Bill Gurley, GP of Benchmark Capital said, “The best ways to protect against the downside is to enjoy every minute of the upside.” Markets have cycles and it’s difficult to time the market. One way to protect against downside risk is to take full advantage of the upside. That way, your returns cushion the inevitable downturn.

See also:

• This is the opposite of the avoiding losers investment strategy or as Howard Marks would say “picking winners”
• Investors like to say the best companies are started in a downturn so running a startup during a recession is also positioning yourself to participate in the upturn
• Many startups will run out of cash starting end of 2023

Bill Parcells, when prompted to defend himself after his first season as the Giants head coach going 3-12 said, “You are what your record says you are.”

Of course, Parcells was talking about football but this maxim applies to many walks of life. At the end of the day, results matter and you can only hide from the truth for so long.

When coming up with goals for your business, it’s a disservice to adjust it down to make everyone—employees, investors, yourself—feel better. There are important goals like staying alive, raising your next round, or seizing the opportunity that are the cold reality of markets that you can only temporarily avoid. While showing progress is important, it’s easy to normalize mediocrity if you’re not careful which is much worse for the company than having to tell your investors you are not meeting the goal.

See also:

• Running a startup during a recession means confronting reality of a changing economic environement
• Advantages accrue to the leader
• The Economics of Superstars

Being offended and caring what others think about you go hand in hand. If you are offended by someone, a part of you values their opinion. Similarly, if you don’t care what others think, you won’t be easily offended.

In practice, this is difficult advice to follow. People tend to care what others think of them and therefore value their opinion. To counter this tendency, ask yourself, “Would you seek their advice in the future?”. If the answer is ‘yes’, then you should talk to them because you actually value their opinion. If the answer is ’no’, their opinion doesn’t matter and recognizing that can help you move along.

See also:

• The struggle switch shows how one emotion can lead to another (being offended leads to anger leads to sadness)
• Actions should be dictated by values not emotions

If you don’t answer a message in a timely manner, the other person has to assume either you haven’t received it or you chose not to respond. If they believe you haven’t received it, their only recourse is to message you again. If they believe you chose not to respond, they might have some feels about it.

It’s always better to respond quickly even if you can’t fully answer the contents of the message. If you can’t answer quickly, acknowledge the receipt and come back to it later. Acknowledging helps the other person know that the ball is in your court and you will get less follow-on pings.

Assuming you actually do come back with a response later, it will help build trust since you followed through on what you said you would do.

See also:

• Sometimes an answer required, not necessarily a good one
• Speed is undervalued but if you respond quickly, even if it’s to acknowledge receipt, gives the impression of being on top of things

In the latest Startup Compensation report from Carta based on 3,000 venture-backed companies, 60% of new hires at startups are out-of-state. Thes ratio of in-state to out-of-state held steady since 2022 despite larger comapnies making vocal return-to-office policies. Remote workers are primarily concentrated in California, Massachusettes, New York, Washington, and Texas.

See also:

• Another sign of remote work permanence
• Share of remote job postings increased post pandemic
• Remote jobs rose to nearly 15 percent of all high-paying job listings

Data from the World Values Survey suggests the population of high-income countries is getting more zero-sum in mindset. A possible explanation is that GDP growth at the time the cohort was born are correlated—if you see wealth growing you are more likely to believe there is enough for everyone and if you don’t see growth you are are inclined to believe people can only get rich at the expense of others.

Read Are we destined for a zero-sum future? from FT.

See also:

• The lump of labor fallacy and why automation doesn’t increase unemployment
• Zero-sum thinking is another form of loss aversion

One way to have good returns when investing is to have a few winners and merely avoid losers. Of course, you must have some winners and a plausible way to avoid the losers which is easier said than done. In the world of investing, the winners take care of themselves because they will have an outsized gain compared to everything else.

Another way to invest is to have more winners at the risk of more losers (e.g. the venture capital model). You need to be able to identify the winners before others do. You need to have more winners to offset the risk of more losers.

This a neat way Howard Marks explains risk and why the extremes don’t work. You can’t have only winners. You can’t avoid all losers.

See also:

• Startup investing is investing in options
• Is risk another form of compounding?
• Lowering interest rates increased the need to find more winners

A recent paper studied text summarization improvements using a chain of density prompt. The prompt improves over vanilla GPT responses and is close to human summarizations in informativeness and readibility.

The prompt instructs the LLM to do several passes at summarizing the source content. After an initial summary, it is instructed to find missing entities and include them when re-writing the summary using the same number of words.

