Weekly Digest 2
High Agency
Material:
It’s basically promoting the mindset that:
- nothing can stop you.
- do the thing that matters.
- do what you want.
- do it now.
I have read similar opinions from Naval and some good tweets, so there aren’t really any new fascinating ideas for me in this article. But I should say I totally agree with it, and I will give it credit for being concise, thorough and actionable. With this single article, you have already gotten the mindset that successful people have in common; all you need to do is practice it by doing the actual things.
P.S. I have found recently that I keep encountering articles sharing the same ideas, especially on the topic of AI. I think this is a bad signal that I might have entered my own echo chamber, where I keep reading what I agree with and like.
I plan to do two things to handle this intriguing problem:
- Read really fast or even skip on these things that I am familiar with, retell their ideas in one sentence and use AI to validate my understanding.
- Keep finding new resources. (I think it’s inevitable that one author usually expresses the same idea throughout his different works, so I intend to learn from different sources).
I think it is also a good example to show that you need not fear missing information that may be precious, because precious information usually stays, and it is the noise that fades away.
Context
Materials:
- Context is the selected, fresh, highly relevant data.
- Apps can use context to provide immediate value to users, which makes users want to provide more context. This is a good cycle.
How to work with context in Cursor
- Use thinking models and Agent mode to gather context automatically. But the initial context is still crucial.
- Use Agent mode to add debug statements to the code and run it to let the agent get access to the runtime behavior.
Cryptocurrency
Materials:
- How secure is 256 bit security?
- But how does bitcoin actually work?
- Use computational work as a basis of what to trust, which means trusting the longest blockchain.
Is Cryptocurrency Secure?
Yes.
- SHA-256 is not going to get broken in the near future (personally I would guess at least 30 years).
- Even if SHA-256 does get broken in the future, the community would probably have changed to use more secure protocols already.
How to confirm a transaction being valid?
After the transaction is written to the blockchain, wait for two more blocks (which means 30 minutes on average).
Is Bitcoin good for daily small transactions?
No, A block includes about 2400 transactions, and Bitcoin network generates 1 block per 10 minutes, which makes transaction fees very high. So Bitcoin is currently used as a tool to preserve wealth (even the U.S. government), not as currency for transactions. People can use other more agile networks for daily transactions.
Cryptocurrency is the future, and I plan to share more things on this topic.