Adam O'Kane

🎉 So happy to share that my app, Swipewipe, has been acquired by MWM!

@BallUpTopBrad people usually say 2002 or 2008 - it was actually 2006, with a bad Celtics roster

When ppl talk about Prime Truth they talk about 08 but this is the real Paul Pierce prime & he did the absolute most with the roster he had

@simonsarris @goblinodds I do wonder (but don't know) if you're imagining "smart" conservatives as well-read people who engage seriously with ideas, and "smart" liberals as professional-class MSNBC watchers

@simonsarris @goblinodds mostly agreed. And conservatives have had to navigate largely liberal institutions for a while, so modeling the other's worldview may come more easily

interesting to me how i frequently hear (and am personally experiencing) things along the lines of "ugh i'm right wing now i did not want this" this is seems to be very specific to the right

@simonsarris @goblinodds Pretty uncharitable framing in your top paragraph. The reverse is true too. Every political position is coherent if given its premises

@goblinodds Put another way I think most rw people would be perfectly happy to live in lib world if only the premises were actually true. But rw people see flawed premises Meanwhile lib people see political opponents as stupid or evil "see"

@joonlee @BostonGlobe awesome work!

For @BostonGlobe: I wrote about why Boston loves Derrick White, and what it says about the future of the city bostonglobe.com/2026/03/08/opi…

@shiraeis Based on what's out there (and not out there) today, "minimize screens" is a good, imperfect heuristic for parents to use right now

"limit your kid's screen time" is correct advice today, but people are confused about why it's correct, and that matters because the reason has an expiration date. the issue with ipad kids was never too much screen time in some vague moral sense, but that the software on the other side of the glass is essentially a superstimulus engine running a curriculum in learned helplessness. bright colors, zero latency rewards, infinite novelty, no boredom, no friction, and no consequence. you poke the most interesting square and something happens immediately. if the world worked that way, it'd be fine, but the world is almost entirely delayed gratification, ambiguous feedback, physical constraint, and needing to sit with uncertainty long enough to actually figure something out. so you're training a kid on an environment that is aggressively uncorrelated with the one they'll have to function in. it's a distribution mismatch problem. this means the winning parenting heuristic isn't "less screen time," but "don't let your kid marinate in a training environment optimized for engagement extraction when they should be building a world model." screens just happen to be a horrible training environment. but that's contingent and doesn't have to stay true. consider an AI that actually knows your kid, not in a creepy ad-targeting way, but in a way an aristocratic tutor knows their pupil. it follows them since birth, and maybe it remembers what confused them in march and checks whether they've resolved it by june. it notices when they're pattern matching instead of reasoning and calls them out on it. it asks hard questions at the right time, not to test them, but because it has a genuine model of what they're ready to think about next, and critically, it keeps routing them back to real world problems instead of substituting for them. this probably starts life as a stuffed animal, but the same entity transfers across form factors as the kid ages. the plush rabbit becomes a voice in their earbuds. he memory and the relationship are continuous. the interface changes, but it's one long developmental arc, not a series of disconnected apps. the thing that made ipad kids a cautionary tale was that the optimization target was retention. a sufficiently good AI tutor could optimize for what actually matters, like reflection, causal reasoning, metacognition, and tolerance for confusion, using the kid's actual life as curriculum instead of some frictionless cartoon sandbox. basically, the principle I'd actually endorse isn't "minimize screens." it's closer to "choose the training environment that best teaches your kid to think, pay attention, and update on evidence." right now that means less screen time, but in maybe two-five years the correct parenting move might be something nobody is emotionally prepared to hear, which is, your kid should probably be raised in part by an aristocratic tutor with perfect recall and great priors who happens to live inside a stuffed rabbit.

@mwmoedinger was just teasing, interesting to know!

@adamokane Oh boy...well yes, I suppose I was using the colloquial meaning of "walk in on someone" not the literal, but yes, I suppose he would have "rolled in" on him 😅

Another one of my favorite stories from history is that Winston Churchill took 2 baths a day, often working in the tub for hours, taking meetings, giving dictation, etc. When he was visiting the White House during WWII, President Roosevelt walked in on him. Standing stark naked on the bathmat, and ever the wordsmith, Churchill apparently quipped that he [and by extension, Great Britain] had "nothing to conceal."

