Tech Historian

technology enthusiast.

[signüll @signulll]

you never forget your early believers because early belief is expensive af.

there’s reputational risk, financial risk, social risk, etc. there’s roughly no proof, no consensus, & no obvious upside. the early believers have to see something way before the market has agreed it should exist.

whereas late belief is absolutely free. this is where you see pure bandwagon & trend following stuff. this rule applies to business sure, but maybe even way more to personal stuff.

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

High-agency people have this weird immunity to embarrassment. And the more you look at it the more you realize it's not that they're braver or or born without the shame gene.

It's that they relocated the shame. they moved the embarrassment button.

It's still there, they're not sociopaths, it's just wired to something completely different than everyone else's.

For most people the button is wired to: being seen wanting something and not immediately having it. Being caught trying. Looking dumb. Getting told no.

For high-agency people the button got rewired to a single thing: not trying. That's the only thing that makes them cringe.

[Kelsey Piper @KelseyTuoc]

My ancestors buried half their children. All mine are alive. My ancestors' house had a dirt floor. Mine is wood. I have indoor plumbing, I have hot water, I have never in my life hauled a full bucket half a mile and I probably never will. Do you know how rare it is, in human history, for small children to wear shoes? Mine have multiple pairs. I can speak to my relatives who live thousands of miles away, for free, at any time. Video, if we want video. With machine translation, if we speak different languages.

The original Library of Congress had 740 books in it. I have more than that. If I run out of books in my home my local public library has 350,000. If I want to take a hundred books with me on vacation, they all fit on a device that fits in my purse.

I have heat in the winter and AC in the summer and a washing machine and I have never, ever, ever had to scrub a dress clean by hand in the stream. I can look up recipes from more than a hundred different countries and I've tried dozens of them. I ride a clean and modern train across my city for $4, or take a robot taxi if I'm out too late for the train. I donate $40,000 every year to the cause of getting healthcare to the world's poorest people and even after the donations I never have to think about whether I can afford a book, or a pair of shoes, or a cup of coffee.

There is a great deal more to fight for, of course. I hope that our descendants will look back on our lives and list a thousand ways they're richer. Maybe we ourselves will do that, if some of the crazier stuff comes true.

But the abundance is all around you and to a significant degree you aren't feeling it only because fish don't notice water.

[signüll @signulll]

the first iphone had no app store, no 3g, no gps, no video camera, no copy/paste, no push notifications, no mms, no real multitasking, no front camera, no facetime, no siri, no icloud, no imessage, no touch id, no apple pay, no retina display, no wireless charging, & no water resistance.

& somehow everyone looked at it & immediately understood the future had arrived. except steve ballmer & this blogger.

[conduct|r @conductr_]

your entire life will change when you understand how neuroplasticity actually works.

your brain isn't fixed. it rebuilds itself every single day based on one simple rule: whatever you REPEAT becomes STRONGER. whatever you ignore slowly fades away. neuroscientists have a saying for it: "neurons that fire together wire together."

which means every repeated thought becomes a highway in your head. think "i can't do this" often enough and your brain paves the road so well that the thought shows up automatically. but the same mechanism works in your favor. repeat a better thought, take a better action, and the old roads grow over while new ones get built. it just takes time and repetition.

like Aristotle said: "We are what we repeatedly do."

that's the loop. your THINKING shapes your ACTIONS, your ACTIONS shape your THINKING, and REPETITION builds your IDENTITY. so choose what you repeat, because your brain is always listening

[@levelsio @levelsio]

Europe fights for 6 years whether to install AC or not

China produces an AC in 6 seconds

[Blake Scholl 🛫 @bscholl]

Boom will be offering a prize—$50k cash and $50k in Boom stock—for the first amateur-built RC airplane to exceed Mach 1.

[ₕₐₘₚₜₒₙ @hamptonism]

You are sitting at your elite school pretending that because you watched TikTok twice and got an A+ on some crazy paper, because your professor couldn’t get a job anywhere else, that you actually understand the world.

- CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Atlas Shrugged made simple:

1. Society runs on a small number of highly capable producers – industrialists, inventors, engineers – whose work everyone depends on but takes for granted.

2. The system starts rewarding need over achievement: the more capable you are, the more you’re expected to sacrifice for those who aren’t.

3. Success gets treated like a debt – taxed, regulated, resented – until the most capable start asking why they bother trying at all.

4. One by one, led by a man named John Galt, they simply withdraw – walking away rather than keep propping up a system that punishes them for producing.

5. Without them, the whole structure collapses, revealing that the “automatic” prosperity everyone assumed was actually being generated by specific, irreplaceable people.

6. Atlas is the Titan from Greek myth, condemned to carry the sky on his shoulders forever – Rand’s stand-in for the producer class, holding up civilization while getting blamed for it.

7. “Shrugged” is the whole argument in one word: Atlas doesn’t fight, doesn’t protest – he just quietly sets the weight down. Nobody realized the sky was being held up by anyone in particular, until the day it isn’t.
You don’t want us? We just go…🤷🏻‍♂️

[scar @imfat]

never fucking quit.

life flips insanely fast.

[signüll @signulll]

when tinder launched tinder gold (one of the most successful subscriptions of all time cuz it was pretty much ~100% margin) there was one psychological trick that worked incredibly well… you just show ppl who liked you but blur them out.

in order to reveal them, you need to subscribe. the human mind cannot handle this type emotional uncertainty, so the subscription which was expensive af to boot became more lucrative than netflix cuz they had zero supply side costs.

instagram plus is now effectively trying to create the same psychological dynamics, including private story views, & pushing your story up etc. incredibly interesting.

[Vivek Sen @Vivek4real_]

PALMER LUCKEY MIGHT BE THE ONLY BILLIONAIRE IN SILICON VALLEY WILLING TO SAY THIS OUT LOUD.

[voided intern @voidedintern]

Mark Zuckerberg reveals what made him believe he could work hard enough to do anything

"After I took that class I was basically like I can work hard enough to do anything that I want. Because I just like f***ing learned all these words that don't matter in order to nail this thing and I won."

"And kind of you know had some fun doing it. So it's like you found a model kind of."

Mark Zuckerberg: "Exactly and it was hard it was a yeah it was a tough model yeah. I mean there's the math version of that. I mean you're talking about Alexander Wang on here. I did a bunch of the same kind of math competitions that he did. I had this like super hardcore math instructor in high school his name was Zuming Feng."

[Suhail @Suhail]

My favorite @elonmusk quote that I often send friends:

Do not fear losing. “You will lose,” Musk says. “It will hurt the first fifty times. When you get used to losing, you will play each game with less emotion.” You will be more fearless, take more risks.

[BasedBiohacker @BasedBiohacker]

you should really listen to this jamie dimon monologue on work efficiency:

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@AJamesMcCarthy Read books, talk to people & iterate rapidly with hardware & software