Notes
I finally got to use the Apple Vision Pro this weekend. This is an incredibly impressive device and likely the future of desktop computing, but it is years away from being good enough for the use cases I care about.
Thailand is famous for beaches and resorts, so most people visit Thailand for these things and stopover for a night or two in Bangkok at most. Bangkok is, however, a great city for urban explorers, and worth visiting for at least a week.
> Human knowledge had become too great for the human mind.
Taiwan is an underrated travel destination. Geographically and culturally, at the intersection of Southeast Asia and East Asia, more than anywhere, Taiwan feels representative of Asia as a whole.
In mature product categories, incumbents sometimes build deep enough moats that there is no question they will remain dominant for the foreseeable future. Technology changes that disrupt a significant company’s foundations are inevitable, but these changes can rarely come. This dynamic means that, while no business is truly safe from competition in perpetuity (save for government-enforced monopolies, perhaps), extremely dominant players can stay dominant for an extremely long time.
First, Big Tech is investing massively in R&D. Amazon’s annual R&D spend, in particular, is staggering:
Recently, the Biden administration announced its framework to manage the deployment of AI by executive order. The order throws a bone to both sides of the AI argument: in some regards, the administration is embracing AI; in others, it’s hampering it. Overall, I’m disappointed.
Here’s an extremely concise timeline of liberalism, focused on key thinkers from each era.
The most interesting thing about Napoleon is his hypocrisy. He was a republican revolutionary who installed himself as monarch. He was an Enlightenment reformer who reinstated slavery in his empire. He modernised Europe with a staggering death toll. He was a deist, technologist, and futurist who leaned on religion for public stability. He was a conquerer who believed in nationalism. One of his advisors was openly gay, yet he legislated away some rights for women. He freed the Jews of the nations he conquered, but he was no friend of ethnic minorities. He was a dictator who fought directly on the battlefield. He was a master war strategist who lost everything to some strategic miscalculations.
I often preach about the downsides of allowing Big Press and social media to firehose us with trash content. But that doesn’t mean I’m against internet content consumption. Fact is, in the age of content abundance, there is way more great content available to us than ever before. Unfortunately, there is also a lot of terrible content, and this is mostly what social media algorithms and clickbait news choose to serve us. So, the secret to being informed on the internet while maintaining social and mental health is to find ways to filter out the junk.
In much of the world, industrialisation has led to the abundance of calories, often in very unhealthy forms — a novel state for a creature that is accustomed to subsistence. This has posed serious challenges for society (e.g., how do we provide large populations of people with healthy food?) and individuals (i.e., how do I eat healthy food in reasonable amounts when millions of years of evolution has instilled a nature of scarcity into me, that drives me to consume all I can find?). Growing up in the 1990s, the golden age of the fad workout plan and diet, the public debate regarding the dangers of junk food was prominent. The parents of many kids in my generation changed their attitudes towards sustenance significantly throughout our childhoods. Abundance, while positive in so many ways, comes with challenges.
There are three major schools of foreign policy in the US. Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian schools of thought originated in the late 18th century, while Wilsonian emerged after WWI. While other nations have other models for foreign policy, many of them roughly map onto these philosophies.
Here are my favourite albums from 2023 so far. I’ll update this post if we get some end-of-year gold.
Contacts might be the most underrated app on iOS and MacOS. I’ve used it for years as a personal CRM. I track contact details, tag contacts for easy search and filtering, use smart filters to identify people I should reach out to, and store notes from meetings.
People throw around terms like socialism, Marxism, communism, and Stalinism as though they are interchangeable. But they are distinct schools of thought that largely build on each other.
This team has successfully grown and levitated LK-99 at room temperature and ambient pressure, the most promising indication that LK-99 may indeed be a room temperature superconductor.
OpenAI just launched custom instructions for ChatGPT. You can now set a default set of instructions for every new chat. Using language to configure your LLM!
I’ve spent a good chunk of my career thinking about SEO. I spent ten years building an ecommerce platform, for which SEO was crucial. It’s only natural that, as I’ve built out this blog, I’ve accounted for SEO.
Melbourne is the cultural capital of Australia. While it doesn’t meet the Aussie archetype of sunny beaches with great surf, it does feature the best dining, arts, and culture on the continent. Anyone headed to Australia needs to spend a week exploring Melbourne.
Contracts and agreements are basically impossible to read without training or some kind of methodology. Over the years, I’ve reviewed many contracts, and have settled on the following methodology.