Jon Crowell

Robot Whisperer.
Brazil, soccer, family, coffee, photography, books, design, art, Netherlands, big ideas, INTJ, Zico.
🇧🇷🇺🇸🇳🇱
Former Mavs fan

[Robin Hanson @robinhanson]

They call it "pre-boarding" but they don't fool me. I can see that it is actual boarding.

[Saganism @Saganismm]

“So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.”

— Aldous Huxley

[David French @DavidAFrench]

One problem with politics is that partisans equate: "Politician in good faith advances policies I dislike" with "Politician is corrupt and abusive."

There is a difference between disagreement and corruption, and the sooner we can draw that distinction, the better off we'll be.

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

POV: The FIFA C-Suite refusing to lower the $10,000 ticket prices on its official website — and quietly dumping everything on SeatGeek — because it’ll piss off people who already bought and prove they were way too greedy while screwing fans over.

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

As a father of two young kids, I keep thinking about this from Dara:

"I think we're doing our kids a disservice by giving them too much, being around too much.

You want to love your kids, you want to know that they're absolutely loved and appreciated.

But it's the challenges in life that form you, and it's the overcoming of these challenges that give humans a profound satisfaction.

If you as a parent are overcoming these challenges for your kids, you're actually doing them a disservice long-term, whereas short-term you think you're doing them a favor.

They've got to learn how to make it in this world themselves.

A happy life is not necessarily an easy life."

[Dylan Byers @DylanByers]

New statement from Scott Pelley:

There has never been anything in America like 60 Minutes.

The Sunday tradition is the most successful program of any kind in history. For more than a decade, its innovative growth on every major online platform has extended its reach to countless millions around the world. This spring, at the end of our 58thseason, 60 Minutes grew rapidly with an unheard-of 9% jump in viewers on CBS.

“60” has been the number-one program in America for decades because our beloved audience finds integrity, quality, and humanity in our stories. When stewardship of the program passed to my colleagues and me, our responsibility was to expand energetically into a new age of media technology while preserving the values our audience expects. Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.

The waste is heartbreaking.

Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.

For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.

At 60 Minutes, we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to “keep up the good fight.” Most of the men and women of CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.

I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion—a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again—a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.

Scott Pelley

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

This is what education in the age of AI looks like. Start with the language: the linguistic surface is your roadmap. Much like an SDK has a set of function definitions, human language is the new API to the world.

It also always has been… there's never been an expert in any field without mastery over its language. The distinction is that English alone could not produce tangible things. You had to translate it into machine instruction, through learning or delegation to others. You can now go direct.

[Jon Crowell @jonrcrowell]

@user1508123 @ThePrimeagen Phenomenal book. The second was a huge step down, and I think Rothfuss knows it and is likely why he’ll never write the third book in the trilogy.

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

"You need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions."

— Paul Graham, How to Do Great Work

https://t.co/AyIk5fnKZL

[The Figen @TheFigen_]

Photography is a skill.

[Jon Crowell @jonrcrowell]

"What would your future self thank you for doing this year?"

I love this way too frame goals.

[Shane Parrish @shaneparrish]

At 28 @markpinc was nearly broke, had been fired by John Malone and Bain, and as he says "my life sucked so badly."

He wanted a place to think and ended up in a synagogue. Sitting there something happened ... but it wasn't a religious experience.

He started writing what he calls the book of life. He documented every single thing that sucked in his life (and it was a long list.)

Then he wrote out a goal for the next year that taught he he was the master of his circumstances, not the other way around.

And he's done this every year of his life since.

The key question he's trying to answer each year is: "What would your future self thank you for doing this year?"

[Tom Goodwin @tomfgoodwin]

One can reasonably imagine that in 2027 you will spend a lot of time proving
- That you are a person
- That you are you.
A lot of the internet is gonna grind to a bit of a halt

[gian @giansegato]

spent my 11-hour flight back from europe working on a very long report. started as a slack message but morphed into a several pages long doc. wifi was as shitty as it gets. after finally making it home i realized that the computer had forcefully restarted. opened slack: draft was gone :(

hail mary: claude pls save me, no clue how but pls try

it checked APFS snapshots, time machine, slack indexeddb, write-ahead logs, service worker / http caches, local storage, app logs, hibernation image... nothing. all gone

but then... it realized i have alfred installed. so it checked the clipboard snapshots alfred keeps in sqlite. sad news: alfred clipboard memory gets deleted after 24h. aggressive retention policy. however! when sqlite runs DELETE, nothing gets actually deleted. it only marks pages as reusable, but it doesn't override the physical bytes. so claude decided to do a raw-scan of the db, reverse eng alfred data format, figure out the portion containing the timestamp, stitched everything back together across overflow pages... and handed me the exact final version of my report, the last one i cmd+C'd

all this, in a single shot

... day 200 of "what if you had an elite hacker you can ask anything to"

