Generation gaps
Allow me to talk nauseatingly about fitness for (I promise) just a couple of sentences. I’ve spent the last two or three years getting back to a metabolic fitness level of 15yrs younger. Diet, exercise, sleep. It’s hard but doable. In contrast, for a long time when I came face to face with newer generations of founders, although I could work as hard as them, I could never have the kind of innate understanding that someone who has grown up in a different era had.
A hugely underrated aspect of what’s happening with AI is the compression of generational gaps across software building (I don’t think ‘development’ is really the right term any more). We’re in a window where forty, fifty, sixty-year olds can be as current as a twenty-year old in producing software output.
Quite whether that phenomenon will translate as easily to other industries and whether software will actually eat the work is unclear but even if it stopped at software (a ~5% contributer to global GDP on a good day) it will be a fascinating experiment.
Anecdotally, it’s interesting to watch people (counter-intuitively) drop back a bit from some of the cutting edge AI chat groups, simply because they know that tuning back in in about six months will be far less painful and more productive than trying to stay up to the second on capability. I see that as a positive maturing signal.
Stephen Kinsella recently wrote a thought-provoking post about what kind of institutions a country needs to create more people who make things. I recently watched someone who would not describe themselves as remotely technical casually pick up Replit and vibe code a meal planner because they were frustrated by existing options. It makes me wonder more and more seriously whether countries like Ireland should simply focus on getting tokens into the hands of its population rather than administrating yet another government-funded startup program.
Let me mention something that I probably don’t want you to sign up to. At 10xHumans, Daria is writing a weekly newsletter called AI Enablement Insider, written specifically for people running AI professional services (e.g. training, consulting, implementation etc.). If this is you, please take a look!
Reading/listening
The 1929 stock market crash is one of those historical events which nearly everyone knows the wrong version of. Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929 is an excellent and highly readable account of this period, as interesting for correcting the facts as it is for describing what was happening in US society and politics at the time.
Speaking of general misconceptions about history…There are lots of cool moments in Dwarkesh’s interview with Ada Palmer on the Renaissance but my inner history nerd shrieked when she mentioned there was a document in the Vatican dating from ~1100 which recognises the existence of Vinland (or Canada as it’s known today) hundreds of years before it was re-discovered by Columbus. The things we forget. Enormously enjoyable and continues to confirm my theory that tech podcasters should do more history interviews.
Gen Z/Alpha marketplaces like Depop are fascinating ways to observe how new generations are running side hustles. Not sure what the backstory was after the Etsy acquisition but something clearly wasn’t working as they’ve just sold it to eBay for $400m less.