@brianshinsh this is awesome. thanks for sharing!

we crossed $20k/mo in 83 days instead of everything that went right, here are the mistakes we made (so you don't make them!) : 1. During the early days, we tried too many marketing channels due to fomo. - we literally tried SEO, pSEO, meta ads, google keyword ads, tiktok video, and cold email all within 4 weeks lol - even if the channel turns out to not work, we think it's worth committing and testing for at least a month to get a good understanding of it - this is especially true because there are things you start to see the more you try and bear through it. trying is different from reading about it. 2. Don't spend more than a few days on a new feature or experiment - this pertains to both product decisions and marketing decisions - honestly i get easily excited about a new idea, and as a founder you probably do too - but it's always the same pattern again and again: i get super excited about the "next big thing", spend 2 weeks on it, and totally flunk - no matter how promising the idea seems, spend max 5 days on it to release and test. if it takes more than that, it's probably too big for experimenting. 3. Stop copying and listen - with 100% accuracy, all of the features that failed were 1) ideas that just magically came from imagination and 2) ideas that were inspired from other products - ofc inspiration is good, but you HAVE TO verify it with your users. do your users really need that feature? - keep in mind the product is for your user, not for you. if you're trying to build a serious product for a real business and not a play project, this is important - on the surface, every idea seems like a good idea. but adding a new feature = more complexity. be very strict about why that feature needs to be in your product - i think this is especially true for consumer products. simplicity is key. 4. Once you start making revenue, spend more where it's needed - 2 weeks ago, our app just flat out stopped working because our servers maxed out. CPU usage went over 100%. - it was literally 1am, users emailing us nonstop, requesting refunds. i panicked. - this was a stupid mistake. a small buffer would have saved us from a bunch of users having a bad experience these are the 4 mistakes on the top of my head but as I remember more, I'll add it to the thread

@simonsarris building a shed this spring that’ll serve as a workspace for me. Trying to figure out windows right now and I think this is what I’ll land on

I've been thinking of the ideal setup. I work from home, with gardens and an orchard to look out on, so against a window where I can watch the seasons and my children play while I work seems nice. But I still don't think I'd want to face the window, just have beside me

@maddierune daughter (our oldest) turns 5 in a few months, and the dentist told us she has her first (very) wiggly tooth...ugh. feeling every milestone!

My daughter lost her first tooth last night. She just turned 5. She said, “I’m sad I won’t be a little girl forever, because when I’m big you won’t hold and kiss me anymore.” I said, “I’ll hold and kiss you forever.” She said, “When I’m big, I’ll hold and kiss YOU because I’ll be really strong.” I am not okay. Daughters are angels.

@tbpn @HipCityReg let’s gooo @HipCityReg. What a get for GC

BREAKING: @HipCityReg has joined General Catalyst as Creative Director

@AlainLamour91 @HeatCulture13 @KingJames @DwyaneWade I still think you're misremembering. There was an overreaction back the other way among *some* in the media but for anyone really paying attention, it felt like a tossup at best, from a Celtics perspective I'm also not trying to take anything away from LBJ - an all-time game

@adamokane @HeatCulture13 @KingJames @DwyaneWade Interesting enough you’re right from oddsmakers. The national media wrote Miami off entirely though. Every single personality on espn said this but… odds makers agree with your statement

Dave Fizdale says LeBron didn’t speak for 2 whole days leading up to game 6 vs Boston in 2012 “For 2 days LeBron didn’t talk to anybody. We had just lost to Dallas, was this going to be the end of the Heat? He wanted to get at Paul Pierce so bad” “That night he was laying down reading his book, I mouthed to D Wade ‘is he alright?’ and Wade said out loud ‘oh he ready’. I went to Spo and said ‘if it feels like I think it feels, stay out of the way bro” (Via @TheHoopGenius) Chills 🥶

@AlainLamour91 @HeatCulture13 @KingJames @DwyaneWade the Celtics were slight home underdogs in Game 6

@adamokane @HeatCulture13 @KingJames @DwyaneWade Before game 6 everyone did. If I’m being honest here

@AlainLamour91 @HeatCulture13 @KingJames @DwyaneWade Nobody, and I mean nobody, picked the Celtics over the Heat in 2012. The Heat were heavy favorites

@HeatCulture13 @KingJames @DwyaneWade This is the era where ppl were hunting for lebron. Couldn’t wait to clown his entire legacy into obscurity and the entire Heat team. They picked the Cs over us and then the Thunder over us. They mocked us. And for this reason Dan lebatard made that sequence of rants. Legendary

@diorvijane It’s A Wonderful Life

please recommend some movies that feel like therapy, pls pls. movies that make you realize so many things in life. movies that make you cry so hard, that are gut-wrenching yet cleansing, and that gently remind you of your most vulnerable side

when it’s time to lock in

I never get the whining about timezones / DST…just lean into it In the fall, take the opportunity to rise a little earlier and go to bed earlier. Cozy season In the spring, everything comes to life, and you can too. Use the extra light to stay up, go out, do things

Not sure if this makes my McSweeney’s piece age better or worse: mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-mem…

@metapreston also I share your skepticism re. people supposedly wanting “just for friends” products and I agree that there’s probably not a $100B+ outcome in the cards for an app that’s friends-only…don’t see how it’d be competitive with the other options we have for our attention rn

@metapreston Hmm idk, stories fit a lot of the criteria of “social media” as we’ve always understood it. And the reply-via-DM mechanism came after the introduction of the format

The unfortunate fact of life is that your friends aren't that interesting And if you really wanted to talk to them, you would just text them So we got strangers (who look and talk like us, but aren't our friends) to make our media and called it "Social Media" Which solved the real problem: We're bored on our phones