Wisereads Vol. 86 — Shopify CEO on AI at work, The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim, and more
Last week, we featured David Hume’s classic exploration of human knowledge and its limits: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. This week, in honor of our recent offsite in Italy and the arrival of spring, we're sharing a full copy of The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
AI 2027
In a forecast that reads like science fiction, a group of AI researchers teams up with writer Scott Alexander to imagine two starkly different futures for AI over the next decade. In Race: "There are even bioengineered human-like creatures (to humans what corgis are to wolves)... Earth-born civilization has a glorious future ahead of it—but not with us." In Slowdown: "The rockets start launching. People terraform and settle the solar system, and prepare to go beyond... A new age dawns, one that is unimaginably amazing in almost every way but more familiar in some."
100 Ways To Live Better
Jacob Falkovich’s Threadapalooza 2019 submission recently resurfaced on LessWrong, packed with offbeat life advice for Mind to Body and beyond. Mind: "Should you watch that movie / play that game / read that book? The formula is: [# who rated it 5/5] + [# who rated it 1/5] – [# who rated it 3/5]." Soul: "Once in a while let yourself cry, fight, scream, and eat your boogers. That shit worked in kindergarten, there’s no reason to completely give up on it now." Relationships: "If your spouse, friend, or family member has a dumb but not strictly harmful habit, try thinking of it as their artistic expression instead of using facts and logic to fail to talk them out of it."
The blissful zen of a good side project
Juggling family life and his role as a frontend engineer at Deno, Josh Collinsworth still makes time for side projects to feel alive. "But I know that when I’m not creating something, a part of me withers. And I think, in some way, we all have that compulsion inside of us. I don’t think what we create is the important part. I don’t even think it needs to be something 'creative' to begin with."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
Scarcity and Abundance in 2025 with Alex Danco
In his new podcast, Packy McCormick of Not Boring interviews the authors of standout internet essays. This week, that's Spotify's Alex Danco on Scarcity and Abundance: "Paradoxically, right, it's like merit-based and high agency can sometimes mean that people feel that the legitimacy for what they want to do comes from them and their ideas, as opposed to like, 'No, there's a goal, and I have to be accountable for what I'm being told to do.' Right? And this is where we got into the whole like, maybe when agency is abundant, accountability is scarce."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
AI usage is now a baseline expectation
A leaked memo from Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke outlines the company’s push to integrate AI into every employee’s workflow—now a factor in performance reviews. Lutke cautions against resisting the shift: "Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you're not climbing, you're sliding."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
America’s Growing Trade Deficit Is Selling the Nation Out From Under Us. Here’s a Way to Fix the Problem—And We Need to Do It Now.
Readers unearthed a 2003 Fortune article by Warren Buffett on U.S. trade deficits, offering food for thought on current events. "Let’s think of it in terms of a family: Imagine that I, Warren Buffett, can get the suppliers of all that I consume in my lifetime to take Buffett family IOUs that are payable, in goods and services and with interest added, by my descendants. This scenario may be viewed as effecting an even trade between the Buffett family unit and its creditors. But the generations of Buffetts following me are not likely to applaud the deal (and, heaven forbid, may even attempt to welsh on it)."
Hand-picked book of the week
The Enchanted April
A bestseller from the start, The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim follows four women who rent a castle in the Italian countryside. With warmth and charm, it explores friendship, love, and renewal amid sunshine and wisteria. Later adapted into an Academy Award–nominated film, The Enchanted April captures the quiet transformation that blooms with the spring season.
"Happy? Poor, ordinary, everyday word. But what could one say, how could one describe it? It was as though she could hardly stay inside herself, it was as though she were too small to hold so much of joy, it was as though she were washed through with light. And how astonishing to feel this sheer bliss, for here she was, not doing and not going to do a single unselfish thing, not going to do a thing she didn’t want to do."
This edition of The Enchanted April 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
A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
Historian Bret Devereaux pays homage to video games and historical fantasy by turning a critical—but affectionate—eye to the details: Did the Siege of Eregion in Rings of Power make tactical sense? Were gold coins as ubiquitous as RPGs suggest? From Collections: Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy 'Gold': "In most pre-industrial settings, a gold coin of any size is an impractical unit of exchange for 'regular people.' Instead, what your aurei or ducats or florins are for is facilitating the storage is substantial amounts of wealth and enabling large-scale transactions by merchants and elites, either of bulk goods or luxury goods... Day to day currency was almost invariably minted in silver or copper (or copper-alloys)."