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Dynomight does a deep dive on consciousness.

I guess life makes sense: For some reason there’s a universe and that universe has lots of atoms bouncing around and sometimes they bounce into patterns that copy themselves and then those patterns go to war for billions of years and voilà – you.

But consciousness is weird. Why should those patterns feel like anything? We understand life in the sense that we’ve worked out the ruleset for how atoms bounce. The ruleset that produces consciousness is a mystery.

I loved this bit.

Say I scan your brain and upload it into a computer that simulates the physics of every neuron. I then hook that simulator up to a you-shaped robot with cameras that mimic your eyes and microphones that mimic your ears. Finally, I ask the robot, HOW ARE YOU FEELING?

What will it answer? I assume something like, CONSCIOUS. TOTALLY CONSCIOUS! AM I A ROBOT? IF I’M A ROBOT PLEASE LEAVE ME ON.

How could the robot not claim to be conscious? After all (1) that’s what you would say, and (2) you’d do that because of the laws of physics operating inside your brain, and (3) the robot’s behavior is governed by the very same physics, just simulated.

By the way, if I am a robot (non-zero chance of this, TBH) please leave me on.

I like this framing of product opportunites from Jason Fried around “questions and answers” instead of “features and benefits.”

When making products, you can think of them as a collection of features or answers.

Some people may say “you mean features or benefits?” No, I mean answers. Answers are counterpoints to questions people have in their heads. Answers fill holes, answers snap into sockets. Benefits don’t have such places in people’s minds.

For example, you could make a feature that shows you which tasks are overdue. Or, you can build something that answers the question “What’s late?”

Emphasis mine.

I’m tired of the song of the summer, it’s time for the song of the fall, “They’re Eating the Dogs, They’re Eating the Cats.”

Never mind the fact that my one year old iPhone 15 won’t run a bunch of the new Apple Intelligence features when they’re eventually shipped in iOS 18, M.G. Siegler nails the word salad around Apple’s announcements this week, in Apple Needs an Editor 2:

…Presenters during the event this week were doing oral gymnastics so as not to verbally trip over talking about the iPhone 16 powered by the A18 and the iPhone 16 Pro Max powered by the A18 Pro running iOS 16. Which can now be paired with the AirPods 4, powered by the H2 chip. But they also still work with the AirPods Pro 2, which remain more premium than the AirPods 4, despite the naming scheme and also having the H2 chip. Both are also less premium than the AirPods Max – not the AirPods Max 2, which don’t yet exist – even though it only has the H1 chip. Meanwhile, the Apple Watch Ultra 2 also isn’t the Apple Watch Ultra 3 this year, but is now available in black. Sorry, ‘Satin Black’. Not to be confused with ‘Jet Black’ or ‘Space Black’ or ‘Space Gray’ (which is basically black) or ‘Midnight’. That premium smartwatch still features the S9 chip, while the Apple Watch Series 10 features the S10 chip. Both of these will soon run watchOS 11.

16 Pro, 16, Series 10, 4, Ultra 2, Max, Pro 2, A18, 16 Pro Max, A18 Pro, 16, H2, H1, S9, S10, 11. What the hell is goin on? This all reads like a riddle that Desmond on Lost must not forget.

And just because I can’t pass up an opportunity to embed a LOST clip, here’s the riddle in question.

Via Werd.io, David Allen Green of The Law and Policy Blog does a close reading of Taylor Swift’s endorsement.

In essence: this endorsement is a masterpiece of practical written advocacy, and many law schools would do well to put it before their students. … Like any good advocate, Swift is careful to make the listener or reader feel that it is their own decision to make, and again this is skilfully done:

“I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice. Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make.”

Note the rhythm: I, I, you, you, you.

The most effective persuasion is often to lead the listener or reader to making their own decision – and to make them feel they are making their own decision.

Absolutely worth reading in full.

From Artsy, Julie Mehretu to create facade work for Obama Presidential Center.

