Dynomight does a deep dive on consciousness.
I guess life makes sense: For some reason thereâs 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 voilĂ â you.
But consciousness is weird. Why should those patterns feel like anything? We understand life in the sense that weâve 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 IâM A ROBOT PLEASE LEAVE ME ON.
How could the robot not claim to be conscious? After all (1) thatâs what you would say, and (2) youâd do that because of the laws of physics operating inside your brain, and (3) the robotâs 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 âquestions and answersâ instead of âfeatures and benefits.â
When making products, you can think of them as a collection of features or answers.
Some people may say âyou mean features or benefits?â No, I mean answers. Answers are counterpoints to questions people have in their heads. Answers fill holes, answers snap into sockets. Benefits donât have such places in peopleâs minds.
For example, you could make a feature that shows you which tasks are overdue. Or, you can build something that answers the question âWhatâs late?â
Emphasis mine.
Iâm tired of the song of the summer, itâs time for the song of the fall, âTheyâre Eating the Dogs, Theyâre Eating the Cats.â
Never mind the fact that my one year old iPhone 15 wonât run a bunch of the new Apple Intelligence features when theyâre eventually shipped in iOS 18, M.G. Siegler nails the word salad around Appleâs announcements this week, in Apple Needs an Editor 2:
âŚPresenters 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 â not the AirPods Max 2, which donât yet exist â even though it only has the H1 chip. Meanwhile, the Apple Watch Ultra 2 also isnât the Apple Watch Ultra 3 this year, but is now available in black. Sorry, âSatin Blackâ. Not to be confused with âJet Blackâ or âSpace Blackâ or âSpace Grayâ (which is basically black) or âMidnightâ. 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 canât pass up an opportunity to embed a LOST clip, hereâs the riddle in question.
Via Werd.io, David Allen Green of The Law and Policy Blog does a close reading of Taylor Swiftâs 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:
âIâve done my research, and Iâve made my choice. Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make.â
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 â 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 Obamaâs speech in 2015 commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches in Alabamaâa 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 Duncansonâs Land of the Lotus Eaters (1861) and Jacob Lawrenceâs screenprint Confrontation on the Bridge (1975). Another inspiration is Ethiopian artist Afewerk Tekleâs giant stained-glass window in Africa Hall in Addis Ababa, where the artist was born.
I absolutely love her work, and Iâm very excited to see this once itâs complete. Hereâs 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 AIâs 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 productâthe product that delivers just enough automation, yet just enough control.
I know youâre probably full up on the news this morning, but Heather Cox Richardson has a fantastic summary of last nightâs 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 tonightâs presidential debate was not how to answer policy questions, but how to counter Trumpâs 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.
Iâm not on Instagram, so a friend texted me a screenshot of Taylorâs endorsement. Like everyone, I cackled at the closing line, âChildless Cat Lady.â Now itâs 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 wasnât 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 âvalue addsâ, 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:
Youâve heard of the stories of sucessful founder because theyâve 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, itâs not âFounder Mode,â itâs âSuccessful Founder Mode.â Lumping all Founders together would mean we should â statistically and more descriptively â call this âFailing Founder Mode,â 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 itâs clever and instantly useful. If youâve been reading me over the years, youâve noted Iâve 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. Iâve gravitated towards the word leader both because I want to make it clear any motivated human can execute the skills of a good manager â leadership comes from everywhere â and, more importantly, I believe managers tell you where you are. Leaders tell you where you are going. Itâs a philosophy thing.
Kieran Healy cuts deep:
Hi Iâm Paul Graham and Iâm 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, Steeleâs transition, and their collaboration at SNL:
Ferrell: My last year on the show, we would have blue notecards of sketch ideas and itâd be like: âHarper, you have to write a sketch called âTaco Time.â Go!â
Steele: Youâre forgetting a key element that speaks to this perfectly. âTaco Timeâ is a perfect example, or âUnicorn Mountain.â I would write the first half and then hand it to Will. So I donât know what heâs gonna do with the sketch. It was always a left turn.
