When Tim Berners Lee talks about how he designed the web, he uses an analogy from physics, describing his process as a quest to find “fundamental laws” which can generate a desired system: One of the beautiful things about physics is its ongoing quest to find simple rules that describe the behavior of very small, simple objects. Once found, these rules can often be scaled up to describe the behavior of monumental systems in the real world. […]

DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives – they’re just worse versions of Google. The next Google can’t just be an input box that spits out links. We need new thinking to create something much better than what came before.

In October 2021, I ran a concierge search engine called Genius Search. That’s a fancy way of saying that I asked my friends to pay me $10/month to research an unlimited number of open-ended questions. I would write and send them a summary of each topic as quickly as I could.

My collection of things I've learned.

This doesn't bother me much because I

Two years ago, I began reading books in earnest. In that time, I’ve completed 310 books across a wider range of subjects, taking photos and reviewing each one on an instagram account (@elklist) so…