Random facts 9 – things I learned recently – Hugh Howey: “I’ll write 2 books a year for 10 years. And at the end of that 10 years I’ll know if I’m a writer.

All of these costs will trend down until eventually it’s just like…the cloud. Like they’re all the same. You might use AWS or Oracle or IBM Cloud, they all have different purposes, but you don’t really care, but there might be lockin. You build your stack on AWS, it’s kinda expensive, you want to switch but it’s difficult… if I had to guess that’s how this plays out…
Turner Novak

Tunnel vision helps. Being a bit of a shit helps. A thick skin helps. Stamina is crucial, as is a capacity to work so hard that your best friends mock you, your lovers despair and the rest of your acquaintances watch furtively from the sidelines, half in awe and half in contempt. Luck helps—but only if you don’t seek it.

And the Portuguese rutter? That’s our death warrant, for of course it’s stolen. At least it was bought from a Portuguese traitor, and by their law any foreigner caught in possession of any rutter of theirs, let alone one that unlocks the Magellan, is to be put to death at once. And if the rutter is found aboard an enemy ship, the ship is to be burned and all aboard executed without mercy.

Alan Greenspan in 1966, when he was still in the private sector:
An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions…In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves

It is breathtaking how slow, substandard and unfocused many companies out there get through the day. And think nothing of it. The lack of energy is palatable. There is performance upside everywhere. As a leader, your opportunity is to reset in each of these dimensions. You do it in every single conversation, meeting, and encounter

In a system that depends on irresponsible government spending (especially for perpetual war) and fiat printing to cover that irresponsibility, alarm bells cannot be allowed to work. There must be no pure price signals. And above all, an alarm bell must not also serve as a life-raft that’s easily accessible to everyone, especially the general public, in the form of an ETF. There must be no escape hatch

The overall degree is negligible. In 2013, researchers found that the average degree of personalization in Google Search was 11.7%, of course varying widely by query and rank. Higher positions, for example, have a higher chance of being personalized than lower positions.11 A study from 2019 found that Google personalizes 2/10 results when searching for people and 4/10 for political parties. In other words, not much

When you’re healthy you have 10,000 needs, but when you’re sick you only have 1

marketplaces are fueled by two core properties: 1) discovery and curation (presenting things that users want to see and interact with), and 2) trust and reputation (providing assurances to users)

I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call this approach “staying upwind.” This is how most people who’ve done great work seem to have done it

From Mercedes effectively renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dish soap, enshittification is metastasising into every corner of our lives. Software doesn’t eat the world, it just enshittifies it.

Tyler Cowen, economist, professor, and founder of the popular blog Marginal Revolution, developed three laws while he was teaching macroeconomics. One: “There is something wrong with everything,” two: “There is a literature on everything” and three: “All propositions about real interest rates are wrong.”

Also, he changes one menu item every week. Has a massive spreadsheet that tells him what’s being ordered, profit margins on each item, etc. He gets rid of the least popular thing, tries something else. Every. Single. Week

The interesting thing about OnlyFans is that OF agencies use the models as image/video content to bait simps. However, many of the OF girls are unable to talk to so many simps at once and end up using virtual assistants who are following a script in an attempt to extract maximal value from simps by sending them prepared media from a google drive after the simp tips his final buck. Even if it is not real, it feels real to the end consumer and that is all that matters

They say movies are the shared dreams of the audience—that’s why they have to be experienced in the dark.

“Peter Thiel used to insist at PayPal that every single person could only do exactly one thing. And we all rebelled. You feel like it’s insulting to be asked to do just one thing.
But Peter would enforce this pretty strictly. He’d basically say: ‘I will not talk to you about anything else except for this one thing that I’ve assigned to you. I don’t want to hear about how great you’re doing in this other area. Just focus until you conquer this one problem.’…
The insight behind this is that most people will solve problems that they understand how to solve. Roughly speaking, they will solve B+ problems instead of A+ problems. A+ problems are high-impact problems for your company but they’re difficult–you don’t wake up in the morning with a solution to them, so you tend to procrastinate…
If you have a company that’s always solving B+ problems, you’ll never create the breakthrough idea because no one is spending 100% of their time banging their head against the wall every day until they solve it”

