My Thoughts

2025

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Yak shaving - A less useful activity done consciously or subconsciously to procrastinate about a larger but more useful task. Or, any apparently useless activity which, by allowing one to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows one to solve a larger problem.
Interesting AI articles - 1, 2
Career advice I generally agree with
Be thoughtful with routine creation
Climate careers
50 years of travel tips
The things we take for granted
Developing a Deep Research query
Cash balance plans as supplement to 401k
Texas water supply and demand explained
I have a similar note system.
AI evaluation
Finding location data
5 different conversation types
How to validate others
We are significantly faster at receiving data (reading, listening) than sending it (writing, speaking). Also, author thinks that AI should function as an always-on command meta-layer that spans across all tools at the OS level.
Questions to ask during disagreement - “Tell me about other strongly-held positions you’ve changed as the result of a discussion like this one.” is a direct way to start a conversation about the argument you’re proposing to have. And “What sort of information would make it likely you could see this in a different way?”
Profile of Jack Tramiel - Inventor of the mass market computer at Commodore
Stop protecting yourself, embrace a change narrative, and get started.
Build slack into the system - something we have done.
Unquestioned traditions may become baggage. Make your thinking visible, involve the team, and document the trade-offs.
The ultimate employee
Data and defensibility
After Stanford physician Bryant Lin was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, he invited students to follow along.
How to stay curious
The deathbed fallacy
The Grant Study from happiness research - a stable income, focus on relationships and experiences rather than stuff, practicing acceptance, and small things like short commute times make you happier.
Sol Price - the grandfather of American retail.
Are you stuck in movie logic?
Pompeii: “In the enthusiasm to reach the [excavation] levels of 79 [CE], with wonderfully preserved frescoes and furnishings still intact, the faint traces of the site’s reoccupation were literally removed and often swept away without any documentation. This phenomenon should lead us to a broader reflection on the archaeological unconscious, on everything that is repressed or obliterated or remains hidden, in the shadow of other seemingly more important things.”
How to dig for music without Spotify.
How off-grid solar microgrids can power the AI race
Stop solving your team’s problems. Questions to ask: What have you tried? What — or who — is getting in the way of tackling this? What support do you need? What would you do if you were in my seat? Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Is there anything else I should know?
Self sabotage
Is it wrong to be friends with a bad person?
The intensity of AI founders in the Bay Area
The negative effects of lead
How to increase neuroplasticity
Data transformations can impact LLM accuracy.
How to build a memory palace
A profile of [Indian scammers]
The art of stability with Beth Lewis (Link 1) (Link 2)
Summary of book An Elegant Puzzle on managing high performing software teams
How to leave an event

