How to ask for help. “There is only one principle. Put yourself in their mind.” The whole piece is a checklist for asking strangers for help without making it weird: show you are serious, give tight context, make the ask […]
11 universal and objective truths about making friends. “Also, when you’ve just moved to a new city, you have to say “yes” to everything.” ~ learn more
People are bad at picking health plan. “They spent 24% more than they had, with a majority of employees picking a plan for which a strictly better version existed.” I am not sure that I’ve always (or ever?) picked the […]
AI confidence theater. “So I started asking a simple question whenever someone told me AI had changed their life: ‘Cool. Show me.’” Elena Verna’s point: most “life-changing” AI workflows are just decent time-savers dressed up like miracles, and the hype […]
The critical mass theory of Al search. “Now the funnel collapses. The person asks a question and gets an answer. One answer. Maybe three.” This is a good article on the topic of AI search by a former colleague who […]
How this Texan Startup Ranch plans to save America. From Ashlee Vance: “A group of twenty-somethings has taken over a 1,200 acre Texas ranch and is trying to turn it into the next Shenzhen. It’s called Proto-Town, and this is […]
Chinese automakers in Detroit. “No one answers a knock on SAIC’s locked office door. It’s not possible to leave the company a phone message unless the caller has an extension, but no phone directory is offered.” Chinese automakers cannot sell […]
Pigeons sense magnetic forces in their livers to navigate. “We found by far the strongest magnetic response in liver tissue,” which points to iron-loaded liver macrophages acting like a compass. When researchers depleted those cells, pigeons could still get home […]
The “women are better multitaskers” stereotype. “We can do things at the same time when they are highly automatized, but other than that, humans in general struggle,” says cognitive neuroscientist Marco Hirnstein. The gender part is messy too: “The findings […]
Data wizardry on road quality. “Using data from Uber, they are able to estimate the roughness of every road in America and precisely estimate the value people place on it, and so much more.” Even pavement condition can be measured […]