TONY CRΞΞCH

Entrepreneurship & innovation require courage & stamina: The courage to be humiliated 100k times because you’re getting it wrong. The stamina to keep exploring & iterating until you get it right! — Alex Osterwalder (@AlexOsterwalder)

Feels like today

Fun

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

Lol

@AmericanDadLive Awesome

This took me 18 hours to design and assemble. How’d I do?

Great list

It’s incredible how a single leak already looks better than the trailer of The Odyssey

I officially reached the end of the Internet. Don’t ask me what I searched to find this.

Gotta love that Apple Silicon.

1000%

Why does this look like trash? The cuts are terrible, the lines don’t land. The language is off ( using “Dad” over father for that line feels wrong) and accents feel off. Chris is from the UK, which has been a standard accent for ancient tales for a reason, this gamble feels terrible in the preview. First time I’ve ever been worried about a Nolan film and it’s one that should’ve been his magnum opus. Did moving from Warner bros really lose Chris’ needed collaborators or something?

You are your own worst enemy. You waste precious time dreaming of the future instead of engaging in the present. Since nothing seems urgent to you, you are only half involved in what you do. The only way to change is through action and outside pressure.

1000% this. Wisdom along these lines shaped my life into a wondrous personal and business success that I love dearly. And fascination will continue to drive me forward.

i love SF symbols, but gosh i can NEVER find icons i want. there are 6k+ options, categories make no sense, and search is useless so i fixed it:

There are many anecdotes from the first IBM mainframes used for business specifically accounting. The general rules of thumb were leasing a 1401 cost $2500/month and replaced 10 manual bookkeepers costing about $5000/month. So the first opinions were all about replacing labor with cheaper and tireless computers. Low-tech clerks and data punch operators were in fact replaced by the computer labor in these instances. The only problem was the computers ended up creating an insatiable demand for a new kind of work in financial analysis, forecasting, planning, and more. These were a new kind of job with new skills no one really had yet. Even mundane auditing became a new higher skilled job. So very quickly that cost savings was replaced by an insatiable demand for new uses of that same data. And those uses required even more compute resources and spend. While the cost savings turned into cost additions, business soon was delivering way more by way of services, profitability, speed, decision making, and predictability. What we do with computers in the workplace today—as smart as we think it is—will be viewed as "mechanical counting" in 20 years compared to what workers will be doing with AI. Yep, Excel will be looked at like a punch card. Ouch. More about what the 1401 replaced here. computerhistory.org/blog/about-the…

Seems like folks think this is big news: Apple just introduced annual subscriptions, paid monthly, for iOS apps!! But Google Play has had this for a bit, and honestly? It hasn't really impacted how most apps offer subscriptions This is what you should know 👇🧵

This Vision Pro app might have the best immersive content I've tested. Full review is live. ⬇️

Been there. But it’s still amazing being a girl dad. Love it.

Total AI disaster, totally predictable

You cannot install a culture of experimentation. You can only model it. Culture isn’t what’s written in the employee handbook or posted on the lobby wall. Culture is what people observe — who gets celebrated, who gets promoted, who gets fired, and why. Everything else is decoration.