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Good tokens 2025-06-14

2025-06-14

Worth your time

  1. How to Live on $432 a month in America
  2. How to read coffee tasting notes
  3. Einstein and relativity. His path of generating the theory stood out to me: in 8 years of thinking about the problem, he cracked it when he signed himself up for a series of lectures where he had to articulate it to others. “Finally, in the week before his last lecture, Einstein cracked it. At the end of the week, he stood up at the Prussian Academy and announced to the world the general theory of relativity he had figured out just days earlier.”
  4. The SCARF Model: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness

Things I learned

More Romans were killed at Cannae than Americans in Vietnam or British on the first day of the Somme — The Rest is History

Musings

“To create anything worthwhile, you have to put God in it.” — Nabeel Qu

Good tokens 2025-05-27

2025-05-27

Worth your time

  1. People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies and China’s superstition boom.
  2. Using Claude to make weapons of mass destruction.
  3. Slate Truck is a $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen <- I’m very interested in this one, although I’d go with the SUV.
  4. And old post of mine about how recycling in Switzerland works.
  5. SEO for Chatbots. It begins. I guessI shouldn’t look down too much on this.
  6. Sacred vs. secular values. When people see an issue as a moral imperative, asking them to compromise on it with money offends them and makes a compromise less likely. Instead, the key is to offer respect and a compromise on a similarly important issue.
  7. The invention and commercialization of stainless steel.

    Commercial success demanded blending science and marketing; a steelmaker had to recognize not just the value of a new alloy, but its potential use. Benno Strauss, of the Krupp Works, later spoke about recognizing the potential of his stainless steel in plumbing, cutlery, medical equipment, and mirrors. He, like Brearley—who realized his stainless steel would be useful in spindles, pistons, plungers, and valves—was focused.

Things I learned

One step back, two steps forward

“Research on third-grade retention policies [holding kids back in 3rd grade] has found that students who are retained tend to have better long-term outcomes than those who are not” from this article on the Mississippi Miracle.

Trade laws of nature?

The distance elasticity of trade (the rate at which trade between two cities drops off as they get farther away from each other) seems to be the same today as it was in ancient Assyria.

Musings

The fact that exposure therapy works with phobias (e.g., if you’re afraid of airplanes, the cure is actually getting on a plane and seeing that it works out okay) makes me more sympathetic that the idea that one should act brave in order to become brave.

Good tokens 2025-05-16

2025-05-16

New around here

In an attempt to make my writing more LLM friendly I’ve added an llms.txt file and a /llms feature where anyone — you included — can copy ~all of my writing for use in your chatbot of choice. Like most things around here, I built this for myself, but perhaps it will be useful to you too!

Worth your time

  1. Four SeasonsRecomposed by Max Richter. Bewitching.
  2. Slightly rude notes on writing.
  3. How the tomato came to be.
  4. Reforming Naval shipbuilding.
  5. “The key thing to internalise is that the customer does not care about your writing, or about your product. A customer does not buy your product because they like your product. A customer buys your product because they believe it will turn them into a more awesome version of themselves. From Speedrunning the Skill of Demand. I also appreciated the insight that some detachment is needed to make great products. If it’s too personal, you can’t see it clearly.
  6. The best customer lead generation idea ever: personalized samurai swords.
  7. Long live prompt engineering.
  8. Using low roads by Veknkatesh Rao. Via my friend Robinson.
  9. A massive list of pricing tactics. Self reminder to reference this next time I have something I need to price. Via The Browser.

Things I learned

  1. Male snakes have two penises. From Nautilus .
  2. Non-linear ethnic niches: 90% of grocery stores in Detroit are owned by Chaldeans. 95% of Dunkin Donuts stores in the Midwest are owned by Indians, mostly Gujarati Patels. In New England and New York, 60% of Dunkin’ Donuts stores are operated by Portuguese immigrants. 90% of the liquor stores in Baltimore are owned by Koreans. Via Aporia Magazine.

Musings

“Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets” — Arthur Miller (via The Browser)

The hobby selection 2x2

2025-05-15

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When I read Range in 2019, one of the things that stood out to me was the role that hobbies have in the lives of high performers. As an example, Nobel Prize winners are 12x as likely to have a creative hobby than their scientific counterparts.

This really stuck with me. I became much more willing to engage in work outside of work. Side projects, hobbies, explorations: I welcomed all of these in my life, sometimes even when I didn’t feel like I had time for them.

On the whole, I’d say this has been a positive thing. Most of them haven’t gone anywhere, but some of them have, bringing people and opportunities into my life that I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t stretched to take them on. Moreover, some of them seemed to provide their own energy, and even a balancing effect to my life. But this wasn’t consistent. Other times, I felt exhausted or burdened by them, beyond the normal speed bumps that come with typical work.

What was the difference? I didn’t really know.

Then earlier this year, David Epstein (the author of Range) posted about this paper in the Journal of Vocational behavior that explained it for me. The authors compared the impact of hobbies on self efficacy, your belief in your ability to do things, and found a consistent pattern when analyzing the seriousness and intensity of the hobbies.

Put simply, if a hobby is very serious and very similar to your core work, it’s going draw you down. This should make intuitive sense: it’s drawing on the same energy you need for your day job.

But this isn’t the end of the story. The authors found that serious hobbies that are different than from your core work don’t have this impact. Having something you pursue seriously that is outside your focus can increase your self efficacy. Speaking personally, I find that hobbies like this help me take setbacks in my day job in stride by reminding me that it’s just one part of who I am and give me an outlet for my creativity when it’s stifled at work.

If you are going to do something in an area that’s close to your focus area, then it needs to be more casual. This is what makes hack week projects so fun: the chance to explore a familiar domain with fresh eyes and fewer constraints. The playfulness of it is the point.

Overtime, I’ve come to visualize this as a 2x2. I’m keeping it as a reminder for when I select my next project: what role do I want this to play in my life? Is it meant to build mastery? Offer escape? Recharge me? Stretch me?

If it’s not my main focus, I want to be intentional about how it fits. Does it complement my work or quietly compete with it? Does it give me energy, or siphon it off?

Notes on "How Will You Measure Your Life"

2025-05-12

I keep a semi-secret list of great reads that I periodically revisit during a period of change or when the spirit moves me.

One of my favorite on this list is Clayton Christensen's "How Will You Measure Your Life", which I revisited this week.

Some things that stood out this time:

Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And yet a shocking number of them implemented that strategy. The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.

And:

When I was a Rhodes scholar, I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.

And:

The lesson I learned from this is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time.

I think this is the first time I've read this one closely since I've had children. At the very least, the first time since my youngest one was born. The grind of parenting is much more real to me now than when I've read this previously. I've described my life recently as a "5 on 3 power play where I'm the 3 and it doesn't reset when a goal is scored." It's good to have the reminder to keep some of my energy for my children and not to spend it all elsewhere.