dave

22 Lessons From '22 [PART 1]

LIV is basically the Michael Scott Paper Company at this point.

My proposal to the schools. No Woolies. We don't need Grade 10s debating which Flat White is the best. Rather build entrepreneur zones in the schools. Do 5 stands, open it up to Grade 11 learners. Each quarter they pitch their ideas to the school and the learners vote which 5 groups can occupy a stand to run their business. Rotate quarterly. Rather develop the kids that supporting a too-big-to-fail business.

@HankFrank I think the value of the company is more about who they’re selling that data to and what they can use it for

I’ve worn a WHOOP every day for 3+ years. Bought a discounted 2-year membership because I’m a data nerd and I love this stuff. I’m still not sure I’ll renew when it’s up. Not because it’s a bad product. It taught me a lot early on. Alcohol tanks recovery. Sleep is everything. Easy days need to actually be easy. That was valuable. But once you learn those lessons you don’t need a monthly subscription to remind you. Garmin gives me the same data with no fee. The people I know who wore one loved it for 6 months then stopped. Not because they lost interest. Because the data stopped telling them anything new. $10.1B is a huge number. I just wonder how many members right now are in month 8 thinking the same thing I am.

@anvisha Moda

We raised $7.5M to kill AI slop. Introducing Moda: the world's first design agent with taste. RT+ comment “Moda” and we’ll design your brand for FREE.

@anvisha Mods

@anishmoonka 35.5km covered in thirteen years? Excruciatingly slow

Those wheels you’re looking at are 0.75 millimeters thick. That’s half the thickness of a US dime. Each one was carved from a single block of aluminum, and NASA sent six of them to Mars knowing they’d eventually shred. Curiosity was built for a 2-year mission. It landed in August 2012, and by December that year NASA had already extended the mission indefinitely. Thirteen years and 35.5 kilometers later, the rover is still going, but the wheels started cracking just 14 months in. The damage came faster than anyone at JPL predicted. Sharp embedded rocks were punching straight through the skin between the treads. So NASA assembled a Wheel Wear Tiger Team (a crisis problem-solving tradition that goes back to Apollo 13) and got to work. In 2017, they uploaded a traction control algorithm from Earth that adjusts each wheel’s speed in real time based on the terrain, reducing force on the front wheels by 20%. They rerouted the rover to softer ground and started driving backward when possible, because pulling wheels over rocks produces less force than pushing them into rocks. The wildest part: if enough treads snap off, Curiosity is designed to find a sharp rock on Mars and use it to deliberately rip out the damaged inner section of its own wheel. JPL tested this on a replica rover and found Curiosity can keep driving on just the outer third. They predict this won’t be needed until around 2034. Every 1,000 meters, the rover pulls over and uses the camera on its robotic arm to photograph its own wheels so engineers on Earth can count every crack. Each wheel also has tiny holes that spell “JPL” in Morse code, which Curiosity uses to measure distance by photographing its own tracks in the dirt. These photos directly changed the next rover. When NASA built Perseverance, engineers 3D-printed about 70 different tread designs before landing on 48 curved treads instead of Curiosity’s 24, with thicker skin. They tested the new wheels over 60 kilometers and got zero damage by Curiosity’s original failure definition. “A boring graph with no data on it,” as one JPL engineer put it. A $2.5 billion machine doing self-surgery with rocks on another planet because the mission outlasted its design by 6x.

@flushingitgolf @AnthonyKim_Golf @livgolf_league AK might be the hero Liv never wanted

In his first round since being signed by Dustin Johnson to 4Aces GC, Anthony Kim shoots a 5 under par 67 with 6 birdies to be T3 at LIV Golf Adelaide 👊 @AnthonyKim_Golf @livgolf_league

Can’t solve for stupid

you wake up and reach for your phone before your eyes focus. scroll through a hundred thoughts that aren’t yours until your own voice sounds like someone you used to know and by noon you’ve consumed more information than your grandparents did in a year but can’t name a single thing that actually moved you. the feed keeps serving up other people’s lives and you keep swallowing them whole, mistaking the fullness for satisfaction when really you’re just bloated on nothing. you’ve become a processing unit instead of a person and the loneliest part is how normal it feels.

@Ringo26 21’s feint inside on the second kick was world class! Created tons of space

79 min Stuck on your line 3 points down Enter Libbok, Hayashi and Kawamura

Need to know how she got to this conclusion — absolute heresy

you pity the moth confusing a lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world

@PopBase Reese Witherspawn

Reese Witherspoon shares new photo with her daughter.

I love them

Sat with the beautiful woman who my husband travels solo with at his work christmas party. In addition to being beautiful and talented in a male-dominated industry, she's a classically trained musician. Incredibly open and genuine.

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told everyone it would "10x productivity." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the usage reports. 47 people had opened it. 12 had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds. Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "AI enablement." I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're "AI-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT. I said we needed "enterprise-grade security." He asked what that meant. I said "compliance." He asked which compliance. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "career development conversation." He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "saved 40,000 hours." I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. "Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot." The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000. But this time we'll "drive adoption." Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "investing in AI." Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

There’s a culture in South Africa now where school kids vandalize and destroy the moment they don’t get their way (exam results, matric dance disputes, or just because it’s Friday). They film it, laugh about it, post it on TikTok, and call it “protest.” Then the same community riots for “better education” while standing in the smoking ruins of the only school their children had. That’s not anger. That’s suicide by stupidity. You don’t destroy your own future and then demand someone else build you a new one. This is exactly what happens when everything is free, and you're the only "culture" that has access to it all.