Creating institutional forms that can incorporate diversity and respond flexibly to a changing environment while maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of citizens is the fundamental project of state capacity that faces us.
especially in the "Dalio Market Principles Online" course I built with great partners at Singapore's Wealth Management Institute (WMI). The course has been completed by thousands of online learners around the world and has gotten great reviews. If you’re interested in joining its next cohort which is starting soon, you can learn more here.
The answer to every significant programming challenge in 2026 is a Python library you didn't think to go looking for because it's in Python and not Rust, as if that mattered anymore.
In an era where validating image authenticity is turning into a real challenge, I think we have to commend Apple for trying to do something in this field.
And maybe you won't get to 100% coverage, but this is the old joke about Microsoft Office. "I only use 5%." Yeah, well, we all use a different 5%. Well, what if we all just build our own 5%? What if I just took the functionality that I need and just did that? That is a completely different challenge and one agents are incredibly capable of doing right now, today, and I've done it a lot of times over.
The first is that new AI models have the know-how to escape containment in testing environments, which should challenge any assumption that advanced AI can be easily controlled by its makers.
the challenge with a lot of these cyber capable models is the same model that is able to sort of do something nefarious is the same model that can be very valuable in hardening an existing system.
if you have a bear or a tiger, you know, something charging at you, that challenge requires a control of behavior that's intermediate between those two extremes. I can't have a reflex for a bear if it's far away or if it's close or if it's a rattlesnake or or or a tiger or all the different kinds of potential threats out there. Instead, I need something that's more flexible, which emotions are.
Thinking Forth by Leo Brodie. I used to have this habit where I learned various programming languages. To challenge my perspective, I chose languages from families and paradigms that were fundamentally different from what I already knew. Occasionally, I stumbled upon greatness. Thinking Forth presents programming as a creative process, and it delivers those lessons in an entertaining and pedagogical way. The book is particularly strong on software analysis and design, but it's the execution and technical writing that brought the book to my top five. This is the book for anyone writing about software — Leo's way is the way to do it.
Even if you're doing hard ones, if you look at the work of people like uh Gloria Mark, the things like crossword and sudoku, they're less of like a true cognitive challenge, right? It's it's almost has more of like a meditation meditative like effect, right? Which can be a good thing, right? So you're focused but not challenged really.
I think the challenge is that everyone can now build apps But 1) almost nobody has distribution (like an audience), or 2) the money to pay for distribution (ads or UGC), or 3) the creative genius to get distribution for free (classically called guerilla marketing)
Their words now
I thought it'd be distribution but who knows, obviously creativity and ideas, but if you can copy a successful app in an hour, then how does that differentiating work?
So a a big challenge in object-oriented programming is dividing the responsibilities because you're moving the computation to where the data is. Saying, "Well, this object does this and that object does that is a really critical decision because you want to you want the computation near to the data so that there's less coupling between them." which is a lesson that I I think uh kind of got lost in the noise. That's the fundamental design move in ob in designing object-oriented programs and I I think I stand behind that.
If you all pivot to AI, then you all will have a problem. It's like kids learning to play soccer. They all run to the ball. No strategy. Spread out, figure where you add value and play your position.
Sixteen is also roughly the age by which a majority of adolescents have completed puberty: a sensitive period of neural reorganization during which it is extremely important to protect the brain.
I say now that China’s biggest challenge is consumption, it’s not production. We know that China’s very, very competitive in production and supply. China needs to be a consuming country to be a rich country.
Another challenge for Class II biotechs is that even if you have a nifty computational drug discovery platform, you are still often bottlenecked by the rest of the drug development process. It takes 1,000 (or more!) small steps to advance a drug through discovery, development, and past the regulators.
Because patents have fixed term lengths, with small extensions to compensate for the year or so when the drug is under regulatory review, drug developers are incentivized to go after conditions where clinical trials can be completed quickly, all else being equal.
Mestre and Docktor tackle this challenge by reviewing the large body of literature on learning physics. I plan on writing a full review of their book, which I found to be a helpful summary.
But once the demographics reverse, the challenge will be to find a person for every job. In the coming years, the impact of demographic changes is going to lead to chronic labor shortages.
Everything is negotiable. Challenge authority. You have the power in any situation. This is how to realize it and use it. A must-read classic from 1980 from a master negotiator. My notes here aren’t enough because the little book is filled with so many memorable stories — examples of great day-to-day moments of negotiation that will stick in your head for when you need them. (I especially loved…
If we collectively devoted the same levels of investment and inventive power and entrepreneurship to developing more and better legal pathways for people to move across borders to needed jobs, including a variety of modalities for labor mobility, we could solve the growing challenge of labor scarcity.
This brings us to the central challenge of all content tracing proposals so far: to make tracing possible, a tracing system needs to turn every WhatsApp user (including the originator) into a cooperative green circle — regardless of whether users actually want to cooperate with police.
We challenge this approach. It encourages design by committee and infuses a superficial sense of collaboration that leads to compromises and weakens ideas. Our view, the product of years of studies of and participation in innovation projects, is that effective teams do not defer critical reflection; they create through criticism.
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