Wisereads Vol. 83 — Middlemarch by George Eliot, John Gruber on Apple Intelligence delays, and more
Last week, we shared a preview of From Start-Up to Grown-Up: Grow Your Leadership to Grow Your Business by executive coach Alisa Cohn—a guide for founders and CEOs to scale their business by scaling themselves. This week, we're sharing a full copy of Middlemarch, by George Eliot's classic English novel.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
Why I’m Feeling the A.G.I.
After talking to dozens of researchers and entrepreneurs with a front-row seat to AI’s rapid progress, tech columnist Kevin Roose is sounding the alarm: whether you're an optimist or a pessimist, it's time to pay attention. "I believe that when A.G.I. is announced, there will be debates over definitions and arguments about whether or not it counts as “real” A.G.I., but that these mostly won’t matter, because the broader point — that we are losing our monopoly on human-level intelligence, and transitioning to a world with very powerful A.I. systems in it — will be true."
How I’ve run major projects
Ben Kuhn shares his crisis playbook from Anthropic: overcommunicate, clear your schedule, stay nimble in how you observe and respond, and keep a "victory plan" on hand. "A specific tool that I’ve found critical for staying oriented and updating quickly is a detailed plan for victory, i.e., a list of steps, as concrete as possible, that end with the goal being achieved. The plan is important because whether or not we’re achieving the plan is the best way to figure out how well or badly things are going... One of the most common megaproject failure modes is to not freak out soon enough, and having a concrete plan is the best antidote."
Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino
Following Apple’s announcement that key Apple Intelligence features—used to promote the latest iPhones—are being delayed and still haven’t been demoed to the press, John Gruber calls out the company for misleading marketing. "A feature or product that Apple is unwilling to demonstrate, at all, is unknowable. Is it mostly working, and close to, but not quite, demonstratable? Is it only kinda sorta working — partially functional, but far from being complete? Fully functional but prone to crashing — or in the case of AI, prone to hallucinations and falsehoods? Or is it complete fiction, just an idea at this point?"
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
Who Is Really In Control Of Your Life?
The team at Kurzgesagt takes viewers on a trippy journey through the nervous system, showing how the brain edits reality behind the scenes—often without your conscious mind noticing. "Each second, your eyes make 3 to 4 sudden jerky movements, saccades, of 50 milliseconds, focusing from one point to another, scanning your environment to get different sharp images that your brain then edits together. During a saccade, your brain shuts down your vision so you don’t see a wild motion blur. This means that each day, for around 2 hours, you're completely blind."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
I wrote a quick new post on "Digital Hygiene"
Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI co-founder and founder of the Eureka Labs school, shares his go-to digital hygiene tips for staying secure and private online: use hardware security keys, password managers, VPNs, treat security questions like extra passwords, and more. "Dinosaur businesses are obsessed with the idea of security questions like 'what is your mother's maidan name?', and force you to set them up from time to time. Clearly, these are in the category of 'something you know' so they are basically passwords, but conveniently for scammers, they are easy to research... Instead, treat security questions like passwords, generate random answers to random questions, and store them in your 1Password along with your passwords."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
Developmental Affirmations
Author of eighteen books on parenting and family dynamics, Jean Illsley Clarke offered affirming phrases to support loved ones through every stage of life: for toddlers, "You can think and feel at the same time." For adults, "You can say your hellos and goodbyes to people, roles, dreams, and decisions," and near life’s end, "You deserve the support that you need."
Hand-picked book of the week
Middlemarch
Published under the pen name George Eliot, Mary Ann Evans’ Middlemarch follows the interwoven lives of characters in a fictional town during the early 1830s, against the backdrop of the Reform Act. Of the historical novels Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison recently read, it’s the one he’d most likely revisit: "There's something memorably compelling in Eliot's affection and empathy for almost all of her characters. If Succession is a show with no likable personalities, Middlemarch is the opposite."
"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."
This edition of Middlemarch is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Diagonal
Early-stage investor at Matrix and former product leader Diana Kimball Berlin shares five tech-leaning excerpts with playful, philosophical commentary in her Substack, Diagonal. A snippet from Just playing by feeling: "'I think google searches conditioned users to highlight keywords, reduce context, and keep it brief in order to maximize search results. We have to completely un-teach this behavior' – Isabella Reed... This has certainly been my experience with LLMs—they love to vibe. I spent some time over the weekend trying to get Claude to output an SVG of a heart and found myself typing 'Much better! But the shape is kind of awkward and gangly, can you make it rounder and cuter?'"