Van Hoang

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on the atlas · 22

highlights · 131

It’s not easy to work here (when I interview people I tell them, “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three”), but we are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can all tell our grandchildren about. Such things aren’t meant to be easy.
Jeff Bezos' Original 1997 Letter to Amazon Shareholders
We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions.
Jeff Bezos' Original 1997 Letter to Amazon Shareholders
When the AI itself becomes cheap and interchangeable, the edge becomes what you feed it and what you can do with its outputs—data it can’t find elsewhere, and actions it can’t take alone.
The Boring Businesses That Will Dominate the AI Era
Think of it like the early internet: Before companies could build Google or Amazon, we needed HTTP and TCP/IP—the invisible communications rules and protocols that let computers talk to each other. We’re in that moment again, but for AI agents. New protocols—AG-UI (agent-user interaction) for agents talking to users, Google’s A2A (agent-to-agent) for agents talking to each other, MCP (model context protocol) for agents using tools—have become the standard pipes and wires
The Boring Businesses That Will Dominate the AI Era
And the next few years will determine who owns this layer while everyone else is still building better AI agents.
The Boring Businesses That Will Dominate the AI Era
When AI models commoditize—when the latest GPT, Claude, and Gemini models are all making similar decisions based on similar capabilities
The Boring Businesses That Will Dominate the AI Era
Amazingly, it has exactly nothing to do with our human ability to give our minds and senses to the world. Rather, it is the name the authors give to a mathematically precise way of computing and ranking information in complex data sets. A more machine-driven, more purely functional notion of attention is impossible to imagine. Does it need to be said? We are not machines. Our lives are not data problems that can be quantitatively optimized. And the actual human ability to attend is something much more expansive and much more beautiful than a tool for filtering information or extending our time…
Opinion | The ‘Attention Economy’ Is a Lie - The New York Times
The screen was now the primary interface between machines and their increasingly sedentary users.
Opinion | The ‘Attention Economy’ Is a Lie - The New York Times
The question driving vigilance studies was how to keep humans attentive to dull and remote screen tasks.
Opinion | The ‘Attention Economy’ Is a Lie - The New York Times
From those bombing raids above the English Channel was born one of the major research projects of the war years and of the Cold War era that followed: Human Factors Research, which worked to quantify and assess human behaviors in relation to machines.
Opinion | The ‘Attention Economy’ Is a Lie - The New York Times
In most of human life, this kind of error wouldn’t have mattered. For a cave-dwelling Homo sapiens, it was certainly advantageous to be a vigilant night watchman, but the stimulus you were waiting for wasn’t a tiny speck on a screen; it was, say, a 10-foot tiger. Figuring out how to retrain the modern mind to attend to these subtle mechanical stimuli was a new kind of life-or-death challenge.
Opinion | The ‘Attention Economy’ Is a Lie - The New York Times
Laboratory studies of how time affects attention weren’t far behind, largely driven by the application of quantitative psychology to the needs of 20th-century warfare
Opinion | The ‘Attention Economy’ Is a Lie - The New York Times
The quantitative study of human attention had begun, and with it a pervasive program to sort and grade and optimize our attentive capacities
Opinion | The ‘Attention Economy’ Is a Lie - The New York Times
The lives we long for involve going for an undisturbed walk in the park with a friend, getting lost in a book or even simply daydreaming. Life is made of these things, and they are made of attention.
Opinion | The ‘Attention Economy’ Is a Lie - The New York Times
that richness, that expansiveness, that freedom
Opinion | The ‘Attention Economy’ Is a Lie - The New York Times
Real attention cannot be measured with a stopwatch or an app, and real attention — human attention — is far deeper and more complex than the ability to get stuff done.
Opinion | The ‘Attention Economy’ Is a Lie - The New York Times
In our efforts to liberate ourselves, we have become anxious accountants of our own attention
Opinion | The ‘Attention Economy’ Is a Lie - The New York Times
Custom Instructions is split into two categories: Biographical Info and Response Style
Using ChatGPT Custom Instructions for Fun and Profit - Chain of Thought - Every
it cannot form new memories.
Using ChatGPT Custom Instructions for Fun and Profit - Chain of Thought - Every
Every interaction is like Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates: it has to learn who you are (and why it loves you) over and over again.
Using ChatGPT Custom Instructions for Fun and Profit - Chain of Thought - Every
ChatGPT reeled off gem after gem. It knows about Every, the company I run. It knows who’s on my team at Every and asks me how they can help. It knows what kind of writing I like to do so it can help me integrate it into the course planning. And the kicker: it knows that I’m working on being a little less opportunistic—on not jumping on shiny new things, and staying focused on longer-term priorities.
Using ChatGPT Custom Instructions for Fun and Profit - Chain of Thought - Every
