Saturday, 18 July 2026

Seth's Blog : Imminent, urgent, trending and important

The nearest lightning was 1, 200 miles away. At least that's what the weather site reported. When lightning is that unlikely, we don't worry about it much. It turns out that this is the best time to install a lightning arrestor on your home, though. The ...
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Imminent, urgent, trending and important

The nearest lightning was 1,200 miles away. At least that’s what the weather site reported.

When lightning is that unlikely, we don’t worry about it much.

It turns out that this is the best time to install a lightning arrestor on your home, though.

The urgency of the moment might be the push we need to take action, but if we rely on that, we’ve given up our agency to external events.

The media is hooked on selling us breaking news in whatever form they can discover–they need to break our rhythm and cajole us into clicking. But what they want and what we need might not be the same.

        

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Friday, 17 July 2026

Seth's Blog : Resources and focus

There are lots of things you can do, but it's not clear you should. OpenAI has virtually unlimited resources. And in addition to building a chat-based AI, they chose to launch pretty good image generation, a basketball, a meme video generator (since ...
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Resources and focus

There are lots of things you can do, but it’s not clear you should.

OpenAI has virtually unlimited resources. And in addition to building a chat-based AI, they chose to launch pretty good image generation, a basketball, a meme video generator (since cancelled), an upcoming speaker that actually moves around your house, and a myriad of other tools, with new ones coming all the time. A short list includes: Operator, Deep Research, Scheduled Tasks, Projects, Canvas, Connectors, famous voices and Record Mode.

At the same time, Anthropic follows a slower (sort of boring) path.

It’s precisely the same choices every solo freelancer and small business faces, except with more zeroes.

At its peak, Yahoo had nearly 200 links on its home page. They were defeated by Google, which had two.

Three things:

  1. More resources could mean you need more focus, not less.
  2. Innovation is critical, and focus shouldn’t be used as an excuse to hide.
  3. No is a complete sentence.
        

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