Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas

Reflecting on this email from a Sublime believer:
Consuming media has become a massive time-suck for humankind. Only decades ago, the average person had one source of information, if any — the newspaper. Journalists chronicled happenings relevant to their community. And that was it. Someone got married, someone is selling their house, someone died,
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A personality sketch of the marginal user
Here’s what I’ve been able to piece together about the marginal user. Let’s call him Marl. The first thing you need to know about Marl is that he has the attention span of a goldfish on acid. Once Marl opens your app, you have about 1.3 seconds to catch his attention with a shiny image or triggering headlin... See more
Here’s what I’ve been able to piece together about the marginal user. Let’s call him Marl. The first thing you need to know about Marl is that he has the attention span of a goldfish on acid. Once Marl opens your app, you have about 1.3 seconds to catch his attention with a shiny image or triggering headlin... See more
Ivan Vendrov • The Tyranny of the Marginal User


The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence,
... See moreJonathan Haidt • The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood
Most of this came to him in the mid-1980s, when Mr. Goldhaber, a former theoretical physicist, had a revelation. He was obsessed at the time with what he felt was an information glut — that there was simply more access to news, opinion and forms of entertainment than one could handle. His epiphany was this: One of the most finite resources in the w... See more
nytimes.com • Opinion | Michael Goldhaber, the Cassandra of the Internet Age - The New York Times
Artisanal software
In a speech delivered years ago, Ev Williams used agriculture as a metaphor to understand what’s possible on the Internet.
Agriculture was a tremendous invention – it got people fed and freed them to do many things. But agriculture – taken to the extreme in the pursuit of profit leads to a sick and obese population and industrial... See more
In a speech delivered years ago, Ev Williams used agriculture as a metaphor to understand what’s possible on the Internet.
Agriculture was a tremendous invention – it got people fed and freed them to do many things. But agriculture – taken to the extreme in the pursuit of profit leads to a sick and obese population and industrial... See more