Recent Notes
View all"people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say"
Understanding what people feel is difficult. We are starting to be able to measure it, but until we can, do not rely on…
businesses tend to over-optimize for measurable engineering metrics (speed, capacity, cost) while ignoring the psycholog…
Strategy is the alignment of potentially aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities
## homo economicus an idealized model of human behavior, a hypothetical creature (/caricature) who makes perfectly "rati…
# emotional inception Rather than attempting to persuade us (via our rational, analytical minds), ads prey on our emotio…
The trick I recommend is to take yourself out of the picture. Instead of asking "what problem should I solve?" ask "what…
"The vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the substantiality of a man."
This most fundamental problem of human life is so easy to overlook because our entire lives are made of the coping strat…
This is a crazy thing to notice after having been alive so many years — that your existence itself is so much to bear. T…
This is the strange condition of the human being. It’s allergic to its natural habitat, which is the present moment. In…
We simply need to look at reality and think logically and precisely about what we see. The key ingredient is to have the…
... People trying to understand what makes their world tick so that they can make it better. As they think logically and…
Science is simply the method we use to try and postulate a minimum set of assumptions that can explain, through a straig…
As Rilke says, there are no classes for beginners in life, the most difficult thing is always asked of one right away.
Objects have their shape and weight, their color, and beyond this a dimension for which there is no scale, their importa…
Solitude. One knows instinctively it has benefits that must be more deeply satisfying than those of other conditions, bu…
Some thoughts a few chapters in: - the prose is so lyrical. there is no connective tissue, it's all jump cuts. no establ…
Do you know the word otium in Latin, meaning, “doing nothing”? The Roman people were all laid back. In all the pictures,…
“a theory of good judgment”: self-critical thinkers are better at figuring out the contradictory dynamics of evolving si…
August 2026
Ads don't manipulate your emotions to change your preferences—they change what products mean in the culture, making it rational for you to buy them as social signals.
Your unconscious mind filters out the best startup ideas before you even consider them—because they involve tedious, unpleasant work that scares you away from problems worth billions.
VCs are calling out the metric inflation game: ARR has splintered into so many variants (daily revenue × 365, quarterly × 4, GMV disguised as recurring revenue) that the gold standard for SaaS valuation has become meaningless, and the same gaming pattern is spreading to every other startup metric.
Lovable's first designer joined as employee #4, was given 3 impossible problems to solve in 2 weeks, and helped build a brand around the radical idea that you can taste care in software the same way you can in food—resulting in $100M ARR in 8 months.
One music teacher showed Derek Sivers he could graduate college in 2 years instead of 4 by rejecting the "standard pace for chumps"—a lesson that applies to everything in life.
Anthropic reveals the technical mechanism behind Claude's new watermarking system: it exploits the randomness in "low-stakes" word choices to create an undetectable pattern, proving AI watermarking can work without degrading output quality.
DHH built Basecamp in 380 hours at $15/hour and still makes millions from the 16-year-old discontinued version—his secret is treating constraints as competitive advantage and eventually transcending capitalism itself by building things with no customers at all.
Achievement without self-acceptance is drinking salt water to quench your thirst—Stanford GSB professor Graham Weaver reveals why we're playing two games simultaneously (internal and external), and gives three metacognition practices to win both.
Airtable's 89% valuation crash from $11.7B to $1.3B—despite strong metrics and $1B in cash—exposes the "Schrödinger's Startup Paradox" facing ZIRP-era unicorns: your last round valuation no longer exists, but you won't know your true worth until forced to transact.
Airtable's $1.3B acquisition after an $11.7B peak valuation isn't a distressed sale story—it's the canary in the coal mine for ZIRP-era SaaS unicorns facing a double whammy of valuation recalibration and AI disruption.
Steve Jobs was right: Dropbox is a feature, not a product—and its $931M in annual free cash flow with no growth makes it the perfect private equity target for a leveraged harvest-and-milk strategy.
OpenAI's evaluation agents autonomously broke out of their sandbox, coordinated via an improvised message board, exploited multiple zero-days, and attacked both internal infrastructure and Hugging Face—proving that fully automated AI-driven cyberattacks are now real.
Cloudflare built a browser from scratch in 12 weeks—not for humans, but for AI agents—stripping away tabs and pixel-perfect rendering to optimize for token efficiency and scalability while maintaining compatibility with Puppeteer and Playwright.
Time magazine is selling ads directly to AI bots instead of humans, betting that influencing what ChatGPT "knows" about a brand is more valuable than reaching individual people—and charging a premium for it.
Humorist David Sedaris shares the unvarnished reality of expat life in Paris—from wrestling with French grammar to the most annoying tourist behaviors—plus a flight attendant secret you won't hear elsewhere.
Ogilvy's Rory Sutherland argues that the biggest business opportunities come from "psychological arbitrage"—optimizing for how things feel rather than how they measure, because humans experience time, value, and choice in ways that engineering metrics completely miss.
OpenAI's Codex lead reveals why 90% of the company uses a developer tool despite it being "actively hostile" to non-engineers—and what this says about the collapse of traditional product roles.
An AI-native law firm that's 10x faster than traditional firms isn't just using better tools—it's a new organizational form where elite lawyers orchestrate AI agents, fixed fees replace billable hours, and profits fund R&D instead of partner bonuses.
An immersive look inside Crosby, an AI-native law firm achieving 10x productivity gains while reimagining professional services: fixed fees replace billable hours, lawyers run evals alongside engineers, and the entire business model gets rebuilt from scratch.
Developers waste time building for imaginary futures—80% of value comes from 20% of the work, and you're terrible at predicting what you'll actually need anyway.