Telling the time by sundial and history not only was custom, but also was understood as following God’s time. The idea of overriding traditional timekeeping because of the needs of the modern world seemed positively sacrilegious. “People…must eat, sleep and work…by railroad time,” wrote a contributor to the Indianapolis Daily Sentinel. “People will have to marry by railroad time…. Ministers will be required to preach by railroad time…. Banks will open and close by railroad time; notes will be paid or protested by railroad time.”
Reduce the bureaucracy to almost zero. Ideally, one person should have almost complete authority over day-to-day decision-making.
Keep the team ruthlessly small.
Whenever possible, only take on contracts where there is enough mutual trust with funders and subcontractors to work with them with a minimum amount of bureaucracy. If funder decisions cannot be made swiftly, the project is probably not worth pursuing.
I’d add: Build ambitious things on short timelines. And a bonus quote from Kelly Johnson: “The theory of the Skunk Works is to learn how to do things quickly and cheaply and to tailor the systems to the degree of risk. There is no one good way to build all airplanes.”
More typically, among today’s ~U.S. high school students~, 60 percent say they have considered killing themselves, and 14 percent have thought about it seriously in the past year.
Panda related merchandise made up half of all Atlanta Zoo merchandise sales — AJC
Between 1986 and 2018, 12.3M hectares of cropland in the United States was abandoned. Note that this figure does not include urbanization or development. Environmental Research Letters.
Musings
“It wasn’t that Dario had the best ideas, although he had plenty… he just ran 10 to 100 times as many experiments as anyone else. That’s when I knew he would do amazing things.”
My latest AI hack for getting out writing more quickly (company project docs, blog posts):
* Record an audio file where I dictate as much as I can about a project
* Add that + any other relevant documentation to NotebookLM
* Ask NotebookLM to write a first draft for me
* Edit that into the shape I want it
I still end up editing out ~50-75% but it gets me passed the empty page as quickly as possible. I estimate I turn a ~half day writing block into something I can do on a 15-20 minute walk + a little computer organization.
People only decide to buy something when they really, really care about it. Otherwise it’s not worth the friction of getting out your wallet.
“The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.” — Marshall McLuhan via Gordon
“If you're not living on the edge you're taking up too much space.” — Stephen Hunt via Ade Oshineye
Pisgah National Forrest, North Carolina, USA. My favorite place I visited in 2024.
I borrowed this concept from Tom Whitwell as a way of cultivating a habit of curiosity. You can read his 2024 version here. I didn’t make it to 52 things this year, but I stayed curious.
Transplant recipients can inherit memories from their donors — Adaobi Adibe
The March 2011 earthquake in Japan was so strong that it shortened the length of a day — Earth Sky via my friend Graham
Plants probably have memories. “On one plant, the touch-me-not, feathery leaves normally fold and wilt when touched (a defense mechanism against being eaten), but when a team of scientists at the University of Western Australia and the University of Firenze in Italy conditioned the plant by jostling it throughout the day without harming it, it quickly learned to ignore the stimulus. Most remarkably, when the scientists left the plant alone for a month and then retested it, it remembered the experience.” — Scientific American via The Browser
US coal power plants killed at least 460,000 people over the past 20 years — Melissa Lott
A banana contains the same amount of radiation that a person would get from living next to a properly maintained nuclear power plant for one year — New York Times via Jim Pethokoukis
Smiling was once considered a sign of drunkenness — Upworthy
Lebron and Bronny James are the highest scoring father and son duo in NBA history without Bronny ever scoring a point — @georgemikan
There are more deaths from alcohol in the US each year than all illicit drugs combined — Charles Fain Lehman
France last used the guillotine to put someone to death in 1977 — The Rest Is History
The Barnum effect is when people give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their own personality that are in fact general enough to apply to a wide range of people — Simon Wilson
Predator-prey models have two stable equilibria: one where predator and prey are in approximate balance and the other where both are extinct — Paul Kedrosky
A correction from my 2023 things I learned: working moms today probably do not spend as much time with their children as stay at home moms did in 1960 — Lyman Stone
“Soccer” as a word for the game of football came from the English, not Americans — Duolingo
Quantity precedes quality. Students graded on the quantity of the art they produce make higher quality art than students graded on the quality of art they produce — Perhaps apocryphal via Austin Kleon
Jalapeño peppers are getting less spicy over time —D Magazine via my friend Mark
Electrons within gold atoms are moving at 58% the speed of light — Will Kinney
Lake Superior is about the size of the state of Alabama — Wikipedia
The Milky Way builds between two and six sun-size stars a year — Quanta Magazine
The increase in driving due to 9/11 led to ~1600 more traffic deaths than otherwise would’ve been expected — David Epstein
A correction to my 2022 list: Men whose wives are diagnosed with a terminal illness are not significantly more likely to get divorced — Retraction Watch
In 1990, 5% of Americans had a passport; today that number is 48% — Devon Zuegel
Fernet Branca uses 75% of the world’s saffron — Eater
Making TB medicine sweet rather than bitter reduced a child’s risk of developing multi-drug resistant TB by over 50% — Bloomberg via News Minimalist
More than 50% of US couples now meet each online — Eric Klineberg
The Eiffel Tower’s lighting is protected by copyright — Tour Eiffel
If you think we’d have an interesting conversation about kelp, local news, our anything else, send me an email (jdilla.xyz@gmail.com). I’d love to meet you!