2024

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Cool phrase - Felix culpa, a happy accident.
Free murder mysteries!
Shein competing with Amazon in fast fashion.
How to scale nuclear power.
Extreme brainstorming questions to trigger new, better ideas.
The best cheeses of 2023
Plan for awe
NYC guide
Deciding whether an investment is worthwhile, finding fulfillment, how to set a vision
The industrial sector is responsible for about 25% of global CO2 emissions, and most industrial sectors are already in a position to cut an average of 85% of emissions. Link
Decarbonization in 2024
Work out to help the 220 other versions of yourself in a week
How to write stuff no one else can. When finishing an interview, ask “Who else do you think I should talk to about this?”
Disorder is not a mistake; it is the default. Order is always artificial and temporary.
Death Spirals
Everything is Waiting for You
The birth of modern AI
Plotter artist
The origin of COVID-19 was more likely zoonosis than lab leak.
Tarpit ideas
Best old fashioned recipes
100 deep questions
Turn trash to ash - “The Phoenix can thermally reduce 4-8 tons of unsorted municipal solid waste – plastic, Styrofoam, food waste – into 3% ash every 24 hours. It operates without using fuel or producing toxic emissions, and at less than half the cost of landfill tipping fees.”
Do you have 1 year of experience repeated 20 times or 20 years experience?
Ambition’s gravity
Public speaking: reframe anxiety as excitement
When people imagine how things could be different, they almost always imagine how things could be better.
It’s more advantageous to structure decisions to be easily reversible than to take too much time trying to make the perfect choice.
Designing a delightful dark theme
How to avoid plastic at the grocery store.
Maine leading the way on legislation to extend producer responsibility for packaging.
101 additional advices
Growth and brand strategy consultant
Copying helps you develop your own style.
Are you hunting antelope or field mice?
Anthropic tries to explain how LLM works.
Take ownership of your future self.
Simple Solution to the Problem of False-Positive Publications.
Investigate further
You can rationalize just about anything.
Tracking the climate crisis with OKRs
Sean Ellis (Hacking Growth) recently completed a world tour and said NuBank is the most interesting company he found. Incredible organic growth and deep product market understanding.
How VCs become jerks
Alarmist narratives about misinformation might greatly exaggerate its prevalence and effects.
Multivitamins don’t seem to extend life
Naming a company
One page Event Websites
60 AI tools to start an online business in 2024
Avoid oxybenzone in sunscreen
Why small annoyances can harm us more than big disruptions: the region-beta paradox
Hardware for lucid dreaming
“It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.”
“The major reason for setting goals is to compel you to become the person it takes to achieve them.”
How to price a data asset
How to get out of the bog
Don’t put this off - take care of yourself
Intensive lifestyle changes often improve cognition in early Alzheimer’s
Profile of Palmer Luckey
Profile of Tom Wolfe
Profile of Alex Karp
Corrugated board grades explained
Thoughts on creating a personal CRM in Airtable
Which utilities are green button participants?
CDR Leaderboard
Cool website founded by guy complaining about NASA
Takeaways from Outlive
Sunset - Helps startups shut down
Content marketing and X presence growth ideas
Peter Thiel class notes
How the semiconductor industry actually works
Dataset of hardware synthesizers, samplers, and drum machines produced since 1896
Market prices are not probabilities of winning an election
Let’s terraform Nevada?
Israel is the world leader in desalination
Lessons from a first exit
Climate footprint calculator
Employee performance is closer to a Pareto distribution than Gaussian. This means low performers are 3x as common as high performers.
Words as weapons: How equity language derails education reform
Vaccine risks and rewards - Today’s vaccine schedule was created for convenience, and doctors recommend so many shots so soon after birth primarily because they are concerned that parents won’t return for future shots. Maybe the Swiss schedule is better
It does not take much effort to be a high performer
Startup to watch: Airship Industries
We can upgrade our transmission lines with a new type of wire: a core made of carbon fiber, surrounded by trapezoidal pieces of aluminum. This will double electricity throughput compared to legacy steel wires.
2024 album of the year compilation
Lessons for a new manager
Dwarkesh Patel’s notes on China
Large solar project in Arizona
An interview with Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox The best tacit knowledge videos on every subject
Having better conversations
How to make AI think like a focus group
The impact of BCL6 on maintaining muscle mass.

2023

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Cool word alert: Armamentarium - a collection of resources available for a certain purpose.
Anatomy of a good conversation
Pick a monster, not an enemy.
How to make friends as an adult.
Try marinating meat with mayo.
How to forgive yourself.
Advice on managing people.
Some thoughts on the evolution of boundary setting.
Improving indoor air quality
“The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet.” - link
You can’t reach the brain through the ears
The scents of history at AromaPrime
Avoid the creation of scar tissue
Satisficing vs maximizing and a method for making important decisions. Rocks, pebbles sand.
100 tips for a better life
Psychedelic first responders - Tripsit.me
Failure is a habit
The bad patient - “As the only person in a position to testify about how he or she feels, the patient is the victim, neutral witness, and scene of the crime.”
By limiting work to 4 hours per day, will give you more agency and cause you to enjoy the work more.
Questions
Reality is very weird
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Admiral Stockdale - “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end, which you can never afford to lose, with the discipline of confronting the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they may be.”
Sam Altman - How to be successful
How to communicate when trust is low
Monotype is monopolizing the font industry
Doing great work - “It will probably be harder to start working than to keep working. You’ll often have to trick yourself to get over that initial threshold. Don’t worry about this; it’s the nature of work, not a flaw in your character. Work has a sort of activation energy, both per day and per project. And since this threshold is fake in the sense that it’s higher than the energy required to keep going, it’s ok to tell yourself a lie of corresponding magnitude to get over it.”
Healthcare in India
Andrew Wilkinson -routines
Simple Fragrance Method Boosts Cognitive Capacity by 226%
Secretary problem
Book rec: Good Strategy, Bad Strategy - A strategy is a high-level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty, designed through recognizing the challenge (diagnosis), setting a direction to overcome it (guiding policy), and detailing steps to implement the policy (coherent actions) - link.
Try using the ladder of inference to reach a shared conclusion without conflict.
The Work by Byron Katie to examine your beliefs.
Consumers say they want sustainability. So why don’t their wallets show it?
Halfsies - A game of shapes and strategies.
Gates Notes on AI and introducing GPTs
Deep sea treasure hunters
Using AI to map scents
The carbon footprint of generating AI images is not good
Alternatives to nuclear power in East Africa