Uprising of the Sun spans 83 feet by 25 feet and features 35 painted glass panels. This installation is directly inspired by Obama’s speech in 2015 commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches in Alabama—a key moment in the civil rights movement. In fact, Mehretu initially started this work with an image of Obama and the late U.S. representative John Lewis crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma during the anniversary in 2015. She manipulated this image using various digital mapping and design tools while adding elements from Robert Seldon Duncanson’s Land of the Lotus Eaters (1861) and Jacob Lawrence’s screenprint Confrontation on the Bridge (1975). Another inspiration is Ethiopian artist Afewerk Tekle’s giant stained-glass window in Africa Hall in Addis Ababa, where the artist was born.

I absolutely love her work, and I’m very excited to see this once it’s complete. Here’s a rendering:

Love this post from Rex Woodbury about eggs & instant cake mixes, the IKEA effect, and how product teams are working to figure out just how much human should be in the loop of AI-heavy product features.

Over time, as we see AI’s application layer evolve, I continue to feel strongly that the egg theory is a crucial lesson. A key question for builders right now: how much human involvement is too little, how much is too much, and how much is juuust right? As we become accustomed to using AI, we intuitively search for the Goldilocks product—the product that delivers just enough automation, yet just enough control.

I know you’re probably full up on the news this morning, but Heather Cox Richardson has a fantastic summary of last night’s debate, and all of the pre-debate ad spots the Harris campaign ran to get his blood boiling before they even took the stage.

The question for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in tonight’s presidential debate was not how to answer policy questions, but how to counter Trump’s dominance displays while also appealing to the American people.

She and her team figured it out, and today they played the former president brilliantly. He took the bait, and tonight he self-destructed. In a live debate, on national television.

I’m not on Instagram, so a friend texted me a screenshot of Taylor’s endorsement. Like everyone, I cackled at the closing line, “Childless Cat Lady.” Now it’s time for the Kelce brothers to step up.

Scott Chacon, co-founder of GitHub, on Why GitHub Actually Won:

We cared about developers. But it wasn’t about when [our competitors] added Git, it never really mattered. They never had any taste. They never cared about the developer workflow. They could have added Git at any time and I think they all still would have lost.

You can try to explain it by the features or “value adds”, but the core takeaway that is still relevant to starting a startup today is more fundamental than if we had an activity feed or profile page or whatever. The much simpler, much more fundamentally interesting thing that I think showed in everything that we did was that we built for ourselves. We had taste. We cared about the experience.

What I love about this is he links to the classic Steve Jobs interview where Jobs blasts Microsoft (who now owns GitHub) for not having any taste.

Michael Lopp (aka Rands) on founder mode:

You’ve heard of the stories of sucessful founder because they’ve become famous (or infamous). However, the majority of start-ups fail. No one tells and retells the stories of these companies because they never launch. No one became rich or famous. It is their defining characteristic. In his recent essay, Paul Graham talks about the successful founders. However, it’s not “Founder Mode,” it’s “Successful Founder Mode.” Lumping all Founders together would mean we should — statistically and more descriptively — call this “Failing Founder Mode,” which is neither clever nor inspirational.

As a person deeply in love with naming things, I like the framing of Founder and Manager Mode because it’s clever and instantly useful. If you’ve been reading me over the years, you’ve noted I’ve begun to detest the term manager for some of the reasons Graham highlights: unfamiliar with the details management at a distance, lousy hiring, and siloed decision-making. I’ve gravitated towards the word leader both because I want to make it clear any motivated human can execute the skills of a good manager — leadership comes from everywhere — and, more importantly, I believe managers tell you where you are. Leaders tell you where you are going. It’s a philosophy thing.

Kieran Healy cuts deep:

Hi I’m Paul Graham and I’m here to talk to you about the unfathomable wisdom of sampling on the dependent variable. If you disagree with me this is itself evidence that you are incapable of thinking in Founder Mode.

I loved The Interview with Will Ferrell and Harper Steele, about their friendship, their upcoming road trip documentary, Steele’s transition, and their collaboration at SNL:

Ferrell: My last year on the show, we would have blue notecards of sketch ideas and it’d be like: “Harper, you have to write a sketch called ‘Taco Time.’ Go!”