“Failure is the information you need to get where you’re going”
Every time in Delphi’s history when we expected or “needed” something to happen. It didn’t happen and ended up turning out for the better.
– We weren’t able to raise money to start our business so we bootstrapped it ourselves and today, Delphi is fully employee owned.
- We weren’t able to finish raising a fund, and today – Delphi Ventures is basically all prop capital.
- There were numerous times we *almost* got acquired and ended up saying no – and it’s resulted in us building up Delphi into a brand we’re proud to be building for the space first and foremost

When galaxies collide, the black holes at their center begin orbiting one another before merging, and astronomers have just identified the largest pair yet. Researchers estimate that the black holes at the center of elliptical galaxy B2 0402+379 (the Loop’s longtime favorite galaxy, obviously) weigh about 28 billion times the mass of the Sun.

Curse of Knowledge: The inability to communicate your ideas because you wrongly assume others have the necessary background to understand what you’re talking about.

Compassion Fade: People have more compassion for small groups of victims than larger groups, because the smaller the group the easier it is to identify individual victims.

Bottom line: There is room up in organizations to boost performance by amping up the pace and intensity. Considerable slack naturally exists in organizations to perform at much higher levels. The role of leadership is to convert that lingering potential into superlative results

We see in professional sports all the time how teams go almost overnight from losing to winning with basically the same roster, but different leadership. Call it what you want, the X factor, whatever, it is real. Anybody can dial into this, but not many do.

It is not easy because you will drive people out of their comfort zones. There will be resistance. Change is hard. Some will vote with their feet. If you want to be popular as a leader, this may not be for you. The role of a leader is to change the status quo, step up the pace, and increase the intensity. Leaders are the energy bunnies and pacemakers of the organization. Some people drain energy from organizations; not leaders, they engulf organizations with energy.

Open Source vs. Proprietary Models: Zhu discusses the ongoing debate between open-source and proprietary AI models. He predicts that open-source models will eventually catch up with, if not surpass, their proprietary counterparts. This viewpoint reflects his belief in the democratization of AI technology and skepticism toward the long-term dominance of closed, proprietary systems.

If you’re not nervous it doesn’t mean anything to you — Justin Thomas

The inevitable direction of history is that the vast majority of AI systems will be built on top of open source platforms – Yann Lecun

“Deep learning, which is fundamentally a technique for recognizing patterns, is at its best when all we need are rough-ready results, where stakes are low and perfect results optional“ Still true

Your worst day is a chance to show your best qualities, to stand out, and to learn an enormous amount about yourself. Very few people plan or prepare for what they’ll do and how they’ll act during those times. Those who do might well end up turning their worst day into their best

In short, it will FEEL like a regular bear cycle, but in reality the game has changed for BTC and ETH – forever.
This means the window in time for the average non rich person to get generational exposure to BTC and ETH is closing, very rapidly

Essentially, most people will be priced out of owning 10 ETH or 1 BTC.
I also believe that going forward alts will be less appealing each cycle as people just prefer the concensus trade of BTC and ETH that are guaranteed to go up due to ETF flows + because of new market participants size, you could still get 20-50% per year, with way less downside risk.
As such I think people will be less interested in altcoins.
This mimics how the S&P500 works, with basically 4-6 massive tech firms, like Google, apple, amazon, meta etc. Propping up the entire thing

Hugh Howey (on Tim Ferriss): I’ll write 2 books a year for 10 years. And at the end of that 10 years I’ll know if I’m a writer.

The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is 60 percent correct on all the problems he sees, while his government’s brute force solutions reliably worsen things. Are housing developers taking on too much debt? Yes, but driving many of them to default and triggering a collapse in the confidence of homebuyers hasn’t improved matters. Does big tech have too much power? Fine, but taking the scalps of entrepreneurs and stomping out their businesses isn’t boosting sentiment. Does the government need to rein in official corruption? Definitely, but terrorizing the bureaucracy has also made the policymaking apparatus more paralyzed and risk averse. It’s starting to feel like the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.

“When you cook for yourself there’s love in there”

“resilience matters in success…I don’t know how to teach it to you except for, ‘I hope suffering happens to you’..greatness comes from character & character…is formed out of people who suffered..I wish upon you ample doses of pain & suffering” – Jensen Huang

We are in a “Tower of Babel” moment of AI research, where hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers, and technologists are collectively using the same language to tackle every engineering problem under the sun.

