I’ve been “quiet quitting” Twitter for many years now. I got on it in 2008 and after the first 6 years or so, the service was just never nearly as appealing. Personally, the net value the service brings to my life has gone lower and lower these last few years. There’s some good stuff on it but you’re better off reading newspapers, books or watching TV.

I can see why a lot of established tech people and VCs in a select few ecosystems probably disagree — many of their peers have been active on here throughout and they echo sentiments to each other in these little bubbles and that probably makes them feel validated. But if you’re an outsider like myself, you’re basically just ranting to yourself publicly. You’d think that makes you feel good, even liberated somehow.. but it’s an illusion. I think the value it adds to your life skews towards zero, or net negative in many cases.

And if you’re non-tech / VC but influential, then Twitter is undoubtedly a daily hazard for you. One wrong tweet and all hell can break loose. Having that kind of risk in your career is so unnecessary. It makes no sense.

Longer form blogging is a much more thoughtful, healthy and intelligent use of your time & effort. Even if nobody is reading it, it brings clarity of thought.

Email has a much higher ROI for building your network or as a distribution platform. Some Substack and newsletter authors make millions of dollars every year. How much do successful tweeters make? I think my guess is good as anybody’s and everyone knows what the answer is.

The most enjoyable parts of Twitter are parody and meme accounts. But there’s just a handful of them. And they’re certainly not making any significant money from Twitter.

So there’s a lot of unbundling that can happen I think. And it’ll happen I think in the form of new networks or added content to existing networks. I think Jack Dorsey realized this to an extent. His idea of open-sourcing Twitter is actually not so bad.

However, the lofty goals that Elon Musk has set are at this point I feel just not possible to achieve with this service. He perhaps realized this and tried to back out of the deal but it was too late. A $44bn write off is going to be a big one for the books, but he should be able to sell it for parts. He’s not an idiot. It wasn’t sheer luck that made him the richest individual on the planet.

It’s best to leave the party before only the hosts are left. (And in this case, the original hosts had left more than a minute ago). So I will be sneaking out the door to spend my time in things that have higher ROI. I wish Elon Musk the best of luck trying to revive this party that feels like it was already over well before he arrived.

✌🏾 Twitter.

Ideas can outlast human lives, last for generations and spark revolutions.

Steve Jobs is no more but his ideas still live on in the tools many of us use daily. I interact with his ideas every day.

Thomas Edison’s ideas live on whenever we turn on the switch every evening to illuminate our living spaces.

Ideas of Ancient Greeks around democracy live on as people vote during midterm elections in the United States or state elections in India to put their desired political leaders in power.

Ideas for gender equality from its early advocates live on as organizations and societies modify policies of the past in response to activism.

Good ideas improve the quality of life in this universe. Bad ideas can do the opposite. Like good ideas, bad ideas can last a while. But history has shown us that bad ideas tend to be replaced by better ideas eventually, either incrementally or by an order of magnitude. Occasionally, at great cost to humanity, bad ideas can take the place of good ideas, albeit this is almost always temporary.

It’s not hard to have good ideas. Great ideas take a little more thinking. The courage to share those ideas with the world — that’s a lot harder. The willingness to work to convert an idea into an actionable plan and to actually take those actions — that requires a lot of effort.

But how you begin is by having ideas. Ideas come from observing and thinking. Ideas are refined by sharing.

Ideas are harder to come by when your mind is constantly consuming or working day in and day out without reflection or thinking. Ideas come more easily when your mind is not tired.

On the plane of māyā / physical manifestation of reality, ideas feel rather abstract. But on some higher plane, ideas seem like living creatures — breathing, growing, moving.

Ideas are special. Ideas are mysterious. Ideas are the invisible, visible secret sauce of this universe.

September went by too fast. I couldn’t find the time or the mental wherewithal to publish anything more than fleeting tweets. I spent some time on the West Coast. Of late, especially the last two months, despite my efforts, inner peace has been elusive. In fact, that’s been the theme of this year so far. For most of the year, I’ve felt incredibly off-center. Lots of anger, lots of sadness yet lots of growth and healing, but in an interminable rotation. Overall, it’s been an annoying and confusing year, not unlike the on-going state of geopolitical affairs and financial markets. As always, I’ll only be able to connect the dots later in the future and will hope things make sense instead of just being a big ugly jumbled mess.

In the complicated mess that life usually is, TV brings comfort for many. And I am a big fan of comfort viewing. This is why this year I’ve mostly rewatched episodes of shows that have brought me comfort in the past. A twinge of nostalgia is probably activated upon channeling that comfort of the past. That can be a beautiful thing or it can spiral into unproductive longing to live in the past. Afraid of the latter, over the last couple of weeks, I decided to explore my desire to find new binge-worthy shows.

