Michael
@mmay3r
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Blows my mind how few people look out the window during flights. These are among the most spectacular scenes ever witnessed by humanity.
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To an LLM, a novel discovery is indistinguishable from an error.
This question is even more puzzling and salient given the existence of Deep Research.
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If something is too expensive for most people to buy, standardize and produce in volume. If later it becomes so cheap that people are no longer price sensitive, make an artisan version. This is an eternal commercial loop.
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Einstein worked out relativity with pure thought experiments and you need an A/B test to change some marketing copy.
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Remote international work is a bigger threat to the western middle class than automation.
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Another galaxy brain take in the wrong direction. Studio Ghibli IP is worth 1000x what it was worth yesterday.
Studio Ghibli lost out on millions today. Don't get me wrong, the world is far better with AI. AI empowers 8 billion people around the world - the teenager in Argentina, the aspiring artists in Kenya, the hobbyist in NYC. But AI companies also use IP without compensation. This
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"In the real world, you won't always have a calculator/computer". Interesting in retrospect that the kids were right that the teachers were full of shit.
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Uncertainty is a privilege. Who has the most certainty in life? A prisoner. Who has the least? An artist.
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A lot of successful people who say "work smart, not hard" worked like dogs to get established. Smart vs. hard is a false dichotomy.
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Your personal conduct is 1000X more impactful than your political opinions. People wish it were the reverse because opinions are cheap.
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Raising money is a good way to learn the weakest parts of your business plan. It’s like free consulting.
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You can predict the long term health of a relationship by whether each cut heals to 99% or 101%.
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If you learn from everything, then it starts to feel like everything happens for a reason.
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I firmly believe there’s never been a better time and place to be alive.
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The richer your parents, the less likely it is that you’ll end up better off than them. Explains the paradox of why it seems the upper middle class believes in the American dream less than the lower middle class.
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Early Amazon PR might be the greatest PR ever. Popular narrative: Amazon grew through word of mouth. Reality: Amazon grew through extremely aggressive marketing. Popular narrative: Amazon was a tech startup. Reality: Amazon spent 3X on marketing vs tech in first few years.
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The phrase "work / life balance" betrays an inherent bias. In what sense is work not part of life?. Refame it as "contribution / leisure balance" and see how you feel.
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Your mind automatically generates thoughts related to the information you consume. Be conscious of your information diet.
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How to make a viral tweet:. "People like it when you say what they are already thinking but you say it better than they were thinking it. It creates a feeling of intellectual clarity in people who had only vague feelings and biases before.".
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Exercising to look better isn’t sustainable, the daily effect is too small. Exercise to feel better. It works every day.
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If you think your opinions make you a good person, you’re bound to think those you disagree with are bad people.
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Sentence autocomplete is a great tool for improving your writing. Whenever the autocomplete is right, start over. You were about to say something so predictable it had little information value.
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This graph of happiness over age is like an inverse graph of expectations.
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The harder I work the more work capacity I develop. I’m sure burnout exists, but I doubt it’s caused only by hard work.
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The richer a society, the more it needs fasting holidays and the less it needs feasting ones.
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Politics is such a cancer that people want things to go badly for everyone when their opponents are in power.
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The best people to control wealth are those who created it. The second best are those who bought it. The worst are those who took it.
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Software created a winner take all economy. It destroyed the blue collars first. You didn’t care. When the hyper-efficient startups emerging from this crisis start hiring in bulk, they’ll hire the top 1% globally, not the top 10% in your tech hub. Then, you’ll care.
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Both books and advice are overrated compared to thinking really hard about a problem.
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Most of you should ignore advice to spend X% of your income on rent or Y% on transit. The only financial metric that matters is whether your dividends are larger than your expenditures. Until then, spend as little as you can and try to climb out of your serfdom.
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Probably the greatest form of privilege in the modern world is being a native English speaker.
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Distraction addiction is the disease. Smartphones are just a delivery mechanism.
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Sometimes it’s more efficient to make the mistake than to spend the time wondering whether it would have been a mistake.
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Money can only buy you some of your own time, but it can buy you a near limitless amount of the time of other people.
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Stripped of their information monopolies, the newspaper is just an opinion aggregator, school a babysitter, university a credential factory.
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If you're never intellectually confused, you aren't taking enough intellectual risks.
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Meeting your heroes and seeing their flaws is not a tragedy, it makes you more likely to try something heroic yourself.
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“I’m sorry for writing such a long letter, I had no time for a short one.”. This quote implies that the generative process is easier than the editing one. The myth of the artist as a generative genius may be false. More likely that top artists are geniuses in editing.
