Lybia leptochelis, the boxer crab, picks up and carries a pair of stinging anemones with its claws to ward off enemies, though this has also earned them the slightly less hardcore nickname of “pom-pom crabs.” They’ll fight other crabs if they’re short of these gauntlets, and if they only have one, will rip it in half, and the anemone will grow into a cloned pair.
the longevity of dinosaurs was such that we humans are closer in time to the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex, than the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex was to the iconic stegosaurus.*
Bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay hurdle sea sponges onto their beaks. Around three-fifths of dolphins are spongers in this area, and researchers think that they are doing this to protect their beaks—more technically, the rostrum—while foraging for sea urchins, crabs and other spiky bottom-dwellers that hide in the craggy seabed. They specifically select cone-shaped sponges too, which presumably sit more comfortably and securely on their beaks. One animal uses a second to eat a third.
The confession is doing structural work. If you admit the danger, you establish yourself as the one honest actor. And if you are the one honest actor, your safety claims do not require external verification. You have pre-certified yourself through the performance of self-doubt. The confession is not transparency. It is inoculation against scrutiny. Behavioral experts call this manufactured credibility. You spend credibility on cheap admissions, theoretical risk, solemn commitments, to accumulate it for claims that would cost far more to verify. The valuation, capability assertions and alignment progress.
In 1969, after a proposal to abolish the Electoral College by constitutional amendment passed in the House, it was only very narrowly defeated in the Senate, mostly due to the surprising opposition of strange bedfellows: the NAACP and Southern segregationists.
China takes energy security seriously. The enormous effort it has made to build low-carbon capacity—solar, wind, and nuclear—has to be understood as part of a broader motivation to make the country dependent on energy sources within its borders. Beijing is trying to mitigate the pain if it ever loses access to sea-lanes that deliver its oil. That is also why, in 2023, China added twenty times more coal-burning capacity than the rest of the world put together. It is serious about addressing issues in climate change, yes. But Beijing is not turning its back on its rich coal reserves. That also explains why China is so enthusiastic about electrifying the auto fleet: It would rather burn domestic coal than Middle East oil to power its cars.
in reality, prediction markets produce the opposite of accurate, unbiased information. They encourage anyone with an informational edge to use their knowledge for personal financial gain. In this way, prediction markets are the perfect technology for a low-trust society, simultaneously exploiting and reifying an environment in which believing the motives behind any person or action becomes harder.
The most valuable tools in this new world won’t be the ones that generate the most code fastest. They’ll be the ones that help us think more clearly, plan more carefully, and keep the quality bar high while everything accelerates around us.
What impressed Churchill during his trip was a quality of resilience, an “unshakeable faith in a golden future,” that he did not see at home. Unlike the English, Americans were not deathly afraid of making mistakes with their money because they believed that even if they were wiped out, opportunities to make it all back, and more, would continue to present themselves. “Before disparaging American methods,” he wrote, “the English critic would do well to acquaint himself with the inherent probity and strength of the American speculative machine. It is not built to prevent crises, but to survive them.”
The man who runs naked across a football field certainly disrupts, but he does not change the rules of the game. The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up. But there are no adults. We own this mess.
Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were, so that they gird the new order rather than resisting it.
Since non-believers don’t invent the future and speculators are always on a hustle, I often turn to practitioners to get a fix on the coordinates of reality. It has always helped me maintain a sense of pragmatic optimism when the rest of the world around me seems either overtly hyperbolic or depressingly pessimistic.
people are rushing too quickly into hyped technology not understanding how to best use the tech. We’ve seen this throughout history with naive database implementations in the 1980s, the dot-com bust of the late ’90s, and the mobile web of the early 2000s. Whenever there is hype, we shuffled into the easy path, forcing the tech into the product without understanding its weaknesses. We are more worried about being left behind than actually doing something of value. We get there eventually, but only after understanding that we were asking the wrong questions. So many companies fail figuring this out.
Gunpowder’s explosive force relies on combustion, effectively a very fast form of burning, which makes it easy to detonate with a lit fuse. But nitroglycerin does not burn. Its power derives from supersonic shock waves generated by atoms of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon rearranging themselves to form more stable bonds after a physical disturbance.
starting with business-level impact in mind doesn’t mean you are putting your customers last. It means that you are putting the commercial relationship between your business and your customers front and center, and letting that relationship guide how you learn about and build solutions for your customers.
I saw more clearly that we’re entering a dizzying age of duality in AI. Is AI going to kill our jobs or create more jobs? Yes. Did I technically build a feature in an app that has since been pushed to a hundred million users, or did I cheat my way through an assignment by leaning heavily on AI and other humans? Yes. Do I need deep foundational knowledge of software programming to be a successful coder, or can I skate by without even knowing the name of the programming language I’m using? Also yes.
Low-impact work creates more complicated products which, in turn, lead to more dependencies and conflicts to manage. Those dependencies and conflicts discourage teams from taking on work that touches on the product’s commercial core. Which, in turn, encourages more low-impact work.
Some low-impact signs to watch out for: Teams that are only accountable for operational goals like velocity or number of features delivered Teams that reverse-engineer their goals from the work they already have planned Teams that broadly resist estimating impact because it’s “too complicated” or “involves too many things outside of our control”