As I usually do, I’ve appended our 1997 letter, our first letter to shareholders. It gets more interesting every year that goes by, in part because so little has changed. I especially draw your attention to the section entitled ‘‘It’s All About the Long Term.’’

that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind.

A counterculture is blowback. It’s intentionally offensive to establishment beliefs. Find it repellent? Good, it’s meant to gatekeep you.

Norwegian endurance training hack: high volume lactate threshold training. Train just below lactate threshold so you can do a lot more volume instead of at or above which requires a lot more recovery

More than a thousand years before Christ, Zarathustra preached the existence of a heaven and a hell, the idea of a bodily resurrection, the promise of a universal savior who would one day be miraculously born to a young maiden, and the expectation of a final cosmic battle that would take place at the end of time between the angelic forces of good and the demonic forces of evil.

in 2016, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI challenged 14-time world champion Lee Sedol and won four out of five games. The next revision of AlphaGo was completely out of reach for human players: it won 60 straight games, taking down just about every notable Go player in the process.

the Bell Labs patent lawyers wanted to know why some people were so much more productive (in terms of patents) than others. After crunching a lot of data, they found that the only thing the productive employees had in common (other than having made it through the Bell Labs hiring process) was that “Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn’t the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, ‘he drew people out, got them thinking'”

Once you make a decision, go all in.
Commit fully to your choices. Half-hearted efforts yield half-hearted results.
Indecision only leads to stagnation and missed opportunities.
Stay committed to your goals, even when faced with obstacles and setbacks. Perseverance is single-handedly the most important key to achieving a goals.

we’ll see Software 2.0 subsume more and more of the existing Software 1.0 stacks, resulting in more compact human-written codebases with the bulk of engineering complexity offloaded to data and learning. One of the most profound benefits of end-to-end machine learning is that it can drastically reduce the amount of code needed. Before deep learning, the AI backing Google Translate was roughly a 500,000-line codebase. After deep learning, a single neural network could be expressed in about 500 lines of TensorFlow code, with the bulk of “translation knowledge” now replaced with data.

Bezos shareholder letters

I invite you to please read the section entitled It’s All About the Long Term, as it is the best way I know to help make sure we’re the kind of company you want to be invested in. As we wrote there, we don’t claim it’s the right philosophy, we just claim it’s ours!

We are doubly-blessed. We have a market-size unconstrained opportunity in an area where the underlying foundational technology we employ improves every day. That is not normal.

Hayek would in particular focus on the function and effect of prices. Prices, he went on to explain in the following years, are the market’s decentralized and socially scalable means of communication. Although established as a simple function of supply and demand for goods and services in an economy, Hayek described how prices actually embed a wide array of relevant information that individuals require to make economic decisions.

Bitcoin is the most successful financial meme since gold and even at today’s all-time high, all the bitcoin in the world is still only worth about 1/14 of all the gold in the world.
Unlike the gold meme, which has infected about as many minds as it ever will, the bitcoin meme is growing — and it’s growing in a time when 1) people have more money than ever to invest and 2) people are more than ever looking for lottery-ticket type investments

Financial Nihilism goes hand in hand with Populism – a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups

The dirty secret of influencer marketing: ~80%+ of influencers DO NOT CARE about anything but $
I see this happen 24/7 in my space. They don’t care about product quality, brand (theirs or the brand they’re repping), their audience, etc. They just want $$$
The reasons why are simple:
– They don’t make a lot of $ (even large accounts)
– This is usually their 1st business venture
– They suffer from extreme short-term thinking / high time preference
– They don’t understand how brand is built
– They can be quite entitled

Peter Thiel on The Power Law of Distribution:
“One distribution method is likely to be far more powerful than every other for any given business:
Distribution follows a power law of its own.
This is counterintuitive for most entrepreneurs, who assume that more is more. But the kitchen sink approach—employ a few salespeople, place some magazine ads, and try to add some kind of viral functionality to the product as an afterthought—doesn’t work. Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work. Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business.”

Perhaps the most important insight NASA has gleaned from studying team dynamics—in space and on Earth—is the preciousness of one trait in particular: a sense of humour. Studies of crews overwintering at the South Pole show that a confined group needs people to fulfil various roles, including leader, storyteller and social secretary. But the most important task by far is that of the clown, a person who is funny and also wise enough to understand each member of the group and defuse tensions. Laughter, as much as courage, will sustain astronauts on their long quest to Mars.

