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Good tokens 2025-07-30

2025-07-30

Inspiration

That became my yardstick: I’d ask, “Is this dish good enough to come downtown and wait in line for? If not, it’s not what we’re after.” A chef can go years before getting another dish like that. We’ve been lucky: Hits have come at the least expected time and place. I’ve spent weeks on one dish that ultimately very few people would care about. And then I’ve spent 15 minutes on something that ends up flooring people like the pork bun.

David Chang on strange loops and food. “Is this good enough to come downtown and wait in line for?” is going to be my measuring stick for all future projects.

Things I learned

  1. In Switzerland, you are never more than 16km from a lake. About Switzerland.
  2. The English Monarchy didn’t formally release their claim on the English throne, originating with Edward III, until 1801 — after Napoleon had become dictator. The Rest Is History.
  3. A 2019 survey of 2,000 American adults found that 79% had made at least one drunk purchase and that they averaged $444 in drunk purchases per year. The Hustle.
  4. International adoptions in the US are down 94% since the peak in 2004. Pew

Worth your time

  1. Cate Hall and Patrick McKenzie on agency. Some notes for me: be willing to go places others won’t and do things others won’t do, including looking stupid and taking hard feedback. More from Cate here.
  2. Ben Reinhardt on Fat Ideas and False Negatives.
  3. A v0 friction log. I’m increasingly convinced that all these vibe coding tools are collapsing into a single hyper competitive category.
  4. How to achieve victory in Ukraine and the future of cheap UAVs
  5. The Bitter Lesson and the Garbage Can. This has me wondering what makes AI a research problem rather than an engineering problem?
  6. The Electric Tech Stack
  7. I’ve officially built an AI agent. And my HeyRecap build in public document.

Good tokens 2025-07-03

2025-07-03

The third day of the Battle of Gettysburg was 162 years ago today. An amazing reminder of the capacity of America to change and flourish. Glory, glory, hallelujah. His truth is marching on. Happy early birthday, America. I continue to love you and believe in you 🇺🇸 🎇

Worth your time

  1. If this doesn’t inspire you, I don’t know what to tell you.
  2. The cultural decline of literary fiction
  3. Tyler Cowen and Any Austin. My favorite CWT in a long time. New goal: to be the best in the world at something no one else does.
  4. The astoundingly high rate of child protective services reports (as high as 37% of children) seems to be real according to Maxwell Tabarrok.
  5. Uri has a request for posts. I personally would like to see the IUD one written. Also, IRB rules apparently apply to all research?
  6. You are 100% alive right now.
  7. The Zvi on school. And the likelihood of me home schooling / Montessori schooling

Musings

"The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury" ―Marcus Aurelius (via The Browser)

An entrepreneur is someone not limited by the resources directly under their control.

Brian Potter on the Apollo Program

2023-12-29

Two things I took away from Brian Potter's recap of the Apollo Program:

  1. The mixture between "complicated" innovation and "brute force" innovation; to make the second stage rocket booster light enough to be effective took both totally new design concepts and simply shaving off weight wherever it could be taken off.

Not every effort at weight reduction was solved through clever (if complicated) ideas like cold-strengthened aluminum or the common bulkhead. Much of the effort was achieved by pure brute force: parts would be fabricated, tested until failure, and then redesigned to be slimmer until they broke at exactly the required load (scaled by an appropriate safety factor).

  1. The interaction between new designs, new materials, and new techniques. New designs almost always require a new material or a new technique to be used.

Worth reading!