Wisereads Vol. 45 — Paul Graham's Essays, Andrew Chen's case against daily routines, and more
Last week, we shared Joshua Slocum's timeless memoir from 1900, Sailing Alone Around the World. This week, we're sharing an epic compilation of over 200 Paul Graham essays into a single ebook.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
Apple intelligence and AI maximalism
Apple's approach to AI positions large language models (LLMs) as commodity infrastructure rather than standalone products, according to tech analyst Benedict Evans. "It’s proposing a single context model for everything you do on your phone, and powering features from that, rather than adding disconnected LLM-powered features at disconnected points across the company. But it’s still trying to make the 'disruptive' new tech into a feature, and it’s trying to put ChatGPT into a box, limited to a pretty narrow set of use cases."
I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again
After hearing about the need to implement AI in business one too many times, software consultant Nikhil Suresh urges companies to focus on their core operations before getting caught up in the hype. "The only thing you should be doing is improving your operations and culture, and that will give you the ability to use AI if it ever becomes relevant. Everyone is talking about Retrieval Augmented Generation, but most companies don't actually have any internal documentation worth retrieving. Fix. Your. Shit."
The case against morning yoga, daily routines, and endless meetings
Andrew Chen, venture capitalist at a16z, weighs the trade-offs between maintaining routines and embracing serendipitous encounters that lead to high-impact work. "Pivotal moments often happen when you inject more risk, new information, or create upside in an otherwise stable situation… Start new projects and make big moves. Raise your hand to volunteer for work with high variance outcomes."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
🧹 Clean Up Your Apple Notes: The Ultimate Organization Guide! 💡
Dylan Stewart (aka the MacWhisperer) guides Apple Notes users in organizing their extensive note collection with features like pinned notes, hashtags, and smart folders. "Rather than having to constantly file them and put them away, what I can easily do is create a Smart Folder. Because I've already selected these hashtags, I'm going to right click on one of them, and you'll notice right there it says, 'Create Smart Folder.' Boom!"
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
I just finished a 2.5 week trip through China
After his first family visit to China in a decade, Corry Wang compares tech in China and the US, noting the proliferation of EV brands in China and the restricted access to the open web. "In the US, we default to finding info on Google, which crawls the open web. In China, the open web basically doesn't exist - instead, every major app has its own walled garden of content… Amazingly, my aunt actually asked me 'what is this?' when I pointed to Safari on her iPhone. I don't think she'd ever opened it before."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought
In light of fMRI results showing that many types of reasoning and thinking don't engage the brain's language network, researchers at MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley argue that language evolved as a tool for communication rather than complex thought. "Many of these cross-linguistic tendencies—including the tendency to minimize dependency lengths, the preferences for particular word orders, and the prevalence of ambiguity—are difficult to account for under the view that language is used for internal thought and without appealing to how language is used and processed."
Hand-picked book of the week
Essays
Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, has single-handedly shaped the modern tech scene through his extensive catalog of essays, totaling over 500,000 words and covering a wide range of topics from startups and culture to tech and art. A few of our favorites include: Do Things that Don't Scale, Schlep Blindness, and The Need to Read.
"In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge. Mysterious 'tapes' would load it into one's brain like a program being loaded into a computer.
That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Not just because it would be hard to build a replacement for reading, but because even if one existed, it would be insufficient. Reading about x doesn't just teach you about x; it also teaches you how to write.
Would that matter? If we replaced reading, would anyone need to be good at writing? The reason it would matter is that writing is not just a way to convey ideas, but also a way to have them."
Luckily for us, Emergent Mind AI engineer Omar Nomad compiled all 200+ essays currently on Graham's website into a monstrously large EPUB. You can see more about his work here.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Craig Mod
On his most recent Walk and Talk, author-photographer Craig Mod gave readers a glimpse into the lush landscape of Indonesia through his regular newsletter updates. From Slow Time and the Bali Walk and Talk: "Time is yours, he said, and it was — time, ours, for the next week as we walked across Bali. Time and sweat, so much sweat. Leeches? They were ours, too, but with less blood and horror than expected. ('Our record is thirty on one person!' they told us. We maxed out at just a handful, no boots sloshing thick with our own juice.)"