https://paulgraham.com/mean.html obviously everything Paul Graham said during his tenure at YC was more about what he wanted founders to be like than what they necesssarily were like...but i do think i agree, actually, that mean people fail. at least, I agree with the weaker claim that the most overtly nasty people are usually jobless and socially isolated. successful people may be ruthless, but almost all of them have manners.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-is-a-space-to-think I like that Anthropic is branding itself as the less-skeezy AI. i want to use products that have a “we’re the Good Guys, we keep it classy” brand identity, even if obviously there are some compromises made for the sake of profit. a company culture of “we don’t do that lowest-common-denominator shit, we have Honor” is obviously toothless from an incentive perspective but can in fact hold out for some time and provide a better-quality customer experience.
links 2/5/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-05-2026
https://paulgraham.com/mean.html obviously everything Paul Graham said during his tenure at YC was more about what he wanted founders to be like than what they necesssarily were like...but i do think i agree, actually, that mean people fail. at least, I agree with the weaker claim that the most overtly nasty people are usually jobless and socially isolated. successful people may be ruthless, but almost all of them have manners.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-is-a-space-to-think I like that Anthropic is branding itself as the less-skeezy AI. i want to use products that have a “we’re the Good Guys, we keep it classy” brand identity, even if obviously there are some compromises made for the sake of profit. a company culture of “we don’t do that lowest-common-denominator shit, we have Honor” is obviously toothless from an incentive perspective but can in fact hold out for some time and provide a better-quality customer experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Shinzo_Abe somehow i didn’t realize this happened. wild story.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/on-technologies-vs-commodities Brian Potter finds that technologies vs commodities are more of a continuum
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21602 scaffolding for text-to-SQL
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/41139/china-attacksblockades-taiwan-in-2026/ why is this so flat?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cevz13xkxpro (from Sept 2025) we are finally beating Huntington’s