The Best Words I Found Last Month
optimized for "novel and interesting"
Ratings reminder (points for novel and interesting):
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
Ideas worth spreading?
(this post will be deleted next month — the full archive has all this and more)