003 | Explaining America's most boring sport to an alien

This is the final installment in the nine-part series. Full series: https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/animated-universe-in-verse Words by Richard Feynman (transcript…

Academy Award® Winner - Best Live Action Short Film 2023 BAFTA® Award Winner - Best British Short Film 2023 On a farm in rural Northern Ireland, estranged…

Watch movies like the makers intended by switching off weird smart tv settings.

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

Reid Hoffman is one of Silicon Valley’s grown-ups. After helping to found PayPal, he moved on to launch LinkedIn in 2002—an endeavor that turned him into a billionaire. He was an early investor in Facebook and now serves as a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock. In this edited interview with Tim Sullivan, of HBR Press, Hoffman explores his idea of “blitzscaling”—the discipline of getting very big very fast. In today’s networked landscape, the path to high-growth, high-impact entrepreneurship can be chaotic and grueling. It involves rapidly building out a company to serve a large and usually global market, with the goal of becoming the first mover at scale. And there’s no playbook to guide you, Hoffman notes. “You throw yourself off a cliff and assemble your airplane on the way down.” Hoffman emphasizes that blitzscaling is not just about growing revenues and the customer base but also about scaling the organization. People naturally focus on the first two, and “if you don’t get those right, then nothing else matters.” But very few businesses can succeed on those fronts without also building an organization that has the capability and the capacity to execute at a high level in the face of extremely rapid growth. The challenges, risks, and headaches of blitzscaling go beyond the operational; they can take a toll on organizational happiness. “But the thing that keeps these companies together—whether it’s PayPal, Google, eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter,” Hoffman says, “is the sense of excitement about what’s happening and the vision of a great future.”

Technology evolves from raw to complex to simple. From the fist to the hand axe to the hammer. From carts to the Model T to Tesla. From switchboard-operated phones to digital phones to smartphones. From SMS to Facebook to Messenger. From the crude to the cooked to Sushi.

A dozen things that drive my writing, research, thinking & actions

The legendary composer on the creative process, importance of deadlines, problem with software in arts and what is art actually for?

AI has its use cases, but it can’t solve a perennial mystery—yet

Though we talk about “the individual vs the collective,” as if that dichotomy is an eternal truth about the world, there exist groups that encourage divergence and healthy individuation.

A plagiarism

11/25/2023 10:58:48 PM

When he opened the seminar that prompted these essays, Fred Turner said that Silicon Valley built more than semiconductors or search engines or smart phones or sharing platforms. Indeed, he suggest…

Freya India explains how algorithms act as conveyor belts, transporting girls to dark and extreme places

The latest book from the author of At The Existentialist Café surveys seven hundred years of humanist thought.

The billionaire investor sees the apocalypse coming. Whether that's a good or bad thing depends on your tolerance for excitement.

Hemingway, Didion, Baldwin, Fitzgerald, Sontag, Vonnegut, Bradbury, Morrison, Orwell, Le Guin, Woolf, and other titans of literature.

How do we solve hard problems? A deep dive into one of the most influential theories of how people figure out difficult things.

Can you learn more efficiently by making things harder for yourself? These three strategies let you learn faster (even if it feels slower).

One of the unsung disasters of contemporary academic life is the death of the physical library. There are so many disasters in current year academia, I doubt as anyone else grouses much about this,…

A series of instincts, thousands of tiny adjustments, hundreds of drafts … What is the mysterious process writers go through to get an idea on to the page?

I have two exemplary pieces of 21st-century writing that I want to share with you. Neither is hot off the CMSes; they've both aged just a li

Byron Katie developed a process of self-inquiry which is called, The Work. It involves asking four simple questions about each belief that causes us pain.

Use the Ladder of Inference to explore the seven steps we take in our thinking to get from a fact to a decision or action, and challenge them.

The big lesson of survivor bias is that you should optimize for being a survivor. You can’t win if you lose – so learn to not lose. Most major failure conditions are avoidable with a little bit of foresight, planning, study and so on. Analyze failures and take conscientious steps…

The following are a set of notes from my tweets. I may eventually flesh this out into some sort of coherent blogpost.  Some preamble: “solve for distribution” is a phrase I came up…

There is an art to replying and commenting, and probably like 60-70% of people I’ve seen on the internet fail at it. The important thing is not to speak your mind, but to “support” the OP. You can support them by disagreeing well & you can “mis-support” them by agreeing…