The guy I know who is the best at friendships (also a spectacular salesman) keeps proposing plans. I asked him why once & he told me:
People get busy. If you want to be their friend, don’t take it personally & keep asking.
He did this with me & he eventually became one of the few genuine, lifelong friends I’ve made in adulthood.

Studies show that by adding physical activity to our lives, we become more socially active—it boosts our confidence and provides an opportunity to meet people. The vigor and motivation that exercise brings helps us establish and maintain social connections.

That’s why mottoes such as Google’s “Don’t be evil” and Facebook’s “Make the world more open and connected” mattered; they instilled a sense of mission in workers

Nothing is Something: “The most underutilized parenting strategy is doing nothing.”– Dr. Becky Kennedy

When Facebook was telling MySpace users they needed to escape Murdoch’s crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, “Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here.” It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your MySpace username and password, and it would login to MySpace and pretend to be you, scraping everything waiting in your inbox and copying it to your Facebook inbox

When Microsoft was choking off Apple’s market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac in the 1990s — so that offices were throwing away their designers’ Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator — Steve Jobs didn’t beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office. He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could read and write Microsoft’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint files

Obviously the most exciting story to write will be the one you want to read. The reason I mention this case explicitly is that so many people get it wrong. Instead of making what they want, they try to make what some imaginary, more sophisticated audience wants. And once you go down that route, you’re lost

The signals have changed over the years: After horse equipage, it was Hermès trunks for traveling by rail, then large Hermès bags for day trips by automobile, and then small Hermès handbags for everyday use (originally sized to fit in the overhead bin of an airplane

The first modern LLM, Jeremy Howard’s ULMFit, was trained on Wikipedia. GPT was trained on a corpus of books. GPT-2 was trained on the reddit-curated “WebText,” corpus, i.e., a crawl of websites linked on Reddit. GPT-3 expanded the dataset scope to web text from CommonCrawl. Data selectivity trended downward as data volume and diversity requirements went up.

It is one of the main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a grandiose spectacle…

Puzzlingly though, despite facing an increased risk of skin cancer, people who are exposed to lots of sun appear to have longer life expectancies, on average, than sun avoiders.

Prior editions:

Fascinating analysis of AI’s effects on freelancer hiring demand: everyone wants a chatbot

Bloomberry Jobs Report

tldr: writing, translation, & customer service jobs declined; everyone wants a chatbot, apparently

A few excerpts:

To my pleasant surprise, most of the job categories actually had an increase in the number of jobs since ChatGPT was released, with the exception of 3 categories that had large declines in jobs.

The above is important to keep in mind for AI luddite doomsayers; as the history of technology has repeatedly shown, though there may be short term disruption and harm to labor, the long term trend is that technology = more (newer and better) jobs

I was surprised to see graphics design, video editing/production, and even software development jobs go up, given all the anecdotal stories we’ve been hearing about people using ChatGPT to generate code, illustrations and even full featured videos.

And surprising on first blush, although perhaps logical if you assume good general purpose AI has reduced the need for specialized ML:

While there was a initial increase in data annotation jobs, the # of data annotation jobs have been fairly flat in the past 10 months. And the # of machine learning jobs has actually decreased a bit since ChatGPT was released.

Finally, I guess everyone loves to chat:

The most popular use case, by far for AI right now is in developing chatbots

Full article: https://bloomberry.com/i-analyzed-5m-freelancing-jobs-to-see-what-jobs-are-being-replaced-by-ai/

Another Bunny banger: “modern US war accomplishes little, wasting trillions and US lives in the process”

However, modern US war accomplishes little, wasting trillions and US lives in the process. Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria. What objectives have been won here? How much did it waste in this futility? These are not exceptions, ineptitude is a verifiable trend now.
Combat is now a hybrid of 4th and 5th-gen warfare: which is to say guerilla war and non-kinetic, manipulative psychological games. The US/NATO does not have a global monopoly on this kind of warfare, in fact they’ve shown to be pretty maladroit about it. And this is basically how wars are fought now

https://backthebunny.substack.com/p/the-us-dollar-a-proof-of-violence

Random facts — things I learned (Dec 15 2023) — “Markets have excellent social scalability; they are the original distributed systems”

Markets have excellent social scalability; they are the original distributed systems, around long before anybody thought to coin that expression. (source)

On the Birth of a Son
BY SU TUNG-PO // ARTHUR WALEY
Families when a child is born
Hope it will turn out intelligent.
I, through intelligence
Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope that the baby will prove
Ignorant and stupid.
Then he’ll be happy all his days
And grow into a cabinet minister.

