Hi, friends.
It’s been an interesting week. I kicked off a new cohort of of Reforge teaching, I had cortisol injected into my spine (fun!), and I got on a plane to spend a few days in New York (actual fun!). I’m currently…
Reading: Demon Copperhead. I picked up a paperback copy of this, but then promptly left it on the plane. Kindling it next.
Listening: ten days, new release from Fred again..
Watching: Beckham, on Netflix, directed by Fisher Stevens. I’m halfway through and hooked, even though I wasn’t a fan of his before. Neck tattoos, anyone?
Hit reply, say hi, tell me things. Or just keep reading — below the line is what happened on the blog this week.
Still,
Michael
I loved The Interview with Will Ferrell and Harper Steele, about their friendship, their upcoming road trip documentary, Steele’s transition, and their collaboration at SNL:
Ferrell: My last year on the show, we would have blue notecards of sketch ideas and it’d be like: “Harper, you have to write a sketch called ‘Taco Time.’ Go!”
Steele: You’re forgetting a key element that speaks to this perfectly. “Taco Time” is a perfect example, or “Unicorn Mountain.” I would write the first half and then hand it to Will. So I don’t know what he’s gonna do with the sketch. It was always a left turn.
Ferrell: “Unicorn Mountain” was a song that led off the sketch and it basically set the premise of being a children’s show. It’s Unicorn Mountain where unicorns live in unity and harmony and they bring joy and they’re magical and they’re fun and let’s all go to Unicorn Mountain. Then we open on myself and Tracy Morgan and — this is Harper’s half — we’re eating a unicorn. We’re talking about how delicious the unicorn was and how easy it was to trap it and kill it because it was so benevolent and sweet and kind and I felt a little bad when we killed it but god this is good unicorn.
Michael Lopp (aka Rands) on founder mode:
You’ve heard of the stories of sucessful founder because they’ve become famous (or infamous). However, the majority of start-ups fail. No one tells and retells the stories of these companies because they never launch. No one became rich or famous. It is their defining characteristic. In his recent essay, Paul Graham talks about the successful founders. However, it’s not “Founder Mode,” it’s “Successful Founder Mode.” Lumping all Founders together would mean we should — statistically and more descriptively — call this “Failing Founder Mode,” which is neither clever nor inspirational.
As a person deeply in love with naming things, I like the framing of Founder and Manager Mode because it’s clever and instantly useful. If you’ve been reading me over the years, you’ve noted I’ve begun to detest the term manager for some of the reasons Graham highlights: unfamiliar with the details management at a distance, lousy hiring, and siloed decision-making. I’ve gravitated towards the word leader both because I want to make it clear any motivated human can execute the skills of a good manager — leadership comes from everywhere — and, more importantly, I believe managers tell you where you are. Leaders tell you where you are going. It’s a philosophy thing.
Kieran Healy cuts deep:
Hi I’m Paul Graham and I’m here to talk to you about the unfathomable wisdom of sampling on the dependent variable. If you disagree with me this is itself evidence that you are incapable of thinking in Founder Mode.
Scott Chacon, co-founder of GitHub, on Why GitHub Actually Won:
We cared about developers. But it wasn’t about when [our competitors] added Git, it never really mattered. They never had any taste. They never cared about the developer workflow. They could have added Git at any time and I think they all still would have lost.
You can try to explain it by the features or “value adds”, but the core takeaway that is still relevant to starting a startup today is more fundamental than if we had an activity feed or profile page or whatever. The much simpler, much more fundamentally interesting thing that I think showed in everything that we did was that we built for ourselves. We had taste. We cared about the experience.
What I love about this is he links to the classic Steve Jobs interview where Jobs blasts Microsoft (who now owns GitHub) for not having any taste.
I know you’re probably full up on the news, but Heather Cox Richardson has a fantastic summary of the debate, and all of the pre-debate ad spots the Harris campaign ran to get his blood boiling before they even took the stage.
The question for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in tonight’s presidential debate was not how to answer policy questions, but how to counter Trump’s dominance displays while also appealing to the American people.
She and her team figured it out, and today they played the former president brilliantly. He took the bait, and tonight he self-destructed. In a live debate, on national television.
I’m not on Instagram, so a friend texted me a screenshot of Taylor’s endorsement. Like everyone, I cackled at the closing line, “Childless Cat Lady.” Now it’s time for the Kelce brothers to step up.
Love this post from Rex Woodbury about eggs & instant cake mixes, the IKEA effect, and how product teams are working to figure out just how much human should be in the loop of AI-heavy product features.
Over time, as we see AI’s application layer evolve, I continue to feel strongly that the egg theory is a crucial lesson. A key question for builders right now: how much human involvement is too little, how much is too much, and how much is juuust right? As we become accustomed to using AI, we intuitively search for the Goldilocks product—the product that delivers just enough automation, yet just enough control.
