August 2022: BBQ, DAOs, BeReal, Basketball
What I Did This Month
Wrote a lot. Published “You Don’t Need to be a Poster” for Foster. “What are the Benefits of a DAO?”, “What is a DAO?”, and “Governance: On Chain or Off Chain?” for Upstream, a Smart Young BC update about Lee Kuan Yew, Andrew Wilkinson, and Red State Migration, and “How Does BeReal Do It?”
Ate BBQ, good pasta, lots of fresh fruit and corn, and Bilar (my favorite candy, but the salty type I didn’t like as much). Got the Pixel 6a, and it’s fine. Definitely an upgrade over my broken 3a but nothing special, I want to spend less time on my phone anyways.
Went to Seattle. Watched Mariners game, went to Chihuly Garden and Glass, ate at Dick’s.
Hosted the second annual Mosquito Creek Invitational at a local basketball court. Courts were looking nice, had 8 teams participate, and we came second.
Added ability to set admin role and some backend changes in Mocha Match. Added contractions and “-ly” words check, a highlighted word counter, some styling changes, to Write Concise. Still working on my keyboard shortcut learning extension.
Thoughts
An underrated way to read more books is to have a lot of books around. Go to the library and take out 10 books. Aggressively skip through them all until you find the best two and read those. Repeat forever.
Everything you see around you was likely someone’s passionate project. Some random guy made that important thing happen. Why can’t that random guy be you?
What are the most important things for you to do today? This week? This year? Are they ambitious enough? Why aren’t you working on them now?
The average American gets 20% of their calories from highly processed soybean oils.
A big advantage of small organizations is they can be opinionated. Larger companies become plagued by caution and collective decision-making, they become less and less willing to have opinions that could be wrong. Small organizations need to take advantage of this to succeed. That means being very opinionated in business, product, content, everywhere you can.
AI image generation is like a camera for words (ideas). Copilot is like a faster, more accurate search engine for code (StackOverflow)
Keep the mission top of mind. People will always try to distract you from it, but to succeed you need to focus.
Arrival is one of the best pieces of science popularization. I will never forget the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (language shapes our ideas and experience of the world) because of it. What other movies or pieces of pop culture have done as good a job?
How large an influence does dark vs light mode have on community happiness and engagement? Discord is traditionally used in dark mode and feels a bit murkier and shady. Slack is traditionally used in light mode which makes it feel more professional and clean.
What role does the church play in religion? This can probably teach us a lot about how platforms shape users and culture. Would be interested in any resources you have about this.
Recommendations
Strategy by Edward Luttwak made me realize everyone uses the word strategy word. In war, it is multi-layer, paradoxical, and complicated. Winning at one level doesn’t mean you win it all, you have to look up and down to make sure you are winning on those levels too.
Deep Nutrition by Catherine Shanahan is the internet lifter bro nutrition bible. Eat less processed foods, and seed oils. Eat more meat, dairy, and fermented foods. Can’t be sure that it is exactly right, but seems right enough for me to shift my eating habits.
If AI-generated images interest you, you should just look at them, you should try to make cool ones. It is slightly harder than you realize. Even better, try to figure out a way to run the programs locally or in the cloud for personal use. Here’s an interesting article on how to use it for creating a logo.
Many recommended Understanding Jane Street by Byrne Hobart (it’s his most read piece ever), but I’m doing it again anyways because it is really good. Jane Street is an elite organization working in a strange but consistently effective way. A lot to learn from the piece, it gives great depth.
Fascinating piece on Monzo Growth. Events and scarcity are underrated. PR is a bit like the lottery, but they hit it big. Provides insight into creating a strong referral program and growth loops that apply to many products.
Guild is building platformless memberships. Communities shouldn’t be as reliant on platforms as they are, Guild helps make this happen.
Programming is a mindset, and this is one of the best intro pieces on developing that mindset. Made me want to learn some C, seems much simpler than I realized. Breaking problems down into simpler steps makes solving them much easier.
Will people die for the network state?
You can achieve 75-80% competency at every skill. Maximize agency over happiness. People are looking for permission. AI isn’t the only important thing to work on. Listen to author talks instead of reading their books. Don’t retreat.
Create clarity at every level. Lord of the Rings was a really big production. Celebrities spend more time staying famous than you realize. Focus on your top goal. Do eccentric things. OpenTable data for every US city. Against “Capital Light” opportunities. Understanding Chinese centralized control and its challenges. Canada is unsophisticated.
Creatine as a treatment for depression. Times New Roman is a good font. Fewer people meditating. Saturn. You suck at day trading. Linkin Park and Transformers GOATed. Real life is like TikTok. Learn how to build a community from kids’ tree cult.
Upcoming
Writing more for myself, continuing to expand my writing work.
Launching keyboard shortcut learning app. Start work on some other projects, want to dive into AI more.
Enjoying the last days of summer, eating BBQ and corn.