2025-01-24
Things I learned
“In 2022, adults spent an additional 99 minutes at home on any given day compared with 2003.“
— BuccoCapital Bloke (@buccocapital) January 12, 2025
Increasingly, we are living an isolated and remote existence. Great article from @DKThomp pic.twitter.com/jEeW2BI4G6
A thread on the Shroud of Turin. Worth it even (especially?) if you think the shroud is fake.
2025-01-17
Uri Bram on Noble Lies
Zheng Dong Wang on productivity. I’ll be reading through each of the documents on his list at some point this year.
Why did everything take so long?
Principles by Nabeel Qureshi
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
“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)
2025-01-10
A message from my sponsor:
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.
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
Materials we have run out of by Ed Conway
Noah Smith on Japanese urbanism. Having zones that restrict certain activities rather than prescribe what can be done seems like a small change with a big impact.
From Zheng Dong Wang’s fabulous 2024 letter:
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.
Chicken tikka masala originated in Scotland; kilts did not — Jason Crawford
Squirrels are becoming carnivorous — Smithsonian Magazine
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
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.
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat
— F. Scott Fitzgerald via The Browser
2024-12-20
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.
From Bringing Elon to a knife fight
New rules for media; from #19:
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.
Eyes have evolved more than 50 times - Salon via Rohit
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
2024-12-13
Already my first correction of my 2024 list: it appears that 75% of the world's saffron probably does not end up in Fernet. Thanks to Tom Whitwell for the correction.
Need a gc filled with people sending esoteric pieces of fact back and forth. For instance, Saturn's rings are younger than the dinosaurs.
— rohit (@krishnanrohit) December 8, 2024
Infanticide facts from Pacific Standard:
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.
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.
this is the japanese snow fairy 🤍
— Nature's masterpiece (@nature-view.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 5:53 AM
[image or embed]
Write shitty first drafts is another way of saying that quality is derived from quantity.