I talk all the time about trial and error. The freedom to let yourself make mistakes, and the skill to make sure they’re not too destructive, are superpowers. With every interesting innovation, company, or product, you’re seeing the late stage of a long chain of missteps and failure. As long as you have the right mindset, mistakes are learning.

We talk about this as a product team — short cycles, iteration, feedback loops — ways to navigate toward broader visions while surviving and building something increasingly useful along the way. I also talk about it with the kids. The more...

🏛️ A Tale of Two Elites

Martin Gurri on the growing similarities between west and east coast elites:

The effect, I suspect, will be the exact opposite of the reactionary dream. In wild and seedy digital gathering-places, far from any pretense of idealism, political discussion will inevitably grow more unfettered, more divisive, more violent. The attempt to impose Victorian standards of propriety on the information sphere will end by converting it into a vicious and unending saloon brawl. No matter how revolting the web appears at present – it can always get...

I refreshed myself this evening on Bret Victor’s amazing talk from 2012, “Inventing on Principle.”

He’s been working on and promoting his ideas on interactive, responsive tools for creativity are still ahead of their time. We’re gradually getting major improvements with products like Observable, but there still aren’t that many out there. Check out his current work at Dynamicland, a research group working on new interactive tools.

🌕 The Atlas of Moons

This is an absolutely phenomenal project showcasing each of the major satellites in the Solar System. The full interactive maps of each one are incredible. It shows how much data we’ve gathered about all of these bodies with imagery on each one and thoroughly mapped with place and feature names.

🏠 Opendoor and Redfin Partner

A cool piece of news here. We bought our house with Redfin and had a great experience with it, after using the website heavily during the house search...

Amazing story about hand made knives that goes deeper into the “Made by Hand” story.

Beautifully shot film about someone making great, quality products.