Navigating the oceanic swaths of waters in this Age of the Streaming Wars, I luckily landed upon three shows rather quickly that would live up to my “binge-worthy” criteria, each on a different network. Without further ado, the shows:

Panchayat (Prime Video)

This comedy drama set in a small fictional village in Uttar Pradesh, India weaves very real themes and dilemmas of small town India with incredibly potent comedy in an immersive tapestry of human emotions that I feel many Indians will relate to. Of course, being from Bihar, I was able to connect to the screenplay on a whole other level. Hats off to TVF and the cast of this show. Not just Jitendra Kumar whom I’ve enjoyed watching over the years in Pitchers and Kota Factory before, but the other established actors like Neena Gupta (who clearly never seems to age on screen), Raghubir Yadav and Faisal Malik pull their weight spectacularly, along with the young newcomer Chandan Roy who is thoroughly impressive.

Seasons 3 and 4 often break a good show or propel one to greatness and only time will tell whether Panchayat can live up to its blockbuster initial success.

Uncoupled (Netflix)

Romcoms set in NYC hold a special place in my heart and I’m always on the lookout for a good one.. but I’m disappointed way too often. The Neil Patrick Harris-starring Uncoupled however was a delight to watch. It felt like Sex and The City but a lot more diverse and made for the iMessage generation. I was hooked. I feel like it’s good enough to return for a Season 2. Let’s see if Netflix thinks so.

Andor (Disney+)

I’m not sure if I will go to the extent of raving about this show with the intensity that well-known tech journalist Casey Newton recently expressed in a tweet, but it is pretty good. This prequel of sorts to Rogue One has a real darkness to it that feels core to the soul of Star Wars. Also, how it explores the corporate underpinnings of the Galactic Empire feels reminiscent of the Time Keepers plot of Marvel’s Loki but real, dark stuff instead of quirky multiverse comedy. At least that’s how I feel as of the first 5 episodes. Let’s see how it fairs over the remaining 7.

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On a related note, I’ve been using an app called Queue to keep a 📺 diary. It’s a beautiful app and the team in LA has been iterating fast. In case you download it, feel free to follow me (@sidjha) on there.

Late last year, I was looking for a timer watch I could use during workouts. An Apple Watch or Fitbit seemed like the default option for many. Even though, in the early 2010s, I was a user of the Pebble watch (RIP) way before smartwatches went mainstream, I never really had a thing for smartwatches. I don’t think I ever wore my Pebble after the first few days of trying it. There wasn’t a whole lot the software could do and charging it felt like a chore. The subsequent release of the Apple Watch was most certainly cool. Though, I’ve never bought in. Yes, believe it or not, I work in tech and I’ve never had an Apple Watch. I’m aware that founders, VCs and generally anyone techy or not swear by their Watches now and I definitely get the appeal, but I’m simply hesitant to add another device to my lifestyle that will give me push notifications.

After loads of research, I stumbled upon this magnificent Hodinkee review by Jack Forster and got myself the $25 Casio AE1200WH-1A World Timer watch. 8 months later, in retrospect, it was the best $25 I ever spent.

What I originally bought as a fitness watch has really become my primary watch. In the words of Jack Forster of Hodinkee:

Like all really great tool watches – the classic Mark series pilot’s watches, for example – the AE1200WH-1A gives every indication of not having been designed, per se, at all, but like the Mark series, its pragmatism in design and execution manages to transcend simple functionality, and achieve an aesthetic all its own. This is watchmaking at its most straightforward and unpretentious; there is none of the smug sanctimony of so much modern watchmaking, where even at the entry level, it is becoming distressingly easy to find the sort of sophomorically clichéd design cues reserved in former times for things much more expensive. The plastic case and mineral glass crystal, as it turns out, reward closer scrutiny with a surprisingly rich display of somewhat muted but strangely elegant geometry, and while the AE1200WH-1A doesn’t have the broad-shouldered tough-guy vibe of the G-Shock, it has another kind of retro-tech appeal that while not apparent at first glance, becomes more pronounced and more enjoyable the longer you wear the watch. Link

I couldn’t agree more.

Some of my dream watches that I wish to own some day are in the thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars range. Doctor Strange wears one of them. But even if I ever do end up becoming wealthy enough to afford those kinds of luxuries, I actually think I might still be wearing this $25 Casio AE1200WH a whole lot.

