"I'm not going there to die. I'm going to find out if I'm really alive. I have to do it!"… “So you think you can tell? Hot ashes for trees… Same old fears…”
Well, if you didn’t like that you mustn’t like baseball ⚾️ (… unless you’re a Canuck). Deep down even they have to realize what they saw/ experienced- - baseball “marking the time, Ray”.
I'm constantly going on about local government and its waste and fraud and abuse but no one cares.
Counterintuitively, local government is the *furthest away* from normal people. They can name Cabinet secretaries and maybe even their Senator, but not a single City Councilman.
Imagine going to the ballpark to see a game between future Hall of Famer Randy Johnson and Greg Maddux, but get disappointed they get scratched for a young Max Scherzer and a young Clayton Kershaw.
Google just made a subtle but massive change
Last month, Google quietly removed the num=100 search parameter.
This means you can no longer view 100 results at once. The default max is now 10.
Why does this matter?
- Most LLMs (OpenAI, Perplexity, etc.) rely (directly or indirectly) on Google’s indexed results, alongside their own crawlers.
- Overnight, their access to the “long tail” of the internet was cut by 90%.
The fallout:
- According to Search Engine Land, 88% of sites saw a drop in impressions.
- Reddit, which often ranks in positions 11–100, saw its LLM citations plummet. Its stock dropped 15%.
For startups, this is brutal. Visibility just got harder. Reddit as part of AEO just changed entirely.
It’s no longer enough to build a great product you need to crack distribution first. Because if people can’t discover you, they’ll never get to evaluate you.
Most engineers seem to always neglect this reality, but a mediocre product with great distribution will always beat a great product with mediocre distribution.
As Peter Thiel says:
“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. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.
Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true. No matter how strong your product — even if it easily fits into already established habits and anybody who tries it likes it immediately — you must still support it with a strong distribution plan."
Distribution > Product
(h/t Adarsh Appaiah on LinkedIn)
my boyfriend wants to start a company called “just” and manufacture stuff like a refrigerator that’s just a refrigerator or a washing machine that just washes your clothes and their products have no tech and work for at least 15+ years.
zyns finally caught up to me
had a scary close call, so sharing here in case it helps for anyone else
it's obviously no secret that I take a lot of zyns (nicotine pouches)
they help me stay mentally focused and alert, which is especially helpful when you're in crypto
they also help suppress appetite, so I feel less of an urge to randomly snack throughout the day
I've been taking them for about 1.5y now and get regular blood checkups and do the usual 8 sleep / oura ring / whoop band tech bro monitoring
but for the past month, I started feeling a small tightness in my chest, and sometimes the left side of my neck
I went to the ER a few times, and they did all the tests, but found pretty much nothing other than exhaustion
I even did an echocardiogram, several X-rays, and wore a heart device for 4-5 days. they couldn't find anything so I figured it must be in my head from stress
last week, it happened again, but I decided to go to a different ER instead of the one near my house, and the ER doctor looked pretty worried
he told me he was very glad that I came because otherwise I might've had an aneurysm from my untreated condition
it turns out that nicotine works by constricting (making smaller) your blood vessels
which can make it such that blood flow to certain organs is reduced, causing long-term damage
he gave me a few pills that are apparently "vasodilators" and I started feeling better after about 20 minutes
he said that I had a severe reduction in bandwidth (of my arteries) and thus greatly increased latency of blood flow (to my organs)
he told me that increasing bandwidth and reducing latency saved my life
Great point. So much top talent has gone into finance good for liquidity, but at the cost of wild engineering breakthroughs. History shows high-density talent drives the biggest leaps. China gets this, channeling talent into strategic industries. The U.S. props up its currency by fueling markets, but once China positioned for dominance that edge started to dissolve. With talent now pouring into AI, the next few years will bring about some wild breakthroughs.
Smart wearables saved an estimated 1.3 million lives in 2020 alone.
If you’re thinking about a gift, make it one that could literally save a life, or yours.