I'm blatantly stealing this from Matt Holden who taught it to me, but I think about it all the time and I want a reference page to be able to point myself and others too.
When working on a team, there are three levels to work on:
Level 1: Agree on the problem to be solved
Level 2: Agree on the approach to solving the problem
Level 3: Agree on the details
Many disagreements happen when you skip these levels or give level 3 feedback when people are looking for level 1 recognition.
This is a book with a handful of big ideas:
1. There are considerable similarities between the UFO stories of the 1950s and 1960s (then current, the book was published in 1969) and the stories of fairies / angels and demons / other mythical creatures from before the space age
2. Those similarities are interesting even if you donât believe that UFOs come from extraterrestrial life
3. Even if these phenomena arenât real the way the Empire State Building is real, they still impact the world in real ways
4. The (then current) UFO stories are folklore in the making, which makes it interesting in its own way
Iâve never gone deep on aliens / UFOs so Iâm not up on the lore, but I think most of the points above are now mainstream?
Beyond this, there were a ton of stories about weird things happening, including a series of stories from 1890s America that just seemed bizarre. The one that will stick with me is the Mystery Airship of 1896 and 1897 where (potentially?) an airship floats around the western and midwestern states, occasionally stopping and having conversations with local farmers. You can choose to believe this or not, but either way itâs a fun wikipedia read.
On the whole, this increased my belief in the supernatural marginally.
Matt Holden and I are doing a YouTube show about building with AI called --dangerously-skip-permissions. The first episode is âHow did we get here?â. Matt and I have been having 1:1 conversations for more than a year now about what tools weâre using and how weâre using them⌠and now weâre having those conversations in public. I especially enjoy the way that Matt is able to connect whatâs happening with LLMs today with previous eras of computing innovation. Give it a listen if thatâs your thing!
OpenRouter has market share by LLM model. Interesting and unexpected in some ways!
On fact checking with AI. I really enjoyed this one. I have a draft blog post in my head called âVibe Craft: How to do serious work with AIâ but every time I try to write it, it falls flat. This is spiritually related to that.
Office building visits are up among people that live less than 5 miles from their office. As someone who made major life changes during the pandemic, I feel the pang of regret.
Musings
âA soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.â â Napoleon
âEveryone has a plan until they get punched in the face.â â Mike Tyson
Yucca man. Iâm a sucker for âdoes this Bigfoot like creature actually existâ stories (see season 1 of the Wild Thing podcast), but this one also has so many great Southern California places in it. Like taking a mini vacation.
Nuclear batteries. âA 157W Voyager-based RTG that launched in 1977 will produce about 88W today.â The clean up problem seems insurmountable.
Why Swiss Kids Walk to School Alone. This is one of the things that made me fall in love with Switzerland. They do this as 5 year olds! Part of it is safety but part of it is teaching agency. The walk to school is a part of the education. This should be our aspiration for American neighborhoods.
Your idea sets the ceiling for your videos potential and other good advice from Paddy Galloway.
Adding an age check reduced online porn traffic in the UK by 47%. Whether or not you believe it is right, I believe it is unlikely that ten years from now people will be unable to get porn online without verifying their age in some way.
Iâm in love with the conspiracy theory that the terra cotta warriors are fake. I donât believe it is true, but I love going down the rabbit hole. Someone make the definitive YouTube video on this!
Product / Market Experiments:âExperimentation is a skill developed via learning-by-doing, and angels have a skill advantage in that domain because of having more operational experienceâ. Filed under âwe all experiment too little.â