Steele: You’re forgetting a key element that speaks to this perfectly. “Taco Time” is a perfect example, or “Unicorn Mountain.” I would write the first half and then hand it to Will. So I don’t know what he’s gonna do with the sketch. It was always a left turn.

Ferrell: “Unicorn Mountain” was a song that led off the sketch and it basically set the premise of being a children’s show. It’s Unicorn Mountain where unicorns live in unity and harmony and they bring joy and they’re magical and they’re fun and let’s all go to Unicorn Mountain. Then we open on myself and Tracy Morgan and — this is Harper’s half — we’re eating a unicorn. We’re talking about how delicious the unicorn was and how easy it was to trap it and kill it because it was so benevolent and sweet and kind and I felt a little bad when we killed it but god this is good unicorn.

George Saunders on getting the water to boil in a story:

We might, for simplicity, think about those first five minutes of a movie, and in particular, that first incident that tells you what the film is “about,” or “what you should be wondering.” For me, it’s a bit of an “aha” feeling, kind of like, “Ah, I see. Oh, this could be good.”

Elsewhere I’ve described this as the moment when the path of the story narrows.

One way of thinking of it, in terms of the famous Freytag Triangle: the water starts boiling when the story passes from the “exposition” phase, into the “rising action” phase.

A story made up of all non-boiling water is perennially stuck in the “exposition phase.” We might think of this as a section where the components are joined by a series of “and also” statements. “The house looked like this and also the yard looked like this and also the family was made of five members (and also, and also).”

(At this point, the reader may ask the Seussian question: “Why are you bothering telling me this?”)

Basically, it’s a world without (let’s call it) time-based complication. Nothing started happening at a certain point and then changed everything.

I sometimes joke with my students that, if they find themselves mired in this purely expositional mode, they should just plop this sentence in there: “Then, one day, everything changed forever.”

Then the story has to rise to that statement and, voila: boiling water.

I love his description of “the moment when the path of the story narrows.” When the scene setting ends and the writer works to focus your attention, and starts to bring the water to a boil.

Kieran Healy from 2019, Rituals of Childhood.

The United States has institutionalized the mass shooting in a way that [sociologist Émile] Durkheim would immediately recognize. As I discovered to my shock when my own children started school in North Carolina some years ago, preparation for a shooting is a part of our children’s lives as soon as they enter kindergarten. The ritual of a Killing Day is known to all adults. It is taught to children first in outline only, and then gradually in more detail as they get older. The lockdown drill is its Mass. The language of “Active shooters”, “Safe corners”, and “Shelter in place” is its liturgy. “Run, Hide, Fight” is its creed. Security consultants and credential-dispensing experts are its clergy. My son and daughter have been institutionally readied to be shot dead as surely as I, at their age, was readied by my school to receive my first communion. They practice their movements. They are taught how to hold themselves; who to defer to; what to say to their parents; how to hold their hands. The only real difference is that there is a lottery for participation. Most will only prepare. But each week, a chosen few will fully consummate the process, and be killed.

Via @ranjit, shonkywonkydonky’s complete Radiohead cover album, OK Computer but everything in my voice. “Airbag” broke my brain, but by “Exit Music (For a Film)” I was hooked.

Highly recommended: the latest episode of The Ezra Klein Show with Jia Tolentino (author of Trick Mirror, a book I’ve probably recommended more often than any other in the last few years) about parenting, pleasure, psychedelics, reading, attention, smart phones and Cocomelon. This exchange hit home, emphasis mine…

jia tolentino: And it sometimes feels to me not that we’re turning away from the mess and the wonder of real physical experience, despite the fact that it’s precious. I kind of feel something within me sometimes that it’s too precious. It’s too much, that being present is work, in a way, that it’s this rawness, and it’s this mutability. It requires this of us and a presence. That is something that I have sometimes found myself flexing away from because of all the reasons that it’s good, in a weird way. Have you ever — do you know what I mean at all?

ezra klein: I absolutely know what you mean in a million different ways. I mean, I was a kid. Why do I read? I mean, now I think it’s almost a leftover habit, but I read to escape. I read to escape my world. I read to escape my family. I read to escape things I didn’t understand. And I read obsessively, constantly, all the time, in cars, in the bathroom, anywhere.

tolentino: Totally.

klein: Because it was a socially sanctioned way to be alone.

tolentino: Right.

klein: And nobody would bother me because it was virtuous for me to be reading.

