472: Crowdstrike Targets, OpenAI + US Military, Starlink, Bubble Psychology, Google AlphaGeometry, Hydro-Quebec, and Dragon Prince

"The pre-Internet era was so different"

The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.

—James Madison

📲 🛒🚚📦📫🏡 How quickly we forget how things used to be… We now take for granted how cool e-commerce is.

I stab my fingers at some buttons on a glass rectangle and a day or two later the stuff I want shows up at my door. And it’s not even a luxury service only available to the super-rich — anyone can do it!

Buying anything used to be such a hassle — if you could even find what you needed! We got used to Amazon and Shopify *very* quickly and now any minor hiccup with an order feels like an affront (it’s the Louis C.K. ‘wifi on a plane’ bit all over again).

I wonder what other new modern conveniences will pop up and become the new norm, rewiring our baseline. My friend who thanks the Universe every time he takes a hot shower probably has it right — let’s not take the good stuff for granted, appreciate it, and fight the hedonic treadmill effect as best we can.

🛀💭⚖️🕸️👀 If your network is your filter and if good taste attracts good taste, then there must be some sort of network effect at play there 🤔

It’s no surprise that a lot of the top creators in any field (and across fields) all seem to know each other. Just look at the list of guests on Rick Rubin’s podcast.

🛀💭📈📉🕰️ It can be difficult for investors to stay in the present. Something’s always pulling your attention forward to whatever may come next (it’s all probabilistic, of course).

When the market is going down, I’m thinking about when it will start to go up again. When the market is going up, I’m thinking about the next time it will go down.

📺🎬🍿👩‍🔬💬 After watching multiple films from the 80s and early 90s with my kids recently, something jumped out at me:

Technobabble has gotten better over time.

I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it used to be *comically* bad, especially if you knew anything about what they were talking about.

Often they were just throwing a bunch of technical-sounding words together and hoping that nobody would notice. The pre-Internet era was so different…

⚔️🛡️🏰🧙‍♂️🐲🧝‍♀️ Death row inmates played Dungeon & Dragon in a Texas prison. This is one of those “when worlds collide” pieces, and the documents tell a lot of the story:

h/t Jeffrey Lebowski and dalibali

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🦅 🔐Crowdstrike Delivering on Past Promises (and making new ones) + a new Tailwind 💨