Wisereads Vol. 148 — Dad Brain by Darby Saxbe, Paul Graham on How to Earn a Billion Dollars, and more
Last week, we shared a preview of Angela Duckworth's Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. This week, we're sharing a new release perfect for the holiday: Dad Brain by Darby Saxbe.
Happy Father's Day! 🌟
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
How to Earn a Billion Dollars
Only a handful of startups ever generate enormous wealth. In his latest post, Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham walks through the math behind those fortunes: "Exponential growth is like magic. It generates outcomes that seem impossible. And that’s why some politicians distrust it. They don’t understand the math of exponential growth, so when they see people becoming what seems to them impossibly rich, they assume they must have cheated."
How the Open Knowledge Format can improve data sharing | Google Cloud Blog
Inside most companies, the knowledge an AI agent needs sits scattered across incompatible catalogs, wikis, and a few engineers' heads. Google Cloud's Sam McVeety details what that fragmentation costs. "Every agent builder is solving the same context-assembly problem from scratch, every catalog vendor is reinventing the same data models, and the knowledge itself is locked behind whichever surface created it."
Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction? Sales Trends, My Personal Data, and What It Might Mean for the Future
Bestselling author Tim Ferriss shares the data on his collapsing book sales alongside a prediction for what AI will do to how-to nonfiction at large. "I’d rather write books for 10,000 people who are genuinely changed by them than crank out short-form videos for 10 million people who forget about them within days or minutes."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
How To Think SO CLEARLY People Assume You're Brilliant
Writing as theMITmonk, former tech executive Sandeep Swadia uses the cobra effect to explain how systems drift from what they were built to do: "When you attach a reward to the wrong thing, people optimize the system for the rewards and ignore the goal that the system was made for. Humans make systems messy."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reflects on what gives a firm staying power in an AI-driven economy. "You can offload a task, or even a job, but you can never offload your learning. The future of the firm is the ability to compound that learning across people and AI."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
The New SDLC With Vibe Coding
In their latest paper, Google engineering leader Addy Osmani and coauthors place vibe coding and agentic engineering on a spectrum. "Telling a CTO that your team is vibe coding their payment processing system will, and should, raise alarm bells. Telling that same CTO that your team practices agentic engineering, with AI handling implementation under human-designed constraints while test coverage ensures correctness, is a fundamentally different conversation."
Hand-picked book of the week
Dad Brain
When psychologist Darby Saxbe's parents divorced, her normally buttoned-up father left the confines of his study to become the hands-on dad who taught her to drive, dance the tango, and make rutabaga soup. That transformation set her on a path to understand fatherhood.
Drawing on more than twenty years of research, she shows how becoming a dad reshapes men's brains in her debut, Dad Brain. Ranging across cultures and told with humor, it weaves science together with compelling storytelling.
"My father has always had a knack for mending things. As a surgeon, he put people back together stitch by stitch. As the neighborhood’s volunteer arborist, making the rounds with brushes and a bottle of sticky ointment, he patched up bare trunks and broken branches. Nowadays, as a serious amateur genealogist, he pieces together family trees from long-forgotten second cousins and third wives. But his most enduring project has been tending to our fractured family. Through trial and error, instinct and research, he glued together the parts of us that had been broken open."
We’re delighted to show Wisereads readers a preview of Darby's debut! If this preview resonates, you can purchase Dad Brain wherever you get your books.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Sarah Guo
Investor Sarah Guo, founder of AI venture firm Conviction, writes essays on startups, tech, and more on her Substack. From The Untrainable: "Real automation isn’t only the model getting better. It’s the product, the model, the workflow, and the firm moving together, and three of those four move at the speed of an organization."