It’s a great reminder that things that bring you joy don’t have to be expensive.

Album art looks really good on iOS 16’s Lock Screen. I like how it takes up most of the screen and how the background blends in.

Album art plays such a key role in exuding a record’s vibes. Over the last 5 years, in the previous releases of iOS (iOS 11 to 15), the now playing on the lock screen was pretty boring. Album art was tiny. It just didn’t do justice to the artist. But finally blowing it up again like this was a good design decision. I imagine this to be exactly the kind of feature that Steve Jobs would’ve loved. And come fall, when iOS 16 is publicly released, I think music lovers will appreciate it greatly.

Whoever is heading up product on the Lock Screen team at Apple has a super exciting job for the next little while. I think it’s some of most impactful work you can do in tech — extremely high-touch real estate that hundreds of millions of people are going to interact with hundreds of times a day. How can you make their lives more convenient? Every little customization option, every little pixel and how content is distributed through it matters so much here.

Today, I went to an art gallery. There was a cool exhibition on one of the floors that had on display, among many artifacts, an assortment of Polaroids, typed letters, handwritten notes and a few home videos. These tidbits had been collected from the lives of well-known artists like David Hockney, Andy Warhol and also from just regular people around the world.

Walking through this exhibit made me wonder what similarly-themed exhibits will look like a few decades from now. The majority of stuff we document now is digital. Unlike daily life relics from the past which we can touch, feel and visibly see signs of aging in, today’s artifacts exist in the cloud. The same underlying data can take the form of a website, a grid of files in a filesystem, a social media feed, a slideshow, a series of emails and so on. There is a considerable degree of interoperability of digital data while the need to print any of this stuff is rapidly reducing.

The visual presentation and consumption of most of today’s artifacts occurs via screens. Does that mean most of the galleries of the future will simply be corridors and corridors of screens?

Or at some point, will we just get tired of looking at digital bits all the time and instead will increasingly prefer things we can hold, touch and smell? Kind of like how there is a growing subculture of young people bringing back Polaroids and 35mm film to document their lives.

One reason why I think that appeals to lots of people is how analog / physical objects of the past composed of atoms and molecules exude a lot more character. Like how an aged letter on A4 paper develops a yellowish tinge and can be folded and stuffed inside an envelope that has a very distinct design. Or a pen someone wrote with. Or a printed issue of Cosmopolitan magazine and the sound the pages make when you flip through.

But as our creation and consumption habits become more and more digital, the tools used by people of today and in the near future will increasingly be software. And the stuff we’ll be creating with those tools will be digital. In today’s world, in my opinion, the majority of software tools and the visual presentations enabled by them lack character, which makes me wonder whether an exhibition in the gallery of the future with artifacts from current daily life will be as enjoyable and exciting as the ones we can visit today.

That said, there’s much to be invented in this decade around VR/AR that it’s very early to tell what affordances will be possible around our data and what will presenting and consuming it will look and feel like. But my guess is that the form factors our data are visually presented in will be radically altered over the course of this decade.

I recently unearthed on YouTube an absolute gem of a conversation held at a Vanity Fair event about 7 years ago between designer Jony Ive, film director JJ Abrams and film producer Brian Grazer — three individuals who are true legends of the creative domain. The convo delivers a volume of timeless creative insights you will rarely find distilled anywhere else in such a free-flowing fashion.

There is one part of the convo that struck me the most and it’s something I think I will keep coming back to over the course of my career. It was the answer to Brazer’s question about the role of emotionality in the respective creative processes of Abrams and Ive. It starts here. And below is the full video:

Another fun part at the beginning of the convo was the way JJ Abrams described his old Powerbook and the power of great tools.

If you haven’t seen this conversation before, watch the whole thing if you have time.

Several months ago, I did a big switch from Spotify to Apple Music due to the savings from the Apple One bundle as I was already paying for other stuff like News+, iCloud separately. I do miss the quality and variety of playlists on Spotify, but as long as there are cost savings (~$20/mo), I think I can live without it. Plus, I ported all my Spotify playlists over anyway.

Apple Music offers the ability to listen in Spatial Audio in addition to lossless audio compression. However, Spatial Audio is only available for the most recent or higher-end AirPods models. I still have the old 1st generation AirPods so I don’t get to try it on-the-go.

In my home / office, I generally stream music (mostly sci-fi film scores during the day) to my Sonos One or Sonos Play:3 which also don’t seem to have Spatial Audio support.

Over the 1.5 years I’ve been on the Apple Silicon / M1 Macbook Air, I have rarely played music directly through the Air speakers, but out of curiosity, I started to just about a week ago. And wow, it actually sounds really good. Spatial Audio + Lossless can make a track come alive. You can feel like the music is coming from all around you.

