What are you reading this weekend?!
I'll make a more thorough attempt to identify the visible books, moving roughly from top to bottom and left to right:
In the leftmost stack:
Several dark-colored books but titles are too blurry to read reliably
Middle-left stack:
"How to Read a Book"
"Shoe Dog" by Phil Knight
"Autobiography" (appears to be by Yogi)
"Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari
"The Stranger" (appears to be by Albert Camus)
Some blurry titles in between
Middle-right stack:
"The Upanishads"
"Never Split the Difference"
"Escape from Freedom" by Erich Fromm
"Finite and Infinite Games"
"Raising Lions"
"Inner Engineering"
"Levels"
"Life After Life"
Rightmost stack:
Several red-spined books including what appears to be titles by Christopher McDougall
"Games People Play"
"Utopia"
There are many other books visible but their titles are either too blurry or partially obscured to read with confidence. The stacks appear to be a mix of philosophy, psychology, business, and self-development books.
I also notice what appears to be titles by authors like Seth Godin and Elizabeth Gilbert in the collection, though I can't make out the specific book titles clearly.
Mint chain
Jalil and Jack Butcher released a new protocol on ETH called Mint that is an awesome tool for artists. Easy deployment, ZERO middleman fees and the contracts seem to be super efficient. Interesting mechanic in that the artist fee matches the gas fee at the time. Mints are always only 24hrs long. They also include ways to either use IPFS or mint directly on-chain…and have p5.js and other renderers baked in so you can mint scripts on-chain which I’m finding to be really cool- like artblocks...but again ZERO platform fee. They’ve also made it easier to customize your own site to display your work. It’s only been going for a few weeks. Jalil is continuing to add more tools to it. Definitely an awesome gift from them to help artists. There’s also a guy called Ripe that has made a site called networked nodes where you can see all the mints from everyone in one place. Anyway- just wanted to share in case you haven’t seen it yet. Gremplin and Jack have added work here. I’ve been using it a couple weeks to drop experiments/ideas- mostly with p5. Keep making cool stuff and thanks again for sharing all your thoughts on the space. Some links below.
https://docs.mint.vv.xyz
https://networkednodes.art
https://networked.art
How Libra Was Killed.
I never shared this publicly before, but since
@pmarca
opened the floodgates on
@joerogan
’s pod, it feels appropriate to shed more light on this.
As a reminder, Libra (then Diem) was an advanced, high-performance, payments-centric blockchain paired with a stablecoin that we built with my team at
@Meta
. It would’ve solved global payments at scale. Prior to announcing the project, we spent months briefing key regulators in DC and abroad. We then announced the project in June 2019 alongside 28 companies. Two weeks later, I was called to testify in front of both the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee, which was the starting point of two years of nonstop work and changes to appease lawmakers and regulators.
By spring of 2021 (yes they slow played us at every step), we had addressed every last possible regulatory concern across financial crime, money laundering, consumer protection, reserve management, buffers, and so much more, and we were ready to launch.
We had worked on a slow rollout of a limited pilot that some members of the Fed’s Board of Governors were supportive of. At last, Chair Jay Powell was ready to let us move forward in a limited way. The story, as I heard it, is that Jay Powell was told by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at one of their biweekly meetings that allowing this project to move forward was “political suicide,” and she would not have his back if he let it happen. I wasn’t in the room when this conversation happened, so take these words with a grain of salt, but effectively this was the moment Libra was killed.
Shortly thereafter, the Fed organized calls with all the participating banks, and the Fed’s general counsel read a prepared statement to each of them, saying: “We can’t stop you from moving forward and launching, but we are not comfortable with you doing so.” And just like that, it was over.
One essential point is worth making here. There was no legal or regulatory angle left for the government or regulators to kill the project. It was 100% a political kill—one that was executed through intimidation of captive banking institutions. That was the hardest part of this story for me personally. Not that we had failed, but that America, this country I immigrated to and became a proud citizen of because of its rule of law and value system, behaved in such a way for political reasons. It was a very tough pill to swallow.
The bright side of the story, though, was the many learnings from this wild ride. By the end of the project, we had made so many concessions to get a thumbs-up that the whole design of the network became a Frankenstein of our initial ambitions.
We also learned the biggest lesson of all, which is that if you’re trying to build an open money grid for the world—eventually moving trillions of dollars a day, designed to be here 100 years from now—you have to build it on the most neutral, decentralized, unassailable network and asset, which, hands down, is Bitcoin.
And now this is what many of us who went through this scarring journey are building together at
@Lightspark
. And this time, we won’t stop until we get it done!
My AI hedge fund is live on GitHub.
You asked to contribute, now you can.
Main components of the project:
1 • agents
2 • tools
3 • backtester
Everything is already setup for you.
Agents contains the main agent definitions and workflow.
Tools contains agent tools like technical analysis and data fetching.
Backtester contains the backtesting functionality.
Time to build.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Replit AI and Agent
Define your MVP
2. Create the base with Replit Agent
3. Or create the base with React
4. Discover the Replit interface
5. Save every step using Git
6. Gemini to add AI capabilities
7. Add features with Replit Agent
8. Add features & iterate with Replit AI
9. Customize your app with Agent
10. Integrate login with Google
11. Implement a database
12. Monetize with Stripe
13. Deploy and Share your app
Marc Andreesen's guide to personal productivity
Marc Andreessen’s guide to personal productivity
Don’t keep a schedule
• Refuse to commit to meetings, appointments, or activities at any set time in any future day
• You can always work on whatever is most important or most interesting, at any time
Maintain only three lists:
1. Todo List: must-do commitments
2. Watch List: follow-ups and reminders
3. Later List: future possibilities
• If it doesn’t go on one of those three lists, it goes away
Daily planning system:
• Create a 3x5 card each night with 3–5 key tasks for tomorrow
• Use the back as an “anti-todo list” to record accomplishments
• Each time you do something, you get to write it down and you get that little rush of endorphins
Practice “Structured Procrastination”
• Never fight the tendency to procrastinate—instead, you should use it to your advantage in order to get other things done
• While you’re procrastinating, just do lots of other stuff instead
Deploy “Strategic Incompetence”
• The best way to make sure that you are never asked to do something again is to royally screw it up the first time
Email management:
• The problem with email is that getting an email triggers that same endorphin hit
• Check email only twice daily
• Process to empty inbox each session
• Use only three main folders: Pending, Review, and Vault
Communication:
• Don’t answer the phone; let it go to voicemail
• Use headphones as a barrier to interruption. People feel much worse interrupting you if you are wearing headphones than if you’re not
Decision making:
• Only agree to new commitments when both your head and your heart say yes
• If you’re not doing something you love with the majority of your time, and you have any personal freedom and flexibility whatsoever, it’s time for a change
Create this sidebar using HTML, CSS and JavaScript 🚀
https://github.com/atherosai/ui/tree/main/sidebar-06
Hillary Clinton in 2008
Hillary Clinton in 2008:
“If they’ve committed a crime… DEPORT THEM! No questions asked. You’re gone!
If you want to become a citizen you have to pay a stiff fine, pay back taxes, and learn english.”
Today’s Democratic party would call her a MAGA far-right extremist on CNN.