Board

The language wars were fun, but they're done

And How It Might Replace The New York Times

With skill stacking, you don’t need to be at the top to be extraordinary.

The Red Queen Effect explains why you need to work harder and harder just to stay in the same place. Here's how to escape the powerful trap that anchors us.

Plus! Google: Benefits and Retention; Tail Risk on Trial; Policy Homogeneity; Procurement; Density Redistribution; Crisis Hormesis; The Other Derivatives Narrative

A examination of when cash can anoint a market winner

When particles in the air on one side of the world can change the frequency of cyclones on the other, you know Peter, Paul, and everyone else is in the exact same boat Read this edition online

If you don't have network effects, what other asset can you have to create a massive online business?

"I’m trying to look at it as leveling up"

What do these have in common: Elon’s Twitter, ants, General von Moltke’s strategy, brains, AI, prediction markets, and Wikipedia? The answer shows the path to the future of democracy.

The pandemic may be over, but so is tech exuberance.

With the Great Exuberance behind us and more restructuring pain ahead of us, it’s clear that we’re back to the standard Rule of 40 in startup land. For several years, it was growth at all costs. Wa…

This week has been difficult. I won’t weigh in on what happened in Texas other than this: What Steve Kerr said. There are, however, things to be positive about. U.S. colleges are graduating millions of young people who will soon enter the real world and deploy their talents. This time last year I wrote some […]

In Linux, virtual memory is divided into user space and kernel space. The kernel is the core part of the operating system that serves as the interface between physical hardware devices and running processes. Kernel space protects that interface from faults (if the operating system itself fails, how does it recover?) and from malicious programs (trying to circumvent operating system security or modify another program). A diagram of Linux kernel space and user space from Wikipedia (source [https:

Language runtimes are fun again. Where can a language run? It's not a question of Linux vs. Windows anymore. Can it run in the browser (WebAssembly)? Can it run in the kernel (BPF)? Does it support x86 and ARM? Can you embed it in another language? Other important questions: How can it be packed into a container? What security boundaries does the runtime provide? First, what is a language runtime? You can think of the language runtime as the environment in which a program is executed. Everyth

So over the last couple weeks, I’ve been talking to VCs and founders who have and haven’t taken VC to learn whether it makes sense for Kinopio. I don’t think it does.

Today we did a research launch of DALL•E 2, a new AI tool that can create and edit images from natural language instructions.  Most importantly, we hope people love the tool and find it useful....

“I would do much better!” you think, watching someone give a presentation about a topic you are familiar with. “I don’t feel like smoking at all, I’ll definitely be able to quit tomorrow,” you say with a relaxed tone, right after smoking a cigarette. These are illustrations of the empathy gap: our tendency to underestimate ... Read More

We constantly make decisions that will affect our lives in the future. That future can be one hour from now (what’s for lunch?) or one year from now (should I hire an assistant?). Unfortunately, the brain has a hard time imagining what our future selves will need. Instead, it takes mental shortcuts and makes choices ... Read More

People using interrogative self-talk seem to perform better than those who use declarative self-talk. That’s the Willpower Paradox.

Recently I was sitting outside at a restaurant and my ears perked up when the gentleman at the table behind me started talking about entrepreneurs with his guest. When pressed by his companion as t…

Half-a-billion people stored files on Dropbox. Well, sort of. Really, the files were in Amazon’s cloud. Until Dropbox built its own. And threw the switch.

At age 39, painter John Baldessari took his entire life's work of landscape paintings and lit it ablaze.

Marco Arment, in Underscore Price Dynamics: This is the real reason why Apple doesn’t care about upgrade pricing: there’s no demand from customers. The market has shown that free apps will be downl…

We are pivoting from PKM and creating a new category, CKM. Our vision is to create a Collective Brain, a social network for learning, collaboration, and innovation.

How to create and use technical wedges strategically as a software business. Lenny Rachitsky of Lenny's Newsletter wrote a piece [https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/wedge] on finding a wedge. He defines a wedge as follows, > A wedge is simply a strategy to win a large market by initially capturing (1) a tiny part of a larger market or (2) a large part of a small adjacent market. He goes on to give examples across different industries that have been impacted by software: Doordash, Stripe, Uber,

Hope everyone enjoyed the Oscars last night (watching one twitter clip over and over doesn’t count). But we’ve got something much better for you today (better than the Oscars, not the twitter clip).

If your existence is all about work, and work goes to shit, then life goes to shit too. If you live for your hobby, and your hobby hits the wall, then your life crashes too. If everything else is waiting until you hang with your mates, and your mates fade away, then you fade too. Betting your drive to get up in the morning on a single ...