Topic
weekend reading
- Weekend Reading: Readwise's Next Chapter, Reviewing Revolt of the Public, and the Helicopter State
📚 The Next Chapter of Readwise: Our Own Reading App Great to see this evolution of Readwise to enter the "read-later" app space. None of the options out there seem to be thriving anymore (Pocket, Instapaper, etc.), b…
- Weekend Reading: Robotic Bricklaying, Medici and Thiel, and Airtable, Roblox of the Enterprise
🧱 Where Are the Robotic Bricklayers? Brian Potter wonders why work as taxing and seemingly-mechanically simple as brick masonry is difficult to automate: Masonry seemed like the perfect candidate for mechanization, b…
- Weekend Reading: DeFi Yields, Cloudflare's Internet, and Standards in Logistics
📈 How Are DeFi Yields So High? This is a great primer on yield farming in DeFi from Nat Eliason. Seeing the insane 1000% APYs on some DeFi products, you have to wonder if it's a Ponzi scheme (hint: sometimes it proba…
- Weekend Reading: DeFi, Worldbuilding and Antifragility, and Shiny Exteriors
🏦 Understanding Financial Institutions Arnold Kling has an interesting point this week in reference to decentralized finance. He argues that for DeFi to work, we need folks that understand the moving parts on two com…
- Weekend Reading: Bubbles, the Magic of Hobbies, and Legitimacy
🗯 Well-Behaved Bubbles Often Make History Byrne Hobart wrote this piece in the inaugural edition of a16z's new publication, Future. On bubbles and their downstream effects: Bubbles can be directly beneficial, or at l…
- Weekend Reading: American-Dream-as-a-Service, Content Marketing, the Fifth Column Reading List, and More
👨🎓 The American-Dream-as-a-Service Antonio Garcia-Martinez interviews Austen Allred, founder of Lambda School. Lambda charges no tuition and builds its program on the ISA (income sharing agreement), in which you on…
- Weekend Reading: Liberal Science, Roam42, and JTBD Examples
🧠 In Defense of Being Offensive Jonathan Rauch on pluralism and the necessity of disagreement in the search for truth. His book Kindly Inquisitors was first published in 1993, but is as relevant today as ever. The bo…
- Weekend Reading: Digital Librarians, Tech Trees, and Alternate Histories in Maps
📑 Chief Notion Officer Julian Lehr is onto something here. All modern organizations are plagued with a problem of managing internal documentations. We have ample tools and keep squishing the problem from one place to…
- Weekend Reading: Non-Experts, Non-Linear Innovation, and We Were Builders
👨💻 The Rise of the Non-Expert Expert Vicki Boykis on the impossibility of true breadth and depth of technical expertise: What used to distinguish senior people from junior people was the depth of knowledge they had…
- Weekend Reading: American Growth, JTBD, and Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
📉 Summary of The Rise and Fall of American Growth Concise summary of Robert Gordon's book on Roots of Progress. 👨🏻🏫 Guide to Jobs to be Done Interviews A solid comprehensive, step-by-step overview of how to condu…
- Weekend Reading: NBA Bubble, Digital Homesteads, and Amateurs vs. Professionals
🏀 What I Learned Inside the NBA Bubble A good piece giving an inside look of what life is like for a journalist inside the bubble. I've missed most of the playoffs this year during this strange time for sports. It's…
- Weekend Reading: Collaborative Enterprise, Algorithms, and Fifth-Gen Management
💼 Collaborative Enterprise Elad Gil describes the trend of continuing consumerization of enterprise software. 🤖 Seeing Like an Algorithm Part 2 in Eugene Wei's series on TikTok. See part 1. 🏫 Fifth Generation Manag…
- Weekend Reading: Guide to SaaS, a Few Rules, and Starting a Company Now
📕 Stripe’s Guide to SaaS Stripe Atlas has a great batch of guides on various parts of company-building. 📜 A Few Rules Some great random clippings from Morgan Housel. I’m currently reading his latest, The Psychology…
- Weekend Reading: Software Builders, Scarcity, and Open Source Communities
👨💻 We Need More Software Builders, Not Just Users On the announcement of Airtable's latest round and $2.5b valuation (!), founder Howie Liu puts out a great piece on the latest round of changes in pursuit of their…
- Weekend Reading: Options Over Roadmaps, Ghost, and Spaced Repetition
🛣 Options, Not Roadmaps An option is something you can do but don’t have to do. All our product ideas are exactly that: options we may exercise in some future cycle—or never. Without a roadmap, without a stated plan,…
- Weekend Reading: Notes Meta Layer, PG, and the Trump Era
📝 A Meta-Layer for Notes Julian Lehr raises an interesting idea on taking notes: the importance of spatial context. 💬 PR Interviews Paul Graham Antonio Garcia-Martinez's newsletter kicks off with an interview with P…
- Weekend Reading: The First Corporation, Palantir, and Designing APIs
