Pauses, Problems, and Petroleum
1 | Remember to pause
Pause.
It's easy to keep moving, but it's hard to pause.
I have been moving way too much recently.
There's too many things to do. Too many things to watch. To read. To check off the list.
It's easy to convince myself to do "just one more thing" before I "allow" myself a break.
And then skip the break altogether.
Today, the open, quiet spaces in the day are easy to fill with the next notification on my phone.
Instead of a deep breath, it's another email.
Instead of a day dream, it's another headline.
It's harder than ever to allow my mind to roam, but it's ever more impactful when it happens.
A few minutes of thought can save hours. Invest in the future.
This is my reminder to myself.
Take the time to step back. Reflect.
Pause.
2 | Many "solutions" are in search of a problem
Crypto tanking is right now.
When I think I crypto, I think of when I was mining Dogecoin in college in 2014. Yes, the one with the derpy Shiba Inu.
Why Dogecoin and not Bitcoin? Because I thought I had missed the Bitcoin wave (whoops).
But that's irrelevant.
What mattered is that I believed in the promise of crypto. The promise that it could solve many problems in the world through "zero trust" verification and a distributed ledger.
Yet, it was hard to articulate what that meant. At a crypto meetup I went to in 2017, we had an icebreaker where we broke out into groups, then tried to think of the best real-world use cases for crypto.
Payments. Contracts. Supply chain tracing for recalls and audits.
Every group said a lot of the same.
Excluding payments, the problems we thought crypto would "solve" have existing solutions that are generally better for one reason or another: better efficiency, less complexity, etc.
Stablecoins are genuinely useful, but remember NFTs?
Until we live in Ready Player One, I'm not sure there's value in me "owning" my own NBA Top Shot.
Contrast that with AI.
AI isn't a fad. It isn't a "solution" in search of a problem.
It's solving real-world problems.
It took scientists around the globe six decades to discover 150,000 protein structures.
AlphaFold identified nearly all 200,000,000 protein structures known to exist in nature within months.
AI is an accelerant.
It multiplies time.
It is useful.
The traction is real and not manufactured.
Its use cases are there and don't need much searching.
I worked in the tech and IT space for years, but I never took the time to host my own site or manage my own server outside my work. I was always interested, but never got around to it.
And now I have this site.
Could I have built this site before AI?
Yes.
But did AI save me hours of trolling through forums and documentation?
Hell yes it did.
3 | What did Harry Potter say at the gas station?
Yup
thought starters.
#1
- My struggles in maintaining my sanity over the past few weeks
#2
- https://stripe.com/guides/why-your-business-needs-a-stablecoin-strategy
- https://nbatopshot.com/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_fHJIYENdI