Alex Banks: “One way to avoid lost thoughts is by ‘linking your thinking’. Proposed by personal knowledge management creator Nick Milo, the crux of this method is that linking your thoughts gives you a better chance of remembering information that you’ve encountered before and written down. Some common tools for this kind of linked thinking include applications like Roam Research or Obsidian organize users’ notes into a networked knowledge graph. By constructing a series of interlinked notes, you can find common themes between your memories, increasing your ability to recall. This means your notes grow in value over time as you add new experiences and connections, enhancing your existing knowledge base. Roam Research has also productized the idea of a knowledge graph by allowing users to visualize and explore relationships between different pieces of information. Roam Research’s thesis about connections has been seen in other applications that have adopted hashtags as knowledge graph markers. By tagging notes with relevant hashtags in applications such as Apple Notes, users can quickly categorize and filter content, making it easier to retrieve and reference in the future.”
WSJ: “From Australia to the Pyrenees, geologists are hunting for underground hydrogen and predict that a subterranean energy boom is only a few years away. Unlike industrial methods of producing hydrogen that require electricity, so-called geologic hydrogen occurs by natural processes deep underground, energy experts say. Underground hydrogen is the product of a chemical reaction between iron-rich minerals in the Earth’s crust and water percolating down from the surface. The resulting hydrogen gas can be extracted by traditional drilling methods. Drilling firms and geologists say they have found underground hydrogen coming from old gas wells, seeping from unusual circular surface features known as “fairy circles” in Australia, North Carolina and Brazil, or bubbling up from cracks in the Earth known as mid-ocean ridges. “The Earth does the production for you using pressure and temperature,” said Michael Webber, professor of energy resources at the University of Texas, Austin. Underground hydrogen “is a cheap, clean, abundant resource that is a game changer for the global economy and for climate change. So it is pretty exciting.””
Shane Parrish: “Common causes of bad decisions: 1. Assumptions based on small sample sizes 2. Wanting the world to work the way we want rather than the way it does 3. Conforming to expectations/authority/group (social default) 4. Blindness to large trends (blind spots) 5. Not asking, “and then what?””
Julius Krein: “Traditionally, value stocks were said to offer a “margin of safety” because their low prices ensured high earnings and free cash flow yields (and/or strong asset coverage). By contrast, the prices of high-flying growth stocks embedded optimistic assumptions about such companies’ ability to increase revenues and earnings. If an economic downturn or some other event threatened those assumptions, however, then growth stocks could suddenly derate from a high multiple on an aggressive earnings forecast to a low multiple on a pessimistic forecast. In theory, then, value stocks offered higher upside and lower downside because they embedded only modest expectations, implying lower risks of multiple compression and earnings disappointments. As the famed value investor Seth Klarman put it in 1991, “the most beneficial time to be a value investor is when the market is falling. . . . Value investors invest with a margin of safety that protects them from large losses in declining markets.” Today, however, the opposite is true. Value has underperformed growth in the last two recessions.”
Matthew Ball: “There are many ways to monetize a platform, few of which are mutually exclusive. For example, the owners can charge upfront fees to end users (e.g., buying Windows 98) or to third parties that want to sell their own products using that platform (Dell shipping a PC running Windows). A platform is also optimally positioned to offer adjacent services to its customers or users (such as ad products, productivity software, analytics). However, the most common form of platform monetization is the collection of “rents” from the third parties that build on top of it. This model also tends to be the best one, too, as it allows the platform to directly benefit from the value they create as well as leverage the investments of all its developer partners, thereby gaining access to their many total addressable markets, or TAMs. The rent model is also why digital platforms are particularly valuable. Every person and company uses the Internet and computing devices (making it a far larger market than just a road system or toy), and there’s no constraint to how many customers can be served at once (Barbie doesn’t appeal to all toy buyers, nor can everyone use a highway at once without making the highway worse), while the marginal costs from incremental revenue are essentially zero (meaning every sale goes straight to the bottom line). To this end, it’s notable that almost all of the most valuable companies in the world operate digital platforms that support billions of daily users and tens of billions of dollars in economic value daily.”
