The Recognitions is a fantastic and rewarding book. It made an impact on my thinking that will probably never go away. Be patient with it and enjoy it.
Congratulations on the progress and getting this out the door! It's very exciting to see significant work on Beaker. I look forward to playing with it.
Any other recommendations in the category of long-term Japanese history and anthropology? I find this subject really interesting, but have struggled to find good sources.
The simplicity of 'tell me about yourself' is brilliant. It's all too easy to say 'what do you do?' Which presumes that the other person actually wants to talk about their work.
I've been trying to switch to 'tell me about yourself', but it's somehow harder than I thought.
Addresses can be committed to the contract in exchange for sparks. The contract then holds those addresses, until someone burns a spark in exchange for them.
We're not sure exactly when or precisely how that market will get initialized — but you get the basic idea. Your star ownership will get mirrored in the contracts.
Yeah, I was struggling to understand the implementation details also.
Given: "Draft is in-progress and may be frequently updated in the next week(s)." I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, and just look forward to it getting more specific.
jraines mostly got it. It's worth noting the look and feel of the Sachs studio. I doubt anyone is taking that advice completely seriously. But if, instead, you just said 'have fun, do whatever!' things would probably be a huge mess.
"Always. Be. Knolling." [0], is probably my favorite of Tom Sachs' Ten Bullets. As a whole, it's a pretty good office manual. Better for a studio than a startup office — but worth a look nonetheless.
"WeChat defies the popular belief that growth is all about user growth. Instead they think about growth as increasing value (e.g., the number of tasks WeChat can do in the daily lives of users).
Unlike other social products, WeChat does not only measure growth by number of users or messages sent. Instead they also focus on measuring how deeply is the product engaged in every aspect of daily life (e.g., the number of tasks WeChat can help with in a day)."
100 times this. I can't think of a single large Western consumer software company who can actually think like that.
It has become a commonplace that WeChat is incredible, and everyone over here wants to build it. But solving that problem is hard. Really hard.
What I love about Vadik is (what I see on his site) as his second principle:
Think long term (like 30 years from now)
I think that's the thing that always comes through in the spirit of his work. Not that the things he makes are always designed to survive, but they're designed for a vision of the future.