Substack fascinates me as a platform particularly because it bothers me. There is a type of writer who writes on Substack, and a type of essay that people publish there (yes, I know it’s not a monolith, but hear me out for a second) and it is its own ecosystem for having conversations, and it just seems to encourage a very reactive and online form of essay writing, like if you took Twitter and made it longform and more polished but you could also choose to paywall your more controversial tweets.

“Networking” seems to be one of those buzzwords that everyone uses and nobody can properly define, which I find extremely annoying. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and maybe I can help offer some clarity. I’m starting to think that there might be two types of networking, which I’m going to refer to as “warm networking” and “cold networking”. If you’re familiar with the idea of “warm contacts” vs “cold contacts”, that’s where I’m borrowing this terminology from.

There is a specific type of article, almost always posted on Medium, that is clearly intended to be included in a LinkedIn post for personal branding purposes. I hate those articles. They drive me insane.

You shouldn’t just write because you want to brand yourself, because if you do that you won’t have anything real to say. Figure out something to say first! It is not that hard.

And these articles all have the same stupid upbeat marketing energetic tone. It drives me crazy. Does anyone actually read and enjoy these things? Who are they for?

I have been compiling a list of articles and academic papers I come across about AI, since trying to understand what it’s doing to society is now one of my obsessions. There is, alas, no good way to review all of these articles. I now have a four page document filled with links to articles about AI, and it’s still getting things added to it at least on a weekly basis. So, uh. This might become an ongoing series.

Really, most meetings should be 15 minutes, 45 minutes, or an hour long.