Action is a high road to self confidence and esteem. Where it is open, all energies flow toward it. It comes readily to most people, and its rewards are tangible – Bruce Lee

Cool find — list of scifi ideas organized by authors and books, mentioned on the My First Million pod:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sBkJ8nZwyG_J1v_WLub-5RM4GhLWCf_b7ml8_qNgNsg/edit#gid=568223314

Set a “No-Internet” Day Once a Week – This has been a game-changer for me. On Wednesdays, I don’t allow myself to go on the Internet until 5pm. This means no social media, no email, no news, no nothing. – Ali Abdaal

We fear too much success is abandoning our roots and will leave us alone.
Think: Why do so many celebs have an “entourage?”
The unconscious thing your brain says:
“I cannot expand to my full success because it would cause me to end up all alone, be disloyal to my roots and leave behind people from my past”
-Jesse Pujji

If you believe that the demands of the situation exceed your resources, you will have a threat response. But if you believe you have the resources to succeed, you will have a challenge response. – reading Kelly McGonigal’s GREAT book about the utility of stress

Elon is already more powerful than many heads of state. It’s not hyperbole. The constellation of assets Elon’s amassed represent real societal and resource power. This man has systematically gained command over numerous critical industries in human transportation, communication, space travel, and technology – BacktheBunny

the difference I guess between the guys who are able to be biggest Champions and the ones that are struggling to get to the highest level is the ability to not stay in those emotions for too long so for me it’s relatively short so as soon as I experience it I acknowledge it I maybe you know burst I scream on the court whatever happens but then I’m able to bounce back and reset – Djoker

There is a connection between freedom and self-confidence: When you are kept from expressing your deepest needs and wishes, you lose trust in their validity and in your own judgment. You survive by finding out the rules and following them, thus hiding what you really want. You make it your purpose in life to please others rather than to affirm yourself. – David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Relationships

I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after
backhanding
mother, then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel
in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls.
And so I learned that a man, in climax, was the closest thing
to surrender
-Ocean Vuong

Kong: I turned down all performance opportunities and avoided meeting anyone. To prevent friends from locating me, I changed my mobile phone number 21 times. During the darkest three months, my mother would leave my meals on a chair outside my door. When my daughter returned from the United States to visit me, all I could do was look at her through the peephole.
Kong: [Laughs] It’s true. Back when I was learning the piano, I felt like many of my classmates, such as Xu Zhong, Wang Jian, and Qian Zhou, had more inherent talent. I relied on relentless practice, often putting in 15 to 16 hours a day. Even after becoming a professional pianist, I needed constant practice to keep my confidence up

while a magazine might project a kind of bulletproof perfection–every story the product of an assiduous and painstaking reporting, editing, and fact-checking process–in practice nearly every story you read is an improvised and often deeply unsatisfying last-minute compromise between the publisher, the top editors, the story editor, the fact-checkers, the copy-editors, the art department, and the writer
Something that’s often underrated by people who haven’t worked as journalists is the extent to which newspapers and magazines (and cable channels, etc.) are institutions like any other–which is to say riven with contradiction and internal tension, populated by cross-pressured workers and managers with competing desires and incentives
from Read Max

Great infographic on DEPIN landscape
https://github.com/iotexproject/awesome-depin/blob/main/depin_landscape_oct.jpeg

Selfish people are incapable of loving others, but they’re incapable of loving themselves too

I think we just can’t help the instinct to give meaning to things we don’t understand — Scavenger’s Reign

But today, people are actively deleting content they have created. It is now considered best practice in some circles to automatically delete twitter comments, old reddit comments and to privatize Facebook posts (or even simply delete Facebook). And when they create new content online, it is more often in places where the masses cannot see it.

