📚 Anxious People, Product MVP Myth, Play Street, Filmmaking Process, Abandoned Ottoman Tomb in India

Strawberry with 2 ‘R’s, Are you a Local? Official Stick Reviews and more

Sep 02, 2024

Hi, this is post #174.

Last week, I revisited a couple of early posts from this newsletter. Today’s “Stay Curious” looks nothing like those. Through the years (yay!) of repeated efforts, the format has evolved. I cannot say if it is for better or worse. I would like to be believe it is for better, but such assessments are always subjective. What matters is that, no matter the changes, it has kept me excited.

Here’s what I have to offer you today. Needless to say, I am super excited about it and confident that you’re going to find something that you will love.

Here’s a quick outline:

Before we get to these, I’ve a small favor to ask. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, please do subscribe to get the future posts directly in your mailbox (or on your Substack app feed). If you are subscribed, then please forward this post to at least one person who you think will benefit from it. Your referrals have been a great help in spreading the joy of staying curious, let’s do some more of it!

And with that out of our way, let’s go to today’s finds…

📖 Book Review: Anxious People

Folks, I am super excited to declare that “Anxious People” by Fredrik Backman has climbed to the top of my book recommendation list. I have had a great year with books (and audiobooks) so far. And yet, this one easily toppled the charts.

I’m short of words to do justice to its goodness, so I am picking up a review from the Amazon profile that captures the essence fairly well.

"[A] tight-knit, surprise-filled narrative... the brisk, absorbing action prompts meditation on marriage, parenting, responsibility, and global economic pressures. Comedy, drama, mystery, and social study, this novel is undefinable except for the sheer reading pleasure it delivers. Highly recommended."—Library Journal (starred review)

And to give you a taste of what to expect, here’re some excerpts chosen randomly. Mind you, this book is filled with gems like this on every page.

“Expensive restaurants have bigger gaps between the tables. First class on airplanes has no middle seats. Exclusive hotels have separate entrances for guests staying in suites. The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.”
Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of; the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye.
“We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone.”

I listened to the audio version, it’s done very well. The narrator has killed it with her delivery. It was such an immersive reading experience! I was in the room, living all the drama and solving the mystery with her.

This book is simply unputdownable! I rate it 5/5, and if you allow me I would like to give an extra point for the brilliant narration.

⚓ Dispelling Product “MVP” Myth

“Dispelling the product "MVP" myth” picks up on Scott Belsky’s idea…

“I’ve had dozens of debates about what an MVP should and shouldn’t include,” Scott reveals, “the argument to ‘just get something out there and start learning’ is flawed in two critical ways: (1) You’ll burn early adopters fast if you don’t polish the few things that distinguish your product the most before launch, and (2) The natural tendency of every product team is to iterate around the MVP. Every MVP drops a heavy anchor in the sea of possibility and it becomes exponentially harder to explore new terrain once you start digesting data and iterating.”

We’re mindful of the first part, but become blind to the second one. And for a lot of projects, this second (and actually more crucial) part can be done well if you’re able to ask the right questions. ‘Why’ is often the most important of those. Author uses the example of the Guggenheim Museum to highlight this.

And that’s not it; there are a couple of lessons from Shonda Rhimes’s approach of building blockbuster shows as well.

And finally, here’s a good summation:

Scott has similar advice when it comes to what to include versus omit from an initial product launch: “Optimize for the problems you want to have. You WANT customers to get into your product and adopt it so fervently that they quickly suss out and request features to go further. You DON’T WANT anything that obstructs customers from finding immediate value.”

🚸 Play Streets for Kids

Stephanie H. Murray’s “What adults lost when kids stopped playing in the street” (archived here) offers a thought provoking take on a world where streets have been taken over by cars.

Here is how our world changed…

Modern folks tend to think that streets serve largely mobile purposes—getting cars from one place to another in swift, orderly fashion. But “prior to the automobile, streets had a ton of stationary functions,” Marcel Moran, a faculty fellow at New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, told me. Streets were where people sold wares and socialized. And particularly after the United States and Europe began to industrialize, streets were the primary location for the rising number of urban-dwelling children to play…

They have beautifully laid out the benefits of street play…

But the street outside a child’s home is very different from a playground or a private yard. It’s a space that connects one home to another and is used by all residents, regardless of age or whether they have kids. On the street, Chesterman told me, kids learn how to find the homes of other children within walking distance. They also encounter children outside their own age group and a broader variety of adults…

Finally, this bit about how this impacts the adults is worth pondering.

