i grew up playing simcity (one of my favorite games of all time), & if you told me i could zone land for data centers which require a massive capital investment into my city, could have enormous tax revenue, they could be extremely clean (depending on energy), there is minimal or no traffic, they could be aesthetically tolerable, & nothing like heavy industry which is pollution central, i’d think i was about to build the richest fucking city in the world. i’d go absolutely ham & build as many data centers as i could possibly fit. & yet, here we are, with people fighting tooth & nail to keep them out. which means the debate isn’t about the data centers at all.

if i were google, i’d start by updating the mission of the company at io. the current one is only about information which is already accessible & useful for the most part. i’d prolly change it to: “make intelligence universally accessible & useful.” a much broader & much more ambitious. i am well aware this is somewhat pedantic but every product should flow from the mission which makes every word in the mission non trivially important.

my friend & i were discussing how just few months ago it felt like the democratic presidential bench was just very very empty besides aoc & gavin (both are sort of eccentric in many ways & also at least somewhat polarizing). but the midterms produced three more viable presidential candidates (tallarico, ossoff, & el-sayed) who interestingly enough all have the necessary requirements & then some to be a future nominee (maybe not in 2028). they all seem to understand culture, they have the ability to communicate & debate with simplicity & vigor, & they seem likable enough overall to the general populace. whereas on the republican side besides rubio (maybe vance) you don't really feel this as much. the post trump republican identity will be definitively be chaotic, wonder how it settles.

one thing about today's personal finance ai products is that they offer very little value beyond a dashboard type experience. i.e. they are built on observability rather than actual agency. there are so many mechanics in which finance can work as a vector to deeply optimize your relationship with money, primarily how you spend, & how you make money. there are so many opportunity scopes around this & many of the current offerings are fragmented. e.g. there are very few set it & forget it agents that work. personal finance should be one of the most autonomous categories in personal ai.. this is why when labs launch products even in these categories, they're much more surface level & they don't offer depth without configuration & management. that's i think there a huge set of opportunities lie in personal ai experiences in general.

starlink is one of those things that permanently resets your expectations after a single experience. kinda like what the original iphone did with smart phones. ppl will stop treating anything other than fast internet on a flight as a defective product offering.

at some point the connective tissue around agents that depends on gmail today will likely disappear because ppl will naturally give entities like schools, service providers, & stores their agents email address instead of a gmail address. if agentic commerce works, that will be automatic because the agent will simply fill in its email to complete the purchase. the idea of connecting your gmail/google calendar to derive value from a personal agent will be a thing of the past.

rich personal websites possibly with your first & last name domain or even with an identity like signull will matter a lot more because when personal agents browse the internet for a variety of use cases, that context will be highly ranked. first & last name domains + a rich website will be the new facebook profile. imagine a match maker agent finding you because you’re single, or a job search agent because you’re looking for a gig, or an agent that finds you ppl to play tennis with, etc. discoverability for agents will be huge & networks like insta & linkedin will have not have huge incentives to open this up for other agents than their own, so it’ll matter again a lot more.

absolutely overwhelmed by the dm’s. could not be more appreciative of you all. i’ll send the invite links asap (we might have to limit the number of friends lol). & we need to get few things super buttoned up since it’s social & sharing. currently deeply focused on getting the emotional mechanics feeling incredibly fun & delightful.

there are roughly five fundamental relationships that shape your life: 1. money, which is your relationship with resources. 2. time, which is your relationship with attention & priorities. 3. health, which is your relationship with your body & mind. 4. people, which is your relationship with other humans, mediated through communication. 5. knowledge, which is your relationship with the world & your understanding of it. so of course the labs will build in these territories & if you thought otherwise or had any doubts you do not understand product & product strategy at all.

the best way to think about the new macbook pro touch is that touch is becoming an expectation & not necessarily a heavy utility feature. if you ever watch a kid encounter any screen, they’ll try to touch it & it often doesn’t work, which feels pretty arbitrary in today’s age. it obviously doesn’t dramatically improve the underlying product but it is kinda nice that the inconsistency itself is addressed. maybe your tv will eventually be touch too or maybe the airport flight status board too.

ai makes 1 to n dramatically easier, but it doesn't make 0 to 1 proportionally easier. the latter requires all of the things that were required pre ai whereas with the former, you can ship ideas extremely quickly, sometimes within hours. this is not to say ai can't help you achieve pmf, obviously it does. i am just saying that it is not proportional. what's also a new challenge with zero to one now is that whatever you do may also be simply copied very quickly with ai either by incumbents & competitors. this is why there are now holding companies acquiring existing businesses at scale & transforming them to remove the countervailing force of org bureaucracy &/or lack of structural capability to leverage ai to transform the business.

when i posted this in march (which is like 8 years ago in ai years) i was very confused about trump starting yet another middle east conflict out of nowhere really (even though he campaigned on the exact opposite). unlike bush who at least articulated wmd narrative, trump had absolutely nothing but vibes. no one in the replies had any coherent answers on what the end game was, & much much worse the american public never understood it either. that's why you got the sweeping results you got last night which will have consequences for decades because the senate terms are 1.5x that of the presidency.

the best way to build an x following is to join a lab, tweet a lot, & then leave. joining obviously gives you credibility. tweeting a bunch converts that credibility into distribution. & then leaving converts that distribution into mystique for your next thing.