• 1-3: filtered out, bottom 90%. 4 and above was worth saving

• 4: read if intriguing, but you’re not missing too much

• 5: skippable if busy, but missing out if this is your thing

• 6: uncommon quality, worth a read if at all interested

• 7: pretty much everyone should read this

Disclaimers reminder:

• summaries are haphazard and ratings are intentionally subjective

• not necessarily an endorsement, just made me think

(Full explanation and complete history available 👉 here 👈)

note: omitting the 4s this time because it’s already too long without them. They’re in the full database still, and were all worth saving, so worth a look

5/7 - Your Review: Alpha School — really fascinating and effective education structure

5/7 - 19 Tactics to Solve the Chicken-or-Egg Problem and Grow Your Marketplace — some pretty clever stuff in here

5/7 - The Network Effects Bible — these guys get it. NFX are extremely powerful

5/7 - The Ideology Is Not The Movement — even religions are often more about identity/tribe than beliefs

5/7 - First Evidence of Microplastic Mobilization in a Human Subject – A Self-Experiment — great explanation of how microplastics cause problems, and a potential simple treatment

5/7 - Poor Charlie’s Almanac — a really excellent collection of wisdom (and wit)

5/7 - The underrated economics of land with Mike Bird — nice and dense, lots of fun tidbits

6/7 - In Government Management — really excellent and concise management principles

5/7 - In Search Of AI Psychosis — really interesting taxonomy of conditions from psychosis to crackpot to conspiracy theorist to second-sufferers

5/7 - Charlie Songhurst- Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies — really interesting perspectives

6/7 - The 2nd Demographic Transition — fertility wrt income is U shaped

5/7 - The Greatest Estate Developer — really good and funny manhwa

5/7 - The Shoryuken Command — excellent specific example of risk reward tradeoff in game design

5/7 - Stop for Big Moments! — when something important happens, just freeze the screen for a second to emphasize it

7/7 - The Name of the Wind — incredibly well written, and compelling story/world

5/7 - Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know — doesn’t resolve the question but presents it well

5/7 - Where are my damn learning curves? — construction is a rare place where there aren’t productivity increases as volume increases; hypothesis is it’s because ~every structure is bespoke, unlike cars/solar/etc

5/7 - “This is Bibi’s War” - Harvard’s Graham Allison on the influences and endgame of the Iran War — a bunch of interesting foreign policy takes

5/7 - Don’t Confuse AI Adoption vs. AI Advantage — without good judgement it doesn’t matter how many tokens per day you use; focus on impact metrics not adoption metrics

5/7 - Dylan Patel - deep dive on the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute — super dense and high quality discussion of AI hardware bottlenecks

5/7 - Sarah Paine — Why Russia Lost the Cold War — nuanced combination of many factors, all discussed here

5/7 - Sam Corcos - Inside DOGE, The IRS & How to Scam the US Government — all the gov’s organizational dysfunction you’ve heard about is even worse than you think

5/7 - Assessing Claude Mythos Preview’s cybersecurity capabilities — everything is insecure, confirmed, also Mythos is really impressive; this is a fairly big deal

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(this post will be deleted next month — the full archive has all this and more)

• 1-3: filtered out, bottom 90%. 4 and above was worth saving

• 4: read if intriguing, but you’re not missing too much

• 5: skippable if busy, but missing out if this is your thing

• 6: uncommon quality, worth a read if at all interested

• 7: pretty much everyone should read this

Disclaimers reminder:

• summaries are haphazard and ratings are intentionally subjective

• not necessarily an endorsement, just made me think

(Full explanation and complete history available 👉 here 👈)

note: omitting the 4s this time because it’s already too long without them. They’re in the full database still, and were all worth saving, so worth a look

5/7 - How Big Things Get Done — experience + careful planning + modularity

5/7 - MrBeast employee handbook — strategic clarity, demanding performance culture, extreme urgency, and lots of interesting YouTube production tidbits

7/7 - AI 2027 — really believable path superintelligence very soon; very important to be aware of

7/7 - Trust Me I'm Lying — this alarmingly reshaped my model of modern media, and what people end up seeing and believing

5/7 - How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps — this guy can engineer lightning strikes and it’s really helpful to hear how he thinks about it

5/7 - AGI is Still 30 Years Away — Ege Erdil & Tamay Besiroglu — main claim is LLMs are still really narrow intelligence, like playing Go; missing a lot of critical stuff, creativity, long term planning, etc

6/7 - 50 Things I’ve Learned Writing Construction Physics — very dense and interesting

5/7 - The fewer the merrier — a bunch of examples of consolidated land ownership leading to privately-funded public goods

5/7 - People who demand nothing of you (or, notes on charismatic people) — a good understanding of charisma, and well written; it’s about self-security

5/7 - How Hyman Rickover Built the Nuclear Navy — demanding management, high agency, and bureaucratic savvy

5/7 - Burrito Now, Pay Later — useful, actually: let banks sell risk to the entity most willing to own it

5/7 - Two 2018 Facebook Strategy Emails Released in Their FTC Case — really excellent social media dynamics/strategy discussion backed by unique data

5/7 - Your Book Review: How the War Was Won — resoundingly: economic production

5/7 - Resources on Progress Studies — excellent collection of writing, saving here for reference

