Ziga

Xi Jinping is putting on a clinic: “The whole world is watching our meeting. The International situation is turbulent. The world is at a new crossroads: Can China and the US overcome the Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm to meet global challenges together.” The Thucydides Trap is the structural tension that occurs when a rapidly rising power (China) threatens to displace an established ruling power that is in decline (US). By mentioning the Thucydides trap, Xi Jinping is signaling that China is the new leader of the free world and what’s remarkable is, unlike the U.S., China achieved this without dropping bombs, waging endless wars, or spending $1 trillion a year on its military. Instead China became the leader of the free world by investing in its people with housing, education, health care, and the best modern infrastructure in the world, and investing in its neighbor countries through its Belt and Road Initiative, which has funded ports, railways, and energy networks across the Global South. The US became a “superpower” through endless wars, corruption, and selling out its own people to the billionaire class while China became a superpower and surpassed the US by building trade and relations with the world and investing in its people instead of wars. Americans would be wise to take note and then change our corrupt government.

Maria Popova is famous for her personal blog, The Marginalian, where she's published more than six million words. All the nights I've spent reading her writing were like an entry point into intellectual curiosity. She's introduced me to more writers and ideas than just about anybody, and this conversation is about how she does it. Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 00:37 Why writers should visit archives 04:39 Lessons from reading diaries 09:41 Letters vs diaries 11:35 Presence over productivity 18:30 How language shapes thought 19:48 Why Maria started reading poetry 36:46 Why college failed her 39:58 Reading to survive 41:41 Why epiphanies don’t stick 43:57 Thoughts on famous quotes 47:32 Why AI can never make art 53:10 Stop calling it content I've shared the full interview with Maria Popova below. If you'd rather watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets.

@DonvitoAI @cuenca @levelsio European cloud provider

@cuenca @levelsio what’s OVH?

kudos to @levelsio for dropping simple and great tips, and 100% in agreement with his takes on “architecture.” Simple hosted server (I use OVH instead of Hetzner), straightforward php, html/css/js. Basic engineering will keep the cost of serving a page at 50ms if you do a good job on your db, and sqlite is a great choice. I always used mysql because that’s the one I started using 25 years ago and I got to know it pretty well, but sqlite is more attractive now with SSDs

@annbauerwriter Thanks for sharing - fantastic read.

This is a very long piece on the "quiet exit from the assumption that travel is where meaning is found." I used to love travel but no longer do. For me, it's because the globalism I saw during Covid flattened my world. Everywhere seems much the same. fugitivemargins.substack.com/p/the-end-of-e…

This is what's possible if government was run by millennials and not a gerontocracy that has a primary objective of hoarding wealth.

@paulg @AOC You mean music industry? One of the most exploitive industries?

@AOC For example, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé are both billionaires. Do you believe that they earned their money?

Someone can certainly *make* a billion dollars. That’s not the same thing as earning. Growing fast and disrupting markets also often means chasing and wielding market power, political influence, and scale. Take Airbnb. They heavily lobby politicians against passing housing laws to protect working class residents because it’s bad for their business model. Airbnb could not exist at its current scale and size without the housing market destabilizations, displacements, and exploits that are supercharging the evictions of working people everywhere from Puerto Rico to Jackson Hole. Now young people are planning for a future where they will never be able to afford to own a home while others have 20 and live off renting it out to them at extortionate rates with zero protections. Yes, a tiny amount of people can make billions of dollars doing that. And millions of everyday Americans are bearing the cost.

@alfcnz What a sad use of park. Europeans would never.

Never would have I thought I could have *worked* in Central Park. I can easily ssh to my laptop 💻 at home, while enjoying the outdoors. No distractions. No emails. No notifications. Just some cocktail party noise from nearby humans.

@visakanv @justalexoki How can you constantly have so many interesting thoughts man? I think you are my favorite person online!

@justalexoki my thinking is: people tend to more or less have the same core aesthetics and mannerisms throughout their lives. these are 90s kids who are in their mid-late 30s now. and we retroactively recognise these as current adult mannerisms. it’s a kind of optical illusion

why do they look so old????

