Last week, we shared a classic of subterranean sci-fi: Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne. This week, we’re sharing Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a timeless piece of gothic literature, perfect for the spooky season.
Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇
Most highlighted Articles of the week
Reflections on Palantir
Nabeel S. Qureshi · nabeelqu.co
Nabeel Qureshi, a former Palantir developer, explains how creating custom on-site software for industrial clients fueled Palantir’s growth. "It wasn’t just a database or a spreadsheet, it was an end-to-end solution to that specific problem, and to hell with generalizability. Your job was to solve the problem, and not worry about overfitting; [Product D…
Last week, we shared a classic of subterranean sci-fi: Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne. This week, we’re sharing Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a timeless piece of gothic literature, perfect for the spooky season.
Keep reading to add to your Reader account below 👇
Most highlighted Articles of the week
Reflections on Palantir
Nabeel S. Qureshi · nabeelqu.co
Nabeel Qureshi, a former Palantir developer, explains how creating custom on-site software for industrial clients fueled Palantir’s growth. "It wasn’t just a database or a spreadsheet, it was an end-to-end solution to that specific problem, and to hell with generalizability. Your job was to solve the problem, and not worry about overfitting; [Product Development’s] job was to take whatever you’d built and generalize it, with the goal of selling it elsewhere."
Learning to learn
Kevin Li · kevin.the.li
After conducting over 300 interviews for his crypto startup Goldsky, CEO Kevin Li shares an interviewee’s answer that left a lasting impression. "One of my favorite now-retired questions is, in Thielian fashion: ‘What’s something you’ve learned that you believe gives you an edge - something that you’re almost surprised more people don’t know about?’ One of the all-time best answers I heard was this: When you’re starting something new, the most important thing is knowing what to learn."
Accountability sinks
Mandy Brown · A Working Library
Mandy Brown’s latest reading note, on Dan Davies’ *The Unaccountability Machine, *illustrates how organizations can obscure the consequences of their decisions. "A higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet somewhere. Later, you are trying to check into a room, but it’s not ready and the clerk can’t tell you when it will be; they can offer a voucher, but what you need is a room. There’s no one to call to complain, no way to communicate back to that distant leader that they’ve scotched your plans. The accountability is swallowed up into a void, lost forever."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
Apple’s Craig Federighi Explains Apple Intelligence Delays, Siri’s Future and More
Wall Street Journal
Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, answers questions about Apple Intelligence’s hold up in his recent WSJ interview. "You could put something out there and have it be sort of a mess, or Apple’s point of view is more like, ‘Let’s try to get each piece right and release it when it’s ready, right?’...This is a many year, honestly, even decades-long arc of this technology playing out, and so we’re gonna do it responsibly."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
ADHD is not a disorder
Ben Smith
After helping an ADHD client achieve deep focus, coach Ben Smith reveals his tried and true methods: training the parasympathetic nervous system and reducing stimulants in a 30-day detox. "We limited stimulants by performing a factory reset: No loud music, no screens, no caffeine, no medication."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
Mind Wandering: More than a Bad Habit
Claire M. Zedelius, Madeleine E. Gross, and Jonathan W. Schooler
Researchers investigate the hidden habits beneath our awareness that contribute to the darker side of daydreaming. "An important part of our experience that seems to fit the concept of a mental habit is the tenacious tendency for our minds to ‘wander’ away from what we are doing and get drawn towards thoughts unrelated to the here and now. Mind wandering—engaging in stimulus- or task-unrelated thought—occupies roughly half of our waking hours."
Hand-picked book of the week
Dracula
Bram Stoker
In his epistolary novel, Dracula, Bram Stoker tells the chilling story of Count Dracula preying on victims in a Transylvanian castle. Although he didn’t create the first literary vampire, Stoker’s tale deeply influenced both Gothic and vampire fiction and continues to echo in countless adaptations.
"Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men’s eyes, because they know—or think they know—some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain."
This edition of Dracula is available through Standard Ebooks—you can check out their entire collection of free public domain ebooks here. Or you can subscribe to this neat Substack—Dracula Daily—that publishes entries corresponding with each date in Stoker’s novel from May to November.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
unzen
In his Substack, unzen, fellow Readwise user Cory Zanoni masterfully weaves his favorite quotes into reflective essays. From Changing your life takes more than just ideas: "Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen master who was a key figure in bringing mindfulness to the West, illustrated the power of attention in his beautiful book The sun, my heart: ‘Remember we are whatever we choose. Have you ever been on a beach when the sun rises, or on a mountain top at noon? Did you stretch your arms wide and breathe deeply, filling your lungs with pure, clean air, with unbounded immensity? Did you feel as if you were just the sky, the sea, the mountain?’"