I found a definition for love this year that made the concept of unconditional love coherent to me Love is a pattern of attention In every person/place/thing/idea there is some reflection of “the good” When you love something, you orient towards whatever glimmer of good is in it, no matter how faint, you sensitize yourself to it, and by directing your attention to it, you will nurture it and help it grow Hatred is the opposite, it is finding some flaw or fault in a thing and letting that fill your mind so much that the flaw blinds you to even the hint of goodness

Just stop drinking

In a single image this is why I hate Reddit and all it stands for

We voted! God bless New Hampshire where you can carry your baby and your long gun into your polling place without issue. Live free or die!

"Balaji was right" might be the most terrifying phrase in the English language.

The meme is very true, and represents the Epistemic reformation we’re in midst of right now Many still make the move of trusting “the pope of science” aka the Harvard/Yale/NYT/NGO consensus of experts They go to bed, ignore the decentralized “show me the data” analysis of autists who want to look for themselves, and end us seeing painful reality of how incentives have eaten away at these institutions and unmoored them from reality but by bit and generation by generation. A lot of you on here in fact ARE smarter and more reality based than the “experts” that won their position by going along to get along… It isn’t THAT hard to find something the world’s “top doctors and scientists missed” when their funding or tenure depends on them not seeing it… but it isn’t rational for median person to trust you, and they reject your contratarían claims because to follow every argument and check each step of your reasoning for themselves would be a DDOS on their attention 30 years war was bloody, this reformation, especially in hot flashes like during Covid has been and will be brutal too. It won’t be rational for mainstream to reallocate authority to uncredentialized amateurs - no matter how much more correct they are, until there is a very legible and scalable way to delegate trust, so that not everyone has to fact check everything the independent shadow academy — the invisible college — the commons — the bazaar— puts forward against the cathedral of “expert consensus” that is so often state sponsored scientism

Home safe and sound!

Our son was born late evening on the winter solstice of Dec 21st 2024, arriving at 8lbs 7oz. His mom was insanely impressive. Unmedicated natural birth, which may well have killed her in the Iron Age, fortunately she had a wonderful team of midwives and the miracles of modern medicine to get through a rough aftermath. They’re both recovering beautifully.

Every time I try to design a process for our team in Roam, keep coming back to this. Complex systems that work ALWAYS emerge from simple systems that worked first

I'm a big fan of writing down what I plan to do, and how I plan to do it (in detail) before I get going. Why? Because sometimes I realize as I am halfway through writing things out that there is a fundamentally better approach then I can skip a ton of needless work!

Like this tweet if you would pay $500 for a 5 year subscription to @RoamResearch With - Priority support - Offline only mode (all data stored locally only, not sent to server) - Quarterly group video-call with the leadership team. - Your name on a page of true believers.

2.75M ARR Over 40% Month over Month rev growth Still no marketing No native onboarding No real desktop app No mobile app Early adopter market for @RoamResearch might be bigger than even I predicted.

I take back all criticisms I’ve made about the current state of culture and art We’re doing great. This is amazing.

Friday

We applied to YC many times Never got an interview Even when we had six figures of revenue pre-launch from the AI researchers who paid us for feature requests on the alpha When got coaching from former YC partner, discovered "Notes app" category gets u flagged for trash bin.

“Fuck around and find out” is a noble virtue in truth-seeking civilizations. Few seem to know this.

Brings me back to winter 2019 - when @RoamResearch had less than 5k in the bank and no leads on investors. @NotionHQ was famously turning $$$ away, so gave @ivanhzhao a demo, offered to share our research if he would invest or help us raise. "We have enough ideas" he said...

I was wrong. You guys were right. Having a native mobile app for Roam is actually fucking awesome

Anything worth doing is worth doing wrong. Only way to start.

Water broke early this morning, waiting for contractions to start. Pray for us and the baby.