See also:

• Context is needed for practical LLM applications
• Intent-based outcome specification
• This could improve summarization of AI for notes

In Talking Watches with John Mayer and Ed Sheeran, the two musical artists talk about their careers and the stories behind their collection of watches. John neatly summarized the romanticism about watches when he said, “I like watches that remind me of who I’ve never been.”

I would add that they also remind me of who I want to be in that moment, in that day. When you have a time fortress strapped to your wrist, you feel more capable even though you would never dive 500 meters (or in my case, dive at all). When you throw on a timeless watch to go out to dinner you feel classic and like the time doesn’t matter so much.

The door-in-the-face technique is a negotiating tactic is when you ask for something rediculous so that your next ask is more likely to be agreed to. This has been proven to be effective in a psychology study in 1975 and then replicated in 2021.

See also:

• Make two offers is another way of increasing acceptance
• Being aware of this technique allows you to avoid stepping into someone else’s frame
• Keep in mind that people respond in kind and the technique might have unexpected results

It’s striking how captivated the world is by LLMs and the latest techniques in AI. What if we were just as excited about progressing human knowledge and learning? Education doesn’t receive nearly the attention and hype it should yet we are far more capable.

On the other hand, cybernetics is an area that could greatly accelerate knowledge creation. We just shouldn’t confuse the technology with knowledge itself.

See also:

• Human intelligence is a special case of artificial intelligence
• The Beginning of Infinity

I’m upgrading from the iPhone 12 Pro to the iPhone 15 Pro. Here’s what I’ve noticed as the biggest differences so far.

Despite all the talk about the titanium case, I barely notice the difference in the hand. It’s slightly lighter but now more top heavy—presumably because of the large size increase in the protruding camera sensors.

The high-refresh rate screen is a big improvement. Scrolling feels like moving around high-gloss magazine paper. It’s smooth and sharp without the blur you see on when scrolling quickly.

The always-on display was surprising at first. It seems pretty handy for how I use the phone by putting it on my desk when I’m working.

The new camera options are pretty great. I briefly tried out taking pictures in RAW and the ProRes codecs. I read about the new Apple Log video recording which makes it easier to adjust video by starting with flatter colors to start (that’s my understanding at least). With a little bit of effort, photos and videos can feel more professional to my eye at least.

See also:

• One of the best parts of getting a new phone is using the old iPhone to make the best webcam

You should set up channel partnerships when it helps your business access new customers while filling an existing need for the partner and not competing with your direct business.

The first part “accessing customers” means that setting up the partnership should benefit you by cheaply acquiring customers the partner already has. It doesn’t work if the partner doesn’t have an ongoing relationship with these customers and it doesn’t work if you can’t make money from these customers.

The next part about filling an “existing need” is that the partner likely has many other partnership opportunities without you so by solving a problem they have already recognized will help prioritize partnering (keep in mind the build, buy, partner framework).

Finally, while partnerships can accelerate growth, long-term you need to be sure it doesn’t compete with your direct business. It would be a bad trade to cannabilize your business by offering the same thing to the same target market through a partner and make less money.

See also:

• Keep in mind a direct business is more valuable than a channel business but commoditization increases the importance of distribution
• Channel pricing models

There is not a finite amount of work that can be distributed throughout an economy. The amount of jobs are not tied to a zero-sum, “lump of labor”. Worries about immigration and automation taking away jobs and leading to unemployment are unfounded. Since the number of jobs are not fixed, changes in the workforce and technology lead to new jobs and or simply different jobs over time.

See also:

• Malthusian catastrophe is similar in that it argued food supply was fixed for any give population size
• Predictions about the future don’t account for new knowledge
• People are bad at long-term thinking
• Automation reduces marginal cost of nonautomated tasks

Hyperbole is an emacs package that matches text and turns it into links (buttons in hyperbole parlance). Links can execute arbitrary code so it’s kind of like a universal emacs subsystem for linking things together (i.e. hypertext).

In some ways you might describe hyperbole as “M-RET does what you expect at point”.

From this generic abstraction you can do a number of things. You can unify the behavior of clicking on file paths, regardless of what mode or programming language you are writing in. You can link together org-mode documents to python code in another directory. You can implement “do what I mean” when you press M-RET anywhere since you can add your own buttons that execute arbitrary code.

I’m not sure how practical hyperbole is yet. It’s hard to discover what is a button (at least in my setup) and I don’t know when I would want to add my own buttons but now that I know this exists, I’m sure I’ll start to see opportunities crop up.

