377: Constellation Software's Lumine Spin, Twitter, Tesla FSD, Peter Thiel & Bitcoin, Microsoft, Batteries, and The Last of Us

"What a terrible position to be in"

People generally have more control over their actions than their feelings.

But we can influence our feelings by taking action.

Take one small step. Move the body first and the mind will follow. —James Clear

🥋🏯 Earlier this week, my son took his first Jiu-Jitsu class.

It’s largely thanks to Jocko Willink, who’s such an excellent ambassador for the sport and wrote the Warrior Kids books that have been a very positive influence on my kid, helping him understand the importance of discipline, learning through practice, and self-improvement.

It’s too early to tell if Jiu-Jitsu will be a big thing for him, but so far so good. He really enjoyed the first class and talked about it for days afterward.

🎮 😮‍💨 I found myself feeling a bit tired lately, probably a mix of being overworked (too many projects!) and fighting off my kid’s cold virus.

To relax, I dusted off my trusty old Doom video game (it’s crazy to think that the community has been building maps and MODs continuously since 1993!).

If you’re an old-school gamer who wants to feel nostalgia, I recorded myself playing and uploaded the videos to my Youtube channel (the version I’m playing is heavily updated and modernized, and quite a bit more difficult than the original — be warned, it’s a very violent game, though the violence is rather cartoonish).

My Youtube channel is mostly a mix of my Doom videos and podcasts from this newsletter. I guess it’s a strange mix, but then again, the newsletter is a strange mix too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

🧙‍♂️🧛‍♀️🧟‍♀️🧌🔮🎲🥃🔥 Unless my plans are somehow derailed, there will not be an edition on Monday.

I will be spending the weekend with 5 of my friends in a rented log cabin drinking peaty scotch, making stupid jokes, and playing D&D by the fireplace.

It should be fun! I’ll try to share some photos when I return.

🐦 🔓 Twitter has apparently been trying to prevent users from leaving the app/site by throttling engagement on Tweets that include links for a while.

This was going on before Musk took over, but I suspect it may be getting worse now.

From their point of view, any time you click a link, you risk not coming back for a while, and you’re spending less time scrolling through ads. There’s definitely a short-term incentive there.

But I hope Twitter will remember that the long term value of Twitter comes from the people who write things on it. And there’s a power law, with most of the engagement surrounding the content on a relatively small percentage of accounts.

If these people feel like nobody sees what they’re posting and that Twitter gets worse and worse as a way for people to discover the things they make (ie. even when other people post links to your things, nobody sees them), this sends the signal that they should build on other things, spend less energy on Twitter and find ways to reduce their dependence on it.

It was already happening, but it will accelerate unless Twitter optimizes for the long-term health of its community of users.

But of course, Twitter probably CAN’T think of anything but the short-term right now. Long-term for them is probably their next debt interest payment… What a terrible position to be in 😬

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