Conan Xin

AI 让个人写代码更快，但让团队理解系统更难。 未来的核心资产不是更多代码，而是能和代码同步的产品理论。 英语本身不是编程语言，但经过版本管理、语义映射、验证和 agent 维护后，它可能成为新的上层编程界面。

Reading 128 books in eight months was a privilege, says Nilanjana Roy, and a lasting education in making time, embracing difference and building literary muscle: ft.trib.al/c2YZimU

My Dan Zanger deep dive is available for free, based on only free materials. Several people DMed me, offering access to Dan’s old newsletters, but I declined. Copyright issues aside, I really wanted to prove just how much you can learn from what’s freely available online. Individual sources are all linked in my write-up (tradingresourcehub.substack.com/p/nuances-behi…), but for convenience, here’s a list of the key resources I used. Dan’s own website, containing various written interviews (2000–2010) chartpattern.com/dan-media.cfm Written interview with the CMT Association (2009) cmtassociation.org/wp-content/upl… Probably Dan’s best interview, and certainly the highest WWR one (2005) Part 1: youtu.be/Y4D9IpKJMLo?si… Part 2: youtu.be/074nnUbDDXo?si… Very good longer spoken interview from 2016 youtu.be/cAllrfPyqNg?si… More recent spoken interviews on Spotify (2018 & 2020) 2018: open.spotify.com/episode/3HUsQ7… 2020: open.spotify.com/episode/0hvngo… A few live broadcasts Dan did, with this being the most interesting IMO (because you can feel just how much he’d improved at environmental awareness/trading less; from 2015) youtu.be/IsnbyyXVPQc?si… The ‘catch’ is that going through this stuff takes a LOT of time and effort. But that’s also a good thing. The *intentionality* this type of exercise requires is what makes a study method effective. Plus, an edge, by definition, involves doing things of value others can’t or won’t do. And when it comes to information in the public domain, the edge must come from what you do with it. As Dan said: you can lead someone to water, but you can’t make them drink.

For the cinephiles: @A24's "Backrooms" is out today. ICYMI, here’s a great piece on the surprisingly deep history behind Backrooms — touching on everything from Gothic literature to internet folklore to video game culture to ’80s nostalgia: thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/backrooms-and-…

At 940 pages, Warren Buffett’s collected shareholder letters sound like homework. Instead, they’re a surprisingly rich read: funny, instructive and full of lessons that go beyond investing. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

If you have every wondered where the work that is featured on Composition comes from, this is for you. We wrote a comprehensive guide on how to find inspiration and references for your own creative practice. Read the full article here ↓ open.substack.com/pub/compositio…

Pinch me, I can't believe someone wrote about lab notebooks. Unbelievably cool

Love these scans of 1978 and '81 issues of Popeye, a Japanese menswear mag that popularized "City Boy" style, which is American Ivy, outdoor, and workwear remixed for cities. Popeye covered clothes, grooming, eating, exercise, and even cars (70s Chevrolet Blazer is very stylish!)

Albert Camus on how to live whole in a broken world themarginalian.org/2024/06/22/alb…

new essay: every story opens a world ⛵️ companies keep hiring “storytellers,” but telling the story well through launch videos, founder posts, and content is different from finding the language, metaphors, and questions that make a new future easier to see for founders, writers, brand people, and anyone interested in how words shape the future open.substack.com/pub/velvetnois…

Tarantino: “I don't think I'II ever be able to hear ‘California Dreamin’ again without seeing Faye Wong do her little dance.” Chungking Express is a dreamy, neon-lit romance about lonely police officers and fleeting connections in 1990s Hong Kong. It captures the feeling of isolation and chance encounters in a fast-moving city where people often miss each other by moments. The film is split into two loosely connected stories, both centered around a small snack bar and the sense of love always being just out of reach. Wong Kar-wai presents Hong Kong as a blur of color and motion, where time feels uneven and elastic, shaped by mood and music like ‘California Dreamin’. The result is a tender, playful film that turns small details—like a can of pineapple, a change in song, or a quiet dance—into emotionally powerful moments.

the moment you realize that your life revolves around the unwritten rules (ones that you can't go against) is the moment you will start achieving quantum leaps + rapid progress

In 1981, I published Evolution of an Artist’s Tool in Creative Computing. It explored the shift from large institutional systems to personal computers. I was working w/ Apple II & a Houston Instrument plotter to see how far a small computer could function as an artist’s medium.

Comment l’IA a bouleversé l’université ? Nous avons interrogé 11 normaliens sur leur usage de l'intelligence artificielle. Un portrait en prise directe de la génération IA. legrandcontinent.eu/fr/2026/05/20/…

* The Development of Mind and Society: the Internal vs. External Paradigms of Structure and Order Joe Corbett holo.substack.com/p/the-developm… "The question of how the mind develops within society has been central to psychology and philosophy for over a century. At the heart of this debate stand two major traditions: the cognitive-developmental approach represented by Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Robert Kegan, and the sociocultural approach pioneered by the Russian-Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky. While the former tradition emphasizes internal, stage-like transformations in individual meaning-making, the latter stresses the primacy of social interaction, language, and culture, reflecting the individual-capitalist vs collective-socialist ethos. Their differences have profound implications for how we might design education systems and organize society in the 21st century for optimizing individual development."

i found this poem on @trq212's blog and i liked it very much. just what I needed after multiple weeks of studying and stressing and ruminating on my shortcomings. today I got some pho and ate it sitting on the ground in a park. it was a cool and lovely evening.

Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

"Something about this place was off, like Disneyland after all the rides have closed and the park is emptied for the night." Read an excerpt of HOW TO RULE THE WORLD in @VanityFair, describing the "War on Fun" — the story that began my investigation of Stanford.

Orsan Senalp has a reaction to Jan Krikke's guest substack article on China's coordination system: 4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/p/china-as-the… "Jan's work is very interesting. I recently realised that since the 1960s-70s, but especially under Deng Xiaoping's Great Leap Forward, China has embraced cybernetics and systems engineering (based accelerationism - which Nick Land celebrated) through the leadership of Tians Quosen (Qian Xuesen - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xues…). Recently, I have been working on the argument that China is a cybernetic systems miracle, and as state-managerial class ideology, Marxism and dialectics are subordinated to cybernetics, systems and now complexity. This is, I believe, to a large extent, explanatory for the rapid rise of China as a global power. I wonder what would Jan and you would think of such an argument."

In China’s rapidly expanding AI economy, tokens are the new commodity shaping social and cultural power. Our hidden gem of the week shows how "tokenization" has become a battleground over value, labor, and identity. By Yichen Rao at @UniUtrecht osf.io/9gz6j