💼 Birth of the Business Corporation Anton Howes looks back to the 1500s and connects Sebastian Cabot’s planned search for a Northeast Passage to China to the birth of the first joint-stock corporation. 🔮 Palantir: O…
- Weekend Reading: A New Web, Future of Higher Ed, and a Ford Concept Car
🔗 A Clean Start for the Web Tom MacWright with some ideas for cleaning up ever-creeping morass of web technology: I think this combination would bring speed back, in a huge way. You could get a page on the screen in…
- Weekend Reading: Raising Less, the Adjacent Possible, and Fire and Motion
🧰 There Are More Uses For A Screwdriver Than You Can Calculate Biologist Stuart Kauffman on biological functions and the "adjacent possible": The unexpected uses of features of organisms, or technologies, are precise…
- Weekend Reading: Commercial Imagery, Proof Mechanisms, and Cinematic Universes
🌏 The Commercial Satellite Imagery Business Model is Broken My friend Joe Morrison's latest is an extended rant on the commercial satellite imagery market, and a plea to that industry to rethink how they might improv…
- Weekend Reading: Timeful Texts, Sumo Startups, and Canva Backlinks
🕰 Timeful Texts A new piece from Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen (beautifully illustrated by Maggie Appleton). Can we make reading a more engaging and interactive learning experience? This builds on previous ideas…
- Weekend Reading: Disintermediating Media, Boring Tech, and DIY Lights
📨 Disintermediating the media with… Substack? Jerry Brito writes about the growth of independent writing on Substack, prompted by a Mike Solana tweet: From a technical perspective, Substack does not belong on Solana’…
- Weekend Reading: Looking Glass Politics, Enrichment, and OSM Datasets
🐇 Looking-Glass Politics On private emotions being thrown into the public sphere: People escape the Dunbar world for obvious reasons: life there appears prosaic and uninspiring. They find a digital interface and, lik…
- Weekend Reading: Quarantine Talks
🛠 Attitudes, Aptitudes, and Progress Joel Mokyr’s talk on the most recent session of The Torch of Progress series. 🧠 How to Be a Neo-Cartesian Cyborg A recent talk from Maggie Appleton on the "building a second brai…
- Weekend Reading: Honeycode, Imagery for Utilities, and BigQuery in Google Sheets
🍯 Amazon Honeycode AWS is making its entrance into the low-code app platform space. 🌲 Using satellite imagery to prioritize vegetation management for utilities Geoff Zeiss on combining satellite imagery and spatial…
- Weekend Reading: Children of Men, Google Earth at 15, and Slate Star Codex is Gone
📽 How Children of Men Became a Dystopian Masterpiece I didn’t realize until reading this piece that this movie was a commercial flop. $70m gross on a $76m budget. I remember seeing this several times in theaters, and…
- Weekend Reading: The Hour of the State, Location AI, and Mapillary Acquired
💬 The Hour of the State or Explosion From Below? Martin Gurri is one of the best minds we have for the current moment. Make sure to subscribe to his essays on the Mercatus Center's "The Bridge." The American people a…
- Weekend Reading: Invading Markets, Sleep Deprivation, and the Observer Effect
🎖️ Commandos, Infantry, and Police Jeff Atwood on Robert X. Cringely's descriptions of three groups of people you need to "attack a market": Whether invading countries or markets, the first wave of troops to see batt…
- Weekend Reading: Dracones, Calendars, and Science 2.0
🐉 Hic Sunt Dracones Adam Elkus with a great essay on the current moment: “Is this as bad as 1968?” is an utterly meaningless question precisely for this underlying reason. People do not invoke 1968 because of the obj…
- Weekend Reading: Post-Truth, Knowledge, and Game Graphics
⚖️ The Way Out of Post-truth Another razor sharp analysis from Gurri: The collapse of trust in our leading institutions has exiled the 21st century to the Siberia of post-truth. I want to be clear about what this mean…
- Weekend Reading: Two Elites, DOS in VR, and Personal Brainstorming
🏛️ A Tale of Two Elites Martin Gurri on the growing similarities between west and east coast elites: The effect, I suspect, will be the exact opposite of the reactionary dream. In wild and seedy digital gathering-pla…
- Weekend Reading: Optionality, Pangaea, and Regulatory Disappointment
⚖️ The Trouble with Optionality A 2017 commencement address from Mihir Desai, critiquing the phenomenon of infinite optionality and lack of commitment pushed by modern universities: I’ve lost count of the number of st…
- Weekend Reading: American Production, On Bikeshedding, and Glyphfinder
🏭️ Why America Can Make Semiconductors But Not Swabs Dan Wang on American industrial production: Learning to build again will take more than a resurgence of will, as Andreessen would have it. And the U.S. should thin…
