Ryan Ham
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on the atlas · 33
- Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | Substack3 savers
- Simple advice for academic publishing - Marginal REVOLUTION5 savers
- The network's the thing — Remains of the Day1 savers
- Remains of the Day1 savers
- American Idle — Remains of the Day5 savers
- Seeing Like an Algorithm — Remains of the Day8 savers
- TikTok and the Sorting Hat — Remains of the Day5 savers
- EX-99.11 savers
- Crypto-Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy1 savers
- Celer Network1 savers
- The Network State in One Thousand Words | The Network State5 savers
- Thoughts Before the Barn Raise | Beanstalk1 savers
- Insights with Rene Girard - YouTube1 savers
- Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status | Hacker News1 savers
- moral-fn.pdf10 savers
- The Dollar's Place In The World Is Shifting Over Time (NYSEARCA:UUP) | Seeking Alpha1 savers
- A whirlwind tour of Ethereum finance - LessWrong2 savers
- Economics - LessWrong1 savers
- What makes people intellectually active? - LessWrong1 savers
- Gears in understanding - LessWrong12 savers
- What Are You Tracking In Your Head? - LessWrong2 savers
- Against Tulip Subsidies - LessWrong1 savers
- Economics and Efficiency - LessWrong2 savers
- Money-Printing: 2020 Vs. 2008 | Seeking Alpha1 savers
- Money-Printing: 2020 Vs. 2008 | Seeking Alpha1 savers
- The Network State in One Essay | The Network State3 savers
- The Network State in One Image | The Network State4 savers
- The Network State in One Sentence | The Network State4 savers
- Deep Dive: The inverted Treasury yield curve – Is it different this time? | S&P Global Market Intelligence1 savers
- The Ethereum Virtual Machine — How does it work? | by Luit Hollander | MyCrypto | Medium2 savers
- And You Will Know Us by the Company We Keep — Remains of the Day12 savers
- Curius / Onboarding2704 savers
- Law of large numbers3 savers
highlights · 366
It is a rapid, hyper-efficient matchmaker
TikTok and the Sorting Hat — Remains of the Daycultural determinist
TikTok and the Sorting Hat — Remains of the DayOr perhaps it’s a business form of persistence hunting. I don’t have to believe more than you, I just have to believe longer.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackVolatility of faith is deadly when it is matched with volatility of funding.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackThus we raised a billion-dollar-plus convertible debt offering, a just-in-case treasure chest.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackThat deal later died as well.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackAmazon tried having merchants like Toys R Us sell directly on Amazon.com; Toys R Us sued to get out of that deal later.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackFew tech companies are willing to fail as often over as long a period of time as Amazon
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackThe problem is that if you’re too early on something, having a faster OODA loop just means you burn through your investor’s money and implode more quickly.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackGiven the increasing returns and winner-take-all dynamic common in tech today, speed is often a powerful, if not decisive, competitive edge.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackOODA stands for Observe - Orient - Decide - Act.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackSilicon Valley treats its startups, in their totality, as an r-selection species; that is, the Valley births many startups but invests relatively little in each.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | Substackwith little qualification other than being high performing soldiers.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackThe idea that investors don’t care what others think is not true; they would love to lead a round if they have conviction, but part of their conviction is predicated on their belief that more investors will buy in down the road.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackSilicon Valley is powered by bubbles
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackUnderstanding the Circadian rhythms like these can also help you to understand why investors and companies and employees are willing to make some investments and not others.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackHow fast that clock counts down depends on your life circumstances, whether you have kids, how much you and your spouse want a bit more room, and so on.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackUltimately every employee with desirable skills is continually gauging whether they’re maximizing the marginal return on their time, however sophisticated their heuristics.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackI never had a cell phone in my dreams.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackIt turns out that at that time, when media came predominantly in physical form, people buy books, CDs, and DVDs at a startlingly predictable frequency interval when grouped into sufficiently large cohorts.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackThe advantage of selecting one of the stock characters is that they immediately put you into a massive tribe, along with all the identity-based network effects that brings. The problem is that the stock character choices are already pitted against each other in challenge mode.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackThere is a legend that maps all of those to some identity.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackIdentity anything is a hell of a drug for a social species.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackHowever, I do think that the internet is a massive amplifier of the ideological sorting that Klein identifies as one of the key causes.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackSoftware may be eating the world, but I posit that networks are going to eat an outsized share because they capitalize disproportionately on the internet
The network's the thing — Remains of the DayWhen social networks come into their own, when they realize their power is not in any one feature but in the network itself, they make changes like this that seem heretical.
