underscored

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My current 'job' is carved up and distributed into a bunch of different work horcruxes should any of my chosen industries die.

Chris Gayomali
2h ago

The number of apps with significant usage is actually going down in the age of AI, even as people are releasing floods of new apps into the world. The deeper story here may be that demand for many of the things that generative AI produces might be a lot more inelastic than we thought. The things we really want a lot more of may not actually be the things that generative AI is yet equipped to provide.

4h ago

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. To the large mind of the astronomer it is neither cruel nor kind, but only stupendous — and that is almost worse than cruelty.

10h ago

The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works. But this is hardly ever the case; he usually also has a job, a family, and other amusements. This is obviously a sign of insufficient seriousness.

10h ago

What we are, who we are, and where we are going, I do not know, nor do I believe anybody who says he knows, except, possibly, Beethoven, in the last movement of the last symphony. All I know is that we are here, and that we are aware of the fact, and that it behooves us to be aware — to pay heed. For we are not objects.

10h ago

The stock promoter sells sizzle, but the great investor buys the business nobody is talking about yet. Most of the time the exciting story and the good investment are mutually exclusive — the more compelling the narrative, the more the price has already discounted the future.

12h ago

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.

12h ago

It is a test of true theories not only to account for but to predict phenomena. We ought to accept a theory if it predicts things which observation subsequently confirms, and if no rival theory is equally successful.

12h ago

But I often remind myself that the topics that make people uncomfortable are usually the ones that matter the most. So instead of backing away, I did the only thing I know how to do — I tried to understand. I saw the mask drop, and for a brief moment, the polished answers disappeared, and I got to see the real person underneath.

1d ago

The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in its end, it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a convention of cartographers.

1d ago

There's an arrangement trick that he does in 'Do You Feel Like We Do' that I lifted for Rage Against the Machine. And it's basically where there's a long breakdown where the rock power goes away, the title of the song is said over and over again, then it comes crashing in with a completely monstrous rock power that raises the hairs on your arms and makes you want to jump around the room. Well, that's the formula for pretty much every Rage Against the Machine song.

1d ago

The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. Most people don't recognize the institutional imperative at work — the tendency of organizations to mindlessly imitate whatever peers are doing, regardless of whether it makes sense.

1d ago

We are compelled to feel that the world presented to our senses is not the world as it really is, but only the world as it appears to beings constituted as we are. The thing in itself remains forever unknowable.

1d ago

It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.

1d ago

Reading a novel don't always make us more moral, for instance—although my moral intuitions have been shaped by reading about the adulterous affairs of Russian aristocrats, and the political idealism of Norwegian PR consultants. The modest claim I'll make here is that novels and films have made me a better person, through the obscure mechanisms of style and form and story, and I'll never be without them again.

1d ago
stratechery.com
2026.23: Power Shifts

Three years ago Google looked hapless, scrambling to respond to ChatGPT, while Microsoft, thanks to their groundbreaking partnership with OpenAI, looked on top of the world. Now Google is pulling away in terms of market capitalization, which makes their decision to issue equity to Berkshire Hathaway a curious one.

1d ago

Even if one country is better at making everything, it doesn't have a comparative advantage in everything. That's impossible. Every country has a comparative advantage at something! That's why in the theory of comparative advantage, trade is balanced. In the real world, China's massive trade surplus means that trade is not balanced; much of the time, China isn't trading goods for other goods, it's trading goods for IOUs.

2d ago

We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.

2d ago

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.

2d ago

The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. A great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for it — and a mediocre company can be a fine investment if you buy it cheaply enough.

2d ago

We are always getting ready to live, but never living. The object of living is life itself, and yet we continually sacrifice it to something beyond.

2d ago

It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the man who hankers after more.

2d ago

The Logitech G512 X 98 lets you swap between mechanical and analog switches in an attempt to achieve the best of both worlds. Unfortunately, its solution isn't as well thought out as I'd hoped.

2d ago

When they built the mall in Athens, all the big stores left downtown, so downtown was open and available for people to do whatever they wanted.

2d ago

The therapy didn't help them metabolize alcohol faster. It restored the liver cells' intrinsic ability to withstand stress and regenerate, as if they were young again.

2d ago

"There's a hype cycle game that sometimes works. And one model someone gave me was B2B software, AI whatever, in 2026 is much more like crypto in 2021, than [it is like] B2B in 2021. The hype matters. The hype goes into the next round. When you have that round and you have the valuation, you get more investors, you get more customers, you get more employees. Hopefully, then, you're using that to build real things, and rinse and repeat. But there is a hype 'fake it 'til you make it' game that I think can work."

2d ago

In 103 years of operation, Valeo sold nothing other than auto parts. Now, suddenly, it's a concept stock. It's exciting when old-economy companies can add a billion euros by value on a hypothesis, but it rarely works out well for everyone.

3d ago

We are all of us the worse for too much solitude. A man who shuts himself up from the world falls into an exaggerated estimate of his own importance, and loses the power of measuring himself by his fellows.

3d ago

All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song — enchants us precisely because it swings open the door to a world distinctly other than our own, whose very otherness clarifies ours, returns us to it magnified and annealed.

3d ago

The greatest competitive advantage in business is a long time horizon. Almost all of the gains in any market come from people willing to wait longer than everyone else is willing to wait, and almost nobody is structurally set up to do that.

3d ago

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home. And within that home there are no sermons preached, no creeds recited; only the ancient, wordless liturgy of wind and stone.

3d ago

We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death. In fact, they are composed of thousands of days, each one a world in itself.

3d ago

When should you refuse AI's help, even when it is offering? When should you hand over the keys entirely? And what do you do when the AI is no longer just your assistant, but your reader, your critic, and the gatekeeper standing between your work and its audience?

3d ago

The album covers have a persuasive vintage look, even with some evident wear-and-tear on the margins, as if they had been part of a record collector's personal archive for many years. Sometimes the musicians even look familiar.

3d ago

If David Ricardo woke up and somebody told him all those jobs did get automated, and then asked him, 'What do you think the prime-age employment rate is in 2026?', I think he'd be surprised to be told it was the highest it's ever been other than 2000. What David Ricardo ended up missing is that you have these economics of structural change, where everything that got automated became cheap. People had more money to spend, and then they started spending it on services.

3d ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Real McCoy’s Edition

The goal was never to deliver a replica, but rather each style's ideal final form: The piece the wartime factory would have made if it hadn't been racing to meet a quota.

3d ago

When he says that he holds corporate consolidation responsible for just about every problem, he means it. A list of social ills Lynn has attributed to monopolists includes not just the cost of goods and services but also: "The vast and growing inequality of wealth, political power, and control. The rise of the radical right. The surge in racism and homophobia. The attacks on reproductive choice and marr

4d ago

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. But stranger still is the fact that it does — partially, provisionally, and always at the cost of uprooting what we thought we already knew.

4d ago

Risk means more things can happen than will happen. The dangerous investor is not the one who doesn't know what will happen, but the one who doesn't know what he doesn't know.

4d ago

The botanist who studies the flora of a distant country is compelled to admit that the very plants which seem most strikingly unlike anything in his own country are, when he comes to know them, simply variations of types with which he is perfectly familiar.

4d ago

We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.

4d ago

I don't know at what point performing for friends and rooting for your team falls over the edge into something darker. I don't know at what point we forget that the person on the other end of our comments is a human being. I don't know at what point our rage becomes more important than the object of our fury.

4d ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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