i first read the Nomad letters when i was 17, and they changed my life. this is an embarrassing admission to make about a collection of hedge fund letters that primarily circulated as a stolen pdf in value-investor circles, and have now become enough of a meme to enjoy a second life of their own. but on the occasion of their republication in beautiful form by Tammy and the team at Stripe Press, i thought it was worth reflecting briefly on the impact these letters had on me. Sleep and Zakaria’s fundamental truth (truke?) is often, and incorrectly, remembered as “scale matters.” everyone knew this when Sleep was writing. the real insight was that scale is most powerful when its benefits are surrendered directly to the consumer. the thing i remember most from Sleep is his wonderfully strange “robustness ratio,” which measured the amount the customer saved against the value retained by shareholders. value escaping the firm to the consumer, rather than being captured by it, was the metric of a great business. a great business is a lossy one. this places Sleep in an interesting position opposite the other greatest anglo-investor of his generation, Chris Hohn. Nomad and TCI look similar from a distance: concentrated portfolios, long holding periods, indifference to benchmarks and, eventually, the conversion of their private fortunes into large philanthropic efforts. they differ not merely in the fact that Hohn decided to continue (and even convert to Hinduism so that he could manage his portfolio in the next life, as reported in the FT), but in that their ideal businesses are exact mirror images. Hohn loves an irreversible asset that can extract a tax on its customer. in Hohn’s world, if a company possesses pricing power, it should, and must, exercise it. rather Sleep’s ideal company possesses pricing power and repeatedly and consciously declines to use it. the emergence and now total dominance of the labs makes this distinction newly urgent and would, on its own, be occasion enough to republish the work, quite apart from how beautiful and important the letters are. our instinctive response to a discontinuity in technology is to invest at the frontier. Sleep’s letters are at least some reason for caution. technical leadership can be copied or simply made irrelevant by the next advance, and capital floods towards visible scarcity just before technology eviscerates that very same scarcity. god knows Sleep was never hostile to technology. he made more money on Amazon than almost anyone else. but, at least in my reading, he was skeptical of technical novelty as a moat in its own right. what mattered to him was whether that technological step had been converted into a self reinforcing relationship in which the customer privatized the gain. in Nick’s frame, and he's welcome to correct me (although my sense is requiring him to lift a hand off of the wheel of a f450 in the hills of northumberland at this point would be a step too far) the enduring AI business may therefore be the one that passes declining costs on most aggressively, not one that preserves scarcity, bombs its own customers margins and tries to eat as much of the application layer as possible. i find it increasingly useful to use the pair trade between totemic-hohn, and totemic-sleep actions as a frame in which to view the actions of the frontier. my guess is, in the fullness of time, or at the very least in this life (hohn is welcome to prove me wrong in the next), that Sleep might have won this bout. very glad to see these letters in print.

Does the public prefer traditional architecture? Half a century of surveys find: worksinprogress.co/issue/do-… - Between 60 and 95 percent prefer traditional architecture; - This pattern holds across gender, class, race, nationality and political views; - More traditional densification schemes seem to attract remarkably high levels of survey support; - Laypeople and design professionals respond dramatically differently, with professionals far more favourable to modern styles. Research is still at an early stage, and many questions remain. Personally, I am particularly interested in how the public would respond to a non-traditional but richer and more decorative style? I think they might like it, but we don’t have hard evidence yet. But the results are already puzzling. Why do people end up buying buildings that are so different to the buildings they say they prefer? How did we end up in this odd situation? What can we do about it? Read more in @RobertKwolek's definitive review of architectural visual preference surveying.

1/ today we're rolling out Muse, our new personal ai assistant. Muse is always-on, wicked fast, can use a browser, connect to your apps, and is designed to be secure. try it now: muse.ai.

Grok Bot can now buy things on the internet. To get started, connect @link, send your Bot shopping, and it can complete purchases on your behalf.

Instinct + Stripe Instinct users who make purchases spend over $1300/month on average through Instinct. Using Instinct to make high value purchases is a sign of trust that we deeply value. We’re partnering with Stripe to deliver a more seamless payment experience. Instinct has enabled use cases that involve payments including: - Planning and booking international trips - Ordering weekly groceries and household essentials - Booking yoga classes, ski tuning sessions, doctor’s appointments, car part repairs, and more - Getting you the best price for anything you’re looking for

OpenRouter is joining Stripe: stripe.com/newsroom/news/str…. As anyone who uses it knows, @OpenRouter is a truly delightful developer tool. It is by far the best way to use new models and manage multiple inference providers. OpenRouter is also playing an increasingly important role: in the future, every business will have to manage both revenue flows and token flows. OpenRouter is the world's leading token marketplace, helping businesses effectively allocate the new currency of intelligence capital. We think that there's a lot to build together.

One second you’re getting a nice tan, the next second the Blue Angels are buzzing by 5 feet from your head 🇺🇸

Introducing GPT-Live, a new generation of voice models for natural human-AI interaction. Rolling out in ChatGPT starting today. You’ll want to turn the sound on for this one.