The network's the thing — Remains of the DayA people follow model is one way, but a topic-based matching algorithm is another.
The network's the thing — Remains of the Daymaking that information marketplace much more efficient is the most critical way to realize the full potential of what is a world-changing concept.
The network's the thing — Remains of the DayIt's a public marketplace of information.
The network's the thing — Remains of the Dayall it demonstrates is that they realize they now have users for whom ephemerality isn't the main draw of the service.
The network's the thing — Remains of the DaySnapchat still imposes a 10 second limit on video length. But now you can string many videos together into My Story. This was brilliant on their part; it allows viewers to skip any boring clip with one tap, but it allows the creator to tell longer stories simply by shooting multiple snaps in sequence. They lowered the content generation cost on creators without meaningfully increasing it for viewers.
The network's the thing — Remains of the DayThe power of Twitter, deep down, is that it's a public messaging protocol.
The network's the thing — Remains of the DayInstagram is dealing from a position of strength here, expanding the flexibility of its tools to meet the needs of a still growing user base.
The network's the thing — Remains of the DayThat they started allowing videos and now differing aspect ratios doesn't change the core value of the network, which is the graph.
The network's the thing — Remains of the Daywhich is the network itself
The network's the thing — Remains of the DayWhen Instagram launched Stories, some people asked me if I thought that would relieve the performative pressure there. My response then was the same as it is to the question around Fleets. They remove some level of pressure around the craftsmanship of the post, but if you don’t change the graph structure, you don’t fundamentally alter the context. The network’s the thing.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackFor much of this first era of social networks, we’ve contorted ourselves to the odd-shaped social structures built by social media companies.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | Substackswitched from Facebook to Snapchat with its more fine-grained, deterministic messaging distribution controls, they were seizing the reigns of context over all their various identities.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackWhen people migrate to Facebook Groups from News Feed, they’re often sacrificing distribution for greater alignment. When people mute or block on Twitter, they’re trying to alter their conversational terrain.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackWhen we see users retreating to private messaging groups to discuss some thoughts they don’t feel comfortable sharing on Twitter or Facebook, they’re merely exercising manual control of context.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackI believe the next wave of social networks to outdo our incumbents will take that job more seriously.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackThe counter to context collapse is the ability to re-inject context.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | Substackyou can’t measure the momentum and velocity of an object exactly at the same time
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackIn New York, rub enough shoulders with finance professionals and you get a distinct sense that ambition is measured in wealth.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackSilicon Valley, Israel, or one of the tech hubs in China.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackSystems sustain themselves in a degraded state until a sufficiently strong stressor breaks them, overwhelming all those duct-taped solutions and jerry-rigged ramparts.
Remains of the Day | Eugene Wei | SubstackIn real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act. You have to communicate in order to maintain an internet presence.
Remains of the DayThe free flow of ideas outside a company shouldn't, or in apps like TikTok, shouldn't exceed the rate at which knowledge flows inside a company, but I see it happen time and again.
American Idle — Remains of the DayIt's as if the company has chronic amnesia. What has the company learned from its past, what is its culture? When employees take months or even years to get up to speed at a company, companies should be embarrassed. Instead, it's treated as normal.
American Idle — Remains of the DayMuch of finding product-market fit in tech is context and timing.
American Idle — Remains of the Day