an antidote to the corporate, centralised web. Yeah, sure, it's probably hosted on someone else's computer – but it's a piece of the web that belongs to you. If your host goes down, you can just move it somewhere else, because it's just HTML.
I think that most of us really want to offer the world
the proper response is to say no because everything we say yes to is, in fact, saying no to something else. No one can be in two places at once. No one can give all their focus to more than one thing. But the power of this reality can also work for you: Every no can also be a yes, a yes to what really matters. To rebuff one opportunity means to cultivate another.
Lists are menus
Over 10 months, 34,374 streetlights were upgraded across 13,275 street segments, converting roughly one-third of the city’s street segments to new LED fixtures that provide clearer and more even illumination. We assess the effect of these upgrades on total crime, violent crime, property crime, and nuisance crime. Results show a 15% decline in outdoor nighttime street crimes and a 21% reduction in outdoor nighttime gun violence following the streetlight upgrades. The upgrades may account for approximately 5% of the citywide reduction in gun violence during this period, or about one sixth of the 31% citywide decline.
One of my themes heading into this new year has been 'bias toward action.' For too long I've let myself get stuck in analysis paralysis.
Odds and ends from the last few weeks.
They’re the people who make things that are wonderful, original, weird, emotionally resonant, and authentic. As our feeds become flooded with instant, AI-generated content, the most dangerous thing you can do is play it safe.
Spend more time in rooms where you don't feel like you belong. Those rooms are all around you, but your fear of being “found out” holds you back from stepping into them. Remember: That feeling of uncertainty, fear, and discomfort is usually a sign of growth.
The problem certainly lies in a lack of funding. *“I said it at the Revolution.Aero event in 2022, just after our first flight, it is investment. Whether VTOL, CTOL, whatever, we are all pulling from the same pool of money. So, unfortunately it is the same problem for everyone right now,”* says Davis.
In his first term, Trump ran up the deficit with glee; and in the first 30 days of this term, his spending per day is $4 billion higher than Biden’s was a year ago. Go read Riedl for how Trump is set to bankrupt the US still further.
So here’s my question: what’s something you could do, right away – not in the tense spirit of Facing Your Fears, but merely by stepping gracefully out of the way, with all your usual overcomplicating nonsense, and letting action happen? “Life completely unhindered by anything manifests as pure activity,” the Zen teacher Kosho Uchiyama observed. What action could you simply decide *not to hinder* today? I bet there’s something. Go on. Act fast.
I really do think anyone could do anything if they work hard at it. You get better at things if you actually try them.
The 70% rule: If you’re roughly 70% happy with a piece of writing you’ve produced, you should publish it. If you’re 70% satisfied with a product you’ve created, launch it. If you’re 70% sure a decision is the right one, implement it. And if you’re 70% confident you’ve got what it takes to do something that might make a positive difference to the increasingly alarming era we seem to inhabit? Go ahead and do that thing. (Please!)
if we want to live in good societies—where most games are positive-sum and decency is the norm—there is no substitute for having a sufficient number of people who are actually good, or struggling to be so.
Marcus Aurelius would say that doing less “brings a double satisfaction.” You get to do less and you get to do those things better. As we enter 2025, consider what you might need to say “no” to in order to say “yes” to what matters most.
The sheer magnitude of potential and inevitable failure made me wanna hurl. But I was too chicken shit to even do that.
Once again, “government waste” is in the wind, & I’d like to take a moment to immunize you against this tired rhetorical loop. Not because it doesn’t matter at all; only because it matters so little, it shouldn’t take up any space in public discourse, or in your wild & precious mind.
If you write quickly, and don’t worry much about writing well, the quality of your writing will improve. That’s probably the best general writing advice I can give you: write as fast as possible. Go for at least 500 words per hour. Just hit the fucking keyboard.
Airbus workersʼ union Force Ouvriere had revealed that the company had informed employees hydrogen technology was 5-10 years behind where it needed to be for a 2035 entry into service. The ZEROe budget was being cut by 25% and �ight demonstration of a hydrogen-electric fuel cell propulsion system on an A380 testbed canceled.
If you actually look at Airbus's statements, they don't actually say that the technology's not going to be ready, they say the infrastructure's not going to
I’m a Spotless Giraffe
Don’t get me wrong, this country is in some deeply disturbing, uncharted waters right now. But the worst thing we can do is get so wrapped up in events beyond our control that we lose our ability to think clearly. We need to train ourselves to process information, stay focused, and take action where it actually matters.
What are you doing in 2032? Whatever it is, you’d best be looking up — because on December 22nd, an asteroid will streak through the night sky, making a very close flyby of the planet.
Hydrogen production uses a lot of energy. Green hydrogen, produced without CO2 emissions, is currently a more expensive option than production from CH4, which produces a lot of CO2. We want green hydrogen to compete on cost, not just vibes. We believe that correctly developed energy should deliver a green dividend rather than demanding a green premium, and that rapid mass market adoption depends on beating the incumbent polluters on price.
Whenever you write your deck and send it out I think you should actually think to yourself, “my competitors are probably going to read this one day and this will be forwarded widely” and if your response isn’t “so what!” or “that would be awesome” then I think you’re doing something wrong anyways.
When American announced their order they said they made a non-refundable deposit but didn’t specify what that means.
Video games are amazing, both viscerally, as experience machines, and conceptually, as possibility spaces. As the intersection of games and computers, they combine our distant past - ancient rituals that pre-date civilization, with our far future - kaleidoscopic glimpses of the various directions in which our world might go.
I’ve discovered a secret weapon for defusing those powder keg situations. A simple technique that can instantly reset the entire dynamic of a meeting gone off the rails.
It was the psychologist Alphonse Chapanis who first suggested that the high rate of crash landings might be the fault of poor interface design. The adjacent landing gear and flap control knobs were identically shaped. The pilots never stood a chance.
on a fundamental level, Biden defined his entire post-2016 political comeback in terms of averting the Trumpian threat to American political institutions. And he failed, catastrophically! It’s not just that Trump won, it’s that he has returned more powerful than before. It’s that we are genuinely much worse off than we would have been if Trump were narrowly reelected in 2020. It’s that Biden alienated an entire cohort of young people, along with many of the leaders of the most important companies in America.
Although we will never have perfect data to rule out any possible link, it seems very important to ask, *What is the evidence on the other side?* What is the reason to think there *is* an association? The answer is: nothing.
Silicon Valley’s best — our top operators, exited founders, and most powerful investors — are almost all on *bad quests.* Exiting your first startup only to enter venture capital and fight your peers for allocation in a hot deal is a bad quest. Armchair philosophizing on Twitter is a bad quest. Yachting between emails in de facto retirement at age 35 is a very bad quest.