Links You‘ll Love

Archive

Links You'll Love: Issue #19

Preamble

Without going into too much detail, I'm currently dealing with a painful medical issue — so instead of my usual commentary, I’ll share three posts that speak for themselves. I promise you'll get a lot out of them, so just pretend that I said some smart things too. 🙂

Links

Noticing the little things

#19
May 9, 2025
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Links You'll Love: Issue #18

Links

The 3 AI Use Cases: Gods, Interns, and Cogs

Learning how to use AI will become a skill that everyone needs to acquire, much like literacy. No one asks if you can read during a job interview; it's assumed that by the time you’ve reached that stage, the skill is a given. However, we all have different levels of reading proficiency, which significantly affects how we navigate the world. The same will apply to using AI.

I use AI to automate some of the more mundane tasks I perform, such as constructing this newsletter. However, because I care deeply about the words I put out into the world, I write every word myself. AI has many use cases, but it won't do everything. It's up to you to decide how you want to incorporate it into your life, which is why it’s so important to understand the different ways AI can be used.

#18
April 25, 2025
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Links You'll Love: Issue #17

Links

Stoop Coffee: How a Simple Idea Transformed My Neighborhood

My wife and I live in New York City, a place often considered "unfriendly," but I don’t believe that! There’s a saying that on the west coast, people are nice but not kind, whereas New Yorkers are kind, not nice. I think New Yorkers can be nice, kind, and friendly.

We are both fortunate to have many friends with whom we share deep relationships. However, when we reflected on our lives at the end of 2024, we realized that we didn’t have as much of a connection with the people who live in our immediate community, just a few blocks away. We decided to change that, and then we came across an article about Stoop Coffee. We started taking every opportunity to engage with the people around us through community-organized events. We don’t need more best friends; we needed more people we can see at the park or the local coffee shop and catch up with. We began seizing opportunities to meet new people, and we’ve become much happier for it! Like the authors of the article, we found community in our community — which, it turns out, was the most obvious place to look.

#17
April 11, 2025
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Links You'll Love: Issue #16

Links

An Unreasonable Amount of Time

When you witness something seemingly impossible with your own eyes, your first instinct is to deem it unbelievable. However, what may appear unbelievable is often supported by countless hours of preparation. Achieving the impossible isn't truly impossible, it merely demands dedication and mastery — which are far more attainable than the impossible.

Years ago, Teller performed a magic trick.

First, he’d have you pick a card. He would attempt to produce the card, but fail, indicating the card may have travelled elsewhere. He’d then lead you on a short walk to a nearby park, and then be inspired to dig a hole. Buried there, beneath undisturbed grass, was a box. When opened, the box would, somehow, contain the card you’d chosen. An impossible trick.

To create this magical moment, he had to do something you wouldn’t expect: he’d gone out into the park and buried a number of boxes, corresponding to potential cards one might choose. Then, he waited months – until the grass had grown over. Only then could he perform the trick.

#16
March 28, 2025
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Links You'll Love: Issue #15

Preamble

I’ll be skipping the next fortnightly delivery of Links You’ll Love, but for good reason. I’ll be spending the next two weeks with my lovely wife on our honeymoon, enjoying some much-needed quality time while attempting to drive on the wrong side of the road in Australia and New Zealand.

If you need some links you’ll love to hold you over, feel free to go through the back catalog of issues, or follow Plinky on Bluesky or Threads — where I post links in between editions of the newsletter. So without further ado, onto this week’s links.

Links

#15
March 7, 2025
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Links You'll Love: Issue #14

Links

The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

Have you ever tried to solve a difficult problem and felt your brain really going at it? It turns out that the exhaustion isn't just mental — it's physical as well. It was absolutely fascinating to learn that the world's best chess players burn more calories during a match than NBA players like Steph Curry do in a game, despite having far fewer seven-footers to move up and down the court.  But there's a lot more to take away from this story, too.

Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters' stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.

"Grandmasters sustain elevated blood pressure for hours in the range found in competitive marathon runners," Sapolsky says.

#14
February 21, 2025
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Links You'll Love: Issue #13

Links

A High School Reunion Reignites a 50-Year Crush

If you don't know me, you'll quickly learn that I'm sappy, sentimental, and a hopeless romantic. I'll always pause what I'm doing to read a story like this and will probably have a tear in my eye by the time I'm done.

“I had a special place in my heart for my first crush that I kept my whole life,” Ms. Hall said. “I often wondered, was he happy? Did he have a good life? But I had no idea.”