Ferrell: âUnicorn Mountainâ was a song that led off the sketch and it basically set the premise of being a childrenâs show. Itâs Unicorn Mountain where unicorns live in unity and harmony and they bring joy and theyâre magical and theyâre fun and letâs all go to Unicorn Mountain. Then we open on myself and Tracy Morgan and â this is Harperâs half â weâre eating a unicorn. Weâre 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 âabout,â or âwhat you should be wondering.â For me, itâs a bit of an âahaâ feeling, kind of like, âAh, I see. Oh, this could be good.â
Elsewhere Iâve 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 âexpositionâ phase, into the ârising actionâ phase.
A story made up of all non-boiling water is perennially stuck in the âexposition phase.â We might think of this as a section where the components are joined by a series of âand alsoâ statements. âThe house looked like this and also the yard looked like this and also the family was made of five members (and also, and also).â
(At this point, the reader may ask the Seussian question: âWhy are you bothering telling me this?â)
Basically, itâs a world without (letâs 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: âThen, one day, everything changed forever.â
Then the story has to rise to that statement and, voila: boiling water.
I love his description of âthe moment when the path of the story narrows.â 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 Ămile] 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 childrenâs 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 âActive shootersâ, âSafe cornersâ, and âShelter in placeâ is its liturgy. âRun, Hide, Fightâ 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, shonkywonkydonkyâs complete Radiohead cover album, OK Computer but everything in my voice. âAirbagâ broke my brain, but by âExit Music (For a Film)â I was hooked.
Highly recommended: the latest episode of The Ezra Klein Show with Jia Tolentino (author of Trick Mirror, a book Iâve 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 mineâŚ
jia tolentino: And it sometimes feels to me not that weâre turning away from the mess and the wonder of real physical experience, despite the fact that itâs precious. I kind of feel something within me sometimes that itâs too precious. Itâs too much, that being present is work, in a way, that itâs this rawness, and itâs 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 itâs good, in a weird way. Have you ever â 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 itâs 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 didnât 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 âindie.â
Darius Kazemi says âIndie is just an economic descriptorâ 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 âHow I Won The Lotteryâ This was to say that itâs 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; theyâre calling for an active and critical engagement with the internet â 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 âdifferent strokes for different folksâ vibes. Because there is no one right way to internet.
Notion has hit 100M users and thereâs 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!)
AndâŚ
Notion is built on the 70sâ vision that software can âaugment human intellectâ. ⌠The world needs a âLEGOs for softwareâ and Notion is here to build that! With our LEGOs, a community of non-programmers can sell âsoftwareâ built on Notion (some made $1M in 2023!) We dreamed of this in the original pitch deck, but I wasnât sure it would come true. Itâs gradually coming together, though instead of 15 months like we imagined in our original pitch deck, it took us 10 years đ
AndâŚ
As with our mission, our love for craft hasnât changed. We tried 30 shades of warm white paints for our office wall. We couldnât 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 âthe Valleyâ in the last decade, and Ivanâs email was a nice peek into the culture driving the company. More like this, please.
Sam Kahn on theâŚI hate myself a little bit for using this wordâŚvibe of every decade from the 1880s to the 2020s:
1920s â Pure hedonism. Hedonism tinged with grief, hedonism as the fruit of experience. The sense of being passed over by technology. JosĂŠ Capablanca seeing a film of himself at the peak of his life and weeping uncontrollably that he would never be that again. Benjamin Buttonâs misfortune of growing ever stronger and younger, only to sink again into senescence.
And:
1980s â Cocaine. Phil Collinsâ 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 cleanerâs.
Two widely-linked things are bouncing around in my head, and I think theyâre saying the same thing. First, Ted Chiang on Why A.I. Isnât 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 perspirationâbut these things cannot be easily separated. Iâm not saying that art has to involve tedium. What Iâm 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 âlarge-scaleâ with âimportantâ 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 donât know it exists. All we have so far are the experiments of individual founders whoâve been figuring it out for themselves. But now that we know what weâre 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 âthere are things founders can do that managers canât.â While there literally may not be tasks that a founder can do that a hired manager canât, there are certainly decisions a founder can make that managers canât. 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; itâs the interrelationship between the large scale (strategy) and the small scale (the design of a listing page) where founder mode lies.