Lenny Rachitsky shares Terrence Rohan: How to spot a top 1% startup early. Lenny: After reading the early draft of this post, my approach to investing and giving career advice immediately shifted. (more)

David A Bell: Enlightenment's Errand Boy. The French Revolutionaries identified the Enlightenment as the work of a small, brave band of 18th-century philosophes. (more)

aka Timothy Leary Tune in, turn on, and drop out. http://www.leary.com/ (more)

Tim Leary book (more)

Leopold Aschenbrenner (born 2001/2002)[1] is a German artificial intelligence researcher and investor. He was part of OpenAI's "Superalignment" team before he was fired in April 2024 over an alleged information leak, which Aschenbrenner disputes. In 2024, he published an essay titled "Situational Awareness" about the emergence of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and related security risks.[2] The essay attracted widespread media and industry attention, and became the namesake for Aschenbrenner's $20 billion AUM (at peak) hedge fund, Situational Awareness LP, which invests in private and public companies involved in AI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Aschenbrenner

Paul Ford timeline project (more)

Steven Johnson: Revenge Of The Humanities. Last week I had the honor of delivering the commencement address at my youngest son's high school graduation... the somewhat paradoxical idea that, thanks to the AI revolution, we are entering a period where it will be a great time to be a humanities major with an interest in technology. (more)

Martin Cagan: Revenge of the PMO | Silicon Valley Product Group (more)

aka Rage Boy (more)

Inside Uniqlo’s Quest for Global Dominance. The brand conceives of itself as a distribution system for utopian values as much as a clothing company. Can it become the world’s biggest clothing manufacturer? (more)

The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors. Growing up in Georgia, Robert Long was given to pondering big questions and the meaning of life — before he was 10, he doubted his own free will. But it wasn’t until college, where he majored in social studies, that he learned he could think about consciousness full time. He read a book by Douglas Hofstadter called “I Am a Strange Loop,” which explored mysteries such as What is a self? “I didn’t even realize that those were questions you could ask,” he says, “and then that there were philosophical disciplines about them.” (more)

Steven Johnson: Notebooks And The Extended Mind. A few weeks ago, the Sunday NY Times business section published a long reported piece called “Revenge Of The Philosophy Majors” written by my old friend Ben Wallace, documenting the unlikely recent trend of AI companies adding academic philosophers to their payrolls. (more)

David Perell: The Paradox of Ambition. It’s positive-sum. We can both have more ambition. (more)

Mark Bernstein: What is it like to be augmented? (more)

Matt Clancy: How to Impede Technological Progress. Most of the time, we think of innovation policy as a problem of how to accelerate desirable forms of technological progress. Broadly speaking, economists tend to lump innovation policy options into two categories: push and pull policies. Push policies try to reduce the cost of conducting research, often by funding or subsidizing research. Pull policies try to increase the rewards of doing research, for example by offering patent protection or placing advance orders. (more)

Vikas Paruchuri questions startup = ambition. It’s an axiom that startups are defined by growth. If it’s not growing 10% a month, then your company is seen as something less - a “lifestyle business”. (more)

A thought collective, a term originated in German as "Denkkollektiv" by the Polish and Israeli physician Ludwik Fleck, is a community of researchers (Community Of Practice) who interact collectively towards the production or elaboration of knowledge using a shared framework of cultural customs and knowledge acquisition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_collective (more)

Gray goo (also spelled as grey goo) is a hypothetical global catastrophic scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating machines consume all biomass (and perhaps also everything else) on Earth while building many more of themselves,[1][2] a scenario that has been called ecophagy (literally: "consumption of the environment").[3] The original idea assumed machines were designed to have this capability, while popularizations have assumed that machines might somehow gain this capability by accident. Self-replicating machines of the macroscopic variety were originally described by mathematician John von Neumann, and are sometimes referred to as von Neumann machines or clanking replicators. The term gray goo was coined by nanotechnology pioneer K. Eric Drexler in his 1986 book Engines of Creation.[4] In 2004, he stated "I wish I had never used the term 'gray goo'," arguing that it had inspired public fears that interfered with research on more conventional, non-self replicating nanotechnology.[5] Engines of Creation mentions "gray goo" as a thought experiment in two paragraphs and a note, while the popularized idea of gray goo was first publicized in a mass-circulation magazine, Omni, in November 1986. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo (existential risk)

Kim Eric Drexler (born April 25, 1955) is an American engineer best known for introducing molecular nanotechnology (MNT), and his studies of its potential from the 1970s and 1980s.[1] His 1991 doctoral thesis at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was revised and published as the book Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery Manufacturing and Computation (1992), which received the Association of American Publishers award for Best Computer Science Book of 1992. He has been called the "godfather of nanotechnology". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._Eric_Drexler (more)

Ecosystem is the next big growth channel. Lenny Rachitsky says: Emily Kramer has identified a pattern in how top AI (and non-AI) startups are able to break through the noise and grow unlike at any other time in history. Once you see it, you immediately rethink your growth strategy. I did! After reading the first draft of this post, I got a whole new level of understanding for why my product pass has been such a success (fun fact: it doubled my growth, and is the most win-win-win idea I’ve ever concocted. (more)