#13
February 7, 2025
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Links You'll Love: Issue #12

Links

My approach to running a link blog

I can't express how fulfilling it is to look back at years of archives on fabisevi.ch and build.ms, and seeing how my ideas have evolved over time. I believe everyone has something worth sharing, so wouldn't it be amazing if we made 2025 the year of blogging?

Instead of spending so much time and energy posting fleeting thoughts on apps like X or Threads, consider writing about your thoughts, feelings, or ideas on a blog. Few bloggers are more prolific than Simon Willison, who has been writing for over 20 years. That's why I would pay attention when he shares his strategy for writing consistently in — of course — a blog post.

#12
January 24, 2025
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Links You'll Love: Issue #11

Links

Does life feel like it’s speeding up? How to slow down time in 2025

The experience of getting older and feeling like you have less time is practically universal. It's not just the shackles of adulthood and capitalism wearing you down; there's a science to the way your mind perceives time. The richness of new and novel experiences makes time feel slower, while routine and repetition can make days speed by. It only starts there, so read on if you don't want 2025 to pass you by.

It’s the time of the year for endless cliches. From “tis the season” and “the gift that keeps on giving” to “new year, new you”, there’s nowhere to hide from tired old phrases. One of my favourites is “Christmas comes around quicker each year” — which ignores the fact that one year equals one trip around the sun.

There’s often a kernel of truth in a cliche, though. A recent study by Ruth Ogden from Liverpool John Moores University and colleagues showed that the vast majority of people in both the UK and Iraq really did experience Christmas (or Ramadan) approaching more rapidly every year.

#11
January 10, 2025
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Links You'll Love: Issue #10

Links

The Polymath Playbook

When I was younger, people always made it seem like you should dream of becoming the best athlete, the best writer, or the best at anything. What I came to learn as an adult is that being the best at one thing may not make you the best version of the person you want to be. Doing many things well may help you see things no one else can, better than someone who is the best at one thing. This post by Salman Ansari opened my eyes to the term "polymath," which describes a kind of person who looks at the world through this lens and finds unique, novel, and interesting answers to questions others may not be asking.

You’ve likely heard the saying: “A jack of all trades is a master of none.” It warns against the futility of pursuing too many disciplines. Be a specialist, or you’ll be nothing.

But there’s more to the story. An extended version of the saying tells a different tale: “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but often times better than a master of one.” With a subtle addition, its meaning becomes inverted. It touts the benefits of being a polymath (a.k.a. generalist), rather than admonishing them.

#10
December 27, 2024
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Links You'll Love: Issue #9

Links

Where I put my money

I consider this post an excellent starting point for anyone beginning their financial journey. It closely resembles the approach I took in my 20s, yet I haven’t seen this advice articulated so clearly before. The piece outlines the various places you can invest your money, detailing the pros and cons each financial vehicle presents.

One important thing I focus on is “allocation priority.” That is, money needs to pay for X before it can pay for Y, or else I put myself at risk. This priority forms a sort of flowchart. There are more complicated ones online (search “personal finance flowchart reddit” for some goodies) but this one adopted from one I saw on r/bogleheads many years ago covers pretty much everything for me.

#9
December 13, 2024
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Links You'll Love: Issue #8

Links

How to rest well

Rest helps you feel better, work more effectively, and become the person you aspire to be. Yet, for a myriad of reasons, many of us find it difficult to rest well (myself included). Sometimes, all we need is a simple reminder, which is far better than the alternative of collapsing after being pushed beyond our limits. Hopefully, this article can serve as that reminder.

Rest is as essential to a good life, and a productive career, as work. Overwork is bad for individuals and organisations: a long period without adequate rest burns people out and wrecks company productivity. A deep dive into the lives of history’s most accomplished scientists, writers and even generals reveals that they laboured far fewer hours than do many people in today’s industrialised Western societies, and they crafted daily routines that balanced periods of intensive labour with downtime.

#8
November 29, 2024
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Links You'll Love: Issue #7

Links

Efficiency is the Enemy

This post was initially titled "Slack," though not the Slack you might be thinking of. A few years ago, I realized that being optimally efficient rarely made me optimally productive. I need to build time into my schedule for letting my mind wander, exploring ideas, and prototyping things that may not be directly applicable today. It all pays dividends in the long run. This post resonates with me today more than ever, as I now work for myself and have complete control over how I spend my time.

Trying to eliminate slack causes work to expand. There's never any free time because we always fill it. Amos Tversky said the secret to doing good research is to always be a little underemployed; you waste years by not being able to waste hours. Those wasted hours are necessary to figure out if you're headed in the right direction.

