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Roman’s one, sweeping, obliterating eulogy blows up on the launchpad, and instead, Logan ends up with three different eulogies — one from his brother (Ewan), one from Kendall, and one from Shiv — each with their own vision of who he was and how to summarize his life. The speeches are tipped against one another — with Kendall’s intended as an opposing viewpoint to Ewan’s, and Shiv’s a softening of Kendall’s. In classic Succession form, though, every eulogy contains its own hairpin turns and attempts to navigate contrasting ideas. Even after Logan’s death, Succession refuses to land on any single idea of who the man was.

As ever with Kendall, there’s still a question about what exactly he’s doing in all of that water. Is it a wellspring or a flood? Is it birth or drowning?

“Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, the man he hired to create the network, saw a market that felt ignored and stereotyped when attention was paid. Like any good business — and journalism is a business — they set out to reach that market.

“Fox News had some good early ambitions. But fairly early on in its existence, the network pivoted far away from straight news and intelligent conservative commentary, and leaned heavily toward the loudmouths. And after that, it went from promoting the bloviators to platforming the outright liars. That was the moment the network completely jumped the shark and pivoted from presenting alternative viewpoints to presenting an alternate reality. This is Rupert Murdoch’s most meaningful political legacy—dutifully carrying water for Trump’s MAGA movement that banished real conservatism,” Lewis wrote. “Instead of elevating conservatism, Murdoch helped undermine conservatism as a serious philosophy, skewing instead toward tabloid conspiracy theories like birtherism and ‘rigged’ election allegations.”

Artists never complete a single, perfect artwork, and a single work never instigates an absolute transcendence in viewers. We may aspire toward this quasi-theological ideal, but art only has the ability to suggest the sublime. The real sustenance of the artistic is the scope of experience it provides, the cumulative sense of growth and cultivation of ourselves through art, a tendency toward a good that we can never capture but only assist in radiating itself and existence.

I quickly realized that my habits were more suited to going to galleries every week than to working regularly on longer pieces, that there weren’t very many shows I wanted to write about at length, and that a regular stream of blithe, off-the-cuff reviews would attract more attention than intermittent longer essays

Film, music, food and book critics write for a general public that can be swayed to spend their money one way or another, whereas the general public cannot afford to buy the art that is written about in Artforum.

Effectively, this is a next-generation step into computational photography. With quad pixels, you can easily see how the iPhone 14 Pro generated 12MP images from a 48MP sensor. It’s grade school division: 48 ÷ 4 = 12. But there is no 24MP sensor in the 15 Pro main camera. The Photonic Engine takes several images from the sensor for each photo, including a 48MP one for detail, and a 12MP quad-pixel one for low-light and noise reduction, then computationally fuses them together to produce a single 24MP image. Apple is having its cake and eating it too, merging the benefits of a sensor with many small pixels with the benefits of a sensor with fewer large pixels. You don’t need to know that this is happening, you just get more detail in your photos from the main camera.

We still believe that there will be a separation between the “application layer” companies and foundation model providers, with model companies specializing in scale and research and application layer companies specializing in product and UI. In reality, that separation hasn’t cleanly happened yet. In fact, the most successful user-facing applications out of the gate have been vertically integrated.

We predicted that the best generative AI companies could generate a sustainable competitive advantage through a data flywheel: more usage → more data → better model → more usage. While this is still somewhat true, especially in domains with very specialized and hard-to-get data, the “data moats” are on shaky ground: the data that application companies generate does not create an insurmountable moat, and the next generations of foundation models may very well obliterate any data moats that startups generate. Rather, workflows and user networks seem to be creating more durable sources of competitive advantage.

Some of the best consumer companies have 60-65% DAU/MAU; WhatsApp’s is 85%. By contrast, generative AI apps have a median of 14% (with the notable exception of Character and the “AI companionship” category). This means that users are not finding enough value in Generative AI products to use them every day yet.

generative AI’s biggest problem is not finding use cases or demand or distribution, it is proving value. As our colleague David Cahn writes, “the $200B question is: What are you going to use all this infrastructure to do? How is it going to change people’s lives?”

