Laurence Favrot

Living to get radical.

[Laurence Favrot @favrot]

Progress isn't always loud (xkcd): http://t.co/k0uBLWAuEv

[drew dillon @drewdil]

Today we're launching Brief into open beta.

Your AI Product Navigator. The product layer for AI-powered teams.

Built with 100+ teams shipping with agents.

[Nan Ransohoff @nanransohoff]

New blog post:

There should be ‘general managers’ for more of the world’s important problems

There’s a surprisingly big category of problems that are ‘orphaned.’ By ‘orphaned’ I mean: you can’t point to a specific person or organization who thinks it’s their responsibility to deliver the outcome in its entirety. Lots of people talk about the problem, and often many work on slices of it. But if you asked: ‘is there a hyper-competent person waking up every day feeling accountable for making sure this gets solved?’—the answer is very often, ‘no.’

These problems exist across domains and at a variety of ‘altitudes.’ Indeed, some are perhaps better described as ‘things we want to be true’ rather than ‘problems.’ In any event, a few examples that have been on my mind recently:

(1) Can we prevent infection from all respiratory pathogens (including the common cold)?
(2) Can we make every new building in SF both serve its function and be beautiful?
(3) Can we permanently fix the American west’s water problem?
(4) Can we halve X risk?
(5) Can we eliminate single-use plastic globally without making convenience trade-offs?
(6) Can we make childcare costs so low that they’re a non-factor in deciding whether to have kids?

In my opinion, there should be ‘general managers’—GMs—for problems like these. These are founder-types who feel personally responsible for delivering a specific outcome (vs field-building generally); hyper-competent leaders who will pull whatever levers necessary to achieve the defined outcome. Most companies wouldn’t let an important initiative go unmanned or without a ‘directly responsible individual’ — why are we OK not having GMs for even more wide-reaching problems?

(Link to full post in reply)

[Laurence Favrot @favrot]

@ajhodls dude

[Laurence Favrot @favrot]

@jasoncbenn Also: indirectly help relationships by coaching you to be more you and less not-you. Feedback in real time or immediately after.

[Laurence Favrot @favrot]

@jasoncbenn Work with you to define those relationships you care about. Then help you manage the state of those relationships. So much value in remembering to call or opportunistically doing something meaningful. Dumb version is a daily reminder to do something nice for your partner.

[roon @tszzl]

there's something at the core of the american ideology that's only captured in happy go lucky 80s movies, which is that the noble pursuit of fun is probably one of the most productive forces in the universe and works way better than grinding away dutifully on things you hate

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Be good. Future AIs are watching.

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepneas in the Sky are two of my favorite books of all time, and I recommend them to everyone.

[threads @Threads]

Hi, we're Threads. 👋 We've been kickin' it on this block for a while, and if you're new here, please note that we have no affiliation with any large social media company.

We are, however, replacing Slack for the modern teams of today. Check out more below:

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

RIP Yammer. The product was ahead of its time and paved the way for freemium and social in the enterprise. However I think there is still more room for innovation in the space. More to announce on that soon.

https://t.co/701DL9fDzq

[Laurence Favrot @favrot]

@Mtclai Yikes. Hoping for the best.

[BetterUp @BetterUp]

Thanks to the recent work of BetterUp Chief Innovation Officer @grkellerman and renowned psychologist Dr. Martin Seligman, they’ve pinpointed four types of creativity for stability and innovation 👀

🧠 Integration
🧠 Distal Thinking
🧠 Figure-Ground Reversal
🧠 Splitting

[Maggie Appleton @Mappletons]

New @tana_inc folks seem hungry for in-depth books on ontologies & schemas.
Initial reaction was... books are overkill? There's not much to know? Just google it? But then tried googling. And it is *noisy* and poorly curated out there.

A few recommendations:

[Paul Stoughton @PaulStoughton]

https://t.co/d82sYAqZBW

[Laurence Favrot @favrot]

@houshuang You can add a second time zone which is somewhat helpful: https://t.co/jVfbaeCo5w

[Laurence Favrot @favrot]

@VitalikButerin The San Diego, California airport is right in the city. It’s a surprisingly easy walk to downtown assuming you aren’t over burdened with luggage.

[Venkatesh Rao ☀️ @vgr]

Oh shit, I think I just figured it out. LinkedIn is the opposite of Very Online. It’s Not Really Online At All. They’re in a sort of “Internet theme park” attached to meatspace.

[Laurence Favrot @favrot]

An Initiation to Game B https://t.co/mzDWrOSWq2

[Laurence Favrot @favrot]

@houshuang @tombielecki How did you try to learn piano?

[Stian Håklev @houshuang]

If you were building a university-like program from scratch, and you had complete control over how to design the grading/assessment system, how would it look like? Optimizing both for how to most accurately assess a student's skill/knowledge achievement, but