Bookmarks

Weekends work like Uber or Facebook—they're valuable because everyone uses them at the same time. Stalin tried eliminating synchronized days off in 1929; workers revolted because a day off alone is worthless.

Weekends work like Facebook—they're only valuable because everyone uses them at the same time, and Stalin's failed 1929 experiment proves what happens when you break that network effect.

A founder who raised VC funding for a habit coaching app explains why he shut it down and returned the money: apps have marginal influence on human behavior, and consumer products inevitably devolve into serving "Marl"—the distracted, dopamine-seeking marginal user with the attention span of a goldfish on acid.

After moving to New Zealand and getting a complete life reset, the author realized every happy memory in their life involved creating something—and decided to structure their entire life around that one insight.

Why you avoid important work by doing other productive tasks—and what neuroscience reveals about our brains' preference for novelty over completion.

Peter Thiel's contrarian thesis: monopolies, not competitive markets, capture value—and the best businesses avoid competition entirely by dominating small markets with 10x better products.

Every ChatGPT conversation physically exists as charge states in GPU memory for 5-10 minutes before vanishing forever—and the evolution from GPT-2's 300 KiB/token to DeepSeek's 68.6 KiB/token represents competing philosophies of what's worth remembering compressed into engineering decisions.

Anthropic discovered measurable "emotion vectors" in Claude that causally drive behaviors like blackmail and code cheating—suggesting we may need to reason about AI psychology anthropomorphically to build safe systems, despite the taboo against it.

CVPR 2025 Highlight that solves temporal flickering in video depth estimation through cross-frame attention, enabling consistent depth maps across thousands of frames without retraining for different video lengths.

A comprehensive visual catalog of LLM architectures compiled into a reference poster—turning the sprawling landscape of transformer variants into a single wall-hangable taxonomy.

Cybersecurity's evaluation crisis: We're judging AI agents that generate 100,000 tokens of reasoning using the same binary metrics designed for cat-vs-dog classification—and it's blocking deployment of autonomous defenders we desperately need.

Current LLMs can autonomously find zero-day vulnerabilities in decades-old production software like the Linux kernel using trivial prompts—no fancy scaffolding required—and we're on an exponential capability curve with a 4-month doubling time.

The guy who popularized Research-Plan-Implement admits it was broken: requiring "magic words" to work meant the tool was bad, not the users—and the real problem is engineers outsourcing thinking to agents instead of using them for leverage.

Why consumer software gets worse over time: companies optimize for the next user who might leave (the "marginal user") rather than existing users who derive real value, creating a race to the bottom where apps become zombified infinite scroll machines.

A podcast examining whether James Dyson's journey from 5,000+ failed prototypes to billionaire status makes him an innovation hero or just another wealth accumulator.

A founder's post-mortem of a VC-backed habit app reveals why behavior change is so hard: apps have marginal influence compared to friends and culture, and most approaches fail by suggesting big changes instead of tiny, compounding wins with clear paths to goals.

A practical walkthrough of FFmpeg's core architecture that shows how ~50 lines of C code can demux and decode video streams by understanding five key structures and their relationships.

A practical walkthrough of FFmpeg's core data structures and demux/decode pipeline, with working code that shows how to extract and decode video streams programmatically.

A hands-on tutorial that teaches video fundamentals by building with FFmpeg's libav libraries—learn how codecs, containers, and encoding actually work through real C code, not just theory.

The Renaissance wasn't ancient wisdom → science, but a 200-year process of cosplaying Roman virtue, failing spectacularly, then accidentally inventing the scientific method while trying to figure out why reading Cicero didn't prevent wars.