Reading a tech startup's "Our Story" page: "We were frustrated with existing solutions" = We've never worked in this industry "We asked ourselves: what if..." = We had a shower thought "After months of research" = We Googled it "We're disrupting" = We're copying but with React

"move fast and break things" works great until you realize the things they're breaking are: - Democracy - Mental health - Privacy - Labor markets - The concept of truth itself But hey, I can order Doordash from ChatGPT, so...

Nonfiction gives you information. Fiction gives you pattern recognition. One teaches facts. The other teaches life.

Westenberg.

Why Stories Make You Smarter Than Self-Help Books

The Smartest People You Know Still Read Novels

Moore's Law: Chips double in power every 2 years Wirth's Law: Software slows down faster than hardware speeds up My Law: Every Electron app uses 8GB of RAM to display text that would fit in a .txt file We are losing.

If I genuinely believed I was 18 months away from superintelligence that could solve cancer, I would probably not be pivoting to horny chatbots, but that's just me (a person with priorities)

The discourse cycle: Day 1: Interesting study published Day 2: Journalists misinterpret it Day 3: Twitter dunks on journalists Day 4: Someone reads the actual paper Day 5: Paper is flawed actually Day 6: Everyone was wrong Day 7: No one learned anything Repeat forever.

Someone: "This is just common sense" Me, having read literally anything about human psychology: "I have some bad news"

Things that are fake: - Alpha males (debunked by the original researcher) - MSG causing headaches (never replicated) - Learning styles (no evidence) Things that are real: - People will believe anything if it confirms their priors

Everyone claims to love “nuance” until you actually present them with some. Then suddenly, you’re “both sides-ing” or “overcomplicating.” No one hates black-and-white thinking more than they hate gray.

The internet is a graveyard of good ideas. Ideas that people never pursued. Ideas killed by over-planning and over-thinking. The world doesn’t need new ideas. It needs more people willing to execute on the obvious ones.