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dwarkesh.com
Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time

Machiavelli could have left exile and worked for any number of different principalities that would have been eager to make use of his talents. Instead, he decided to rot in the countryside and compile his career's lessons about power, politics, and human nature into a book he dedicated to the very man whose new regime had tortured and exiled him, Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici.

— Dwarkesh Patel
48m ago
longreads.com
Name of the Father

"Not everyone loved Jarrod's family history," explains Burchfield, Sr. "Like Ali, half of them came to see him win, the other half to see him lose."

2h ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Regenerative Agriculture Edition

It is precisely the unstable transition window that kills most regenerative experiments, because farmers cannot absorb the income gap.

4h ago
theconvivialsociety
AI Is Not Conscious, But It Is Becoming Our Unconscious

The would-be athlete that hypothetically employs a machine to do all the 'menial' drills for them so that they can get to the really exciting parts of the game will, in fact, never get to them at all.

12h ago

To live without philosophizing is in truth the same as keeping the eyes closed without attempting to open them; and the pleasure of waking up is so much more beautiful than that of dreaming, that it must never be desired to have the eyes closed.

14h ago

The ability to sit quietly and patiently while everyone else is acting is not a passive virtue — it is the hardest-won competitive advantage in investing. Most of the damage investors do to themselves comes from the compulsion to do something when the right action is nothing.

18h ago

It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, as the confidence of their help.

18h ago

The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

18h ago
themarginalian.org
How to Live Fully: The Samurai Guide to Dying Every Day

There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A person's whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue.

18h ago
lennysnewsletter.com
🎙️ How I AI: Claude Fable 5 review & How Braintrust uses AI agents, evals, and CI to ship better software

Practical quality beats theoretical quality every time. In theory, a human engineer with infinite time and focus might produce better code than an AI agent. In practice, humans lose context over days, have decaying attention spans on hard-but-tedious problems, and skip benchmarks they know they should run. AI agents maintain consistent focus, run every test, and can work on problems continuously for days or weeks.

1d ago
upstartsmedia.com
Meet Elbow Grease, New York’s Scrappiest, Most Promising Startup Accelerator

In many accelerators, startups spend the program looking to ship and validate a minimum viable product, or MVP, readying it to a point to pitch to investors by demo day. In Elbow Grease, founders mostly knew how to use the various vibe-coding and agentic tools already in the market from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI; they could ship a product in a matter of days. Programming and workshops instead oriented around recruiting, sales and other aspects of company building.

1d ago
stratechery.com
Anthropic’s Safety Superpower

A world where models are interchangeable is one where models are commodities, while most of the value flows elsewhere. Right now that's compute, but in the fullness of time, whenever we have enough compute, the most valuable place to be in the value chain will be the place that has always been the most valuable: owning the user touchpoint.

1d ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Monday Media Diet with Patrick Kho

Elsewhere in London, crowds escape from the hard times of '94 by going all the way back to the amniotic womb of ambient, but here, in an opposite which couldn't be more extreme, the propulsive clatter of cyberdrums and the subdermal pulse of the bass triggers a furious frenzy of the feet, a jittery, skittery pandemonium, as if the entire crowd is willing itself into another future, fast-forwarding on and on until the tape of today runs out and suddenly, shockingly, it's tomorrow, a new tomorrow.

1d ago
ai-supremacy.com
The Business Engineer in the Era of AI

Inside the companies pulling ahead — Anthropic, Cursor, Cognition, Replit, and a small number of others — a different unit shape had emerged: five-to-ten people, direct CEO reporting, broad decision rights, hybrid roles, communication overhead at roughly one-tenth of a comparably-staffed conventional product unit.

1d ago
noahpinion.blog
Will China, Inc. be zombified?

Caballero, Hoshi, and Kashyap argue that evergreening was very bad for the Japanese economy, because it hoovered up scarce resources that better companies could have used to grow. With all of those crappy loans clogging up their books, Japanese banks couldn't lend to healthier companies. With big zombies like Daiei still able to employ large amounts of Japan's best managers, young scrappy upstarts were deprived of talent.

1d ago

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.