2022

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Attention to detail is necessary to achieve most things.
Tim Ferris favorite episodes: 353, 338, 329, 356, 415
Song Exploder favorite episodes: The Books, The Album Leaf
Ryan Holiday - 35 lessons
Taking action
Facing existential threats
Floor 796 of ever expanding space station.
Daily puzzles
Book recommendations from Hacker News* How Monday.com Wrote 1,000 Articles in 12 Months
Nuclear energy primer
AI music interpolation
Cultivating high agency
10 attractive behaviors
Be generous and feel good.
“The Catastrophe We Fear Will Happen Has Already Happened”
Andrew Huberman’s toolkit for sleep
The leaf blower parable
Climbing gear wish list: Kong Gigi
OpenAI Cookbook
Corporate turnaround

1/1/20

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Autobiography of a famous Instagrammer
The Crane Wife
Stories of escape
50 ways to be generous
Dopamine fasting
Subtract
Neumann’s charisma was intoxicating to be around. “If you had to go to war, you wanted him to be your general,” a former executive said. “His sense of himself is beyond human,” recalled another.
Convince a conservative of a liberal viewpoint by appealing to respect for authority or something else they value, and make sure they know that you are listening to them.
Story of the two lights
Be more careful, but more importantly build a better system
Do one creative thing every day before you start dealing with BS. For me it doesn’t seem like great advice, I like creative outlets as a break or as a focus. I don’t assign personal value to producing continuous creative output.
The psychology of being late. Overly optimistic, reluctance to change gears, undervaluing of self. Or just arrogance. Only way to change is to actually want it.
The cofounder of Wired - •Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be. Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe, and a skill you can get better at. It’s the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everyone else knows.
Minerals at British Museum
Wakaresaseya - Ending a relationship via paid sabotage
When an abuser is given a boundary, to them it will feel like abuse

7/4/19

Thu, 04 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

What’s America like locally? (Not too bad)
A shift toward empirical economics
We need more people - we should aim for the biggest population we can support, even if that means average happiness goes down.
Letters to Sons
Popularity should not be the only metric we use to measure value
Improve your SQL
Jerks buying up land
Hedge funds tracking private jets to find the next mega deal.
Every decision at an early stage forms the ethical trajectory of a company due to precedent.
Elizabeth Gilbert quotes
Depending on the person, late specialization can be a key to success.
Look at things from the perspective of the farmer
What’s the value of darwinism in the workplace? - “The relief of an easier life can inspire new biological forms just as powerfully as the threat of death.”
Jim Mattis - “A wise leader must deal with reality and state what he intends, and what level of commitment he is willing to invest in achieving that end. He then has to trust that his subordinates know how to carry that out. Wise leadership requires collaboration; otherwise, it will lead to failure.”
Spotify migration to Google Cloud Platform
John Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research
I was Caroline Calloway
Long walk place ideas: Japan, Madeira
Profile of Honnold

3/1/19

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Netflix losing a lot of money to subscription mooching (quantified by Mechanical Turk)
How China’s social credit system works
Quantum computing 101
My Grandfather Thought He Solved a Cosmic Mystery
Make your own AlphaZero based engine
Wealthy and miserable
Happiness is about an expectation of positive change
How to make the most of small talk - conversations based on observations, interests, shared experiences
Profile of a skateboarder
Building a community
How the information age leads to micro targeting, the fall of higher education
Traveling across the US by Amtrak
Investing in the apocolypse
Best hike in every state.
Freddish
Robert F Smith
Seth Rogen - “A lot of our career is just based on not being their biggest headache.”
Dandelion wish factory - Draw people into the experience, no spectators
Incel Plastic Surgery - “It’s easy to look back on something and say we shouldn’t have operated,” he tells me. But screening for someone who will never be happy is difficult. “My job is not to be a psychiatrist sitting in a chair. You’re serving a need, and you don’t know the depths of that need.” … He believes each of us is actually three people: how we see ourselves, how others see us, and how we actually are.
Someone to watch - Jacob Glanville of Distributed Bio. In 2012, at 31, Glanville took his code and left his prestigious job at Pfizer. He then founded Distributed Bio while also becoming the first Ph.D. candidate in computational immunology at Stanford University. Five years later, Glanville completed his doctorate, and business at Distributed Bio was booming. He now licenses his software and antibody library back to Pfizer and each of nine other pharmaceutical giants for around $500,000 a year and typically receives 2 percent of the profit from any drugs developed using them.
- How was he able to take his code with him? Doesn’t Pfizer own it?
We can no longer escape the past - teenagers should have a moratorium not on experience, but on consequences. What happens if one does not have these lessons early?
How elite athletes handle pressure - With repetition, stress can be transformed into fortitude.