From Artsy, Julie Mehretu to create facade work for Obama Presidential Center.
Uprising of the Sun spans 83 feet by 25 feet and features 35 painted glass panels. This installation is directly inspired by Obama’s speech in 2015 commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches in Alabama—a key moment in the civil rights movement. In fact, Mehretu initially started this work with an image of Obama and the late U.S. representative John Lewis crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma during the anniversary in 2015. She manipulated this image using various digital mapping and design tools while adding elements from Robert Seldon Duncanson’s Land of the Lotus Eaters (1861) and Jacob Lawrence’s screenprint Confrontation on the Bridge (1975). Another inspiration is Ethiopian artist Afewerk Tekle’s giant stained-glass window in Africa Hall in Addis Ababa, where the artist was born.
I love her work, and I’m very excited to see this once it’s complete. Here’s a rendering:
Via Werd.io, David Allen Green of The Law and Policy Blog does a close reading of Taylor Swift’s endorsement.
In essence: this endorsement is a masterpiece of practical written advocacy, and many law schools would do well to put it before their students. … Like any good advocate, Swift is careful to make the listener or reader feel that it is their own decision to make, and again this is skilfully done:
“I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice. Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make.”
Note the rhythm: I, I, you, you, you.
The most effective persuasion is often to lead the listener or reader to making their own decision – and to make them feel they are making their own decision.
Worth reading in full.
Never mind the fact that my one year old iPhone 15 won’t run a bunch of the new Apple Intelligence features when they’re eventually shipped in iOS 18, M.G. Siegler nails the word salad around Apple’s announcements this week, in Apple Needs an Editor 2:
…Presenters during the event this week were doing oral gymnastics so as not to verbally trip over talking about the iPhone 16 powered by the A18 and the iPhone 16 Pro Max powered by the A18 Pro running iOS 16. Which can now be paired with the AirPods 4, powered by the H2 chip. But they also still work with the AirPods Pro 2, which remain more premium than the AirPods 4, despite the naming scheme and also having the H2 chip. Both are also less premium than the AirPods Max – not the AirPods Max 2, which don’t yet exist – even though it only has the H1 chip. Meanwhile, the Apple Watch Ultra 2 also isn’t the Apple Watch Ultra 3 this year, but is now available in black. Sorry, ‘Satin Black’. Not to be confused with ‘Jet Black’ or ‘Space Black’ or ‘Space Gray’ (which is basically black) or ‘Midnight’. That premium smartwatch still features the S9 chip, while the Apple Watch Series 10 features the S10 chip. Both of these will soon run watchOS 11.
16 Pro, 16, Series 10, 4, Ultra 2, Max, Pro 2, A18, 16 Pro Max, A18 Pro, 16, H2, H1, S9, S10, 11. What the hell is goin on? This all reads like a riddle that Desmond on Lost must not forget.
And just because I can’t pass up an opportunity to embed a LOST clip, here’s the riddle in question.
I’m tired of the song of the summer, it’s time for the song of the fall, “They’re Eating the Dogs, They’re Eating the Cats.”
I like this framing of product opportunites from Jason Fried around “questions and answers” instead of “features and benefits.”
When making products, you can think of them as a collection of features or answers.
Some people may say “you mean features or benefits?” No, I mean answers. Answers are counterpoints to questions people have in their heads. Answers fill holes, answers snap into sockets. Benefits don’t have such places in people’s minds.
For example, you could make a feature that shows you which tasks are overdue. Or, you can build something that answers the question “What’s late?”
Emphasis mine.
Dynomight does a deep dive on consciousness.
I guess life makes sense: For some reason there’s a universe and that universe has lots of atoms bouncing around and sometimes they bounce into patterns that copy themselves and then those patterns go to war for billions of years and voilà – you.
But consciousness is weird. Why should those patterns feel like anything? We understand life in the sense that we’ve worked out the ruleset for how atoms bounce. The ruleset that produces consciousness is a mystery.
I loved this bit.
Say I scan your brain and upload it into a computer that simulates the physics of every neuron. I then hook that simulator up to a you-shaped robot with cameras that mimic your eyes and microphones that mimic your ears. Finally, I ask the robot, HOW ARE YOU FEELING?
What will it answer? I assume something like, CONSCIOUS. TOTALLY CONSCIOUS! AM I A ROBOT? IF I’M A ROBOT PLEASE LEAVE ME ON.
How could the robot not claim to be conscious? After all (1) that’s what you would say, and (2) you’d do that because of the laws of physics operating inside your brain, and (3) the robot’s behavior is governed by the very same physics, just simulated.
By the way, if I am a robot (non-zero chance of this, TBH) please leave me on.