1d ago

Most people think that if they just had more information, they'd make better decisions. But the problem is rarely a lack of information — it's that we don't want to believe what the information is telling us.

1d ago

The world is so constructed, that if you wish to enjoy its pleasures, you must also endure its pains. Whether you like it or not, you cannot have one without the other.

1d ago

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

1d ago
personalcanon.com
i'm teaching 2 workshops this summer and you're invited

I use the word 'interlocutor' to describe someone who is invested in your work and helps you understand it more deeply, but is not directly involved in the way a collaborator would be. Interlocutors can help draw out what matters most to us (in a particular project, or in our overall practice).

1d ago
themarginalian.org
Nick Cave on the Two Pillars of a Meaningful Life

If we look with curiosity at people who do not share our values, they become interesting rather than threatening. As I've grown older I've learnt that the world and the people in it are surprisingly interesting, and that the more you look and listen, the more interesting they become. Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world.

1d ago

The human race has had long experience and a fine tradition in surviving adversity. But we now face a task for which we have little experience, the task of surviving prosperity.

2d ago

The single greatest edge an investor can have is a long-term orientation that isn't merely stated but is structurally enforced — meaning your capital, your clients, and your own psychology are all aligned so that you literally cannot sell at the wrong time.

2d ago

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts. To a man who is indifferent to beauty, the Sistine ceiling is only paint on plaster.

2d ago

It is not reason that gives us our moral principles; it is habit, custom, the slow deposit of human experience. Reason comes after, to justify or to criticize what instinct and tradition have already established.

2d ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Saturday Selection, Vol. 108

This clearly brilliant person catalogs everything they've eaten, read, and listened to that day, then posts it here.

3d ago
noahpinion.blog
Degrowth would make Europeans into "Europoors"

They see degrowth as a grand project to unify and reinvigorate the political left — a Big Idea to fill the hole left by the collapse of communism in the 20th century. Each buzzword or stock phrase is a shout-out to a particular faction of the European left — 'decolonial' leftists angry about colonialism, climate activists, old-line socialists still angry about 'neoclassical economics', unionists who want job guarantees, social democrats who care about housing and education and welfare, and so on.

3d ago

The boundary between living and non-living matter is not a sharp line but a broad zone of increasing complexity, and to ask where life begins is like asking where a forest begins as one walks from open country into woodland.

3d ago

The risk of paying too high a price for good-quality stocks is not the chief hazard for the thoughtful, enterprising investor — his chief hazard is the adoption of unsound principles or inapplicable methods under conditions of excitement and stress.

3d ago

We must not inquire too curiously into the price paid for the stability of the universe. The universe has always exacted a heavy price for its harmony.

3d ago

It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of intelligence.

3d ago
readtrung.com
FIFA's World Cup Ticketing Fiasco, explained

FIFA sold a crypto token that gave buyers the "Right To Buy" a FIFA ticket. This was separate from the ticket price itself. Many users bought the token (jesus, what a grift) only to later see the marked up price and declined their "right to buy". They didn't receive a refund. FIFA likely made "tens of millions of dollars" from the scheme.

3d ago
notboring.co
Weekly Dose of Optimism #197

The work is based on Japanese Nobel Laureate Shinya Yamanaka's eponymous Yakanama Factors, four genes that can rewind any adult cell all the way back to a stem-cell state. The problem is, a reset retina cell forgets it's a retina cell. So Life Bio uses three of the four factors (dropping c-Myc, the one most tied to cancer) and nudges the cells only partway back: younger, but still themselves.

4d ago
upstartsmedia.com
Using Living Brain Cells To Train AI, With TBC's Alex Ksendzovsky

"I think the pie in the sky, the North Star is real-time biological computing, where we're actually plugging biological networks or neurons into data centers for real-time inference, for things like intuition, for a personalized AI that's constantly learning, just like the brain does."

4d ago

The universe is a harmony of tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre. It is in the opposition of things that the finest attunement is found, and from things that differ comes the most beautiful concord.

4d ago

The lesson of history is that there have always been more buyers of stability than sellers of it. When uncertainty rises, the price of certainty rises with it — and those willing to sell certainty at that moment earn returns that compound for decades.

4d ago

We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.

4d ago

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

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