Here we argue that several—so far mostly unrelated—biases (e.g., bias blind spot, hostile media bias, egocentric/ethnocentric bias, outcome bias) can be traced back to the combination of a fundamental prior belief and humans’ tendency toward belief-consistent information processing. What varies between different biases is essentially the specific belief that guides information processing. More importantly, we propose that different biases even share the same underlying belief and differ only in the specific outcome of information processing that is assessed (i.e., the dependent variable), thus tapping into different manifestations of the same latent information processing.

A chain will always break at its weakest link, and there will always be a weakest link. No matter how tall the walls are, there will always be a snake—one that God can’t even save you from—hiding in your paradise. Fate is called fate precisely because it is unavoidable.

Hamartia, on the surface, may seem like the will of the gods, but dig deeper and you’ll find that it is your own habits—formed by luck, genetics, or conditioning—that determine your ways

If we can’t be immune to the attack of the unknown unknowns, if we can’t prevent unpreventable mistakes, then the best we can do is stomach it…otherwise, don’t try at all.

If your curiosity outweighs your discomfort around risk, write. If the worth of broadcasting your ideas to the world is heavier than the burden of doubt, write. Otherwise, you’re better off doing other things.

The men and women of the Senate might not need their government salary to survive, but they needed the stimulation, the sense of relevance, the power.

Perhaps Romney’s most surprising discovery upon entering the Senate was that his disgust with Trump was not unique among his Republican colleagues. “Almost without exception,” he told me, “they shared my view of the president.” In public, of course, they played their parts as Trump loyalists, often contorting themselves rhetorically to defend the president’s most indefensible behavior

The strategy Apple has achieved, as I see it: Pro models: cutting-edge chips, cameras, and materials; will be produced for just one year. Non-pro models: refined architecture using the year-old SoC and older camera systems; will be produced for 2-3 years after their launch year.

Stressing about a problem rarely fixes it. Try to bias towards improving things instead of whining about them. Or if you can’t fix them, forget about them.

It’s never the right time. Any time you catch yourself saying “oh it’ll be a better time later,” you’re probably just scared. Or unclear on what to do. There is never a right time for the big things in life: having kids, changing jobs, breaking up, getting engaged, married, moving in together. And no it’s never an amount of money, either. Err on the side of too early over too late. Related to that point, since there’s never a “right time,” it’s almost always better to do things “too early.” Your conception that it’s too early is just your fear, and once you dive in you’ll figure it out. Old people tend to regret the things they didn’t do, or didn’t do earlier. Not the things they did.

Beware of shadow careers. This idea comes from Steven Pressfield: “Sometimes, when we’re terrified of embracing our true calling, we’ll pursue a shadow calling instead. The shadow career is a metaphor for our real career. Its shape is similar, its contours feel tantalizingly the same. But a shadow career entails no real risk. If we fail at a shadow career, the consequences are meaningless to us.”

You have more time to build a career than a family. You can complete great work well into your 80s and 90s. If you want to know your grandkids as adults, you only have until your mid 30s to start a family. Every year you spend waiting is another year you lose with your future family.

The time will pass anyway. Maybe it’ll take you five or ten years to succeed at whatever you want to do. Well, those ten years will pass anyway. In ten years you can either have made progress on your goals, or still be whining about how long things take.

Most of the world is held together with duct tape. The last 5-10% of everything seems to get slapped together at the last minute. It’s just hard to see in any area where you aren’t an expert. Don’t worry about living duct-tape-free.

The faster you get something, the faster it tends to go away. Languages, money, influence, friends, the sharper the rise the faster the fall.

Money is a tool for freedom. The best reason to accumulate wealth is to buy yourself freedom from anything you don’t want to do, and the freedom to do the things you do want to do. Money is not an end in itself. If you sit on it and never use it, you’ve wasted your life.