Nietzsche: Compassion is a psyop designed by the weak to redirect resources from the most deserving to the least.
Napoleon: Logic will lose you wars because sometimes the moment demands imaginative maneuvers that work because they are irrational
Chateaubriand: Beauty is useless if you care for efficiency, but shockingly useful if you care for lovability. Yes, beauty is a wasteful luxury but ultimately the only thing people will protect, and make pilgrimages to.
John Fowles: High IQ is a terrifying gift. The ability to predict the consequences of any action means your will gets lost in a labyrinth of hypotheses. Rule 1: Do not lose the will
from @oldbooksguy

On a journey, ill;
my dream goes wandering
over withered fields.
-Basho.

China has focused on battery-powered electric vehicles. Even after consolidation in the sector, over a hundred firms still produce such cars. A few brands are world-class. Most are cheaper than Western rivals. Chinese firms became dominant through a mixture of subsidies and coercive transfers of foreign technologies, but also hard work and foresight, as they leap-frogged slow-to-change foreign firms

Manny Pacquiao on the power of volume, leading up to a fight he’d spar 36 rounds in a day, every day (!) — so he wasn’t tired at all in a regular 12 round fight: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzeHP6itCK7/

During a threat response, your emotions will likely include fear, anger, self-doubt, or shame. Because your primary goal is to protect yourself, you become more vigilant to signs that things are going poorly. This can create a vicious cycle in which your heightened attention to what’s going wrong makes you even more fearful and self-doubting.

the brain suffers from severe limitations. We use its massive parallelism (one hundred trillion interneuronal connections operating simultaneously) to quickly recognize subtle patterns. But our thinking is extremely slow: the basic neural transactions are several million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits.

If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, it’s simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations. – Kurzweil

Thoreau goodies:
-Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
-For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?
-But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness.

In their zeal to attack believers whose frailties have led them to embrace the supernatural, atheists may neglect the frailty that is an inevitable feature of all our lives. – de Botton

Let me Google how to suffer. That ain’t gonna be in there – David Goggins

Diabetes, glioma, chronic pain, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, dementia, and H pylori bottom out around 1 drink per day. Cardiovascular disease bottoms out around 2 drinks per day. Erectile dysfunction stays lowered at up to 3 drinks per day. Depression bottoms out at 0.7 drinks per day.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1731863379902349781.html

Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. […] To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them

When a supernova explodes, the blast wave creates high-energy particles that scatter in every direction; scientists believe there is a minute chance that one of the errant particles, known as a cosmic ray, can hit a computer chip on Earth, flipping a 0 to a 1. The world’s most robust computer systems, at NASA, financial firms, and the like, used special hardware that could tolerate single bit-flips

弘益人间,在世理化
official education motto of South Korea
To broadly benefit the human world

Sizzling Sunlight: Bask in both morning and evening sunlight. Even if it’s cloudy and cold. It’s not just about Vitamin D; it’s about regulating your natural circadian hythms

And if you avoided everyone who treated you unfairly at some point, you’d probably just be alone. You’d better hope they give you the benefit of the doubt for your mistakes, too

I can’t predict the future. But I can spot investor over-reactions. – Ram Ahluwahlia

They weren’t trying to be safe. They were trying to become competent—and it’s competence that makes people as safe as they can truly be. – Jordan Peterson

Make that phone call you’ve been putting off
Push through when you feel like quitting
Have that uncomfortable conversation
Introduce yourself to that cute guy/girl
Check out that church or faith group
Ask for that promotion or raise
Apply for that new job
Sign up for that class
Start that side hustle
Post that tweet
Take that trip
The world belongs to the bold. Be a seeker, open to change and opportunity.
And most importantly…
Shoot your shot.
Source

Highlights from Google & Temasek report on SEA internet and tech

Full report here: https://kevinhabits.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/e_conomy_sea_2023_report.pdf

Some excerpts:

SEA-focused funds have seen significantly lower distributions to paid-in capital compared to funds that are focused on other regions, suggesting difficulty in realising returns for investors.

New sector growth: enterprise, healthtech, edtech, deeptech/AI, Web3/crypto, property, automotive, etc.

dry powder still growing though ($15.7B in 2022)

Consumers are adopting digital financial services (DFS) at a rapid pace; cash is no longer king.

High value users (HVUs) are defined as the top 30% of online spenders — HVUs spend more than 6X the amount non-HVUs spend online, and are more likely to increase spending over time

For non-HVUs who only purchase offline: lower prices, trust in the platform, and ease of use can change behaviour

Screenshot 2023 11 13 At 11.56.26 Am