1/ Throughout my startup career, I’ve seen many founders have an aversion to sales. This is a mistake that can kill your startup.

So, today, for the first time in 25 (!) years of Apple, I downgraded. From the 2016 MacBook Pro to my 2013, which I had kept in a drawer...

It was pretty simple to do—Apple Time Machine backups let me do it with one click.

That first tweet captures, in two pictures, how badly Apple has “lost the plot” (to quote @wylieprof). On the right is the Apple MagSafe adapter, from 2013. On the left, what I had “upgraded” to.

Thanks, Apple! I really was nostalgic for worrying about yanking my computer off the table.

Oh and I really appreciated not knowing if my computer was charging. What was great was the little whoop sound you used, so that the speaker before me could be informed I was charging my laptop.

Remember: Just because an idea is old doesn't mean it's good.

Knowing whether old ideas are more likely to be good requires understanding whether conditions have changed in important ways.

Horse archery was an amazing method of warfare for over a thousand years...then people invented guns, and suddenly this great idea that had stood the test of time became obsolete.

Then again, when underlying conditions don't change much, tried-and-true approaches are probably better.

"Learning the lessons of history" usually just means assuming ergodicity and stationarity in an informal time-series model...

(end)

So I was talking to @gewt about Job: A Comedy of Justice and I came up with a theory that I think explains why Heinlein's late-period work is so kinda-terrible and why I still enjoy it so much

So Heinlein had always been very interesting in the short parts of his novels, like the little snippets inside chapters. He had a very fun writing style, and wrote some fun dialogue with fun characters, right?>
It probably comes from how much of his early stuff was short fiction

And I think what happened with a lot of his longer works is that he'd just start writing fun bits and hope it would end up going somewhere or having a bigger plot by the end. like eventually he'd figure out where this was going, then go back and rewrite it into a cohesive whole

and I'm sure he had editors that'd help this process. No editor would let you publish something as rambly and changing-gears-every-other-chapter as The Number Of The Beast, for example... unless you were God-King Of Science Fiction 1980s Robert Heinlein.

so basically I think what happened is that by the 80s (when he was in his seventies!!) he lost the drive to go back and rewrite and he was too Untouchable for editors to make him.

THE BATTLE OF SARAIGHAT (1671)

Lachit Borphukan's humiliation of Aurangzeb.

The battle of Saraighat was a naval engagement fought on the Brahmaputra river near Saraighat between the M0ghul empire and Ahom kingdom in 1671.

Guts, resolve and glory!

(Elaborate thread)

Koch was a state situated between the dominions of M0ghuls and Ahoms. For Ahoms, it was a buffer state for keeping M0ghul territorial expansions at bay.(1)

Times changed when the ruler of the Koch kingdom, Nara Narayana passed away in 1587 resulting in Koch being divided into 2. Western Koch was ruled by his son Lakshmi Narayan and the eastern Koch by his nephew, Raghudev.(2)

Lakshmi Narayan formed an alliance with M0ghuls after which he attacked Parikshit, son of Raghudev, in 1602. Parikshit Narayan was defeated while his brother Bali Narayan took refuge in the Ahom Kingdom.(3)

The M0ghuls used it as a pretext to invade Ahom kingdom. The first battle between them took place in 1615 leading to a series of engagements in which both sides had their shares of ups and downs resulting in a stalemate.(4)