👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
Three articles and three podcasts that deserve saving from this week's algorithmic feeds and click-bait chum. No fluff, and signal over noise ⚡️
📚 Reading
Beyond Smart:
Why do so many smart people fail to discover anything new? Viewed from that direction, the question seems a rather depressing one. But there's another way to look at it that's not just more optimistic, but more interesting as well. Clearly intelligence is not the only ingredient in having new ideas. What are the other ingredients? Are they things we could cultivate?
🥸 6-minute read by Paul Graham
Why We Crave Software With Style Over “Branding”
As technology advances, software will increasingly be chosen not just for how well it addresses its use case, but how it conveys its personality, similar to how we choose our clothes [..] What we’re witnessing, I’d argue, is the reemergence of style in software: the process of humans recognizing and projecting their sense of self onto products — turning inanimate pixels into something with soul.
💅 10-minute read by Molly Mielke in Future
This Can't Go On:
So as with economic growth, the rate of scientific and technological advancement is extremely fast compared to most of history. As with economic growth, presumably there are limits at some point to how advanced technology can become. And as with economic growth, from here scientific and technological advancement could [..] stagnate, explode, collapse.
⛔️ 10-minute read by Holden Karnofsky in Cold Takes
🎧 Listening
The Great Reshuffle & Decline of Gatekeepers:
I feel like, the past ten years, there's a new crop of businesses that have basically no historical analogs [..] We have these businesses growing superfast organically, that in a couple of years have global reach. They have no capital requirements. They have expensive stock, so they can hire all the best engineers, and they can hire them around the world [..] If you look further back, there's basically none of them. There's great tech business like Microsoft, but there's not 50 Microsofts.
📈 62-minute chat with LibertyRPF on Infinite Loops
Cloud Infrastructure for the Metaverse:
We didn't have enough storage and compute. And now with the cloud, with edge capabilities, with high-performance GPUs, with all these things we have today, some of this vision of the merging of the virtual and physical world and the ability to move back and forth between the two seamlessly... like my iPhone has a LiDAR on it, and I can go around and create 3D worlds.
🤖 43-minute chat with Bill Vass on Building the Open Metaverse
DeepDive into Remote Work:
We are a remote team: we really value efficiency and productivity and, realistically, people's happiness. If people can find the information they are looking for when they are looking for it, they are happy. Especially if they don't have to ask somebody because there is a lot of feelings, emotions, anxieties, and nervousness around asking people on your team for things.
🗄 81-minute chat with James Beshara on Below The Line
📬 Suggestions?
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