Nicolas Nowinski

@commonsenseplay Why not make your hybrid a hedge on # 1 by purchasing put options?

You’ve got 3 choices in this market. 1. Ride the euphoria higher (and risk a 20-40% drawdown, grim and bear and keep DCA’ing for decades) 2. Sell everything move to cash/tbills, lock in gains, and try to time the bottom 3. Hybrid: keep your best companies, take profits on the speculative stuff, and move some cash into T-bills, bonds, metals etc. I’m on the hybrid path. What are you doing?

@johnennis It’s a mix of exhilaration at how cool it is and a feeling that just “talking” isn’t really working…but totally get it!

When I work with AI, I pretty much always have this weird feeling that I should be working when I am actually, in fact, working Does anybody else feel that way?

Reality is this is a lot of my coding now. Not everything is a big application that justifies a more complex setup. It’s just create this code and boom Claude gets me an app. And I give it some changes and it does it. And then in a few hours I’ve got an app/tool.

It's a rough combination when people are simultaneously overreaching and uninformed. They want the best of everything, but they don't know what the best is, so their demands are simultaneously strident and random, like a set of vectors with large magnitudes and random directions.

Imagine being this stupid…

There are plenty of billionaires who would love to end world poverty…but even if you are @elonmusk you know you can’t actually end it. You can’t actually get close to ending it. If you liquidated everything. Kept $25M to live off of and threw a few hundred billion of US dollars at the problem we would have the same level of world poverty in a decade.

It’s not weird to y’all that not a single billionaire wants to end world poverty? Not even one rich person? It’s just “what they do with their money is up to them”? Yeah, sure- but it’s not WEIRD to you that not ONE single person wants to be a big hero and solve the world’s problems when they LITERALLY could? That’s not bizarre or suspicious?

I am in the agree/disagree camp. HTML is powerful for visual representation but challenging for editing and diffing - the things MD was originally designed to help with. So I see a need for both. But what this article really reinforces for me - and something I’ve been thinking about for a while - is the need for a much more expressive MD. Call it EMD For Expressive MarkDown. MD solves for the basics. But anything where I need a bit more expressiveness and control forces me to either create a PDF (using Docs, Word, etc.) or a single file HTML (as you recommend.) Those both work but have the issues of editing and diffing (and in PDFs case browser rendering.) A more expressive markdown would help to bridge the gap. Still would be reasons to use HTML, your article and repo show many, but the more we can get expressive static content with the least metadata complexity the better.

I don’t necessarily agree with the idea that we should tell people what food to buy…but isn’t a logical benefit of creating this rule that you make it hard for the convience stores & Dollar Generals of the world to profit from SNAP and create demand in these areas for stores that sell eligible food?

I appreciate the push to get people to eat healthier, and I don’t mind using SNAP as a lever. But it’s not as simple as many privileged people think/ say. If you live in a grocery desert and all you have is a convenience store or a Dollar General, it’s not so simple to EAT REAL FOOD. 🤷🏽‍♂️

AI makes you more productive…it doesn’t directly equate to working less.

No one really cares that they spend their money on McDonalds…it’s when they then say their income should be a matter of public policy - social welfare, minimum wage, tax credits, etc. - that people start caring. It’s the same reason people opine on military spending but don’t really care how Proctor & Gamble spends money - one is taken by law from the public and other is voluntary.

Not sure I fully agree If someone on minimum wage treats themselves to a McDonald’s for example, people can be a lot more judgemental than if a billionaire buys themselves a super yaught Even if the minimum wage guy worked for every penny and the billionaire inherited their wealth

You ever noticed that it’s socially acceptable to tell poor people how to spend their money? But when we ask the rich to stop hoarding wealth, the response is always “it’s their money.”

@davepl1968 @OrevaZSN Yep…one of the reasons I really wanted a job in high school and to become an adult was to have my OWN money and decided how I wanted to spend it. Surprisingly, my parents, although very generous and loving, had thoughts about what their money should be spent on!

@OrevaZSN It has nothing to do with whether the person is poor or rich. It's about whether money was earned or given. If the latter, people tend to have opinions on how their public funds are spent. If it's earned, people tend to not care. That's the difference.

A person has 40-50 years of earning potential assuming they graduate high school at 18 and plan to retire in their 60s. You need to actually build a long-term plan and execute against it based on that time horizon. Almost all complaints on here about money come down to people looking at this moment in time outside of any larger context. You don't worry about today, you worry about the larger plan you are executing and where you plan to be and progress towards those goals 5/10/20 years down the road. At all times today will be a little unsatisfactory (you may be the best off you've ever been but there is always road ahead, and people ahead of you, and things you haven't accomplished) - which is why you need to find a way to have fulfillment and meaning in your life regardless of your ability to spend money.

@EmperorSnyder You work 40-50 hours a week but you are driving 450+ miles a week outside of work?

A 46 hour work week as a Semi truck driver gets me $950 after taxes in Janesville, Wisconsin. My budget for next week: - $150 gas - $150 groceries - $400 rent - $200 bills I’m working 45-50 hours a week for $0.00 or negative. How do you guys have kids??????

