No Notes: Near Perfect Posts on AI Ruining the Public Web, Silicon Valley Etiquette, the Fear of a Second Success, and +++ [Link Blog]
No Notes. Just some chef’s kiss, on-target reads
Encore Anxiety [Anu Atluru/Working Theorys] — Wonderful read on the pressure to succeed a second time. Oh please, some might concern troll, but I’ve witnessed this in tech careers. Most frequently with (a) repeat founders who fear their next company will fail and prove their initial win was a lucky fluke, and (b) younger folks who ending up joining an early stage rocketship out of school and once it succeeds beyond their expectations, worrying they’ll never find another. As Anu writes,
Impostor syndrome gets all the attention, but encore anxiety is its cruel foil: not the fear that you’re a fraud, but the fear that you’re genuine and still might not be able to prove it. The difference in attribution matters to the dominant psychology at play: the impostor fears their past success was luck; the encore-anxious person believes it was skill and yet fears they can’t summon it again at will.
Either way, there’s a focus on what others are thinking.
Ultraviolet Catastrophe: AI is about to make the public internet useless [Philip Rosedale/Philip’s Newsletter] — You might assume this post is about business model incentives pushing quality content behind paywalls or disincentivizing its creation all-together, but it’s actually about trust and malignant AI content (fraud, slop, etc). Philip believes the volume will be so significant that we’ll need to rethink the architecture of the web itself. His summary paragraph:
AI is about the flood the internet with messages and render it useless for many tasks. To scale to billions in a world filled with AI agents capable of typing 1000 times faster that us means a complete overhaul of our aging internet architecture. We will have to turn off anonymous public services, replacing addresses with channels — or in the language of graphs — replacing nodes with edges. There will be turbulence during this process, so fasten your seat belt and find some good books to read during the down-time.
Silicon Valley Etiquette [Angelo/Parallel Lines] — This was a really interesting sociological view of SV etiquette and the history of these norms. I hope we’re able to continue keeping the best aspects of our community, while reexamining how we also unintentionally (and intentionally) create barriers.
The Editorial Battles That Made The New Yorker [Jill Lepore/The New Yorker] — Skip this if you’re not a writing/creative process egghead like me. But for those who are, this is a great tour through the New Yorker’s editorial philosophy history and how it conflicted with (or helped) the writers they contracted for articles.
Inside Home Depot’s $20 Billion Secret Garden [Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal] — Home Depot doesn’t just stock flowers and plants, it very much works hand-in-hand with growers, shaping what gets grown, what genetic attributes to optimize, and ultimately, what gets brought to market.
To find those plants, Home Depot runs 25 trial gardens in nine climate zones across the U.S. and studies them in the field under a variety of conditions. After all, a plant that thrives in New Mexico might not survive in New Jersey. For security purposes, some of those experimental gardens are hidden in cornfields or through backyard donkey corrals, protected on secret farms before the plants are selected and patented.
A Note on the State of Applicant Fraud [Matt Hoffman/M13] — Recruiting is changing dramatically because of AI — the LLMs now polish resumes, generate perfect responses, and in some cases, even create the candidates themselves. Some early data and how actually AI might also be the solution from Matt Hoffman, VC firm M13’s talent partner.
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