“Atari Was Very, Very Hard” Nolan Bushnell on Atari, 50 Years Later ✦
Links
How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1-Kg ✦
Hydrogen production uses a lot of energy. Green hydrogen, produced without CO2 emissions, is currently a more expensive option than production from CH4, which produces a lot of CO2. We want green hydrogen to compete on cost, not just vibes. We believe that correctly developed energy should deliver a green dividend rather than demanding a green premium, and that rapid mass market adoption depends on beating the incumbent polluters on price.
I Know Everybody Told You to Send Your Fund-Raising Decks as a Link. Here’s Why You Should Just Send the Deck ✦
Whenever you write your deck and Send it out I think you should actually think to yourself, “my competitors are probably going to read this one day and this will be forwarded widely” and if your response isn’t “so what!” or “that would be awesome” then I think you’re doing something wrong anyways.
Rejected by the Industry, Boom Supersonic Raises $100M to Prove Critics Wrong—But at a Cost ✦
When American announced their order they said they made a non-refundable deposit but didn’t specify what that means.
Fractal Block World ✦
Video games are amazing, both viscerally, as experience machines, and conceptually, as possibility spaces. As the intersection of games and computers, they combine our distant past - ancient rituals that pre-date civilization, with our far future - kaleidoscopic glimpses of the various directions in which our world might go.
The Art of Calling Out Room Dynamics ✦
I’ve discovered a secret weapon for defusing those powder keg situations. A simple technique that can instantly reset the entire dynamic of a meeting gone off the rails.
The UX of LEGO Interface Panels ✦
It was the psychologist Alphonse Chapanis who first suggested that the high rate of crash landings might be the fault of poor interface design. The adjacent landing gear and flap control knobs were identically shaped. The pilots never stood a chance.
Throw Biden Under the Bus ✦
on a fundamental level, Biden defined his entire post-2016 political comeback in terms of averting the Trumpian threat to American political institutions. And he failed, catastrophically! It’s not just that Trump won, it’s that he has returned more powerful than before. It’s that we are genuinely much worse off than we would have been if Trump were narrowly reelected in 2020. It’s that Biden alienated an entire cohort of young people, along with many of the leaders of the most important companies in America.
How Can You Know if Vaccines Are Safe ✦
Although we will never have perfect data to rule out any possible link, it seems very important to ask, *What is the evidence on the other side?* What is the reason to think there *is* an association? The answer is: nothing.
Choose Good Quests ✦
Silicon Valley’s best — our top operators, exited founders, and most powerful investors — are almost all on *bad quests.* Exiting your first startup only to enter venture capital and fight your peers for allocation in a hot deal is a bad quest. Armchair philosophizing on Twitter is a bad quest. Yachting between emails in de facto retirement at age 35 is a very bad quest.