Update: @RoamResearch launching End to End Encrypted option for graphs tonight. It’s a major feature - verifiable technical assurance of privacy. Means you don’t have to trust us (or the tech giants we use) to secure your notes for you. Tradeoff is: Lost password = lost graph

Here’s a concrete example Perhaps you know the feeling of the first time waking up on a Saturday morning next to some beautiful hilarious fascinating person you’re infatuated with and there is absolutely nothing in the world you’d rather do than just hang out with them and just BE. The best morning like that I ever had when dating was like 10% of the TYPICAL morning I have with my toddler crawling all over me and my wife. My daughter is the coolest person I’ve ever met and it’s not close.

Just shipped our biggest new feature in a very long time. Makes Anki style SRS flashcards a first class feature of Roam, solves repeating tasks, continuing a project across multiple days, an overflowing backlog of TODOS, and much more. Will demo to believers this weekend ∆

A brief rant on note-taking apps and the structure of thought. Or "Why Evernote is a terrible second brain."

We did it!

Marcel Mauss talked about this in “The Gift”, in a gift economy the transactions are as much about the escalation of intimacy as exchange of material goods. The ideal situation is that when one party pays the other back they overpay at least a bit, thus continuing the debt bond

The risk is not desensitization, but sensitization, and not sex but love and bonding coupled with narrative collapse that is greater danger. When you’re bonding with a person in emotionally heightened state, neuroplasticity off the charts, new memories forming, anchoring to them, trillions of weights adjusting. That song, that drive, the way they like eggs, everything is heavy with meaning. You’re fine tuning subtle social patterns on them. Learning them. This is a major feature if you’re starting a life together and hopefully compounds with help of predicative processing so your old man brain is literally running their face through a built in Snapchat filter and the 80 year old is experienced as unassailably the most beautiful person alive, you’ve learned to see them in 1000 different ways, and everything reminds you of them. If traumatic breakup follows though (lost love should be traumatic), pain of the breakup backpropogates through system, presents itself as triggers, emotional walls, you are anti-patterns that can inhibit bonding with your next partner. Which is why standard advice from friends is to FORGET that ex.

Wow. I take the past for granted. Reminder that someone invented this stuff.

Did you read the bill? It’s literally the opposite of that. Lists the history as essential knowledge, bans saying one race is superior to another, or saying individuals are inherently racist or oppressive because of their race. Wonder why folks could be losing trust in news?

Announcement 1: after months and months of hard work from @hashbrown490 and our eng team, we've built the new back end that allows for API and Multiplayer. Next week 20-30 users who have plans to build off API, or have multiplayer experiments they want to run will get 1st access

Yeah but they aren’t putting ciggys in my McNuggets

How many companies have hit $1M ARR within 2 months of starting to charge? I know at least one, but curious if there are others.

Last time I bought a vehicle it was for under $2,500 and I lived in it for a year. Pretty sure that was less than 6 years ago.

Single purpose hardware is the future

After incessant demands - we have changed the @RoamResearch loading icon to be an SVG instead of a PNG. To the 50 people who will be able to tell the difference - you're welcome.

Just do the call again sober and implement any ideas that still sound good

Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama — and very few others — designed their organizations to get them maximum [[Return on Attention]] I knew about Bezos’ silent meetings. 💕 to @samhinkie for showing me Obama’s [[multiple-choice presidential briefs]] 10/10 EXCEPTIONAL INFORMATION DESIGN

The Zettelkasten. "It's like the GTD for intellectual progress" What it is, and why you want one. (thread)

Funny looking swing makes whole thing like 10,000x better To the point that this is a clear sign of virtue

Thread of threads on @RoamResearch and general thoughts on knowledge, notes, and collective intelligence Best place to start is with one we didn't have any part in writing

Not a joke. Roam Mobile for iOS is in the App Store apps.apple.com/us/app/roam-m…

The partially covered crucifix is another interesting detail

[[Intermediate Deliverables]]

I was wrong about the war in Gaza

Three times I've written drafts of this thread in my Roam, and three times I've failed to publish it. But Feynman is right So for next 4 hours: one like one tweet on difficult lessons and painful mistakes I made as CEO in 2021 In the words of Bill O'Reilly "We'll do it live"

Reminder that expertise is real, good experts make counterintuitive non-consensus predictions that turn out correct Balaji was right

Therapy: an expensive conversation with a highly credentialed progressive about how other people hurt you. Confession: a free conversation with a highly credentialed conservative about how you hurt other people.