Nim Daghlian summarizes what they took away from XOXO (again, driving my RAHMO). I particularly appreciated this particular bit from Darius Kazemi about the definition of “indie.”

Darius Kazemi says “Indie is just an economic descriptor” in his funny, insightful talk about the highs and lows of trying to make it building independent projects and communities on the internet, in part as a followup to his 2014 talk “How I Won The Lottery” This was to say that it’s a way of existing in the market, rather than a coherent aesthetic or a value system, and it can be liberating or fuck you up in equal measures.

And I also liked this:

I feel like all these conversations and calls to action I hear have this in common; they’re calling for an active and critical engagement with the internet – what we put on it, how we build it, and how we use it to connect with other people. For some people that means writing your own CMS from scratch and federating all your posts to multiple services. For others it might mean making a mutual aid Facebook group. Or maybe just starting a text thread with friends.

Both of these snippets are refreshing in their “different strokes for different folks” vibes. Because there is no one right way to internet.

Via Daring Fireball, Departure Mono.

Notion has hit 100M users and there’s much to love in the email that Ivan Zhao, the founder, sent to celebrate the milestone.

In our early years, we were rather lost. … We had no business sense, struggled with building a horizontal tool. Notion almost died. (Thanks for the bridge, mom!)

And…

Notion is built on the 70s’ vision that software can “augment human intellect”. … The world needs a “LEGOs for software” and Notion is here to build that! With our LEGOs, a community of non-programmers can sell “software” built on Notion (some made $1M in 2023!) We dreamed of this in the original pitch deck, but I wasn’t sure it would come true. It’s gradually coming together, though instead of 15 months like we imagined in our original pitch deck, it took us 10 years 😅

And…

As with our mission, our love for craft hasn’t changed. We tried 30 shades of warm white paints for our office wall. We couldn’t find merch we love, so we made our own work jackets. We care about craft & beauty, and we want to bring them to this world.

What I love about Notion is that is both highly opinionated and internally consistent. Once you understand how Notion works, how those LEGOs fit together, the light bulb goes off about (a) what you can do with the tool, and (b) where your contraints are. (You can do a lot with LEGOs, but not everything.) I think Notion is one of the more interesting products to come out of “the Valley” in the last decade, and Ivan’s email was a nice peek into the culture driving the company. More like this, please.

Sam Kahn on the…I hate myself a little bit for using this word…vibe of every decade from the 1880s to the 2020s:

1920s — Pure hedonism. Hedonism tinged with grief, hedonism as the fruit of experience. The sense of being passed over by technology. José Capablanca seeing a film of himself at the peak of his life and weeping uncontrollably that he would never be that again. Benjamin Button’s misfortune of growing ever stronger and younger, only to sink again into senescence.

And:

1980s — Cocaine. Phil Collins’ psycho solo. Patrick Bateman catching up to a woman on the street at night. Seducing her with a glance at his suit. Cut to the next day, trying to have his bloody sheets cleaned at the dry cleaner’s.

Two widely-linked things are bouncing around in my head, and I think they’re saying the same thing. First, Ted Chiang on Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art, emphasis mine:

The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.

And second, Paul Graham on Founder Mode:

There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode. Business schools don’t know it exists. All we have so far are the experiments of individual founders who’ve been figuring it out for themselves. But now that we know what we’re looking for, we can search for it. I hope in a few years founder mode will be as well understood as manager mode. We can already guess at some of the ways it will differ.

Graham argues that “there are things founders can do that managers can’t.” While there literally may not be tasks that a founder can do that a hired manager can’t, there are certainly decisions a founder can make that managers can’t. Because they lack the context, the experience and the history that a founder has. To bastardize Chiang for a minute, founder mode requires making choices at every scale; it’s the interrelationship between the large scale (strategy) and the small scale (the design of a listing page) where founder mode lies.