Given that the broader--and VERY clear--context of the Bible is that there is life after death and and we should store up treasures there not here, it is worth considering what point the author of this quote was making.
https://t.co/ZzszVwgUi5
one of the quotes i find most inspiring on a hard day:
"Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom"
Ecclesiastes 9:10
An especially good read if you are an achiever. The reward of titles, money, and scope can feel so validating. Until you realize you are judging your career by someone else's rules, not your own.
I still have the simplicity and syncing I love (via iCloud), but also fast editing with markdown, improved search, keyboard shortcuts, bookmarks, side-by-side views, a non-proprietary data store (folders + markdown files), AI accessible if I want, and plugins if I need more.
Apple Notes has been my go-to for over a decade, since I gave up on Evernote. I love the simplicity and that it makes it easy to access my notes on any of my devices.
Obsidian feels like Apple Notes 2.0. Here's why...
This is the question every software company is asking themselves right now. What happens to our roadmap if an engineer can produce 2X or 5X more output.
The general direction will be roadmap expansion. Companies that just use this leverage to cut costs will be outcompeted by those that decide to do more.
As a result, this will mean we will see more competitive battles between companies, but also the expansion of many more categories since software can touch more surface area.
The limiter then becomes how rapidly your customers can actually adopt new software, how good you make that software (vs. it becomes slop because it’s so much easier), and whether you can get paid for more software or if customers’ expectations just go up over time for what they get from each vendor.
As an aside, building up a brand, ecosystem, and distribution moat ends up being critical. If software development cost per unit go down, then the new game is how you can get customers to adopt and remain sticky. GTM becomes a critical factor in all this.
Everyone's in love with their own ideas; that's natural. The actual skill needed is about learning to create real value, connecting it to a real audience, and doing it in away that generates sustainable profits. AI can help accelerate that too, but it's a very different mindset.
2026 feels poised to be the year of product slop. It reminds me of when blogging/social media/podcasts each entered the spotlight. Each time it was a digital gold rush; the promise of success was oversold and the work needed undersold.
Dropped the phrase "product slop" today in a call — when teams can ship so much more at 100x the speed, the risk of bloated, feature-dense but unfocused experiences quickly becomes a concern. "More things faster" is rarely a recipe for excellence.
When it takes weeks to ship, you justify every feature.
When it takes hours, you ship everything. Why not? It feels like progress and momentum, right?
When the cost to build something was higher, and took more time, the need to justify the build and ensure it was oriented to mission and incrementally valuable (aka the *right thing* to build) helped mitigate this. With the cost and time effectively dropping to zero (I can code a complete product feature tonight after dinner) — everything changes about how we build high-quality products. Judgement and taste become the constraint.
Unsurprisingly, I believe design plays an even more critical role in this new world than ever.
There are definitely exciting new opportunities ahead, but the skill is not about churning out more content/products/ideas. That's the trap most people will fall into before burning out. Those are the crayon drawings posted on the fridge; fun to make but without broad value.
@noahkagan This is really good. Sure they are generalizations, but I lived in Europe for over 20 years and this represents a few realities it is easy to be completely unaware of if you've lived your whole life in the States.
There are more... 😄
I’m increasingly convinced that the willingness to change your mind is the ultimate sign of intelligence. The most impressive people I know change their minds often in response to new information. It’s like a software update. The goal isn't to be right. It's to find the truth.
Good Products are Opinionated.
“Every great founder I’ve seen up close, or even from afar, is highly opinionated and they’re almost dictatorial in how they run things.
Also, early-stage teams are opinionated. And the products they build are opinionated. Opinionated means they have a strong vision for what it should and should not do.
If you don’t have a strong vision of what it should and should not do, then you end up with a giant mess of competing features.
@Jack Dorsey has a great phrase: “Limit the number of details and make every detail perfect.” And that’s especially important in consumer products. You have to be extremely opinionated. All the best products in consumer-land get there through simplicity.
You could argue the recent success of ChatGPT and similar AI chatbots is because they’re even simpler than Google.
Google looked like the simplest product you could possibly build. It was just a box. But even that box had limitations in what you could do.
You were trained not to talk to it conversationally. You would enter keywords and you had to be careful with those keywords. You couldn’t just ask a question outright and get a sensible answer. It wouldn’t do proper synonym matching, and then it would spit you back a whole bunch of results. That was complicated. You’d have to sift through and figure out which ones were ads, which ones were real, were they sorted correctly, and then you’d have to click through and read it.
ChatGPT and the chatbot simplified that even further. You just talk to it like a human—use your voice or you type and it gives you back a straight answer.
It might not always be right, but it’s good enough, and it gives you back a straight answer in text or voice or images or whatever you prefer.
So it simplifies what we looked at as the simplest product on the Internet, which was formerly Google, and makes it even simpler. And you just cannot make a product that’s simple enough.
To be simple, you have to be extremely opinionated. You have to remove everything that doesn’t match your opinion of what the product should be doing. You have to meticulously remove every single click, every single extra button, every single setting.
In fact, things in the settings menu are an indication that you’ve abdicated your responsibility to the user. Choices for the user are an abdication of your responsibility. Maybe for legal or important reasons, you can have a few of these, but you should struggle and resist against every single choice the user has to make.
In the age of TikTok and ChatGPT, that’s more obvious than ever. People don’t want to make choices. They don’t want the cognitive load. They want you to figure out what the right defaults are and what they should be doing and looking at, and they want you to present it to them.”
@MindyLynn511 We are screwing it up all the time. And yet: “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,”
Romans 8:1 NIV
https://t.co/Xjo9o2FQ5C
Some cool things happening during Global Bible Month: the Bible App is featured on the Las Vegas Sphere (and Times Square) and there's a Bible Month carousel on Amazon Prime.