Exactly right.
It’s hard to see for the people who are into how things work (the technologists), because the technology alone is compelling enough.
But for most people (who aren’t technologists), the tech needs be embedded in a product to become compelling in THEIR unique context.
This reflects the difference between a “technology” and a “product.”
Technology is how something functions. It’s amazing and fascinating to people who are into how things work (which is not everyone)
Product is how something functions in a person’s specific context.
Very different things!
meta-note
There’s a lot that is tragic (in the Greek sense of the word) about what happened to Twitter, but 1 of the most profound is the lost potential for it to be the medium for something like this.
Not a post with a screenshot of a book.
But another strand in a great web of connected thought
(Re-)reminder to stop writing for everyone and write for someone instead, whoever that someone is for you (for me).
Via @visakanv.com
FAN is his book? collection? amalgamation? “Friendly Ambitious Nerd”
visakanv.gumroad.com/l/FANbook
Absolute gem in @visakanv.com‘s FAN.
To paraphrase: Ppl who are blindly confident are unlikely to worry about being blindly confident
So if you worry about being blindly confident, you likely don’t need to worry about it as much as you do (esp if worrying holds you back from doing what want to do)
plot twist: the tech CEO is the child
and the venture capitalist is a hallucination, they're actually a surgeon and tech CEO is on the operating table
and the surgeon is saying "I can't operate on this person, they're my child"
and the surgeon is the mom
My favorites are the ones I've seen in action (coincidentally, one by kids, one for kids).
Titus Andronicus put on by high schoolers. What they did with the over the top violence was 😚👌
Comedy of Errors when done right, the jokes had an audience of middle schoolers falling out of their chairs
Gonz Solo
I used to think writing in books was defacing them.
I'm a convert to "writing in a book connects the writer and reader in a way that everyone can witness. it brings the writing deeper into the warm embrace of all humanity...which is the goal of writing in the first place."
bsky.app/profile/john...
Marginalia Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive - “Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” - that kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading, my thumb as a bookmark, trying to imagine what the person must look like who wrote “Don’t be a ninny” alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson. Students are more modest needing to leave only their splayed footprints along the shore of the page. One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s. Another notes the presence of “Irony” fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal. Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers, hands cupped around their mouths. “Absolutely,” they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. “Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!” Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points rain down along the sidelines. And if you have managed to graduate from college without ever having written “Man vs. Nature” in a margin, perhaps now is the time to take one step forward. We have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria jotted along the borders of the Gospels brief asides about the pains of copying, a bird singing near their window, or the sunlight that illuminated their page– anonymous men catching a ride into the future on a vessel more lasting than themselves. And you have not read Joshua Reynolds, they say, until you have read him enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling. Yet the one I think of most often, the one that dangles from me like a locket, was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye I borrowed from the local library one slow, hot summer. I was just beginning high school then, reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room, and I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness was deepened, how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed, when I found on one page a few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencil– by a beautiful girl, I could tell, whom I would never meet– “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”
Are we talking about people writing stuff in books today?
Sweet!
That means I can share one of my all time favorite poems: Marginalia by Billy Collins
being a Mets fan is enough of an adventure, thankyouverymuch
Will also add that the speaker clearly CARES DEEPLY.
This sounds obvious (but is often overlooked): when communicating, you're attempting to transfer a fraction of your enthusiasm to the listener.
It helps to have a deep reserve of genuine interest about the subject you're talking about.
’Twas brillig, and the NPCs
Did mog and rizz in their drip:
All skibidi were the delulu OPs,
And the looksmaxxers did simp.
Feb 12, 2026: The day Piqua, Ohio became a notable midwestern town because amy brown instigated a notable wikipedia edit fight over whether or not "amy brown was notable"
3 posts The definition of Groundhog Day as a situation in which the same or usually negative or monotonous experiences occur repeatedly is the bread. A post explaining that the groundhog doesn’t actually see his shadow but a person receives the message verbally is the meat.
Nothing could honor the legacy of Groundhog Day more than deeply understanding its pointlessness and honoring it anyway
Groundhog Day | noun | a situation in which the same usually negative or monotonous experiences occur repeatedly or are felt to occur repeatedly with no change or correction
Contributors
Honestly saying “I don’t know” is such a power move.
If you think about it, it also creates a sympathetic bond with the audience because it’s highly likely many of THEM don’t know as well.
After all, you’re the one on stage and they came to watch you speak.
Cake Pop Demon Hunters
Zohran sign with the lyrics to War War huh yeah what is it good for absolutely nothing
BABY SHOES FOR SALE NEVER WORN (typeset in the style of Mamdani's campaign logo)
Zohran sign saying “two wheat for one sheep”
I’d make this trade any day
Me reaping: Heck yeah! I’m an early adopter on this platform that’s going to blow up soon! I get to make my username my first name! Haha finally!
Me sowing: Oh no. Ohh god. Well this sucks. What have I done?
Any game designers out there? Specifically focused on deck building games?
Because Tshirt-shirt, doesn’t really roll off the tongue
Super interesting.
I always thought the ‘T’ stood for Tshirt.
“It depends,” is almost always the answer.
You got it!
After all the joy I’ve gotten from McMansion Hell, a solid lox rec is almost literally the least I can do in return.
JB’s deli in Andersonville has machine-cut and hand-cut lox and when you get the hand-cut they do it nice and thin.
jbs-deli.square.site
