A deep dive on how a clothing brand prices their clothes.
Ethan Mollick on Deep Research. I’ve been working with it quite a bit this week and generally speaking been impressed with it.
Musings
“All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen” — Sidney Lumet, via The Browser
An underrated truth about the modern world is that everyone reads their @mentions and sees who likes their posts
The Luka trade is a reminder that even at the highest levels, mistakes genuinely do happen. You would think that evaluating the market for one of the 5 best basketball players in the world would be an efficient market… but it appears that it wasn’t!
Reflecting on the ROI of marketing efforts I’ve done recently
Print isn’t that useful unless it’s with a writer with a voice (e.g., a substack)
Audio and video really make an impact. You want to be inside someone’s EarPods.
Speaking at trade shows is helpful in expanding your network
Asking good questions is more important than ever
On the modern internet, one should never be self congratulatory. It’s totally okay to accept compliments from your audience, but the moment you start saying or implying you’re great at something or have it figured out, you begin to sew the seeds of your downfall.
Noah Smith on China Talk. Interesting throughout but what I enjoyed most was him talking about the types of posts he writes:
1. Things he already understands that are topical (he can just sit down and write)
2. Things where he is going out and doing the research because he thinks something should be better understood
3. Things he is passively interested in and just collects links as he goes, so when it becomes topical, he can go back and find those things and quickly write them.
I think I can adopt some of this into my own work.
The short case for Nvidia, but also a fantastic explainer on how different approaches to AI work. I now understand what makes Groq special.
Musings
Goals:
I’ll never forget standing in your kitchen in Oakland, watching you juggle a toddler and two babies while making margaritas and asking you about your next venture - what problem you wanted to solve. You looked at me replied “I want to bring commercial super-sonic flight”
Pine needle tea has more than 100 percent of the vitamin C of orange juice — Nautilus
The value of returned purchases in the United States would make it the 16th largest economy in the world — Rohit
Musings
“Great problems have to be discovered; often the solution of the problem is only a tiny part of the story, most of it is really about discovering the problem.” — From Michael Nielsen, ~Quick thoughts on research:~ (found via Zheng Dong Wang)
OceanMade has announced pre sales of its Kelp Pots. These seed starter pots use kelp pulp to retain water instead of the traditional peat. The kelp pulp used in these pots is a byproduct of Macro Oceans beauty ingredient, Big Kelp Hydration. I’ve gotten a chance to see some of these up close and I’m really excited to see them coming together. It’s a small example of a big dream: using traceable, ocean farmed kelp products as an alternative to higher impact terrestrial sources. Due check them out if you’re a gardener.
Worth your time
Michael Lewis’s story about Chris Marks, a public servant who “led the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States”, is fantastic. Some gems:
At the height of the Vietnam War, a coal miner was nearly as likely to be killed on the job as an American soldier in uniform was to die in combat, and far more likely to be injured. (And that didn’t include some massive number of deaths that would one day follow from black lung disease.)
And
People facing a complicated problem measure whatever they can easily measure. But the measurements by themselves don’t lead to understanding.
And
Roof bolts were indeed more efficient and effective than timber supports in preventing chunks of roof from wounding miners. But they were expensive to install. The coal mine companies had, in effect, figured out how few roof bolts they needed to use to maintain the same level of risk their miners had endured before their invention
Noah Smith on Japaneseurbanism. Having zones that restrict certain activities rather than prescribe what can be done seems like a small change with a big impact.
The first awesome conclusion of the model does the eval is that we will achieve every evaluation we can state. Recall that evaluations must be legible, fast, and either a good approximation of a wanted capability or useful itself.
And:
Two years ago, ~Demis Hassabis enumerated~ three properties of problems suitable for AI: a massive combinatorial search space, a clear objective function to optimize against, and lots of data or an efficient simulator.
All of the world’s gold is estimated to fit in one 20 meter cube — BBC
There are more people under the age of 25 today in Africa than there are in all of Europe — Stephen Kotkin
Musings
All large scale changes should be presented as a return to the past.
I wonder what it would look like to restructure local government around an escalating set of reviews. Imagine filing for a building permit where:
The first level of the form is evaluated by AI with the ability to appeal
The second level goes to a human
The third level goes to a supervisor
The second and third levels become new evaluation cases. This already happens today at places like YouTube, but imagine bringing it to your local government.
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