Another water bottle won’t fix your hydration problems. A new note taking tool won’t make you a better writer. If you find yourself looking for a tool to solve a problem, you’re probably just procrastinating.

Host more events. Everyone wants to do more social stuff, but no one wants to organize it. Organize it. It’s not that much work, you’ll be much happier, and you’ll make more friends.

Get physical. Buy real books. Print photos. Write cards. Buy vinyl. Space is how you show yourself and others what you value. Minimalism is a horrible, dull trend. Fill your life with totems to what you care about.

Money can absolutely buy happiness. So long as you spend it on upgrading and expanding the things that make you happy, instead of using it to play status games or on fleeting experiences.

Advice only works in retrospect. You usually have to have experienced a failure or loss to understand the relevant advice. Hearing some piece of advice will rarely stop you from making the related mistake.

Be early. Get on trends early, try new things early, visit places early, learn how to develop the requisite taste to be a little ahead of everyone else. It’s fun and can be profitable.

Embrace the many things you’ll never do. Enjoy saying, “I’ll never learn Chinese,” or “I don’t need to visit every country.” Everything you say no to creates space for the most important things to say yes to.

You can handle more than you think. If you aren’t occasionally failing at things, you’re not pushing yourself. You only need to make a few great decisions per year. You only need to get a few big things right each year and follow through on them. Your life will be shaped by surprisingly few big choices.

No one is crazy. They just have different values and information than you. If you had their life experience, you’d probably think the same. The sooner you embrace this, the sooner you can empathize with people you disagree with instead of pretending you’re superior.

There are four signs your idea has legs:People pay you money: Several people start to pay for your product, ideally people you don’t have a direct connection toContinued usage: People continue to use your prototype product, even if it’s hackyStrong emotion: You’re hearing hatred for the incumbents (i.e. pain) or a deep and strong emotional reaction to your idea (i.e. pull)Cold inbound interest: You’re seeing cold inbound interest in your product

Every prosumer collaboration product, including Figma, Notion, Coda, Airtable, Miro, and Slack, spent three to four years wandering in the dark until they stumbled on something that clicked.

The idea that the future is created by flawed geniuses who happen to accumulate great wealth is outmoded and simplistic, and it encourages a flattened view of how technology is developed and whom it impacts. Just scan the list of sources Isaacson includes in the book: executives, venture capitalists, founders and high-ranking engineers. Yes, Isaacson spoke to “adversaries” like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, but not (at least per the list) to line workers, not to Jenna, not to anyone whose family member died in an Autopilot crash, nor anyone who tried to organize a Tesla plant.

the question of whether the past was better than the present, writ large, is useless because we can’t go back to the past. What’s past is gone. But it also isn’t really particularly coherent either. You can always just decompose out various elements and find arguments for what’s better and what’s worse, and in fact, you kind of have to.

Your mind should be flexible, but your process should be repeatable. Style is a set of constraints that you stick to. You can explore many types of constraints: colors, shapes, materials, textures, fonts, language, clothing, decor, beliefs, flavors, sounds, scents, rituals. Your style doesn’t have to please anyone else. Play by your own rules. Everything you do is open to stylistic interpretation.

Collect constraints you enjoy. Unusual constraints make things more fun. You can always change them later. This is your style, after all. It’s not a life commitment, it’s just the way you do things. For now.

Having a style collapses hundreds of future decisions into one, and gives you focus. I always pluralize tags so I never have to wonder what to name new tags. Style gives you leverage. Every time you reuse your style you save time. A durable style is a great investment.

if you want to edit your constraints, you can. It will be easier to adopt the new constraints if you already had some clearly defined. You don’t need a style for everything. Make a deliberate choice about what needs consistency and what doesn’t. If you stick with your constraints long enough, your style becomes a cohesive and recognizable point of view.