With poor you mean free kindergarten, free education, subsidized public transport, free meals at school, free healthcare, PAID holidays, 25 days of per year, walkable neighborhoods, cheap coffee. Yeah men, it's terrible.

@brian_armstrong How can someone trust CEO who can't identify and mask AI sentences, unable to hide the fact that he didn't write that?

This is an email I sent earlier today to all employees at Coinbase: Team, Today I’ve made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%. I want to walk you through why we're doing this now, what it means for those affected, and how this positions us for the future. Why now Two forces are converging at the same time. We need to be front footed to respond to both. First, the market. Coinbase is well-capitalized, has diversified revenue streams, and is well-positioned to weather any storm. Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption, with stablecoins, prediction markets, tokenization, and more taking off. However, our business is still volatile from quarter to quarter. While we've managed through that cyclicality many times before and come out stronger on the other side, we’re currently in a down market and need to adjust our cost structure now so that we emerge from this period leaner, faster, and more efficient for our next phase of growth. Second, AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically, and it's accelerating every day. All of this has led us to an inflection point, not just for Coinbase, but for every company. The biggest risk now is not taking action. We are adjusting early and deliberately to rebuild Coinbase to be lean, fast, and AI-native. We need to return to the speed and focus of our startup founding, with AI at our core. What this means To get there, we are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we’re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it. What does this mean in practice? - Fewer layers, faster decisions: We are flattening our org structure to 5 layers max below CEO/COO. Layers slow things down and create coordination tax. The future is small, high context teams that can move quickly. Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. Fewer layers also means a leaner cost structure that is built to perform through all market cycles. - No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams. - AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role. In short: AI is bringing a profound shift in how companies operate, and we’re reshaping Coinbase to lead in this new era. This is a new way of working, and we need to leverage AI across every facet of our jobs. To those who are affected I know there are real people behind these decisions — talented colleagues who have poured themselves into this company and our mission. To those of you who will be leaving: thank you. You’ve helped build Coinbase into what it is today, and I am sincerely grateful for everything you've done. All impacted team members will receive an email to their personal account in the next hour with more information, and an invitation to meet with an HRBP and a senior leader in your organization. Coinbase system access has been removed today. I know this feels sudden and harsh, but it is the only responsible choice given our duty to protect customer information. To those affected, we will be providing a comprehensive package to support you through this transition. US employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks base pay (plus 2 weeks per year worked), their next equity vest, and 6 months of COBRA. Employees on a work visa will get extra transition support. Those outside of the US will receive similar support, based on local factors and subject to any consultation requirements. Coinbase prides itself on talent density. Our employees are among the most talented people in the world, and I have no doubt that your skills and experience will be highly sought after as you pursue your next chapters. How we move forward To the team that is staying, I know this is a difficult day. We’re saying goodbye to colleagues and friends you've been in the trenches with. But here’s what I want you to know as we move forward together: Over the past 13 years, we have weathered four crypto winters, gone public, and built the most trusted platform in our industry. We’ve made it this far by making hard decisions and by always staying focused on our mission. This time will be no different – nothing has changed about the long term outlook of our company or industry. And most importantly, our mission has never been more important for the world. Increasing economic freedom requires a new financial system, and we’re building it. The Coinbase that emerges from this will be more capable than ever to achieve our mission. Brian

