Paul Graham

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"The cases reaching us are of people who collapsed in the streets from lack of nutrition."

I had to explain to 13 yo what it means to describe someone as "rum." It's a subtle word. I finally said it's when someone seems strange, but not simply in a lame way, and in fact you worry it might be because they know something you don't.

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So basically you're free to say anything you're not forbidden to say. Right.

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Teenage boys in the UK have spontaneously taken up golf. Not because of a marketing campaign or a charismatic young golfer. They just like it.

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The reaction of a British founder who went to visit YC:

"It has a fantastic buzz about it – a huge empowering energy – but also a collaborative and encouraging kindness that could so easily be absent."

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In fact the hugeness of the outcome explains why it's rational for n to be large. If there were 100 delivery apps, the expected value of starting one would be a founder's share of at least a billion dollars.

The "nth delivery app" is a terrible idea, unless it happens to be Doordash, in which case it's worth 100 billion dollars and no one ever describes it in those terms.

It's an illusion that there was a "bad old days" when Silicon Valley was funding crap startups. Most startups fail, and failed ideas sound bad, even if they could have evolved into something good. So past cohorts of startups will always seem crappy.

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Journalism was still a thriving industry in 1980. People like Woodward and Bernstein still aspired to work in it. By 2010 you could no longer make either of those claims. That left a gap, and the gap was filled by different people with different motives.

In retrospect one of the things that allowed wokeness to become so powerful, at its peak, was the decline of journalism as an industry. The kind of people who undertook its institutional capture in 2010 mostly couldn't have gotten hired in 1980.

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Every child in this picture is now dead.

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"We are, to be blunt, eating too much and probably eating too much of the wrong foods."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2025/07/16/obesity-cause-diet-exercise/

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https://x.com/firasd/status/1944829349569425575

Beware of those who are excited about something that should at most be an unfortunate necessity.

Stephen Miller shares this in common with Europeans against air conditioning. He's excited by deporting people. They're excited by the idea of people being uncomfortable.

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It's usually a bad sign when the founder who seems the most natural CEO wants someone else to be CEO. But in the last two days I've talked to two startups where it might not be. Might. It did work for Google.

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Boccaccio's gesture in Andrea del Castagno's painting of him gives him an extra edge for 21st century viewers.