Then, I turned Custom Instructions on and gave it the same starting prompt. Here are a few of the responses (emphases are mine): “Purpose: What's the primary goal of the course? Is it to augment your existing offerings at Every, serve as a standalone product, or something else?” “Content Depth: Given your love for detailed, intellectual writing, how in-depth will you go on each topic?” “Guest Contributions: Do you plan to involve guest experts, perhaps even some of your writing heroes or team members like Kate Lee and Evan Armstrong?” “Time Investment: Given that you're already grappling with …
Using ChatGPT Custom Instructions for Fun and Profit - Chain of Thought - Every
not to be stressed and to be reflective.
The CEO with an Empty Calendar - Superorganizers - Every
In order to do creative work you have to manage your energy and set up your life to allow creative moments to happen.
The CEO with an Empty Calendar - Superorganizers - Every
We have very few private channels, which means that at Doist all of our information is default public
The CEO with an Empty Calendar - Superorganizers - Every
Twist works like a combination of Slack and email. Twist has channels like Slack, but inside of channels are what we call Threads — which are kind of like email threads.
The CEO with an Empty Calendar - Superorganizers - Every
the text input is designed for long-form communication, rather than short messages going back and forth. So it encourages thoughtfulness.
The CEO with an Empty Calendar - Superorganizers - Every
The whole company runs asynchronously — so there’s no expectation that you’ll get an immediate response to a question
The CEO with an Empty Calendar - Superorganizers - Every
Being able to disconnect allows you to manage your stress levels and your energy levels, which is very important especially for me
The CEO with an Empty Calendar - Superorganizers - Every
you pay a high price for those kinds of things.
The CEO with an Empty Calendar - Superorganizers - Every
The other thing we tend to have meetings for are 1-1s and check-ins. Our teams will generally do at least one check-in per week to get everyone on the same page to make sure things are working. But that’s it.
The CEO with an Empty Calendar - Superorganizers - Every
That means most of our communication happens in written form, rather than being verbal.
The CEO with an Empty Calendar - Superorganizers - Every
The best way to grow is to learn — and so if I wasn’t learning constantly I wouldn’t be part of the culture we have here. A big chunk of what I do is trying to learn as much as possible.
The CEO with an Empty Calendar - Superorganizers - Every
One nice thing about Todoist is that it allows me to see where I’m spending my time. Each todo is assigned to a project, and Todoist graphs out which projects I’m working on.
The CEO with an Empty Calendar - Superorganizers - Every
Creative work means being all alone in your room. Creating organizations means being in every room, all at once. It’s hard.
The CEO with an Empty Calendar - Superorganizers - Every
food-specific language data
Panera's new voice ordering option is powered by Amazon
That approach doesn’t allow for the variation in the way humans speak,
Panera's new voice ordering option is powered by Amazon
“[We] realized we needed to start doing something that was much more turnkey, and that meant truly understanding the end-to-end life cycle of the ordering experience
Panera's new voice ordering option is powered by Amazon
We needed to understand, for every one of the food items on the menu, what are the modifications that are possible?
Panera's new voice ordering option is powered by Amazon
it uses conversational AI, which means the ordering experience can replicate an in-person scenario
Panera's new voice ordering option is powered by Amazon
The future is really about going from thought to order in a matter of seconds
Panera's new voice ordering option is powered by Amazon
smoother, more conversational ordering experience
Panera's new voice ordering option is powered by Amazon
You have spent 100% of your life with yourself: observing what works, what doesn’t work, what makes you come alive, what contracts or expands you. Only you can access the deep gut feeling of being at home and comfortable when you’re in the right place—and conversely: the loneliness and unease that accompanies the feeling that you’re in the wrong place. You know when you’ve made a decision to please others instead of choosing what is right for you, because you can feel the visceral self-betrayal that comes with it. Only you can detect the difference between being somewhere you genuinely want to…
you might disappoint people (and that's okay) - by Isabel
potential side effect
you might disappoint people (and that's okay) - by Isabel
a younger, more conditioned version of yourself
you might disappoint people (and that's okay) - by Isabel
This is the process of individuation: becoming who you truly are instead of who you want to be for others.
you might disappoint people (and that's okay) - by Isabel
when your top value is pleasing others, you end up living a life designed to suit them instead of crafting a life in attunement with yourself.
you might disappoint people (and that's okay) - by Isabel
these qualities reflect my personality, not my priorities. They do not determine how and why I put myself in the places that I do—they determine how I act once I'm there.
you might disappoint people (and that's okay) - by Isabel
thrilled with narrative alone. The story you tell, the emotions that it incites in people
The Internet Demands Greatness - Napkin Math - Every
Your product has to be something that people rant and rave about. Since you can’t afford to buy attention with paid marketing, technologists have to solve a problem so spectacularly that users will market it for them.
The Internet Demands Greatness - Napkin Math - Every