Brandon Kent Wang

The short-form essay of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's new book “Abundance”.

A fascinating and loving dive into Gorton, a typeface ubiquitous and little understood.

A clear summary from Bret Taylor's Sierra on the strengths of outcome-based pricing within AI. See also Intercom's Fin.

Via Matt Levine. A challenge to trick an AI worked with a win for the humans. The English language, as it turns out, is a confusing one.

Max Levchin (Affirm)'s bullet points on high-performance culture.

An argument for the application layer.

“Imagine you want to start a business in AI. What layer of the stack do you target? Do you want to compete on infra? Good luck beating NVIDIA and the hyperscalers. Do you want to compete on the model? Good luck beating OpenAI and Mark Zuckerberg. Do you want to compete on apps? Good luck beating corporate IT and global systems integrators. Oh. Wait. That actually sounds pretty doable!”

With the return of the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius, the .io domain name — a tech favorite — will likely cease to exist. The fall of domain names is a fascinating story intertwined with history, Communism, and more.

“Which leads me to one final word of advice: Never lose your shared bit. In the absence of regular physical time together doing activities (which is really time spent acquiring primary material for future bits, isn’t it?), a successful [long distance friendship] requires an acute understanding of the location-agnostic binding glue that keeps two people interested and enthusiastic about staying in each other’s lives that isn’t just catching up over drinks until we all die.”

Jobs was the quirk; Cook is the predictability: John Gruber's great take on where Apple goes from here.

This is a popular PG essay making the rounds, defining and contrasting a “founder” way of operating a larger business to the delegated-management model that conventional wisdom thinks is best.

You've seen a reversible lane where digital signs indicate which way the lane is going. Or a movable barrier, like on the Golden Gate Bridge, to physically give an extra lane to one direction of travel.

But there aren't many situations where the *entire* road switches directions (zero people going the other way). The only one I can find is DC's Rock Creek Parkway, and it presents a strange mandate for the local Park Police.

Mark Zuckerberg's internal email on how he thought about Facebook Messenger's monetization in 2014. Almost none of this happened 10 years later, but it's still a fascinating read into his clarity of thought.