Harvard scientists ran a simple test. They put adults under blue light for 6 hours one night, then under green light at the same brightness the next. Blue light pushed their bedtimes back by 3 hours. Green pushed them back by 1.5. And in kids, the same lights hit about twice as hard. The reason comes down to a tiny patch of cells at the back of every human eye. These cells have one job. They tell your brain whether it is day or night. They wake up most when light hits a very specific shade of blue, the same shade phone screens and modern bulbs are loaded with. When those cells fire after dark, the brain stops making melatonin, the chemical that pulls you toward sleep. Red light barely sets off those cells at all. A 2025 study from the University of Zaragoza put people under red lamps and blue lamps for three hours at night. Under blue, their melatonin stayed scraped to the floor. Under red, it climbed back up to more than three times higher. Same brightness. The color did all the work. Children get this worse than adults. Two reasons. Their pupils are bigger, so more light gets in. And the lens inside a kid's eye is still glass-clear, where adult lenses slowly yellow with age and filter blue out naturally. A 10-year-old's body clock is roughly twice as sensitive to evening light as a 45-year-old's. A bedside lamp that feels harmless to a parent can be wrecking a kid's sleep clock at the same time. Then there is the lag. Once the brain catches a dose of blue light, the wake-up signal it sends out keeps echoing for 3 to 4 hours after the lights go off. So a kid on an iPad at 9pm can still be wired at midnight even if you took the iPad away at 9:01. Modern LED bulbs and screens are tuned to roughly 6500 Kelvin. That is sunlight at noon. Old incandescent bulbs sit around 2700, mostly red and yellow with almost nothing in the blue range. To a human eye, a red-lit room is just about as close to no light at all as you can get. The brain reads it as nighttime. The fix is boring. Use warm bulbs at 2700 Kelvin or lower in any room a kid spends evenings in, switch off phones and tablets two hours before bed, and if a night light is needed for bathroom trips, make it red or amber. The science was pinned down to the exact color of light back in 2001.

pg is such a funny enigma. He continuously drops some of the best dad-like wisdom there is, but once in a while he manages to write something so stupid.

There's a certain genre of article I can't get enough but find hard to name. It's typically a numbered list of life advice, maxims, practical tips, principles, and so forth. Done well, it's a marvelous compression of wisdom, both quirky and universal. Here are some of my favorite collections. Are there others that should be on this list? (I'm planning to write my own soon; it'd be cool if more people did this!) 103 bits of advice by @kevin2kelly kk.org/thetechnium/10… Principles by @nabeelqu nabeelqu.co/principles 50 things I know by Sasha Chapin sashachapin.substack.com/p/50-things-i-… 50 things I know by @catehall usefulfictions.substack.com/p/50-things-i-… Observations on People, the World, and Everything Else by @mariogabriele generalist.com/p/observations… talking points by @visakanv visakanv.com/blog/talking-p… 28 Pieces of Life Advice by @david_perell perell.com/note/28-pieces…

@gerardofortuna Most of them didn’t even know before

ChatGPT seems to be down and two-thirds of Brussels bubble stares blankly at their monitors not knowing how to do its jobs now

Wait, is this not normal??

Just remembered the story about a computer scientist who had his bike stolen and tried to explain binary search to a cop

Some personal observations. Everyone is generally friendly and open to conversation. Clean and well maintained public spaces. Occasional homeless sighting but rare. Zero mental illness on the subway. Didn’t see any pickpocket type stuff and felt completely safe walking at night Talked to a handful of everyday people too. Both transplants and natives, 20’s and 30’s working in retail, cafes, etc. Pleasantly fascinated by how positively they all spoke about their lives. Said they were paying ~$1k for a 1br apartment, up to $1.5k in the more posh and central areas. Despite the relatively lower salaries, common sentiment was “I love it here” and you could tell it was genuine Honestly such a life changing trip. Every stereotype turned out to be untrue. Definitely my new favorite European city by a mile and will surely be back often. Can’t wait to get home to NYC and continue the adventure Final comments. Boulangeries are top 3 greatest inventions of all time. Bastille is the best neighborhood to stay in. No tipping culture will be desperately missed. Hot people exude an entirely different aura here. You can just drink wine with friends outside of a tiny Le Marais bistro with Tame Impala’s End of Summer adorning the scene during a random weekday evening in the permanent underclass and nothing bad will happen

@BogataTimar Replies in this thread are a small demonstration of what he was fighting against

okay I guess I have to talk about Péter Magyar here. Let me just start with saying, in a very unladylike way, that you guys seem to have zero clue what happened in Hungary in the last two years, you completely miss the point, and you're a disappointing bunch. Let's go.

@MatthewACherry Even beyond the practical reality of getting stuff done, we need someone like this to remind us that government is supposed to work toward making our lives better

Esto es crear valor para tu club y para tu ciudad. Hacer basura con IA es justo lo contrario: restar y manchar.