I’ll be listening to music directly on my Air speakers a lot more. The M2 Air which at some point I’d like to upgrade to has a 4-speaker sound system as opposed to stereo and I’m curious how different that will sound.

I wouldn’t be alone to admit that one of my most important possessions is my Gmail archive. I’ve used Gmail since it launched in 2004 as my primary personal email. This information isn’t public so I don’t know for sure, but Gmail probably had users in the low millions that year. Well over a billion people use the service now. Paul Buccheit, the former Google employee who invented Gmail, must feel good about his project progressing from just an idea to billions of users.

For most of the 2000s, texting wasn’t really a thing and most important communication happened over email. From time to time, I go looking for emails dating back well over a decade for inspiration or simply nostalgia — it gives me a peek into how a younger me thought about some topic at that time or an insight someone I communicated with had. And other times it’s information from the past I quickly want to find out like for my last post I wanted to check what year I started using Instapaper. A quick Gmail archive search gave me the answer. This utility is priceless to me.

Through the 2010s, more and more communication moved from email to texting. But I seldom find myself searching for old texts like I do with email. This is probably because a) texts are not as thoughtful as email since they’re more in-the-moment, and b) searching for texts is a user experience which has always sucked.

Email search also sucked before Gmail. But Google, originally a search company, was in the best position to fix that. And they did it well. I believe the ease of search was a big reason why Gmail continued to resonate so much with its users.

Like Gmail, for similar reasons, my iCloud Photos is another very important possession. It has all the beautiful (and mundane) moments of my life I’ve managed to capture of myself and with other people, and of places and time.

Sometimes I can’t believe how much I rely on these two services to keep my prized data safe. I put my trust in them. And I have to continue to do so throughout my life. I don’t have any other option. I feel comforted by the fact that they are the world’s biggest companies and probably won’t go out of business in my lifetime. But I also feel unnerved that they are after all companies — an everchanging set of people and priorities — and in the world of capitalism, companies are ultimately driven by bottom lines.

Yet, I try not to worry about it like how I don’t really worry about the safety of the cash in my bank accounts. We trust these companies running these services to keep our important possessions safe. As humans, trust is often all we can offer.

Late last year, I decided to try Matter. Matter is a fairly new reading app that lets you save a URL of interest to read later. I’ve been using ‘read it later’ services for longer than I can remember. IIRC, it was my good friend Aareet that introduced me to Instapaper back in 2009 after we had brainstormed our own idea for an ‘interesting links manager’.

I think I used Instapaper up until it was acquired by Pinterest, following which I switched to Pocket. I used Pocket for many many years and probably saved and read thousands of articles through it. ‘Read it later’ is one microcategory of software where all a user needs is a solution that “just works”. Bells and whistles are generally a distraction in these products and often get in the way.

Since its launch, Matter has iterated fast. With Matter II, it achieved a level of usability and simplicity that I felt comfortable enough to move to it from Pocket entirely. There’s something wholesome about the clean lines, beautiful typography and little thoughtful touches like haptic feedback on taps and lack of an unread badge.

I also like the fact that it functions as an RSS reader. People have declared the death and comeback of RSS over the last decade more times than I can remember — just do a Google search. But it continues to live on. I now read blogs that I love like Daring Fireball and AVC most days via RSS subscriptions in Matter. I know I’m probably in the minority here, but I’ll bet there are enough people like me.

Many people will argue that the simplicity of email killed RSS. But I think both can coexist. I get some writings in my email inbox and some through RSS now in my Matter inbox. I recommended Matter to my friend Aareet last year and he recently texted me that he’s moved all his email newsletter subscriptions there.

Certain categories of software become ripe for innovation every few years. This category, broadly defined as social bookmarking, is a good example. Every few years, an entrepreneur decides “none of the existing solutions work for me, so I’m just going to build one myself”. Every decade, one of these products becomes iconic. While I was too young to know of any web 1.0 services in the space (were there any? 🤔), I remember very well Joshua Schachter’s del.icio.us (or simply, Delicious) which in many ways defined social bookmarking in the web 2.0 era. Then there was Pinterest that rose to prominence in the early-to-mid 2010s, became a household name and the most valuable company in the space to date.

To an entrepreneur, it’s a reminder to be careful of “doesn’t that already exist? have you heard of XYZ?” when analyzing or sharing an idea for a product. Yes, sometimes a new solution is very well redundant, but sometimes there is still untapped opportunity.