It’s crazy how so many hiking trails have natural rock formations that exactly resemble human stairs. Nature works in mysterious ways

Just found about 40k BTC in an old wallet. What floors am I sweeping? 🧹

beer

Spotted Cow beer. This is only distributed in Wisconsin / not allowed to be sold outside of the state. Pretty good!

I need to spend more time in the Midwest. The American Heartland as they say

David promptrotator and Kevin entropybender busted out Greek letters in LaTeX. Bros are not messing around rn

I’m in Wisconsin eating cheese curds on the lake. Americana type shit

i hate when i think of a good post for a meta that has already passed

In a bit of a bad place rn…

Ain’t nothing wrong w me I’m just flying out of Newark airport

i’ve thought about in-game economies, tokens & ecosystem design nearly every waking second for the past two years

not casually—obsessively, pathologically; like a madman replaying the same dream with slightly different mechanics; a new approach, a different experiment, but the same objective 

it started as curiosity, became instinct, now it’s religious intuition. this isn’t a “space” to me—it’s a worldview, an extension of how i see value, trust, coordination, progress—the future 

fc had a chapter, but i’ve since moved into more recursive loops—where game loops, economic loops, social loops & incentives collapse into one

i don’t have hot takes on anything else, or at least nothing that you should take to heart. i barely even know what day it is. this is the one thing my brain recycles, all day, everyday

Whenever uber black is the cheapest option I’m like alright bro you said it not me

sort of interesting that islander ig follow changes are kind of like a market view on who people like or dislike after a given episode

bruh that's embarassing af for robinhood lmao

aesthetic

Japan

based.li // third rate builder // /basedspacepunks

one thing i appreciated in japan was the care they put into Retail Design. i feel like it's not given as much emphasis in the US, stores are more functional than experiences in and of themselves

interesting part of robinhood strategy is their intentional focus on millenials since they will be recipients of the Great Wealth Transfer of boomer inheritance

which means most of that inheritance money will end up going to robinhood accounts as robinhood becomes the primary financial services product for millenials

barely missed this, should be an interesting week

Books

Book review status update, short term plans, and reflections:

We're almost exactly halfway through 2025.

I've been writing a book review per day since January 1st. That's 183 reviews without missing a day, as far as I know.

I've reviewed everything that I read in 2024 and almost everything I've read in 2025.

The reviews I got the most engagement on were mostly recent-ish (last 75 years) and pop-leaning. Childhood favorites punched above their weight class.

I'm planning on taking a break for at least 3 months, maybe even 6. I'm almost out of books to review, and I think this review business works better as an every-day-or-never thing. 

Plus, I want to spend more time fishing, working on side projects, and playing outside with my kids while they're on summer vacation.

This is the second most fun I've had on social media (the most fun was running a popular NFT account through the rise of NFTs, if you're wondering). Thank you all for the likes, the comments, the quotes, and the rest of the engagement. My favorite reactions were the respectful disagreements. You all are great at that. Thank you especially for pushing back gracefully.

If you've made it this far, I'm inferring that I've earned some credibility with you, and I'd like to expend it all right now. Please carefully consider the following.

You must read good books.

Your entire experience is downstream of the information you consume. The way you think about problems, the way you see the world, the way you feel about other men and women, the things you value, and your sense of how to live a good life are all a product of the playlist of thoughts you put on in your head. 

We consume culture with mothers' milk, as the Romans believed. But we retain some degree of mental plasticity through our whole lives. That means that you, as an adult, are choosing your own propaganda. The thoughts you permit to pass through your mind, the things you look at, the things you watch, and the things you read are not just database entries. They're updating your firmware in real time.

If you choose to consume short shelf life information, you're depriving yourself of abilities to process and understand the world's most important patterns. If you choose to consume partisan information, you are willfully warping your perspective. A poor nutritional diet causes lifestyle diseases of the body. A poor information diet causes lifestyle diseases of the mind.

It's impossible to know what the ideal piece of information for you to consume at any given moment is. Reading about Bictoin on HackerNews in 2011 was extremely high yield for some people. But chances are, if you were reading the latest tech news in 2011, you were mourning the death of Steve Jobs or getting hyped about Arab Spring unfolding on Twitter or something. The chances of a piece of content 100 hours old proving itself of substantial long term value to you rounds down to 0.

On the other hand, the chances of something 100 years old, or better yet 1000 years old, proving itself of substantial long term value to you round up to 1. It's not a perfect system, but give older books the benefit of the doubt nonetheless. The Lindy effect is real, and young content should require extraordinary proof of value before you allocate your time to it. 

Don't worry about falling behind on the news. You can't escape it. I've got 15 years of practice, and I fail at least a little every day. You won't be left behind.

And to state the implicit part of all this explicitly: prioritize books above all else. You should not consume information with the primary goal of adding database entries to your memory. We have the internet for that now. You are training the LLM in your head. You are refining your ability to process novel situations by building up a stable of mental models that have proven themselves valuable across millennia.

I encounter no greater catastrophe on a daily basis than a high horsepower mind malnourished by a suboptimal information diet, or worse, turned against itself by an information diet antithetical to its own true interests.

You are smart people. You don't just sit around on the couch eating chips and candy. Despite your base urges, you eat right.

I implore you to take your mental wellbeing as seriously. You shouldn't just watch short form videos and read political listicles. Read good books, because reading is thinking and every thought that passes through your head leaves behind some trace of itself, great or small, in your deepest nature.

You must read good books.

six

@six