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Two rules for Twitter replies:. - “Yes, and” is better than “no, but”. - Don’t criticise lack of nuance, add it.
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If Twitter would have kept the 140 but added embedding of longer text, it would have become the largest blogging platform overnight.
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The greatest sin for the highly credentialed is thinking that’s enough to guarantee success. The greatest sin for the lowly credentialed is thinking that’s enough to guarantee failure.
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@GarrettPetersen Another solution is to make all expenses on children tax deductible, (including a portion of rent or mortgage).
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Software eats anything legible with sensors. We are sensorizing the world. Software is eating the world.
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For long term improvement, your daily goal should be to tire yourself in as many dimensions as possible.
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The internet doesn’t fracture truth, it reveals the many competing truth that always existed but were flattened by centralized broadcast technology.
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Advice for nearly everything: start slowly and maintain traction.
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Every tech billionaire has left the world a better place than they found it. The same cannot be said of many activists.
Successful tech founders would have far better lives and legacies if they competed for happiness and impact instead of wealth and users/revenue.
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Education has already been revolutionized. The only thing left is credentialing.
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We’ve got free, global, instant communication and all they could imagine is flying cars.
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The present only lasts a few seconds, we don't actually feel time passing. Therefore, the perception of time’s speed must be constructed by memory. I think time seems to pass faster as we age because we accumulate experiences and each day contains fewer novel/memorable ones.
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If school is more about compliance than learning, and it’s the primary filter for getting into the elite class, our elite must really be useless.
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As a society moves from scarcity to abundance, the cultural value that is most likely to be underdeveloped is restraint.
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People will always find a way to sell socially unacceptable things through an acceptable format. Examples:. Starbucks is fast food for the middle class. Political journalism is tabloids for the educated.
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The car you drive says nothing about you. How much consideration you pay to what others think your car says about you says a lot about you.
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Many books should be read twice, and most shouldn’t be read at all.
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Throw ten people in a room for three hours and by the end they'll all have a nearly identical subconscious map of the temporary social hierarchy that was formed.
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Industrial education flattens outcomes. It leaves idiots behind, pulls up the below average, pulls down the above average and stunts the intelligent. The smartest adults I know had nothing but contempt for their educations.
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Test the highly credentialed for ability to think for themselves and free thinkers for ability to follow through.
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Modernity should be defined as when our impulses went from being an asset to a liability.
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“Narcissism”: inability to hide one’s self-centeredness from others.
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It’s silly that I have an Econ major but never had to read Adam Smith, Keynes, Friedman, etc. Just their regurgitations in $200 textbooks.
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People are desperate for some sort of disorder, unfairness, external circumstance to explain a lack of thriving.
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Ivy Leaguers are selected by being really good at high school, possibly the most bullshit institution in American life.
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In an age of information abundance, the only things that really need to be taught are those that are counterintuitive.
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Perhaps my most impactful epiphany was that the information you consume is the building blocks for your thoughts.
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Aliens arrive on earth and declare we get to ask them one question. Some idiot yells “what’s your morning routine?”.
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Most Americans are phenomenally wealthy by historical standards, but don’t notice because everyone else is wealthy too (and they mostly care about relative status).
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Ford created 8 models in its first 5 years. Once they made the model T, they produced nothing else for 18 years. Classic iteration until product/market fit followed by rapid scaling.
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Almost everyone people look up to is abnormal in some important way, yet they strive to be normal.
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Good habits are personal capital. They require investment, but many pay off 1000X over a lifetime.
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You’ll never change someone’s mind by telling them that they aren’t allowed to think that way.
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Travis Kalanick probably did more for racial equality than your favorite activist.
"Black riders were 73 percent more likely than white riders to have a taxi trip cancelled and waited 6-15 minutes longer than white riders, all else equal. By contrast, ridehail services nearly eliminate the racial-ethnic differences in service quality"
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To-do lists:. 70 IQ - pencil and paper. 100 IQ - asana integration with email. Kanban board with a dozen statuses. Moving tasks to color coded blocks on calendar. 130 IQ - pencil and paper.
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Big business mistake that seems common today: optimizing something easy to measure at the expense of something hard/impossible to measure that’s more important.
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Remote work is the worst thing to happen in the careers of tall people.
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If all you consume is widely replicated information, you won’t even rebel in unique ways.
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The more people identify with a group identity the easier it is to manipulate them at scale.
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Most powerful energy in tech is dudes alone, hyper-focusing on a specific problem, muttering “fuck” under their breaths.
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