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This week's token stream

2024-10-11

Things I learned: “the Milky Way builds between two and six sun-size stars a year.” Quanta Magazine.

My friend Alex Komoroske on Lenny’s Podcast. Alex is in the top 5 most influential people on my career in the past 5 years.

Henrik Karlson on how Jesuits and Montessori schools teach and scale culture.

The Swiss border is changing due to climate change.

“But the truth is that kids are more like artificial neural networks — they’re at a subtly different point in mind-space, they’re good and bad at different things than adults are good and bad at.” The Psmiths.

The story of how Dr. Zhivago got published. One of the most haunting books I’ve ever read. A reminder that civilization can collapse before your eyes.

How Jason Crawford chooses what to work on.

Speed Matters. “Being 10x faster also changes the kinds of projects that are worth doing.”

This week’s token stream

2024-10-04

How to make millions as a professional whistleblower. What a weird and interesting career path.

It’s time to talk about America’s disorder problem. One of the things that stood out most to me when moving back to the US from Switzerland was the amount of disorder that we tolerated as a society. This tolerance for disorder might not be entirely bad — America is nothing without its weirdos — but I’m not sure we realize the degree to which it is a choice.

Inventing on principle. Fantastic and through provoking talk about what motivates innovation. It has me wondering what principles I can commit to in this way.

How to succeed at Mr. Beast Productions. Includes a great 101 description of how YouTube’s algorithim works + a lot of tenacity.

How I failed. The CEO of O’Reilly Media talks candidly about the biggest lessons he’s learned along the way. Rare to get this much candor in one of these.

Meta smart glasses lead to real time doxxing. I don’t see anyway we can expect to unrecognized in the future. Better to accept it.

This week's token stream

2024-09-09

How the psychiatric narrative hinders those who hear voices | Aeon Essays - an exploration of the “Targeted Individual” community, people who hear voices in their heads. Weird, wild, and a bit scary.

How to beat AI at Go - humans are able to beat the best AIs at Go by finding failure cases they aren’t prepared for. This is the future of warfare.

Palmer Lucky profile: such a great reminder that anything is possible with hard work and determination. Similarly, Casey Handmer on how entrepreneurship has changed the way he thinks.

Scaffolding

2024-08-14

I’m really coming to appreciate the value of scaffolding in product development.

What do I mean by scaffolding? The structure that allows you to build the product effectively.

Some examples:

  • A group of early customers willing to give fast, high quality feedback
  • Sample inputs and outputs that allow you to verify quality
  • Analytics or telemetry that give you an early indication of success or failure

You set up scaffolding to help you build. It doesn’t need to be pretty, but it needs to be fast, cheap, and effective. At the end of the project, you take it down. Or maybe you incorporate it into the structure of the product, improving it to make it fit for purpose.

Sometimes the scaffolding feels like a distraction. I’m going to build a whole separate structure just to help me build? Only if you want to build it well.

The best projects I’ve worked on outline the scaffolding early. These are the support structures we’ll need to do good work fast.