This applies to EVERYTHING Get into flow, if the work is triggering anxiety, ease off, it’s it’s boring, turn on the gas

Big news. We figured out how to make Roam available to folks who don't want data stored in the cloud. (Though you'll eventually definitely want that for some notes at least) Stay tuned.

In the spirit of Christmas, I'll do a @vgr style ratchet of one tweet per like on the intersection of Jesus Evolution The Simulation Argument Julian Jaynes & Predictive Processing No cap. No deadline either though.

Update: Patrick Collison, our beloved goat, has given birth to twins.

Something you should pay attention to if you’re watching @DustinPoirier’s post game interview. He just knocked out Conor McGregor, and says he “feels good but..” just wants to get home to his daughter. SO MANY PEOPLE our age completely missing how much better life is with kids.

This past weekend I was baptized and confirmed into the Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints. One of the witnesses recorded my testimony after @cayblood and I came out of the lake. You can watch it here piped.video/watch?v=f6dMVssv…

Big news. We’ve built an App Store for Roam where extensions will be reviewed for security by the Roam team, developers can charge, and where we’ll be sharing some % of our top line revenue with extension maintainers We’re calling it #roamdepot Follow @hashbrown490 for details

Donating blood is the only way to rid your body of toxic “forever chemicals” For many reasons I’ll thread below it is incredibly healthy To the point that I’ve looked into paying someone to come to my work to take my blood, I must dig into this

You don't need to learn anything besides writing a few words you think are important in [[these brackets]], and hitting tab. The rest is just folks getting excited and building on that foundation. Very easy gateway, and many very capable people never feel need to go beyond.

100 Opinions on this -- prompted by @vgr Will have to break for a call any minute, but will do best to free associate in meantime.

Official @RoamResearch pricing. Very close to opening the waitlist for those ready to put down a card. Everyone already in the beta will have at least a month more of free usage - but will need to upgrade if you want multiple graphs/workspaces or to try out offline-only mode.

@NotionHQ backlinks give you seriously NONE of the benefits that backlinks give you in Roam. They're links to pages, not blocks, no inheritance or intersections, clearly stapled on to try to catch the wave. 20 months of watching Roam's rise and this is all you've got to show?

If you don’t admire RFK JR. for taking his young daughter and a chainsaw to the beach to collect the scull of a beached whale and drive it 5 hours back on the roof of a minivan You’re a plebeian and I renounce you

Have been working with the door closed for the past few years. @nikitonsky and I agreed yesterday that it's about time we kick it down. Goal for the next 6 weeks: 30 tweet sized demos of small improvements and experiments shipped to @RoamResearch Threaded here. Wish us luck!

Has anyone ever seen a phone or computer in a dream? For how much of our waking attention they get, surprisingly absent. I can’t recall ever seeing any screen in any dream.

Yeah I’m long Costco

Was burning out on emails today - so I took an hour or so off to make a new hidden feature for @RoamResearch {{mermaid}} * text nested beneath this get's interpreted as instructions for generating diagram using mermaid lang mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid… roamresearch.com/#/app/help/…

Cool hearing @pmarca cite “Never Eat Alone” by @ferrazzi Rather that worrying about how to break into “the network”, flip the problem, and be the person who connects people. Be the network, doesn’t matter what stage you’re at. One of most important books in my career.

Will be doing some more work on the Roam Mobile App this weekend, thinking about something @micsolana and @webdevMason said in a clubhouse chat earlier today. A twitter for just yourself. There is something about the twitter UI for writing blocks that seems really interesting.

Inspired by @Malcolm_Ocean - made a little Pomodoro timer for @RoamResearch tonight {{POMO}} will give you button that when you press, starts a 25 minute timer - then gives you a 5 minute break. Have used this system a bunch in the past en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodo…

Ideas don't belong to us. We don't "have them" - we're just the vessel they flow through. Ideas find their way through you when you're living at the edge of their [[Adjacent Possible]] This is how Newton and Liebneitz both discovered Calculus independently. Living on same edge.

