Marilynne Robinson, a famous writer, and a rather astute thinker had a speech where she spoke about how she had difficulty reconciling the immense complexity of nature, the even larger complexity of our inner lived lives, with the deterministic nature that comes from evolution. …

The Ancient Greeks figured out a decent way of managing their city-states around the 5th century BC. They figured out that if they got people (non slave, nonforeigner, nonfemale, but .. you know … people) to voice their support for ideas, it would act as a sort of collective glue…

Once upon a time, there lived a King who loved to build giant monuments in his honour. In itself, this isn’t particularly unusual of course. There are monuments everywhere. A monument to the King’s glory, one that would take 60,000 man hours to build. So either you need to stack…

Introduction The world changes surprisingly fast sometimes. For example, a century ago, 22,000 people died in the construction of the Panama Canal, which was an acceptable casualty rate for something so important. It dropped a lot for the empire state building, which only cost five lives and was considered massive success…

Thought it was worth doing a post-mortem on the barrage of S1s that happened over the summer. Looks like the entire analyst community came out swinging this month, and I don’t think I have ever read this many founder/ company/ strategy/ technology histories and deep dives. …

A decade and half ago, when I first started getting interested in public markets investing, I had started by making a small portfolio that I could play with. Just to see if I actually knew what I thought I knew, and to try and make sense of my beliefs about…

In the original days of the new software stack evolution, there was a fringe section which consisted of developers getting together in old fashioned chat rooms, offline and online, and coding for the love of it. When Linus Torvalds started the project to create a new operating system it was…

In the original days of the new software stack evolution, there was a fringe section which consisted of developers getting together in old fashioned chat rooms, offline and online, and coding for the love of it. When Linus Torvalds started the project to create a new operating system it was…

One of the most interesting insights of the last few decades, and something Steven Pinker has called the only true insight into AI, is Moravec’s Paradox. Put simply, it says that things we consider to be extremely difficult, which require high level reasoning, such as mathematics or playing chess, seem…