I’m really curious how much of a future Word and PowerPoint have. Excel is solid for a while, it’s incredibly useful and any near alternative is just another version of sheets/rows/columns, but the other two don’t really make sense. They’ll continue to exist for a long time because the world changes slowly. Word is essentially a desktop publishing tool and if you aren’t printing to paper it doesn’t really make sense. The future is way more likely to be a simpler Markdown based editor but with some extension for Markdown which definitely has some limitations. But I don’t start with Word for anything today, I only use it when what I’m working on is going to require it because it’s got to be multi-page formatted printable (PDF) output. And PowerPoint just doesn’t make sense. AI is always going to struggle with it and it’s intended as a platform for a human to be able to layout a slide. But it makes a lot more sense to use HTML/CSS/JS to create a visual presentation - because AI has lot more understanding of that approach. I wouldn’t say I’ve spent a lot of time on this but I’m a pretty heavy Windows user in a traditional corporate environment - management and tech consulting - and I can tell you it’s been while since I started a new document in Word or PowerPoint, and that wasn’t the case just a year ago.

@abbas_xyz @paulg Are you consistently growing both revenue and customer count or not…if you can consistently grow you are finding fit and can justify investing to accelerate growth. If you aren’t growing then you need to fix that before you invest to accelerate.

@paulg i know it’s impossible to precisely answer this question with no context but what would you consider absolutely bad and absolutely good growth rates?

By default my first question to any startup is "What's your growth rate?" That's the patient's pulse. Which is why we push startups to launch. Till then you have no pulse; till then you have no idea if you're doing well or badly.

@paulg @dadiomov Fraud protection.

@dadiomov Because then you have to add card fees. Why drag Visa along with us into the future like a software virus?

I don't understand the premise that "agents must use stablecoins." Why can't an agent remember the 16 digits of a credit card? Sorry maybe I'm a payments n00b. Stablecoins have a lot of great use cases, but ecommerce shopping is pretty well optimized already for cards.

This is directionally correct. Not sure how it will play out. Also, there will still be non-core operator types - finance, hr, legal, etc. - but in those functions you’ll either be a senior leader OR a hands-on doer. There won’t be a need for middle managers. Much of what middle managers do is provide coordination and oversight, those are things that ai will help scale out massively. You could imagine a senior leader with 150 direct reports, easily.

One of the biggest AI things happening in 2026 is the changing of organizations. The middle layers are going away. It’s about to get a lot harder to pretend you provide value when you don’t. Not settled on the model, but I think every org will have 3 main roles: 1. Idea people come up with the thing 2. Technical SMEs build and maintain the thing 3. Sales and marketing sell the thing Top employees will have lots of all three and will be world-class in at least one. What massively goes away are managers and facilitators that aren’t creators, SMEs, or sellers. Basically anyone who’s not directly shipping in one or more of the three categories. Very hard to predict, obviously, but I think the order in which these then also get eaten by AI are probably: 1. SMEs without creation or selling 2. Idea people without SME knowledge 3. Sellers without SME knowledge Selling might be the most durable skill in a world full of nearly free ideas and expertise.

@GarrettLucas @davidpattersonx Go read the original post, it wasn’t a discussion about progressive vs flat tax rates. It was a discussion about absolute dollar taxation. I.e., should all people pay the same dollar amount of taxes regardless of their income.

It's amazing the mental gymnastics you went through to flip it upside like that. We are all born free and make choices in life that determine what marketable skills we have that will generate income. Those choices are the individual's alone. Better education, more studies or training in a particular vocation, etc. all determine the value of your work. Nobody can determine that except for the individual themselves. That's absolutely fair. Everyone has the same opportunities provided by "living in society" to generate some level of income. What is not fair is the collective deciding to tax one person at a higher percentage bracket simply because they earn more. That person doesn't get fire or police service 10X faster. They don't get water that's 10X cleaner. They don't get roads that are 10X better. They get the same exact services from the government than the guy who pays much less tax, and even those that pay no taxes at all. Around half of US citizens pay no federal taxes at all. Some of those people actually get "refunds" because they had kids or some other program when they never paid money into the system to begin with to justify calling it a "refund". So, no, living in a society where half the people don't pay any federal taxes isn't a huge benefit that justifies taxing someone that makes more at an accelerated rate. You can make all the excuses and talk about theories until you are red in the face. It is simply not fair that some people pay 37% while others pay nothing in federal tax. What you're talking about is robbing one person under threat the threat of government force to give that money to someone else. Fair is every single person pays the exact same percentage on their income or they pay the same percentage with a consumption tax. Rich people who have more money will still pay more in taxes because they buy more, but the percentages are the same and they can always choose NOT to buy excess products.

If taxes were fair: You earn $100,000 per year and pay $30,000 in tax. Your neighbor earns $1,000,000 and pays $300,000 in tax. Your neighbor is paying 10X more than you. If taxes were fair, you should both pay $30,000, since you both receive the same government services.

@joesanders33 @davidpattersonx Duh. That’s the point of the analogy.

@nicknow @davidpattersonx What a lousy analogy. Not all work has the same value. 🤦🏻‍♂️

3-4 years is nothing...the broad economy productivity boom, if there will be one, won't likely start showing up for another 5-8 years and may not hit its peek until we are 15-20 years in. The desktop computer era is probably the best similar example to look at, and if you looked at the early (even mid) 80s you would have said it was nothing - until you look at it take off in the 90s and into the early 2000s.

3.5 years into the “AI revolution” Basically no sign that it has mattered for productivity.