My favorite discoveries from 2025. Previous best-of posts are available here . Books Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy LeCarre’s spy masterpiece. This year I read the entire Karla Trilogy, of which this is the first and my favorite part. I enjoyed it so much I read it...
In the book Four Thousand Weeks , Oliver Burkeman introduces a dilemma: We spend our days pursuing various accomplishments that we desire to achieve. And yet for any given accomplishment [. . .] it’s always the case that either you haven’t achieved it yet, so you’re dissatisfied because you don’t...
My favorite discoveries from 2024. Previous best-of posts are available here . Books The Deep Places A NYT writer gets a crippling disease that officially doesn’t exist and has to go looking for a cure outside of mainstream medicine. No surprise: it takes him to some...
“Solutions in search of a problem” are inventions with interesting properties that have no clear commercial use. They seem like they would be useful. But no one can figure out what for. YCombinator says that pursuing solutions in search of a problem (SISPs) is the single most common mistake ...
DISCLAIMER: I am neither a doctor nor a lawyer and this does not constitute medical or legal advice. I am leaving my medical records to my children and grandchildren in my will. I wish my grandparents had done this for me. I hope my parents will consider doing it. You...
When my cofounder and I started ATLAS , our thesis was that a small upstart could create the “AI-powered UI of the future”. We weren’t alone. Since then a number of well-financed startups have launched with the same thesis. Some of the more notable examples: [0] , [1] , <a...
We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. – Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene A lot of people are concerned with...
My favorite discoveries from 2023. Purchases Charmander Community Day, Pokemon GO Hands down the best bang-for-my-buck purchase in 2023. It cost $1 to participate in this 3 hour ( mobile game ) event. My kids and I went to a park on a beautiful day. We all...
Note: This post was also published on Atlas’s blog . Kahneman famously distinguished between two different modes of thinking: type-1, or “fast” thinking type-2, or “slow” thinking The former is the kind of thinking that’s automatic, low-effort,...
2 weeks notice is the gold standard when quitting. But giving more notice (a lot more notice) actually has a lot of benefits. Usually you get to: Do only the parts of your job you enjoy the most Eliminate ~all stress from your job Get paid the same Extend...