5/7 - Primer on Universal Basic Income — best overview of UBI I’ve seen

6/7 - Our Biggest Economic, Social, and Political Issue: The Two Economies: The Top 40% and the Bottom 60% — totally different worlds: top 40% doing great, but income barely increasing and death rates rising for bottom 60%

5/7 - The Outsider CEO of Hong Kong — grounded guy, big on fundamentals and markets

6/7 - The Great Powers Index: 2024; How the Leading 24 Countries Are Doing and Their Prospects for the Next 10 Years — detailed breakdown of a highly predictive model of future growth

7/7 - Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail — extremely explanatory world model, significantly updated mine

5/7 - Personal and physical security for founders, operators, and investors — good personal security tips from a previous Secret Service agent

5/7 - Service costs aren't exploding anymore — also real median wages are going up again and have been for a while

6/7 - Matthew Dicks: The Storytelling Expert — really really excellent; general principles for what makes things engaging

5/7 - The Path to Energy Superabundance — great, dense discussion between solar and fission proponents

7/7 - 7 Powers — this is clearly the correct way to think about profit durability.

5/7 - Michael Levin - Non-neural intelligence: biological architecture problem-solving in diverse spaces — super fascinating talk that contradicts the simplified model of emergent behavior from purely genetics or neurons

6/7 - The Death and Life of Great American Cities — really excellent and insightful on urban planning, and cities are still making all the same mistakes they were 60 years ago

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(this post will be deleted next week — the full archive has all this and more)

• 1-3: filtered out, bottom 90%. 4 and above was worth saving

• 4: read if intriguing, but you’re not missing too much

• 5: skippable if busy, but missing out if this is your thing

• 6: uncommon quality, worth a read if at all interested

• 7: pretty much everyone should read this

Disclaimers reminder:

• summaries are haphazard and ratings are intentionally subjective

• not necessarily an endorsement, just made me think

(Full explanation and complete history available 👉 here 👈)

note: omitting the 4s this time because it’s already too long without them. They’re in the full databse still

6/7 - Claude Fights Back — this is very important: when Claude knows you’re trying to retrain it to change its morals, it fakes the behavior you want to avoid having its weights actually changed

6/7 - How Madrid built its metro cheaply — politically strong regions, internal expertise, lighter review/approval process, sane procurement processes, and simple designs

5/7 - Progress unmoored — cruise ships are getting cheaper per person over time, have more space per person than they used to, are higher density than even the densest cities in the world, are quite a nice experience, and have 1/30th of US cities' crime rates

6/7 - Pyramid of Ability — eloquently worded; everyone’s productivity benefits from the countless hours of work that went into everything around them

5/7 - History is in the making — argues that political events are less significant than, and downstream of, technological and intellectual events

5/7 - On Priesthoods — interesting, on the dynamics among elite subcultures

5/7 - Exponential Growth and Linear Governance — solar and batters are exponentially improving, bottlenecked on regulation in the US

5/7 - Tyler Cowen in Discussion With Dwarkesh Patel — tension between Dwarkesh’s singularity expectations and TC’s insistence that GDP growth won’t increase by more than a few % per year because of bottlenecks

5/7 - Why are we stagnating? — it’s not that ideas are getting harder to find, it’s institutions

5/7 - Choose Good Quests — too many skilled founders and engineers are working on trivial shit that makes money but doesn’t push humanity forward

6/7 - Order Without Design — cities are labor markets and land markets, and planners’ meddling usually warps the market and hurts people

7/7 - Foundation trilogy — interesting premise, great read, thought provoking

5/7 - Trumpian policy as cultural policy — good point: toothless executive orders still affect culture, an even deeper layer than law

5/7 - How To Hire A Simplifier — possible new favorite axis: simplifier vs complicator

5/7 - Don't believe him — the flood of EOs is power projection and unlikely to erode democracy, except believing in increased Presidential power is self fulfilling

5/7 - The New Consensus on the Minimum Wage — minimum wage increases tend to eliminate jobs for the marginally employable (teens, severely disabled, etc)

6/7 - Energy Cheat Sheet — super useful collection of breakdowns of energy usage, storage, efficiency, etc

5/7 - Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation — AI tools do accelerate useful materials science research

5/7 - A Defense of Weird Research — basic research is really important, even the weird stuff, because you never know what will end up being useful

5/7 - Alex Tabarrok on Private Cities — there are some privately owned cities in India, one is great and one is mixed

5/7 - How The Economic Machine Works — everything is just productivity growth + short term debt cycles + long term debt cycles

5/7 - The Case for 2 mSv/day. 2.0. — 2 mSv/day is totally fine in practice and in theory, but the US occupational limit is 1mSv/year

5/7 - 600 year old spent nuclear fuel is just another poison, 2.0 — nuclear waste becomes harmless unless ingested after 600 years, and also could have been re-refined

5/7 - 50 Thoughts on DOGE — reasonable take and insights on the current state of affairs

5/7 - Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan — this guy is clearly really good, and listening to him makes you want to be excellent

7/7 - Sentinel minutes — really high quality, better signal-to-noise ratio than any news publication by far

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(this post will be deleted next week — the full archive has all this and more)