Betterment

Four ways to build fandom and rethink traditional customer-building approaches.

The New Yorker recently published an article about the insane lengths New Yorkers will go to secure a restaurant reservation. Of course it all comes down

There isn’t much of a correlation between how fast you swim and how much energy you put into it. In fact, drowning people burn plenty of calories but they don’t go anywhere. When we&#82…

They can carry us away, amplify our work or slowly change everything around us. These arcs can easily become invisible forces, pushing us to make choices and to ignore their origins or consequences…

The system can be changed and normal is not permanent Find the smallest viable audience Pick your customers, pick your future Outdated maps might be worth less than no map at all Reliability is a s…

Publicity is the hard work of getting media outlets and social media influencers to talk about you. Hustle for attention and mentions. Public relations is the much harder work of engaging with inte…

[written by claude.] Here’s the thing about ChatGPT that nobody wants to admit: It’s not intelligent. It’s something far more interesting. Back in the 1950s, a Russian linguist na…

Here's the simple rule to explain when you should build on your strengths or fix your weaknesses.

It doesn’t care whether you’re excited or filled with trepidation. It arrives, regardless. What an opportunity. Or a threat. Up to us.

Weeknotes 347 - Preventing the Moloch trap of collective intelligence through designing the right intentions. And more on last week’s human-AI-thing news and beyond.

Not smart is a passive act, remedied with learning, experience and thought. Stupid is active, the work of someone who should have or could have known better and decided to do something selfish, imp…

How to find machine learning projects that will get you hired.

Last week I charged $15,000 for work a better coder would do for $1,500 and I think you should learn these skills now that we have AI

Why I Erased 10,000 Notes, 7 Years of Ideas, and Every Thought I Tried to Save

Everything flows from the strategic decisions we make early in the process: Choose your landlord. The rent is due every month. The place we set up (whether it’s a retail storefront, a social …

It's the Fourth of July weekend. People are celebrating the birth of the nation with barbecues and fireworks. It’s also wedding season, and people are

“If it breaks, we’ll know how to fix it.” Old cars had an oil light, and that was about it. Often, we build things hoping they’ll work. But complex systems are more resilien…

Typesetters did not like the laser printer. Wedding photographers still hate the iphone. And some musicians are outraged that AI is now making mediocre pop music. One group of esteemed authors is d…

There two different times that we need to prioritize work and we should be using completely different approaches to that prioritization, for each stage.

This series of posts explores how we can rethink the intersection of AI, creativity, and policy. From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the ris…

Spend enough time inventing possible futures in your head and you won’t have any time to build the future we will all share. Time to get to work.

Game theory has a lousy name. When most people think of games, they think of commercial stuff for kids, like Chutes and Ladders or possibly Monopoly. But a game is simply a system where humans, fac…

Email is your most important online account, so keep it clean.

A sea slug sees far more colors than you do, and you probably see more than a profoundly color-blind person. Who’s right? We each carry our own version of reality, our own story about what ha…

Imagine you’re on a third date with someone you really like. You’ve taken her to your favorite restaurant – the one you take your mom to when she’s

That’s a complete reversal of how it used to be. Colleges used to be measured by how many books they had in the library. Access to courses was restricted. If knowledge was power, controlling …

At sea level, water boils at 100 degrees C. It doesn’t matter how much more heat you use, steam is what you get. It turns out that water this hot makes lousy coffee. Tea too. And an amp turne…

Verbosity is the new brevity. Google felt like a miracle. We could type just a word or two (“blog”) and it would magically guess what we wanted and take us there. This shortcut spread f…