[Klaas @forgebitz]

remember scrum masters?

wild times

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

Funny how the pendulum shifts

1. "GPT wrappers are worthless" → the value acrues to application layer

2. "AI will eliminate white collar jobs" → someone needs to manage all these AI agents and everyone is now saying white collar workers will rise due to AI

3. "Open source will never catch up" → Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of tasks

4. "I only use Claude Code, Codex is mid" → Codex is becoming a super app. Coding, docs, browser, computer use, automations, all in one surface.

4. "You need to pick a model and go deep" → model loyalty is dead, the best founders swap weekly based on the task

5. "SaaS is dead" → This was mostly true but for some SaaS margins actually improve when agents pay for their own tokens and need their own seats

6. "AutoGPT is the future" → AutoGPT died. Then agents actually got good 2 years later with Hermes, OpenClaw, and managed agents. The idea was right. The timing was wrong.

7. "Prompt engineering is a career" → lasted about 18 months as a job title. Workflow engineering replaced it.

8. "Computer use is a gimmick" → "sent from computer use/ai agent will be the new sent from iphone

9. "AI design looks generic" → the generic look is a taste problem not a technology problem. The founders feeding their agents references from Japanese packaging, brutalist architecture, and 1960s print are getting beautiful output.

10. "Fine-tuning is the moat" → a well-structured Obsidian vault with good markdown files outperforms fine-tuning for most use cases and costs nothing.

11. "Benchmarks tell you which model to use" → benchmarks tell you which model won a test. I think we're all waking up to this lol.

12. "AI will consolidate into 2-3 winners" → AI is fragmenting into thousands of vertical applications built on commodity models. The consolidation is at the model layer. The explosion is at the application layer. Both are happening simultaneously.

13. "The hard part is building" → the hard part is choosing what to build. Building takes a weekend. Choosing the right thing to build takes taste, domain knowledge, and customer conversations. thats why i built https://t.co/a5ARFnvky2 to make it easier for you.

14. "The terminal is the future" → desktop apps just ate the terminal. Claude Code desktop, Codex app, both shipped GUI versions in the same month. The next 100 million agent users will never open a terminal (thank god).

I guarantee you I'm holding at least 2-3 beliefs right now that will look stupid by Christmas. I just don't know which ones. Neither do you. No one does. Build anyway.

Keep moving because this is the greatest time to be building.

I'm rooting for you.

[B. Miller @BlaiseInKC]

There’s some quirk in physics where, if there’s a small hole in a bag of mulch it will leak all over your vehicle.
But if you rip a giant hole in the bag and try to dump it out into your landscaping, almost none will fall out.

[Griffin Gulledge @griffingulledge]

Is it too much to ask that our political leaders be mentally stable and generally moral?

[Roland-Garros @rolandgarros]

“He was here for my first match as a junior at Roland-Garros. It’s a pleasure to have him here.” 🇧🇷✨

Idol in the stands. Fonseca delivering. We couldn’t script this better 🎬🎾

#RolandGarros

[David Perell Clips @PerellClips]

Our obsession with the news distorts our reality and "industrializes" our inner lives. Author and philosopher Alain de Botton explains:

"People will routinely say things like, 'Of course, we're living in this very sad age.' And sometimes I think: says who? When did this age get anointed? Compared to what, the fourth century in Abyssinia, the twelfth century in Syria?

Our inner lives have been industrialized. And commercialized. And that's no good for the free thinker, the honest thinker, the authentic thinker.

"You're not really a responsible adult until you don't know certain things that people around you think are very important. If there's a singer you don't know about, a movie you just haven't crossed that threshold on--congratulate yourself. You're doing well. You're keeping a bit of your mental experience for yourself.

We don't need to know everything that everybody else knows. We need to know the interesting bits of our own experience."

[Rеvеn @RevenRV]

Acabas de ganar la Champions y en vez de ir a celebrar con tus compañeros vas a apoyar a tu compatriota. Cuanto honor. Fútbol, señores.