Raphael Poss

Two Strange Books and a Bench Full of Bad Ideas: November's Links A month of odd contrasts: an ancient-wisdom happiness classic that still made me yawn, a therapist’s truth-telling manifesto that made me squint, and serious AI papers (hello, PropensityBench) that ma...

Two Strange Books and a Bench Full of Bad Ideas: November's Links #ReadingNotes #Books #Psychology #AI #Ethics

Coaching the Selfie Generation: A Year of Spent a year in a community of 20-somethings. They're unashamedly self-obsessed, surprisingly good at spotting BS, and can't afford houses but excel at casual mental health talk. The anonymity helps a...

Coaching the Selfie Generation: A Year of "Me Too" and Muscle Pics - #GenZ #Mentoring #OnlineCommunity #MentalHealth

Warts, Data Models, and Why AI Won't Make You Rich: October's Reading List Products with warts love their users. Your data model is your destiny. AI boom won't enrich investors (just operators). Bonus: memory is O(n^⅓), ChatGPT triggers psychosis, and you could just choose o...

#ReadingList #AI #ProductDesign #Economics

What the EU’s efficiency labels can teach us about helping customers choose Markets work when buyers are well informed. The European Union’s A–G label family is a long-running, quietly radical lesson in how to make that true for everyday decisions.

I did a review of the EU labels. The design system is super nice.

Pareto's 80/20 is wrong (it's 80/40), AI hallucinations are mathematically permanent, and reverse centaurs turn workers into
slop-cleaners. Lemon markets kill online authenticity while tech crushes small orgs. September reads: minds, markets, machines. 🍋🤖

Why Old Political Labels Don’t Help You Run a Business Anymore “Conservative” and “liberal” don’t forecast your business risks anymore. Grid capacity, chip supply, housing, and water do. If you’re still modeling strategy around 19th-century labels, you’re running...

Ever notice how “liberals” push tariffs & “conservatives” push green subsidies? 🤔 Labels are cosplay. The real game: energy, chips, water, supply chains.

Your portfolio cares about volts, not votes. ⚡💸

#business #politics #supplychains #AI #energy #investing

I'm supporting EU–INC – a single legal entity to upgrade Europe for startups. Let’s make it happen. #EUINC
eu-inc.org/cta

From Hormozi’s sales psychology to sobering AI results: LLMs misalign when fed mistakes, people grow less human treating AIs as machines, and the startup bubble may burst before the AI one. Plus, a philosopher exiled for noticing the Earth moves. Value, hype, and hubris—annotated. 🌀

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Influence psychology transformed my view of sales, LLM context rot discovered, and developers overestimate AI productivity gains. Also: feudalism exists within democracies via corporations, and "being too ambitious is clever self-sabotage." Time to weaken belief edges, not fight facts. 🎯

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Apple proves LLM "reasoning" is just cosplay—accuracy collapses beyond training complexity. Cursor pricing will create AI "haves" vs "have-nots." Also: spending time with LLMs is like being gaslight by bad people. The authenticity crisis demands we go smell things. 👃

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Built a TypeScript library for complex time scheduling because "Saturday morning" isn't a point—it's a recurring range. Events vs periods: the mental model that changes everything. Also: my first AI-assisted post. 📅

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Building Quintism philosophy and a calm digital companion while discovering that friction is the most valuable commodity in the world. Also: narrative prison constrains creativity, the "Who Cares Era" reflects institutional trust breakdown, and we need new social structures. 🧘

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Silicon Valley is preparing a coup against geography-based government, hyperlegibility is trading secrets for attention, and LLMs can't do what we think they can. Also: we won't live to see the consequences of our AI investments. How do we guide choices responsibly? 🎭

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The public internet is broken—even when you know what to watch out for. Algorithmic feeds are destroying our ability to search for knowledge and form memories. LOTR is brain-rot for technologists; read Discworld instead. We're approaching zombie war. 🧟

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Jordan Peterson is a fraud, RISC-V threatens US/UK hegemony, and Calm Tech certification could save our sanity. Also: DeepSeek demolished NVIDIA, and we have a moral duty to write human content before LLMs train on it. The PC is dead—time to make computing personal again. 💻

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Decoded lullaby language ("just" means unpredictable complexity), learned about systematic design vs empirical methods, and discovered universal moral principles. Also: advanced civilizations might be indistinguishable from nature. 🌱

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Mentoring a California CTO, learning that care doesn't scale, and discovering the 70% AI problem. Also: moral education might fix America's meanness, and egoless engineering beats strict division of labor. 🧠

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Learned the power of networking through the Ambassador vs Sympathizer vs DJ vs Figurant matrix. Also discovered the spiritual evolution of brands: traditional → modern → post-modern → network. What comes next after community brands? 🤝

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Joined an incubator program and discovered I need 4-5 important things in life to stay balanced, not just one. Started international trade consulting and ADHD career coaching. Turns out my focus is fine—I just need variety! 🎯

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Health forced me from reading to YouTube, but I found gems between the garbage. Started serious projects: international trade, AI-generated smut (yes really), urbanism, and a funnel factory. Marc Lou's ShipFast is virtual gold! ⚡

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DoorDash = payday lenders for restaurants, Bruce Schneier explains how tech companies borrow from our collective social future, and group chats are the new web. Also: teenage plagiarists monetize audio+visual content demand. 📱

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AI leaves accessibility behind, misallocated talent builds video games instead of solving real problems, and self-expression economy breeds cognitive dissonance. Also: phantom stock plans and why beautiful terminal animations matter. ✨

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Spent a month as a full-time construction project manager and learned that leadership is all about relationships. Delayed decisions, soft accountability, and empathy work better than pushing for perfection. Also: Kelly's criterion and why big companies suck. 🔨

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Peter Thiel = Ayn Rand with computers and venture capital. Zero to One meets Seven Habits meets "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" Also discovered demurrage currency, statistical paradoxes, and why React/Vue/Svelte are all awful for prototyping. 🤔

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Ego is the enemy, fractal dimensions explain project cost overruns, and trust saves money. Also: AI will only simulate the most deeply flawed versions of our collective intelligence. Sometimes the hardest learnings aren't easily teachable. 🔍

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Rebooted my reading habit and discovered that most corporate structures are social games where participants don't realize they can influence the rules. Also: LangChain brings order to AI chaos, and I learned what I'm "allowed to do." 📚

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Asked Claude AI to build a graphing calculator in GW-BASIC. It knows the syntax but insists on using EVAL()—a function that doesn't exist in the language. Christmas morning revelation: AI can't think outside the box... yet. 🎄🤖

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Plot twist: after 15 years solving the hardest CS problems, I realized I'm actually a product person at heart. Leadership science is mostly descriptive, not prescriptive—and that CEO looking for their "first technical hire" has the cart before the horse. 🐎

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From coding to campaigning: one techie's journey toward political office starts with building executive credibility. Sometimes the loudest complainers about politicians should actually *become* politicians. 🗳️

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"What's on your mind?" creates blind spots. Here's a mega-list of 1-on-1 questions organized by theme—because busy managers forget to cover important topics. Plot twist: the list is missing the most important question about organizational agency. 🤔

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