See also:

• Hyperlinks as a foundation for distributed knowledge fails because it lacks transclusion
• Org-roam brings backlinks as a form of hyperlinks between org-mode documents

Effective writing that gets a response is written for busy people. The message should be constrained to a single idea. The message should be brief, reducing as many words as possible.

The longer a message is the more time people think the task will take. In the Book “Writing For Busy Readers”, the authors tested a request for a survey. Resonse rate doubled when the number of words was cut down from 127 to 49. In another example, donations increased 16% when deleting every other paragraph in a fundraising email.

Read In favour of simple writing.

See also:

• Always give the summarizing idea first prevents the reader for having to dig for the point, so does a BLUF
• The Pyramid Principle has many techniques for business writing
• Business writing should always answer a key question (similar to “a single idea” raised in this article)

A meta-study of research of 1MM people, found differences in personalities and cognitive abilities. Neuroticism was negatively related to most cognitive abilities like reasoning and knowledge. Extraversion was positively related to processing ability and retrieval fluency. Industrousness and compassion was positively related to knowledge found different correlations for neruorticism, extraversion, conscientiousness.

See also:

• Imitating high-status people doesn’t work
• You can’t be normal and expect abnormal returns

A new study on the climate impact of teleworking found that switching from working onsite to working from home full time can reduce up to 58% of work’s carbon footprint. Hybrid schedules have some improvement (11% to 29%). Working one day from home has no benefit.

Read Working from home now has another powerful benefit.

See also:

• Remote work is not necessarily better for the environment
• 20% of US workers are expected to work from home permanently

A pattern I really like in Notion is that you can a @ (at) mention any page with search as you type and autocomplete. I’d like to do something similar in org-mode so that I can quickly link related headlines.

Using the fantastic org-ql library for Emacs, I integrated it into completions triggered by letters following the @ symbol. This translates the input after the @ symbol into a query and inserts a org-id link when selecting a match.

(require 'org-ql)

(defun my/org-agenda-completions-at-point ()
  "Function to be used as `completion-at-point' in Org mode."
  (when (looking-back "@\\(\\(?:\\sw\\|\\s_\\|\\s-\\|\\s-:\\)+\\)")
    (defvar heading-to-id (make-hash-table :test 'equal))
    (let* ((start (match-beginning 1))
           (end (point))
           (input (match-string-no-properties 1))
           (candidates (org-ql-select (org-agenda-files) (org-ql--query-string-to-sexp input)
                         :action (lambda ()
                                   (let* ((heading (org-get-heading t))
                                          (id (org-id-get (point))))
                                     ;; Avoid having to look
                                     ;; up the ID again since
                                     ;; we are visiting all
                                     ;; the locations with
                                     ;; org-ql anyway
                                     (puthash heading id heading-to-id)
                                     heading))))
           (exit-function (lambda (heading status)
                            (when (eq status 'finished)
                              ;; The +1 removes the @ symbol
                              (delete-char (- (+ (length heading) 1)))
                              (insert
                               (format "[[id:%s][%s]]" (gethash heading heading-to-id) heading))))))
      (list start end candidates :exit-function exit-function))))

(defun my/org-agenda-completion-hook ()
  "Configure org-mode for completion at point for org-agenda headlines."
  (add-to-list 'completion-at-point-functions 'my/org-agenda-completions-at-point))

(add-hook 'org-mode-hook 'my/org-agenda-completion-hook)

See also:

• This personal infrastructure helps speed up my workflow when working on tasks
• Emacs is the ultimate editor building material
• The downside of using org-id links

A study of 73,000 NFT collections found that more than 95% had a market cap of zero ether and an estimated 23 million people are holding worthless assets.

Read Remember when NFTs sold for millions of dollars? 95% of the digital collectibles may now be worthless.

See also:

• Trading volume of NFTs fell 97%
• Investment strategies that only work in a bull market
• Growth in tech during the pandemic was not permanent

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The nice part about ChromaDB is that you can read the tables in SQLite using the new Emacs 29 sqlite-mode. That means there is no other configuration for accessing the database, you can open the sqlite file directly.

I was curious to see what metadata was extracted from an automatic document loader in LangChain. I opened the sqlite file and browsed the metadata directly to see what was available. Nice!

See also:

• Why vector databases are important to AI
• Emacs is the ultimate editor building material

ChromaDB is a vector database used for similarity searches on embeddings. It’s extremely easy to use if you are using Python and works well with LangChain.

See also:

• Turn off Chroma telemetry in langchain
• Emacs and ChromaDB