Looking forward to the Matthew Miller clips from this one.

Yellow Mountain Imports is great.

I think the two most salient points here are:

1. Podcasts

TV and radio are dead, social media is a wasteland. Podcasts are reaching young folks, especially men.

Which brings me to…

2. Young men are in freefall

They’re doing worse than previous generations did at their age, across every metric you can imagine, and they’re also doing worse than young women.

That’s not to say we should stifle women’s success!

But if all you have to offer young men is a lecture on their unearned privilege, I think it’s not surprising that they take their business elsewhere.

Importantly: This doesn’t make them right.

But if we don’t figure this out, we’re fucked. We have to have a positive message for men who are struggling and desperate. If we don’t offer a plan, guess who will?

Some are just opportunists, but there are certainly true believers — either in specific technologies, or pedal-to-the-metal growth as the only rational solution to the world’s problems.

Andreessen is pretty open about it: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

And Lina Khan will be right there!

Humanity is so fickle, it’s impossible to tell.

In the US, we went from overwhelming opposition to gay marriage to overwhelming support in less than a decade.

On the other hand, we went from aggressively eradicating CFCs and fixing the ozone hole to dragging our feet on renewable energy for several decades.

Even further back, we went from back-to-back world wars and economic collapse to a tentative global peace and prosperity.

Monarchy seemed inevitable for ages, and then multiple democratic revolutions all sprang up in quick succession.

Equality was fundamental to the Constitution, but we still haven’t healed the wounds of slavery.

There seems to be no telling. Some problems languish for a long time, but then see massive improvements in the blink of an eye. Some obvious fixes lay dormant for an offensively long time.

When I think about this stuff, I get a weird mix of hope and despair and guilt and frustration and impatience.

It seems unfair that we got stuck with these particular crises, with no guarantee that we’re actually prepared to handle them. (Maybe that’s the entire story of humanity.)

And then I remember what Tolkien had to say about such things:

If you have multiple cats and kids, it becomes like The West Wing.

The goat scream?

DNC in 2028: We’re finally ready to learn our lesson from 2016+2024 and listen to our base. We hear you loud and clear: “No more female candidates.” We will be reallocating AOC’s delegates to Chuck Schumer.

People also drink coffee while driving. It’s a depraved world out there.

“Done is better than perfect.”

Everything is political.

I thought that was the free space.

If my time consulting is anything to go off of…

The agency provided several options. The client liked 3 of them and wanted them all smooshed together.

Client opened up the agency’s .pptx and moved some things around until they had this monstrosity and said “There! That’s what I want. See how easy that was? Why do we even pay you?”

The designers quietly held back the urge to quit on the spot, but the lead said “Absolutely, that’s a great decision, we’ll have a final version for you tomorrow!” And the designers took great joy in delivering precisely what the client asked for.

It’s the private equity playbook. Sell all the real capital assets to cover existing debt, rent replacement assets from the owners themselves using new debt, run operations so lean that you burn out 100% of your labor force, then declare bankruptcy and settle your own debt while keeping all the assets.

It has already destroyed swaths of the private sector, and now they wanna do it to the entire economy.

Return to freakin sender!

He and Trump deserve each other.

They’re all towers. But the buttons are all pretty shallow with very light actuation force required.

And they all happen to be situated such that the corner which has the button is the corner furthest away from the desk, so when she jumps up onto the PC as a platform to get ready to jump onto the desk, her feet are all grouped up right in that corner.

And you can imagine that if she’s crouched down ready to jump, and I put my arm out to prevent her from jumping from the tower to the desk, that’s a lot of pressure all applied to her little toe beans.

It’s an unfortunate coincidence. But that experience, together with seeing this Mac Mini design, has made me wonder why we tend to put a button with such drastic effects right out in the open like this.

That sounds…

Easier to get almost right than actually learning the subject.

Much, much harder to get completely right than actually learning the subject.

So yes, basically the archetypal use case for LLMs.

Go for it!