Venkatesh Rao: Terms of Centaur Service. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve gotten into a groove with AI-assisted (GenAI) writing, as you may have noticed, and I am really enjoying it. You’ve seen the results — a 3x increase in posting frequency (more)

Phrase commonly associated with Robert Anton Wilson, esp from the Illuminatus Trilogy. (more)

McSweeney's Lists Donald Trump's 1056 Atrocities. Early in President Trump’s term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, and crimes, and it felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors—happening almost daily—would not be forgotten. (more)

Dorian Taylor: What Do You Mean By “Marketing”? A friend ambushes me with a paper that causes me to adjust my mental dictionary with respect to what certain business-critical words mean. (more)

Venkatesh Rao is now over the Cozyweb. The cozyweb has a weird rhyming version of fomo going on. Because each island is small, memetic competition is not efficient. It’s actually like a high tariff regime discourse. So stuff like the AI 2027 report and the Abundance discourse which would probably not even make the top 10 in an efficient public meme market like Twitter circa 2015 feel like they’re at oppressively must-read level. (more)

Rich Ziade and Paul Ford: Why We're Building Aboard. We’re building a product that deep inside we think, for those who use it and commit to it, will make a better internet. (more)

Kroc Camen: The Markdown Web. You cannot replace the ’Web; Every Grand Scheme to Reinvent The ’Web just creates unpaid work for developers to boost another company’s profile. (more)

see Quantity Beats Quality

Jeremiah Lee: Spotify's Failed #SquadGoals. Spotify doesn’t use “the Spotify model” and neither should you. (more)

Bruce Hoffman on a creative way of Dealing With Terrorism. So approximately a hundred of these beautiful young women were brought to Beirut. There, in a sort of PLO version of a college mixer, boy met girl, boy fell in love with girl, boy would, it was hoped, marry girl. There was an additional incentive, designed to facilitate not just amorous connections but long-lasting relationships. The hundred or so Black Septemberists were told that if they married these women, they would be paid $3,000; given an apartment in Beirut with a gas stove, a refrigerator, and a television; and employed by the PLO in some nonviolent capacity. Any of these couples that had a baby within a year would be rewarded with an additional $5,000. Both Abu Iyad and the future general worried that their scheme would never work. But, as the general recounted, without exception the Black Septemberists fell in love, got married, settled down, and in most cases started a family. To make sure that none ever strayed, the two men devised a test. Periodically, the former terrorists would be handed legitimate passports and asked to go to the organization's offices in Geneva or Paris or some other city on genuine nonviolent PLO business. But, the general explained, not one of them would agree to travel abroad, for fear of being arrested and losing all that they had - that is, being deprived of their wives and children. "And so," my host told me, "that is how we shut down Black September and eliminated terrorism. It is the only successful case that I know of." (more)

the root/main page of a website: see also Splash Page, Landing Page

Google Forms is a survey administration software included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google... The app allows users to create and edit surveys online while collaborating with other users in real-time. The collected information can be automatically entered into a spreadsheet.[1] Google Forms was first introduced in 2008 as part of the Google Docs suite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Forms

Postlight built a custom CRM with AirTable. (more)

how you expect to deliver value to a (potential) customer; see esp Unique Value Proposition

Unique Value Proposition, aka UVP: kinda like a Tag-Line, more terse (and outward-directed) than a Positioning Statement (more)

for AI-coding tool, see/also cursor.com

Patrick McKenzie: It’s only very probably as big as the Internet, which I believe is the crowning achievement of the human race. ((2024-09-30) ZviM AI And The Technological Richter Scale) (more)

Lenny Rachitsky: How Linear builds product. Linear.app is a story I’ve been wanting to tell for a long time. (more)

Lenny Rachitsky: Identify your bullseye customer in one day. Today, my guest is Michael Margolis. Michael has been a UX researcher at Google Ventures for almost 15 years. (more)

Lenny Rachitsky: What’s in your stack: The state of tech tools in 2025... insights from over 6,500 of you... 50% work in product, 11% are engineers, 10% are founders, and the rest work in other cross-functional roles, including marketing, design, and growth. (product team) (more)