- Weekend Reading: Beastie Boys, Links, and Screencasting
🎥 Beastie Boys Story We watched this a couple nights ago. It's hard to tell how objectively good it was, but I loved the heck out of it as a decades-long fan. 🔗 Linkrot I'll have to try out this tool that Tom built…
- Weekend Reading: COVID Edition
⚗️ COVID and Forced Experiments Benedict Evans looks at what could return to normal after coronavirus, and what else might have accelerated change that was already happening. "Every time we get a new kind of tool, we…
- Weekend Reading: The State and the Virus, Future of Work, and Stephen Wolfram's Setup
🏛 The Individual, the State, and the Virus I agree with most of Kling's takes here on the role the state should play in the coronavirus crisis. 👩🏽💻 Mapping the Future of Work A nice comprehensive list of SaaS pro…
- Weekend Reading: Virtual Oncology, Waymo Data, and the Future of Programming
🧪 Virtual Oncology A discussion among physicians on how oncology is changing and will likely continue to evolve in the wake of the coronavirus. Testing, chemo, and other treatment steps currently considered to be sta…
- Weekend Reading: Readwise with Roam, WWI Naval Intelligence, and Interaction Density
📖 Readwise2Roam I'm liking so far the process of manually typing notes in Roam from highlights in my books. Something about it feels more efficient and leaves me with more meaningful, succinct notes. This could come…
- Weekend Reading: Cloud Services, Cities After the Virus, and Corona Care Map
☁️ Value of Cloud Based Services in Times of Crisis Bryan wrote this post about how Fulcrum is supporting the COVID response efforts. 🏙 Cities After Coronavirus I speculated a bit about this sort of thing earlier thi…
- Weekend Reading: Chess, COVID Tracking, and Note Types
♟ Chess Tom MacWright on chess. Reduce distraction, increase concentration Once you have concentration, you realize that there’s another layer: rigor. It’s checking the timer, checking for threats, checking for any of…
- Weekend Reading: LightSpeed, Kubernetes, and a Car-Free Market Street
📱 Project LightSpeed: Rewriting the Messenger Codebase A technical piece describing the goals for Facebook’s rewrite of the Messenger app. Interesting to see them avoiding their own React Native for this, and doing t…
- Weekend Reading: Tagging with Turf, Mars Panorama, and Kinds of Easy
🗺 turf-tagger Bryan put together this neat little utility for merging point data with containing polygon attributes with spatial join queries. It uses Turf.js to do the geoprocess in the browser. 🚀 Mars Curiosity Hi…
- Weekend Reading: Figma's Typography, Xerox Alto, and a Timeline of CoVID
⌨️ I Pressed ⌘B, You Wouldn't Believe What Happened Next An entertaining talk about the complexity of typography, from Marcin Wichary at Figma's recent Config conference. 🖥 Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto An tech…
- Weekend Reading: Landgrid, Quantified Self, and Tesla Teardown
🏘 Landgrid This is a product from Loveland Technologies, with a cohesive dataset of parcel boundaries provided as an API for application builders. More on their parcel data and how they do it here. 🤳🏽 My Quantified…
- Weekend Reading: Universe Sandbox, Mapping Math, and Japanese Companies
🌌 Universe Sandbox This is a physics simulator that replicates the physics of interstellar objects. You can simulate massive planetary collisions or supernovae in the Earth's solar system, in case you want to see wha…
- Weekend Reading: Software Dependencies, Conversational AI, and the iPad at 10
🛠 Dependency Drift: A Metric for Software Aging We've been doing some thinking on our team about how to systematically address (and repay) technical debt. With the web of interconnected dependencies and micro package…
- Weekend Reading: The Anti Portfolio, Downlink 2, and nucoll
📂 The Anti-Portfolio Bessemer maintains this page of companies they passed investing on. I like the idea of publicly acknowledging your big misses or errors as an organizational accountability tool. Some big names he…
- Weekend Reading: Enemies of Writing, Wealth, and the Superhuman Inbox
✍🏼 The Enemies of Writing A great piece from the Atlantic's George Packer, a transcript of his acceptance speech for the Hitchens Prize. At a moment when democracy is under siege around the world, these scenes from o…
- Weekend Reading: Internet of Beefs, Company Culture, and Secular Cycles
🥩 The Internet of Beefs Venkatesh Rao has assembled a most compelling explanation for how the internet polarization machine works: The semantic structure of the Internet of Beefs is shaped by high-profile beefs betwe…
- Weekend Reading: Soleimani, Prosperous Universe, and Roam
🇮🇷 The Shadow Commander This 2013 piece from Dexter Filkins gives an excellent background on Qasem Soleimani, an important figure now well known after his killing a couple of weeks ago, but prior to that hardly know…