Newsletter : Issue #53
Time to read!
Happy Sunday! Welcome to the 53rd edition of my weekly newsletter. Here are some of the articles and resources that caught my attention this week.
Reading
1. The neurobiology of reading
“Reading uses some of the oldest circuitry in the human brain. For most of our evolutionary history, we were readers — just not of books. We read animal tracks in mud, storm patterns in clouds, danger signals in the rustle of leaves. Our ancestors who could decode these natural patterns survived; those who couldn’t often didn’t. When you read, your brain’s visual system recognizes letter shapes and transforms them into words. Language networks map those words to meanings stored in memory. Attention systems keep you focused on the narrative thread while memory systems integrate new information with existing knowledge. Multiple brain regions work together in coordinated activity.”
2. It Was Never About AI (We Are Not Our Tools)
“Tools are extraordinary. They extend what we can do, what we can reach, what we can build. But somewhere along the way, we started to confuse what a tool can do with what a tool should do. I believe that the companies that survive the next era won’t be the ones that moved fastest. They will be the ones that moved with purpose. The ones that kept their people. The ones that chose meaning over margin, long-term resilience over short-term extraction, humanity over efficiency.”
“Once rice is harvested for consumption, it’s brown. The outer layers of the rice husk contain the bran and many of the nutrients in the rice. And yet, most people, including many of the poorest people in any population, only eat white rice. The origin of milling rice has to do with storage. Brown rice goes rancid much sooner, particularly in warm climates. As a result, white rice is more reliable–you’re not going to serve a bad batch. The reliability led to status. Status in serving it and in consuming it. You might not have much, but at least you can eat white rice. Once that signal is established, it becomes a sign of cultural affiliation. If your family or neighbors are doing it, it’s important to fit in. People insist that white rice is normal and that they prefer it, but that’s only because of their history and culture.”
4. Hayden Capital Quarterly Letter
“What’s important to remember, is that the most resilient technology businesses aren’t selling a product. They’re selling convenience, trust, reliability, and business process knowledge. Maybe 20% of a software company’s value is in the code itself. The other 80% is a customer service business – constant maintenance, security patches, compliance updates, new integrations, new features. Most businesses don’t want the responsibility for any of this. They’re not buying code. They’re buying headache-free, all-in-one solutions to their problems.”
“The negative implications for society are greatly compounded by AI’s speed of adoption as described earlier. AI can rapidly put people out of work for whom it will take years to find and be trained for new careers. It’s hard to think the speed of change under AI won’t vastly outstrip society’s ability to adjust. Think of the damage offshoring did to manufacturing jobs in the U.S. and other developed nations; this will impact more jobs and faster. For me, the bottom line is that not only are we unable to fully understand AI’s abilities and what it will do for us (or to us), but it thinks and moves faster than we can. That brings me to the optimists. I’ve spoken with people – mostly from within the tech sector – who are sanguine in this regard. They say every technological innovation – the mechanization of agriculture 200 years ago; the industrial revolution that turned over factory jobs to machines 100 years ago; the handing over of research to the internet 25 years ago – was predicted to cause widespread joblessness. But in every instance, new jobs materialized and employment continued uninterrupted, and it’ll be so this time as well.”
Few more :
ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini: Revenue, Users, and Funding Comparison 2026
Watching
Tools
Text Behind Image create text-behind-image designs in seconds using AI.
“Learning more will increase knowledge, but only attempting more will reduce fear. The more you try it, the less you will fear it.”
- James Clear