Children’s tendency to violate social boundaries—to stare a little too long, ask someone an overly forward question, or wander into someone else’s yard—can nudge adults to reach across those boundaries too. It probably isn’t a coincidence that playgrounds are one of the few places in America where striking up a conversation with a stranger is considered socially acceptable and even expected. By siloing play there, we may have inadvertently undercut children’s capacity to bind us to one another.

(via Dense Discovery)

🎦 Filmmaking Process

What goes into making an animated film?

A lot of things! From an idea to sound design to final readiness to be projected on a big screen, there is a lot that goes behind the scene to create magic on the screen. Disney Animation shares a glimpse of this world with this visual essay - Filmmaking Process.

It’s a fun read and uses references from “Wish” movie’s work as an example.

I cannot do justice to this story by sharing anything here, so I’m skipping that altogether. Just go for this story, you will be amazed to know the behind the scenes.

(via The Pudding)

🍓 Strawberry with 2 ‘R’s

So here’s the deal - AI can't spell 'strawberry'. You ask AI how many ‘R’ are there in the word strawberry and you will be surprised with the answer. This is not to prove that AI is dumb and AGI is just a pipe dream. Read it to know a bit more about the inner workings of LLMs and understand how it leads to its myriad limitations.

Here’s the relevant snippet:

Most LLMs are built on transformers, a kind of deep learning architecture. Transformer models break text into tokens, which can be full words, syllables, or letters, depending on the model.
[...]
This is because the transformers are not able to take in or output actual text efficiently. Instead, the text is converted into numerical representations of itself, which is then contextualized to help the AI come up with a logical response. In other words, the AI might know that the tokens “straw” and “berry” make up “strawberry,” but it may not understand that “strawberry” is composed of the letters “s,” “t,” “r,” “a,” “w,” “b,” “e,” “r,” “r,” and “y,” in that specific order. Thus, it cannot tell you how many letters — let alone how many “r”s — appear in the word “strawberry.”

The post goes on to expand the challenges faced by image generators (remember missing or extra fingers, wrong spelling in posters and imaginary words etc). A quick yet insightful read on a new age problem!

🏞️ Are you a Local?

Noah Kalina wonders what it means to be a local and how long it takes to really become one.

It’s not an easy question to answer, especially if you are open to go beyond the political/legal views. Noah collected responses from his readers and shared them in this short essay.

A couple of interesting answers that he gathered:

My hot take as a military kid who has continued to move around is that I think it's a little weird how people gatekeep being a "local." If you've lived somewhere long enough that you know your way around, have connected yourself with other locals and the local culture, are invested in the community, & see yourself continuing to stay there long term, I think you're a local. Local to me is about the relationship to a place, not a chunk of time.

In New England, the rule is simple. You are considered a local as soon as you have three grandparents who were born in the town where you live.

Some more answers in the original thread.

(via Kottke)

🔖 Long Reads

A couple of long reads for your midweek binging.

Revealed: Why there is an abandoned Ottoman tomb in remote India. Abdulmecid II, the last caliph, dreamt of resurrecting the caliphate abolished by Turkey. And India (Hyderabad, to be precise) was at the center of this plan. A fascinating read about a piece of history that’s often overlooked.
Inside the secret negotiations to free Evan Gershkovich. The effort to bring home The Wall Street Journal reporter and others unfolded on three continents, involving spy agencies, billionaires, political power players and his fiercest advocate—his mother. This is the plot of a Hollywood thriller.
The last line submitted a proposal of his own: After his release, would Putin be willing to sit down for an interview?

(via FF Insights)

✨ Everything else

Whenever Emergent Ventures announces the next cohort, I check it out with great curiosity. The mix of people who get selected, their background, their ideas - all make me excited about the idea of chasing something you believe in. These are young folks who are taking extraordinary ideas to life. Here’s the eighth cohort from India.
Official stick reviews, It just can not get better than this! (via TAoN newsletter)
Super unique lift in 36-year-old Pasir Panjang condo feels like riding a tram in Hong Kong. It’s sad that this is going to go away soon. (via MR Blog)
Finally, If you’re looking for more book recommendations, here’re my reviews of “Never Enough: From Barista to Billionaire” by Andrew Wilkinson (my rating: 3.5/5) and “What I Learned About Investing from Darwin” by Pulak Prasad (my rating: 4/5)