"Slack is the time when reinvention happens. It is time when you are not 100 percent busy doing the operational business of your firm. Slack is the time when you are 0 percent busy. Slack at all levels is necessary to make the organization work effectively and to grow. It is the lubricant of change. Good companies excel in creative use of slack. And bad ones only obsess about removing it."

#7
November 15, 2024
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Links You'll Love: Issue #6

Links

Why short-sightedness is on the rise and what can be done

When I was a kid, we were warned that sitting too close to the TV would ruin our vision. More kids than ever now need to wear glasses, and you might think it's because of all the screen time. However, it turns out that the reason for the growing vision issues in this generation is a bit more pernicious than that, it has to do with time spent outdoors.

Myopia – the medical term for short-sightedness or near-sightedness – is on the rise. And perhaps most worryingly, this trend also affects children.

Around 2.6 billion people were short-sighted in 2020, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which anticipates that this figure will rise to 3.4 billion by 2030.

Meanwhile, a third of children and adolescents globally are affected by myopia, according to a recent study published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.

#6
November 1, 2024
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Links You'll Love: Issue #5

Links

Experts vs. Imitators

Shane Parrish’s blog post starts off with a simple assertion:

If you want the highest quality information, you have to speak to the best people. The problem is many people claim to be experts, who really aren’t.

How do you tell the difference between an expert and an imitator?

#5
October 18, 2024
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Links You'll Love: Issue #4

Links

São Paulo: The City With No Outdoor Advertisements

Ads are everywhere — on every corner, in your browser, and even staring you in the face while you're 35,000 feet in the air. There is no escaping them these days, and it pains me to see people plaster an ad anywhere there’s a blank space. It feels like nothing can be done about this ever-present nuisance of ads, but São Paulo had other ideas and in 2006, they passed the Clean City Law to outlaw the use of all outdoor advertisements. Since then Paris removed a third of their outdoor ads, Grenoble has replaced ads with trees, and Vermont, Maine, Hawaii, and Alaska have all gone billboard-free. It just goes to show the change you can make when you think outside the frame.

In September 2006, the mayor of São Paulo passed the so-called “Clean City Law" that outlawed the use of all outdoor advertisements, including on billboards, transit, and in front of stores. Within a year, 15,000 billboards were taken down and store signs had to be shrunk so as not to violate the new law. Outdoor video screens and ads on buses were stripped. Even pamphleteering in public spaces has been made illegal. Nearly $8 million in fines were issued to cleanse São Paulo of the blight on its landscape. Seven years on, the world's fourth-largest metropolis and South America’s most important city remains free of visual clutter and eye sore that plagues the majority of cities around the world.

#4
October 4, 2024
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Links You'll Love: Issue #3

Links

How The Guinness Brewery Invented The Most Important Statistical Method In Science

You may have heard the term “sample size” before, usually in the context of election polling, clinical trials, or even market research. I'm a big sports nerd, so I've been using the term since I was 14, trying my hardest to predict how my favorite players would perform next season. Despite using the term for over 20 years, I never knew that the “sample” in sample size was… a sampling of beer.

The Guinness brewery has been known for innovative methods ever since its founder, Arthur Guinness, signed a 9,000-year lease in Dublin for £45 a year. For example, after four years of tinkering, Michael Edward Ash, a mathematician turned brewer there, invented a chemical technique that gives the brewery’s namesake stout its velvety head. The method, which involves adding nitrogen gas to kegs and to little balls inside cans of Guinness, led to today’s hugely popular “nitro brew” styles of beer and coffee.

But the most influential innovation by far to come out of the brewery has nothing to do with beer. It was the birthplace of the t-test, one of the most important statistical techniques in all of science.

#3
September 20, 2024
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Links You'll Love: Issue #2

Links

An argument for logging off

It might be time to log off, or at least to drastically reduce your information intake. The real question isn’t about how much screen time is right for you though. Aaron’s argument is about control, that you should focus your energy on what you can control. But what can you actually control? Aaron has some very useful guidelines around that.

In the excellent book Amusing Ourselves to Death, the author, Neil Postman, quotes Thoreau as saying:

“We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”

Writing in 1854 (!!), Thoreau pretty much nailed it. Having all information instantly accessible everywhere all the time has led us to be consumed by things that we'll never encounter, have no influence over, and in many cases don't change our lives at all. Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough! Yes, and?

#2
September 6, 2024
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Links You'll Love: Issue #1

A love story, a transatlantic essay, and a lesson about time, walk into a bar.


Links

What France and America Know About Each Other

#1
August 23, 2024
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