Gokul Rajaram explaining the difference between dashboard product and pipes product, and why it is important to identify early on which product are you are working on. Every startup needs to make a choice: is their product a dashboard product or a pipes product? Dashboard products are used directly and regularly by end users as their primary interface for accomplishing tasks. The goal for these products is to get customers to live in the product. The primary North Star metric for these companies is active users (daily / weekly / monthly, depending on the natural frequency of customer usage for the category).

This excerpt from research paper by Koyeli Sengupta, Srushti Gandhi and Alokananda Rudra on highlighting the importance of making autistic individuals aware of their diagnosis. Self–advocacy is possible only when autistic individuals are aware of their diagnosis and cognizant of their strengths and differences (Shore, 2004). Knowledge about their diagnosis helps create an empowering positive autistic identity (Cooper et al., 2017, Oredipe et al., 2023) rather than fostering an image of a broken neurotypical (Almog et al., 2024). An increased understanding of one’s condition among autistic adults is associated with enhanced self-understanding, awareness, and self-compassion (Crompton et al., 2020, Leedham et al., 2020), with opportunities to belong to a community by connecting with other autistic individuals (Hickey et al., 2018, Tan, 2018).Studies also suggest that the earlier individuals know their diagnosis, the greater the association with a more positive disability identity (Corden et al., 2021) and sense of self (Oredipe et al., 2023, Smith et al., 2018), while later knowledge of diagnosis was associated with experiences of grief for the pre-diagnosis years when autistic individuals struggled and blamed themselves for the challenges. (Leedham et al., 2020).

Emily M. Bender and Nanna Inie sharing an approach on how we should be talking about AI. A more deliberate and thoughtful way forward is to talk about “AI” systems in terms of what we use systems to do, often specifying input and/or output. That is, talk about functionalities that serve our purposes, rather than “capabilities” of the system. Rather than saying a model is “good at” something (suggesting the model has skills) we can talk about what it is “good for”. Who is using the model to do something, and what are they using it to do?

Jason Fried explaining why obvious things need to be kept obvious even when the hard things become possible. Much of the tension in product development and interface design comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the possible. Figuring out which things go in which bucket is critical to fully understanding how to make something useful. Shouldn’t everything be obvious? Unless you’re making a product that just does one thing – like a paperclip, for example – everything won’t be obvious. You have to make tough calls about what needs to be obvious, what should be easy, and what should be possible.

Awais Aftab provides a succinct explanation of autism, as per DSM-5, and how its diagnosis is based on a descriptive prototype rather than medical tests. To be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder according to DSM-5, a person must have ongoing difficulties in social communication and interaction in all three areas: trouble with back-and-forth social connection, problems with nonverbal communication like eye contact and body language, and difficulty making or keeping friendships. They also must show at least two types of repetitive or restricted behaviors, such as repetitive movements or phrases, needing things to stay the same, having very intense focused interests, or being unusually sensitive (or under-sensitive) to things like sounds, textures, or lights.

Addy Osmani shares his 21 lessons from working in Google for 14 years. This lesson stood out the most for me. 14. If you win every debate, you’re probably accumulating silent resistance. I’ve learned to be suspicious of my own certainty. When I “win” too easily, something is usually wrong. People stop fighting you not because you’ve convinced them, but because they’ve given up trying - and they’ll express that disagreement in execution, not meetings. Real alignment takes longer. You have to actually understand other perspectives, incorporate feedback, and sometimes change your mind publicly. The short-term feeling of being right is worth much less than the long-term reality of building things with willing collaborators.

Shubhabrata ‘Shumi’ Marmar reflecting on the dramatic design of Mahindra BE6. What you should know about dramatic designs is there is always been a long-standing debate about whether they're good for a company to do or not. Dramatic designs can draw attention; they can create aspiration, but they can also age very quickly, which is why a lot of companies are a little leery of doing super out-there designs for production cars. You do that for concepts because the concept is about attention and not production. Therefore, if you look at, for example, the Polo—the Polo didn't age a lot, but the Polo didn't also look super fresh when it arrived.

Anand Sridharan talking about how predicting future events cannot help us predict the future consequences. Herein lies the true unknowability of the messy world around us. It is not just we cannot predict major events. It is that, even if we could, we have no idea how their consequences will play out. It is impossible to reliably unravel a chain of future events in a manner that is useful in real-world decision making. I used a 2-level thought experiment merely to illustrate that the world is unknowable at many levels. There is no reason to stop at two levels.

In the early days of my equity investment journey, I was looking for companies to invest in by focusing on those whose products I used. These companies—for me—were familiar, established, and likely…

Thsi comment by TexanFeller on Hacker News explaining monotropism with a metaphor. I find monotropism an apt way of understanding it. A normal person's attention is like a flashlight they control that illuminates much of a room at once. Autistic brains are a tight beam flashlight, almost a laser for some, with its aim difficult to change. ADHD brains are more like a tight beam flashlight on a motorized mount that swivels in all directions, but you're not always in control of where it swivels to...it's like an AI constantly overrides your direction inputs and points the light at what it deems most exciting or urgent at the moment.

Robert Greiner reflecting on the recent acquisition of Bun by Anthropic. Leaders don’t express their true beliefs in blog posts or conference quotes. They express them in hiring plans, acquisition targets, and compensation bands. If you want to understand what AI companies actually believe about engineering, follow the cap table, not the keynote.

Becca Caddy talking about the future humans in the Pixar movie Wall-E and how that future now looks scary. I’ve been researching how AI shows up in sci-fi for an article I’m writing, and I keep coming back to Wall-E. Compared to The Terminator or The Matrix, nothing overtly terrifying happens. There’s no war between humans and machines, no extinction event, no malevolent intelligence plotting our downfall. And yet, Wall-E feels more disturbing than most AI dystopias, at least to me. Because in Wall-E’s imagined future, humans aren’t enslaved by machines – at least not in the Matrix-y sort of way we usually imagine.

Ted Lamade explaining how our imperfections give us character. Perfection, or the perception of it, has become the goal. We curate our lives on YouTube through highlight reels and post our airbrushed photos from vacation on Instagram. It’s why people are increasingly using artificial intelligence to “perfect” nearly everything they do. And yes, it’s why people are increasingly buying artificial Christmas trees….because they are easier to set up, cleaner to maintain, and “perfect” in so many ways. But here’s the question: By attempting to remove all the imperfections in life, are we removing the stories?

This comment by socketcluster on HackerNews on how seniors can ask dumb questions and why juniors hesitate to do the same. …I find that it's seniors who ask the 'dumb' questions. Everyone is worried about losing face in this precarious economy... But seniors are able to ask really smart questions as well so even their dumb questions sound smart... They can usually spin dumb questions into a smart questions by going one level deeper and bringing nuance into the discussion. This may be difficult to do for a junior. My experience as a team lead working with a lot of juniors is that they are terrified of losing face and tend to talk a big game.

In the early days of my equity investment journey, I was looking for companies to invest in by focusing on those whose products I used. These companies—for me—were familiar, established, and likely…