1/1/19

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Words of the day - Gamine: A girl with mischievous or boyish charm, Burnish: To improve or make something more attractive. To rub metal until it is shiny.
Profile of Mackenzie Bezos
English woods
Techniques to get what you want in a negotiation might include positive small talk, light touch, offering the comfy chair, and a good smell
Amazon liquidation boxes
Cleaning up the garbage patch - people want a solution that does not require anyone to make a huge sacrifice.
George Soros is a pretty good guy.
The history of nut milk
How to raise generous kids
Unconventional techniques used to create a biography of Lyndon B Johnson
Programming zines
Ketamine for use in treating suicidal ideation
Using AI to create seasoning
China’s massive new silk road infrastructure project
Topic of conversation when travelling: Netflix
Shawn Achor - Cognitive afterimage. Book: The Happiness Advantage
Museum of Pocket Art - The Museum of Pocket Art began fifteen years ago with an idea that everyone should carry with them a small artwork in a pocket to enrich their day and share with others.
Karl Lagerfeld - “It’s chic, huh?” Brad said. “Yes, perfect for Dubai,” Lagerfeld said.
Pain is the fuel of addiction
Speaking a language idiomatically is very valuable because people sort others into “us” and “not us”.
“You think people start losing their mental ability when they get older. Nobody got a chance to say that about Buster. Buster, to the very end, seemed to be playing better than he had in 20 years.” “He gave everybody the same amount of respect and then he’d beat you.”
Frame the weekend like a vacation to be happier - stay present in the moment.
How to be successful according to Sam Altman

11/1/18

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Word of the day - Apotheosis: The highest point in the development of something.
Coffee rust is going to make growing coffee in Latin America impossible
“Intelligence, it has been said, is the ability to hold two opposing ideas at the same time and still function” - Source
Modern Meditation
Smell Expert - “smell memory kits” to preserve event
Is alkaline water BS?
PLants
Jigsaw mashups
Tech monopolies - Key argument of antitrust cases is consumer welfare, which historically has been measured by low prices. For tech companies where the product is free, this is not an effective metric.
Standing desks linked to varicose veins, recommended to sit and take walking breaks.
Bread in SV
Techniques companies use to get more for the same product - artificial scarcity, shrinking the product, bundles, pain avoidance, target different markets
Margaritaville - Residents hope not to be bored or alone.
100 books of 2018
Profile of Paul Singer and an opinion piece by him
Kojo yakei - aesthetic night time tours of factories in Japan
antique memes
Get to know yourself
Ski map artist, Priest interrogator, flop accounts
Environmentally oriented entrepreneurs - Tim Sweeney, Jason Fried
Single stream recycling is coming to an end
Conversational skillz

9/1/18

Sat, 01 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Antibiotics not becoming ineffective from overuse, but from use of cleaning agents, toothpaste, etc.
A profile of cruise ship entertainers
Lego searching for environmentally friendly plastic
Sun Microsystems cofounder Vinod Khosla tries to protect property rights on principle from his purple lair. Also recommends book Lying by Sam Harris
History of watermelon racist stereotype: it emerged after the Civil War when free black people grew, ate, and sold watermelons, and in doing so made the fruit a symbol of their freedom. Southern whites, threatened by blacks’ newfound freedom, responded by making the fruit a symbol of black people’s perceived uncleanliness, laziness, childishness, and unwanted public presence.
Market segmentation explained
- Don’t ever offer an Unlimited price tier
- List prices on your website, don’t allow reverse segmenting to happen
David Foster Wallace
Science of sleep
Coding zines and interactive explanations
Why you should throw your children’s art away
Ticketmaster enabling scalpers to succeed with its TradeDesk platform.
Effect of a $15 minimum wage in California - no sources cited