Many wonderful public servants made valiant efforts and scored some great wins, but Democratic leadership did not make it a top priority to clear out the underbrush that jams the gears of government.
Every second for the viewer is just that viral video where the person picks between two pop stars. You’re always deciding what to pay attention to. The relationship between person-who-makes and person-who-consumes is paramount to long-term success, because if you are winning that game then you will be able to survive.
Things I learned
Eyes have evolved more than 50 times - Salon via Rohit
Musings
You can only avoid competition by avoiding good ideas. — Paul Graham
Product market fit provides a business with gravity
- It lets you know up from down — this helps
- But it also weighs on you; it’s tough to take the business in a direction that your current product / market / customer isn’t pulling you
A key skill for the future is going to be how to work with something that is:
1. smarter than you in many / most domains
2. sometimes wrong
A surprising amount of life is figuring out the right words to say in order to get what you want
A surprising number of pregnant women—about 1 in 2,500— are in denial about their pregnancy until birth
Fascinating, but extremely hard to read, especially as my infant daughter slept on my chest.
From my friend Oriana: The more males and females of a bird species look alike (e.g. cranes), the more likely they are to mate for life. The more males and females of a bird species look dissimilar (e.g. mallards), the more likely they are to be promiscuous.
The oldest bond in the world dates from December 10, 1624; pays €13.61 of interest a year. From the FT via The Browser.
Worth your time
Ben James on Fusion. Can’t wait to read the rest of his guides.
Some thinking on how companies get penalized for trying to be more sustainable by the Green Beauty Community. I do think that one reaction to the backlash on greenwashing has been some companies pulling back from talking about what they’re doing.
My coding stack as of December 2024 looks like this:
I keep a running Google doc that functions roughly like a PRD:
What’s the product — what’s the vision, where does it stand today, what am I building towards
What’s the current project — e.g., set up a system for taking a pdf, extracting the text, and then organizing it in a way that’s useful to the rest of my app
What’s part of the current project am I working on — at the moment, squashing a bug related to super large files
Any files that I can’t upload directly to the Claude project (e.g., my prisma database schema)
I have this connected to a Claude project so it stays synced. In this Claude project, I’ve got the ~5-10 most critical files for the project at hand also uploaded.
In my Claude project, I’ve got some background information about my tech stack (e.g., NextJS app, I’m using yarn, not npm, I’m on a mac) and some guidance (I want you to challenge my thinking rather than flatter me; ask questions if you have them; I prefer simple solutions).
I sit down and start chatting with Claude on whatever I happen to be working on (at the moment, uploading PDF files and extracting key data). I chat through different considerations and then create or update a file. I’m using Cursor as my text editor, but really only rarely using the AI features at this point as I was running into too many places where it would spiral off and start making changes I didn’t need and couldn’t follow. Claude feels better at staying on the task at hand. I probably won’t re-up my subscription when it’s done.
I usually code in 2-3 hour blocks. When one of these blocks is ending, I ask Claude to summarize what we’ve been working on:
What we accomplished today
What the next steps are
What the 5 most important pieces of context would be for them to get started again
I then paste this into my Google doc and I’m done for the day, picking back up at the beginning the next day.
The first part of the book was too dense for me. But when the book gets into how the Montessori classroom works, the role of the child and the role of the teacher, it really shines. It is a continuous struggle for me not to expect my children to behave as adults.
Some gems:
Children are taught to speed up their performance by an emphasis on completing a task or test accurately within a fixed time. The young child has, in his own view, all the time in the world. And he needs this time. And he needs this time. The number of perpetually harassed mothers who tell their children to stop dawdling and get it finished, whether ‘it’ be supper or dressing, is legion.
The action has merit above and beyond the actual physical fact of the child’s accomplishment. It has the merit of allowing the child to participate in the society in which he finds himself, not at the level of an adult, but at the level of an emerging individual. The importance of a strong sense of self can be seen when we think of the tasks which will be demanded of an American child of three in a few short years. The ability to work independently, to continue to accomplish, whether or not the adult is physically present at one’s elbow at all times, the ability to initiate work because one has had previous successful experience, are important learning skills for a child. Many children are so conditioned by adults that they will refuse to attempt anything new until they have been given either explicit directions by an adult or, what is more frequent, explicit approval to do so by an adult.
The rhythm of the child is a rhythm different from the adult. The child works at a thing until he is satisfied. The teacher has no foolproof way of knowing when this point is reached. The teacher must constantly guard against over-teaching and over-correcting—correcting a child who is unaware that he has made an error, intervening to show a child how to improve a skill he has barely learned. Respecting at all times the child’s right to help himself, and to solicit help only when he feels it is needed, requires tremendous patience.
Telling the time by sundial and history not only was custom, but also was understood as following God’s time. The idea of overriding traditional timekeeping because of the needs of the modern world seemed positively sacrilegious. “People…must eat, sleep and work…by railroad time,” wrote a contributor to the Indianapolis Daily Sentinel. “People will have to marry by railroad time…. Ministers will be required to preach by railroad time…. Banks will open and close by railroad time; notes will be paid or protested by railroad time.”
Reduce the bureaucracy to almost zero. Ideally, one person should have almost complete authority over day-to-day decision-making.
Keep the team ruthlessly small.
Whenever possible, only take on contracts where there is enough mutual trust with funders and subcontractors to work with them with a minimum amount of bureaucracy. If funder decisions cannot be made swiftly, the project is probably not worth pursuing.
I’d add: Build ambitious things on short timelines. And a bonus quote from Kelly Johnson: “The theory of the Skunk Works is to learn how to do things quickly and cheaply and to tailor the systems to the degree of risk. There is no one good way to build all airplanes.”
More typically, among today’s ~U.S. high school students~, 60 percent say they have considered killing themselves, and 14 percent have thought about it seriously in the past year.
Panda related merchandise made up half of all Atlanta Zoo merchandise sales — AJC
Between 1986 and 2018, 12.3M hectares of cropland in the United States was abandoned. Note that this figure does not include urbanization or development. Environmental Research Letters.
Musings
“It wasn’t that Dario had the best ideas, although he had plenty… he just ran 10 to 100 times as many experiments as anyone else. That’s when I knew he would do amazing things.”
My latest AI hack for getting out writing more quickly (company project docs, blog posts):
* Record an audio file where I dictate as much as I can about a project
* Add that + any other relevant documentation to NotebookLM
* Ask NotebookLM to write a first draft for me
* Edit that into the shape I want it
I still end up editing out ~50-75% but it gets me passed the empty page as quickly as possible. I estimate I turn a ~half day writing block into something I can do on a 15-20 minute walk + a little computer organization.
People only decide to buy something when they really, really care about it. Otherwise it’s not worth the friction of getting out your wallet.
“The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.” — Marshall McLuhan via Gordon
“If you're not living on the edge you're taking up too much space.” — Stephen Hunt via Ade Oshineye