Continuations

I have missed writing (my last post was at the beginning of September). Well writing publicly. I have started to keep a journal which takes a bit of time every day. I have also been ridiculously busy with both existing and new investments as well as several projects, such as finally wrapping up work on my book The World After Capital. But I have a lot of thoughts rattling around my brain and I find that only writing has the power to help sort through them. So here are some of the topics I pla...

Despite making progress on the recovery from my shoulder surgery, I have not been blogging and today will be another missed Uncertainty Wednesday. I have been spending the last few weeks of summer reading more which has been enjoyable. I am learning about Zero Knowledge Proofs from various blogs, including Vitalik Buterin’s excellent posts on the topic. I am also nearly finished with Michael Pollan’s “How to Change your Mind” about psychedelic drugs. And I am halfway into Judea Pearl’s “The B...

Spent some time today catching up on comments from my crazy Friday. I have already learned a ton from the thoughtful comments – many thanks! (Also thanks to Fred for sending folks over here). Replying to comments by email via disqus is super convenient for short comments. For longer comments, especially ones that refer to other comments or include links, I still need to see the web version, but maybe I will get better at that (hey – just started getting comments!). For some of the long and re...

Yesterday, in my Tumblr dashboard, I saw a post by Marco about spam from Parallels. In it he saysI can confidently say that VMWare’s is the far better product. It’s much more polished, and most importantly, much more stable than ParallelsNow I have been running Parallels 4.0 since I switched to my Mac and I have been very happy with it (it has continued to be stable since I wrote my post). This is a simple (and single) datapoint, nothing else. Instead of blogging about this here (as I have no...

This will most likely be my last blog post for the year. I am planning to take off a couple weeks not just from writing but also from spending pretty much any time online. During this time I look forward to reading a number of books that have piled up in my queue (both non-fiction and fiction – thanks for the many recommendations in comments here and on Twitter). I have taken breaks like this several times before and have always felt refreshed by them. In addition to the normal changes I will...

Yesterday’s post about the Google-Groupon deal generated a lot of views and comments and two important lessons. First, on a “meta” level there was a lesson about blogging. While I had known this to some degree before, for stimulating dialog it is far better to write about a current topic and take a one-sided approach. The important lesson though that I am still learning is that one then needs to be open to actually engaging with the comments. Disqus is a wonderful tool for doing that as I can...

I will be taking most of the rest of August off from writing daily blog posts. I am largely doing this because I will also be unplugging from the constant information drip. This is the information equivalent of a purge diet. My theory is that we are mal-adapted to the supersaturated information environment we are in now. Our brains evolved in a setting that had much less information in it but what bits of information it had were super important as they often determined life or death. With sma...

Today marks my 8-year anniversary of blogging. I have learned so much from it and want to thank everyone who has engaged in the comments over the years. I am particularly grateful for comments that are critical and for ones that provide links to additional material. The reason is that those help move my thinking forward. They are part of the critical process through which knowledge improves over time (of course the occasional compliment or thanks are also much appreciated). We should not take...