Started learning more about the golden era of American motor companies, and it dawned on me. SF is the new Detroit.

Only way to start is wrong. This was @RoamResearch 5 years ago.

Well.... Turns out @obsdmd is fucking gorgeous. Damn fine job Shida and Erica. Seriously impressed.

Block references are about to get a LOT more powerful Hold onto your f*ckin hats #roamcult

Spirits are patterns of thought that live in your mind, reproduce through memes, and shape the world through the people they possess. Embody Santa.

We're pushing up a change in that will let you install Roam on your phone's home screen, which will allow you to 🥁🥁🥁 Share tweet via... @RoamResearch

Twitter as a company is culturally oriented around NOW. Product reflects this. The Twitter users who search their own and others timelines for building webs of threads are hacking the platform to build a collaborative Memex (memory extension) Eventually those users will migrate

Round was quite oversubscribed, and very grateful to investors who took lower allocation than their normal minimum. We felt like 10M was a good round number, and saved last 1M for the #roamcult - starting w Believers We expect to create a lot of value before IPO. Want you w us.

The good ones cross the chasm - and then we just call it culture.

Men in tech if you’ve got 50k in savings and you aren’t willing to give your girlfriend kids THIS YEAR if she wants them... grow the f**k up, stop wasting her time.

Happy Friday y'all Quality of life improvement for @RoamResearch, shift-clicking "Daily Notes" will now open today's note in your sidebar.

Mason got me a hat!

We earned more in the first 48 hours of offering the True Believer plan than we earned OR raised in the first two years of @RoamResearch Thank you citizens of Roam. We'll be here for long haul.

The Variable Schedule Reward Zettelkasten. A strategy for Memexing Twitter (to get better ideas, and build new relationships)

Happy 4th of July! America is in many ways the first and most successful start-up society, but if we're lucky it won’t be the last. Celebrating our past today by reading a roadmap from @balajis to our possible future. God Bless America, and God Bless the coming Network States

Big day today

The biggest danger in Capitalism is that people with Money invest large amounts of it into convincing you to give them more Biggest danger in Democracy is that people with Power invest large amounts of it into convincing you to give them more Neither system helps you seek truth

During the Islamic Golden age the House of Wisdom would pay scholars the weight of translated books in gold. Tomorrow is the start of #Ramadan and there is knowledge from that era I would very much like to see translated into @RoamResearch Seems appropriate to pay w #BTC 🧵

Most of the productivity discourse seems to be about top-down planning Most how we think and talk about project management is in that paradigm too My focus is on bottom up project management: Breaking things down into ever smaller pieces - then exploring how they fit together

Never forget. They lied and people died.

Every time I've posted a job for @RoamResearch publicly this year, we've had huge flood of applicants and its been overwhelming to try to parse signal from noise. Sense there were strong candidates from unconventional backgrounds we were passing up. Trying something new.

In other news @azlenelza is starting at @RoamResearch next week.

Willpower is at best a short term solution, whenever you reach for it, consider it a signal your systems need changing. Image credit @haseebinc

It’s a girl!

Announcement 3: We've committed 1M from our balance sheet, and 1M from our option pool to a [[Roam Fund]]. For makers building Tools for Thought generally... And founders building new products/experiences via our API, or content businesses off Roam multiplayer specifically.

Wat

Interesting 🧵 here: a communist podcaster who makes $65k per month on @Patreon, who I have now learned is dating the campaign manager for an SF district supervisor... tweets about murdering @micsolana a few days after twitter asks him to run for local office Tech sure is evil

The people who spend 60+ years with their high school sweetheart EXPECT the person will change so much they might be unrecognizable, they expect they’ll change too in that change, there is bound to be novelty 1000 different versions of your soulmate, some great, some not, each shining light on others you see before Might end up far less boring than 10 or 100 casual lovers who can only show you who they are at the moment you meet, who can only imagine who you were or will become. Imagine your frame on either matters. Same food could dull or sharpen different pallets depending on approach.

Most expert knowledge is vibes. Most verbal reasoning is lies

Strongly strongly considering closing signups to @RoamResearch and putting up a waitlist.