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The most powerful thing a product can do is give its user a premise.1 A premise is the foundational belief that shapes a user’s behavior. A premise can normalize actions that people otherwise might not take, held back by some existing norm

AirBnb. The premise: It’s ok to stay in strangers’ homes.

the idea of staying in strangers’ homes for short stays was doubted even by the founders. Crashing in someone’s spare room wasn’t unheard of, but it might be seen as weird, taboo, or even dangerous.

Bumble. The premise: It’s ok for women to ask men out.

The best way to follow through on a premise is to make it the core feature of the app. Bumble did, requiring that women make the first move on the app. A woman would be presented with a list of her matches and would have to make the first "move" before men could reply. This of course became a powerful differentiating feature and marketing hook.

Substack. The premise: It’s ok to charge for your writing.

Substack's premise aimed to normalize the hardest part of internet writing: getting paid. They aimed to show that independent authors could succeed at making a living (and subscription models aligned with this ethos). In doing so, Substack also made the less-hard parts of internet writing even easier. You could start a newsletter and keep it free until you felt confident about going paid. This not only normalized the end goal but also lowered the barrier to getting started.

A premise is valuable not only for “products,” but also for experiences.As I recently shouted, people still underestimate the power of giving a social event a premise. Hackathons, housewarmings, happy hours and the like are hangouts with a narrative. They have a good premise — a specific context that makes it more comfortable to do something that can be hard: socialize. (Side note: some of the best tv series and films are built on great premises.)

Premises work best on end consumers, prosumers, small business freelancers, and the like. Many two-sided marketplaces serving two of these stakeholder groups tend to have a good premise. For example, Kickstarter's premise for the creator might be: It’s ok to ask for money before you've built a product.

when they aren’t hallucinating, what they’re capable of is still impressive, though it’s a bit like watching a dog walk around on two legs — fun, but not exactly an efficient way to get around.

It was my brother, the lawyer, who pointed out that what I had experienced sounded a lot like a coerced confession. “I read enough transcripts of bad interrogations in law school to understand that anyone can be convinced that they have a very narrow set of terrible options,” he said. When I posed this theory to Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies coerced confessions, he agreed.

“If someone is trying to get you to be compliant, they do it incrementally, in a series of small steps that take you farther and farther from what you know to be true,” he said. “It’s not about breaking the will. They were altering the sense of reality.” And when you haven’t done anything wrong, the risk of cooperating feels minimal, he added. An innocent person thinks everything will get sorted out. It also mattered that I was kept on the phone for so long. People start to break down cognitively after a few hours of interrogation. “At that point, they’re not thinking straight. They feel the need to put an end to the situation at all costs,” Kassin said.

classics scholar Craig Williams writes that Romans didn’t use terms like “just friends” or “more than friends” to refer to spouses because “the implicit devaluation of friendly as opposed to romantic or married love would have struck most Romans as perverse.” At that time, he asks, “what could be more than friendship?”

Imagine being able to see through walls, or to understand the strength of radio waves emanating from you Wi-Fi router. You'll be able to see which piece of furniture or wall is blocking the signal from getting a reliable connection to that one device in your home constantly getting disconnected.

Imagine never losing your keys or wallet ever again. Like a hint in a video game, the headset will simply highlight its exact location in the house for you through the walls.

Not many people realize Vision Pro’s visual augmentation in passthrough mode is actually a step backward from human vision in many respects. Perhaps that’s part of the reason so many people greet this technology as dystopian? After all, who wants to volunteer to have degraded eyes on the real world? Even for floating windows or the promise of cool virtual worlds to visit, that’s a tall order

Android phones still don’t have this effect. It’s not because they don’t have high-enough frame rates or low-enough latency for touch input. It’s just that the math is off for putting everything together to create the illusion of direct manipulation. The physics aren’t quite right. It’s no longer about hardware specs (although that was a factor working against Android in the early years). It’s about craftsmanship

Strong technologies capture the imaginations of technology enthusiasts. That is why many important technologies start out as weekend hobbies. Enthusiasts vote with their time, and, unlike most of the business world, have long-term horizons. They build from first principles, making full use of the available resources to design technologies as they ought to exist.

Thinking in dialogue is easier and more entertaining than struggling with feelings, letters, grammar and style all by ourselves. Using AI as a writing dialogue partner, ChatGPT can become a catalyst for clarifying what we want to say. Even if it is wrong.6 Sometimes we need to hear what’s wrong to understand what’s right.

Seeing in clear text what is wrong or, at least, what we don’t mean can help us set our minds straight about what we really mean. If you get stuck, you can also simply let it ask you questions. If you don’t know how to improve, you can tell it to be evil in its critique of your writing

Just compare usage with AI to how we dealt with similar issues before AI. Discussing our writing with others is a general practice and regarded as universally helpful; honest writers honor and credit their discussion partners We already use spell checkers and grammar tools It’s common practice to use human editors for substantial or minor copy editing of our public writing Clearly, using dictionaries and thesauri to find the right expression is not a crime

Using AI in the editor replaces thinking. Using AI in dialogue increases thinking. Now, how can connect the editor and the chat window without making a mess? Is there a way to keep human and artificial text apart?

It seems like you almost have to say, "Look, you can't have rules about these general patterns of masculine and feminine without dishonoring those who don't fit those binaries." I think that's completely wrong. I think in the real world, we're perfectly capable of saying, "Yeah, this is the norm. This is how things usually are. There are some people who's not like that, and we can equally respect each other."

And I'll tell you that my gay friends, but also my trans friends, they're not asking me to be less masculine. They're asking me to respect them for who they are. And they'll do the same in return to me. And so in the real world, we don't live in these zero-sum games and we don't — and we refuse this admonition that we can't think two thoughts at once.