The TikTok Ban goes into effect on Sunday, assuming Elon or Mr. Beast doesn’t buy it first, both of which seem equally improbable. If you remember, Trump was against TikTok until Jeff Yass supported Trump 2024. Yass has a 15% ownership stake in TikTok’s parent company ByteDance. And so suddenly Trump was against the ban. It’s no surprise he’s nudging his “first buddy” to see about a takeover deal. It’s not about national security, it’s about doing a fellow billionaire a solid.
Meanwhile, if you want to know how the US feels about the ban, check out a snapshot of the top charts on the US App Store this week:
Temu down at the bottom is a highly addictive ecommerce app run out of China. Lemon8 up in slot #2 is yet another ByteDance app, run out of China. And that top app? The one you can’t read? It’s called RedNote, but the Chinese name for it is “Xiaohongshu” which means Little Red Book. As in: Mao’s Little Red Book. Yes, seriously.
On to the reading!
Timely
The TikTok Ban Shows America Is At War With Itself - There are a lot of problems with short form video, but the big one is that we’re addicted to it and we don’t want to admit it. Like most big problems, the real issues are system and incentive design.
Generative AI: The Power and the Glory - A great look at where data centers are going and what will actually power them. We need to think about energy a lot more than we are.
AI in America - OpenAI offers what they call a “blueprint” for where AI should go in America that is 3 parts obvious, 1 part cringe and 1 part “NO”.
How To Build Your Own Software With AI (No Experience Necessary) - Not trying to shill the course here, but it’s getting remarkably easy to build personal tools quickly. Nat says “we’re entering a golden age of easy, personalized, software development.” I think he’s right.
Is education inequality in America worse than wealth inequality? - Austin Scholar is a freshman at Stanford writing about education. Here she offers some thoughts for parents about standards.
Timeless
Principles - We’re all a sucker for a good list of aphorisms, and this list is pretty great.
The Origins of Woke - In classic PG fashion, PG lays out how woke is just the latest priggishness.
The True Self Is The Person You Want Others To Believe You Are - The title says it all here. “In Michelangelo’s mind the David existed within the rock before sculpting began.”
Books
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino - The entire book is a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan wherein Marco Polo details some of the cities he’s seen in his travels and doles out the wisdom the Khan needs. This book is like a poem in novel form, occasionally opaque but still beautiful. Sometimes you have to read a page twice to capture the imagery. Gore Vidal’s one-liner on it is more than enough:
“Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.”
Tweets
Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!
The world is amazing. Cheers!