better doing

The problem with building good habits.

The author of this post was super into habits (a la James Clear’s Atomic Habits) until he had some sort of breakdown and now think it’s done him more harm than good. My hot take is that he was way […]

better doing

Did you climb the wrong status hierarchy?

Aaron Renn grew up in southern Indiana, went to Indiana University, moved to Chicago to eventually become a managing director at Accenture, and now believes he screwed up royally at the very start. He thinks he should’ve gone to Harvard […]

tech, startups, internet

Do AI companies work?

“In other words, the billions that AWS spent on building data centers is a lasting defense. The billions that OpenAI spent on building prior versions of GPT is not, because better versions of it are already available for free on […]

tech, startups, internet

How the semiconductor industry actually works.

One of the comments on Youtube for this interview is “Feels like you need a security clearance for this episode”. I absolutely loved this discussion between Semianalysis publisher Dylan Patel, Asianometry creator Jon Y, and podcaster Dwarkesh Patel. Highly recommended. […]

fun facts

Keep the units.

“Of all the cognitive tools our ancestors left us, what’s best? Society seems to think pretty highly of arithmetic. It’s one of the first things we learn as children. So I think it’s weird that only a tiny percentage of […]

fun facts

Why the US can’t build icebreaking ships.

I don’t want to overstate it, but it does seem like the inability to build important infrastructure is a pattern in the United States. “The Coast Guard has handled all U.S. icebreaking since 1966, and estimates that it needs 8-9 […]