Good Tokens 2025-12-19

In case this is the last Good Tokens of the year, have a great holiday season and end of 2025. See you in 2026!

A message from my sponsor

Christmas is just 7 days away. If you’re here, you already know about my dear friend Uri’s hit new game Person Do Thing, but out of love for the game and it’s creator, I have to say one final time, this is a perfect stocking stuffer and a great way to spend time with your friends and family without a screen. Highly recommended!

Worth your time

Human Invariant: “In simple terms, good work gets noticed by everybody who matters.”. On some level, I think this is a useful reduction. At the same time, I also think that HI underates the dance between creators and audiences. Most great things are to some degree co-created. Also, Human Invariant interviews a YouTube screenwriter.

On Bill Snyder’s career at Kansas State.. This level of obsession makes me wonder if I have What It Takes.

I feel I don’t spend enough time thinking about Esmerelda and how ambitious of a project it is.

The story of kelp pots (seed starter pots made from seaweed), a fun story in which I played a small part.

New to me: The Gettier Problem

The Lost Generation. This one is controversial because it deals with race and DEI, but if you can distance yourself from that a little bit, it’s really informative. It made me believe more in the Elite Overproduction Hypothesis.

The story of the fight over Romansch. Particularly enjoyable for me because the Engadin is among my favorite places in the world.

Things I learned

The average boomer will get paid out significantly more in medicare and social security than they paid in taxes — Russ Greene. Soon we’ll need a Boomer Corner.

This was the first year where no Pearl Harbor survivors were able to attend the commemoration ceremony.

Americans drive 3.3 trillion miles each year — Rohit

The EU makes more from fines on US tech companies than it does from taxes on all EU tech companies — David Fant

Lebron James has played against 35% of players in NBA history — CBS Sports. To be fair, he has played in 28% of the league’s seasons. I think this makes him the Queen Elizabeth of athletes.

Musings

I feel like the Grinch saying this, but we’ve got to cut down on the number of special clothing days (e.g., pajama day) that are happening in schools or daycares. All it does is create stress for me as a parent and I don’t get the sense that my kids actually enjoy these. Who is this for?

LLM corner

Some shameless self promotion: The latest episode of —dangerously-skip-permissions: How Penny Schiffer works. Penny is another technical product manager turned AI software developer who I think has really mastered creating with AI.

Dexter, Claude Code for researching stocks.

GenAI created ads outperform human created ads by 19%… unless they are disclosed as created by AI, in which case the performance goes down by 32% — Eric Seufert

The coming AI wildfire.

Dev Browser, a better tool for agents to view local webpages. I can’t wait to play with this one.

2025-12-18