flâneur

Nicklaus Tran

12 followers · 33 following · 1214 views

on the atlas — 367

highlights — 390

  • it has always been most extreme in universities. So where in universities did it begin?
    The Origins of Wokeness
  • Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
    The Origins of Wokeness
  • Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally peaking after the riots of 2020.
    The Origins of Wokeness
  • A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.
    The Origins of Wokeness
  • There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules.
    The Origins of Wokeness
  • The few details Andreessen let slip to me suggested a climate of antiquity, superstition, frustration, and penury. “The natural state of human beings is to be subsistence farmers, and that was my expectation,”
    The Mind of Marc Andreessen | The New Yorker
  • Andreessen says that he loves Twitter because “reporters are obsessed with it. It’s like a tube and I have loudspeakers installed in every reporting cubicle around the world.”
    The Mind of Marc Andreessen | The New Yorker
  • The black-swan events of the past forty years—the PC, the router, the Internet, the iPhone—nobody had theses around those.
    The Mind of Marc Andreessen | The New Yorker
  • Venture capitalists with a knack for the 1,000x know that true innovations don’t follow a pattern.
    The Mind of Marc Andreessen | The New Yorker
  • We are capable of figuring shit out. My parents taught us that every day you have to try to be better than you were the day before, that you have to just keep going in life, because we are all on borrowed time.”
    The New World - Colossus
  • In life, we all make mistakes, but it is how you deal with the consequences of your mistakes that enable you to move forward. When you get knocked down you always have to get back up. He immediately acknowledged his wrongdoings, paid a heavy price, and since then he has dedicated his life to giving back to others. To be humbled but then still have the determination to be better is something I admire greatly.”
    The New World - Colossus
  • I overheard zero chatter from employees about getting rich. At Stripe and Figma (and most other startups), this was a favorite lunch table topic among the first few hundred employees at a decacorn
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • “growth can hide poor execution.” (It reminds me of one of the most repeated operating principles at Stripe: “We haven’t won yet.”)
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • Until working at Cursor, I don’t think I had fully internalized to what extent progress is bottlenecked on our ability to build excellent software.
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • But the thing the people at Cursor actually care about is code, and code generation as the fabric of the world.
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • The “friction” here works because everyone genuinely wants the best for the product and each other.
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • critics are also problem-solvers
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • I’ve also encountered many (very talented) people that make poking holes a sport but don’t have any intrinsic desire to fill them.
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • “What are you worried about right now?”
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • micro-pessimist, macro-optimist
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • At Cursor, people poke and prod each other’s work a lot. This can be quite jarring for folks who haven’t operated in that kind of culture before. Top builders know what great products feel like, so people can get very opinionated about how things should work. They’ll liberally offer feedback on what is missing to hit the bar, and extra hands to help get it there.
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • The product team then expresses their deepest gratitude for the time and consideration and settles in for a long night of fixing…often accompanied by the people who identified said fixes in the first place.
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • The product owner then sends a link and instructions out for the latest build and instructs the truffle pigs to get to work.
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • “Take responsibility for bugs. Mistakes happen, but every bug we ship to users is a disappointment. We are asking users to code in Cursor all day, every day, and bugs or performance problems are easy ways to make them switch.”
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • Fuzz is my favorite Cursor ritual. When a big ship is imminent (think a new client release or website update), everyone gets in a room and tries to break it.
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • To share what they’re observing and learning, many team members create “brain” channels in Slack where they publish their personal musings
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply rich portrait of one of the era's most guarded figures and tells a larger story about entertainment, celebrity, and America itself.
    Frank Sinatra Has a Cold - Gay Talese - Best Profile of Sinatra
  • Nobody gets upset if singers hook up with their fans, but if a dating app exec artificially inflates his profile then that seems pretty bad.
    Become the broker
  • You’re now providing people with a service by letting them compete in your market. They might offer you money or other forms of value to raise their standing and competitiveness- this is the “dating app premium tier” scheme. You can even have people bid against each other on market standing (the advertising marketplace model).
    Become the broker
  • All deals flow through you. You understand exactly how the market works and can manipulate it to your advantage.
    Become the broker
  • home in small rooms where the line between “designer” and “engineer” is blurry
    Introducing The Creative Technologist
  • No matter how internet-influenced San Francisco may be, the city’s raw density lends itself to a neighborhood atmosphere that, if really taken advantage of, can hardly be beat.
    Leaving San Francisco (for now)
  • Still, my favorite moments living in the Bay had nothing to do with technology.
    Leaving San Francisco (for now)
  • I’ve made peace with adopting what works for me.
    Leaving San Francisco (for now)
  • I have stubbornly analog tendencies. I write in my leather Paper Republic journal each morning, I shoot a few rolls of 35mm film each month, and I refuse to ever own a TV
    Leaving San Francisco (for now)
  • Don’t wait for external validation once you’ve reached conviction
    Six months as an Alchemist’s apprentice – Terraform Industries Blog
  • and would be frantically bidding against each other, pushing their wages down in the hope that someone would hire them for the equivalent of a low-productivity odd jo
    READING: Gunnar Myrdal: "Challenge to Affluence" (1963)
  • “dual economy”: there would be those who were successfully plugged into the technostructure of large firms, high throughput productivity, plus those who knew how to provide key services to keep the pieces of the machine running.
    READING: Gunnar Myrdal: "Challenge to Affluence" (1963)
  • Myrdal greatly feared that technological change was robbing people outside of the educated élite of their path to a secure and worthwhile and respected livelihood
    READING: Gunnar Myrdal: "Challenge to Affluence" (1963)
  • Never in the history of America has there been a greater and more complete identity between the ideals of social justice and the requirements of economic progress
    READING: Gunnar Myrdal: "Challenge to Affluence" (1963)
  • temporary unemployment turned into permanent unemployment, underemployment, and entrenched poverty
    READING: Gunnar Myrdal: "Challenge to Affluence" (1963)
  • poverty reproduced itself
    READING: Gunnar Myrdal: "Challenge to Affluence" (1963)
  • young, the less educated, older workers, and racial minorities
    READING: Gunnar Myrdal: "Challenge to Affluence" (1963)
  • with no evidence the economy will by itself shift into a rapid, stable growth path. A rich élite and a prosperous “middle third” coexisted with tens of millions in poverty and destitution
    READING: Gunnar Myrdal: "Challenge to Affluence" (1963)
  • In Sweden, with stable full employment and strong macro policy, automation was driven by labor scarcity; firms automate because workers are hard to hire. The state then actively managesdadjustment: retraining, relocation subsidies, regional policies, targeted support for lagging sectors.
    READING: Gunnar Myrdal: "Challenge to Affluence" (1963)
  • structural—a mismatch between the kind of labor supplied and the kind demanded in a technologically advancing economy.
    READING: Gunnar Myrdal: "Challenge to Affluence" (1963)
  • As Myrdal saw it, technological change did not mechanically create mass unemployment, but in the actually existing U.S. institutional setup it was a powerful engine of polarization and a hardening underclass—and would indeed generate mass future unemployment unless policy became radically different.
    READING: Gunnar Myrdal: "Challenge to Affluence" (1963)
  • That pushed labor demand even further toward people with schooling, smooth resumes, and strong social capital—and away from the already disadvantaged.
    READING: Gunnar Myrdal: "Challenge to Affluence" (1963)
  • he would also learn the name and story of every barista, the dogs and people in South Park
    All Roads Lead to Om | Matt Mullenweg
  • Om was a lover of humanity
    All Roads Lead to Om | Matt Mullenweg