Smiling was once considered a sign of drunkeness. Upworthy.
☢🍌"A banana contains the same amount of radiation as a person would get from living next to a properly maintained nuclear power plant for one year"@NYTpic.twitter.com/pb4gF7m090
every decision i've ever made that wasn't an instant "hell yes" has been a mistake. every pro/con list is an admission the thing isn't worth it. the path God has laid out for you is so obvious it feels like getting bludgeoned with an anvil. no analysis makes a bad decision good
Be able to pull yourself to c-minus at just about any task
Be able to identify which parts of a project need an A+
Be able to find the people who can do an A+ on those tasks
Be able to work with those people and help those people work with each other
If you try and tell people 5 interesting things about your product / company / cause, they’ll remember zero. If instead, you tell them just one, they’ll usually ask questions that lead them to the other things, and then they’ll remember all of them because it mattered to them at the moment they asked.
Modern social media rewards information abundance, so if you find yourself with a product / company / cause that has lots of benefits, tell each of those story one at time. People are more likely to remember it and it gives you more to post.
78 percent of Christmas hits were penned before 1990. From Can’t Get Much Higher. Also: “According to a report by CNN, about 52% of adults said they celebrated Halloween in 2005. In 2012, that percentage had jumped to around 72%. Over a decade later, ~the New York Times related~ that that percentage has slowly crept up closer to 75%.”
Transplant recipients can inherit memories and preferences from their donors from Adaobi Adibe. More on this here and here.
Worth your time
Getting materials out of the lab by Ben Reinhardt in Works in Progress. Lots of this resonated for me in my work at Macro Oceans, even though our materials aren’t novel in the same way that say carbon fiber was in the 1960s. There’s an interplay between unique functionality (what the material does), scale (your ability to produce consistently), and price at each step along the journey. The art is picking use cases where your unique functionality isn’t blocked by your limited scale and high price.
I know from my own experience of studying martial arts in Japan that intense study brings rewards that are impossible to achieve by casual application. For a year I studied an hour a day three days a week and made minimal progress. For a further year I switched to an intensive course of five hours a day five days a week. The gains were dramatic and permanent, resulting in a black belt and an instructor certificate. Deep down I was pessimistic that I could actually learn a martial art. I thought you were either a ‘natural’ or nothing. Then I saw natural athletes fall behind when they didn’t practice enough. This, shamefully, was a great morale booster.
"Social media basically brought us to something like an oral culture" and more from Katherine Dee.
The Marginal Revolution Podcast on Crime in the 1970s. They were somewhat pessimistic as the episode ended, but it made me much more optimistic about America’s future. The resilience of our society is really underrated.
AR binoculars that automatically identify birds anywhere in the world. Stupid great product idea.
Observations
Product market fit provides gravity for a business. Before you have it, moving in almost any direction might be a good idea. But after you have it, you’re either going to double down on what’s possible or expand into the adjacent possible. All the moves are directly related to your current momentum.
“For an increasing proportion of software it’s more helpful to think of it as content rather than software” — Daniel Kuntz
“The difference is that I just get to be really stubborn about making things as good as we all know they can be.... But the real big thing is: if you’re going to make something, it doesn’t take any more energy — and rarely does it take more money — to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time. Not that much more. And a willingness to do so, a willingness to perservere until it’s really great.” - Steve Jobs
Sometimes caution is the riskier choice.
Politics is made up of both style and substance. I remember Tom Holland of the Rest Is History saying that Roman political parties didn’t break down on policy lines the way that ours do but on style: a conservative style vs a progressive style.
Risks are tackled up front, rather than at the end. In modern teams, we tackle these risks prior to deciding to build anything. These risks include value risk (whether people will buy it), usability risk (whether people can figure out how to use it), feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills and technology we have), and business risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business).
A great article on creative discontent from Celine Nguyen. One of my favorite David Halberstam quotes is “Being a professional means doing your job on the days you don’t feel like it.” He wrote one of my favorite books, Breaks of the Game, which is so good because it’s insanely well sourced. I imagine him getting up, he’s got a cold and it’s rainy. He would rather sleep in, but he pours a cup of coffee, gets in his car, and goes to have one more conversation with one more soruce. This one reminded me of him. Plus it lead me to the Ogilvy company principles:
Dogged determination is often the only trait that separates a moderately creative person from a highly creative one. Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. Before them, obstacles vanish into thin air and mountains crumble into atoms.
And:
Conclusion: We are what we repeatedly do. Being very good is no good. You have to be very, very, very, very, very good.
How to build an LLM judge by Hamel Husain. Notice the role of the taste maker?
Musings
When I was a PM on the YouTube Creator team, a super common interaction I had with top creators when something like this:
- Me: How did your channel get started
- Creator: I just started one day and it blew up almost from the first video
- Me: Really?
- Creator: Yeah.
- Me: Wow, that’s crazy.
- Creator: Well, it’s actually my third YouTube channel. I’ve had a couple of others that never really went anywhere.
I must've had this exact conversation at least 5 times. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
