Week 30 · 2025-07-21 → 2025-07-27 · 16 newsletters
Two Arrows And A Hulkster
mind-and-meaning · ai-and-the-self · craft-and-taste · value-investing-fundamentals
Twenty emails across seven days, almost none of them news. The week leaned personal: two George Milton essays on Buddhist philosophy applied to work, a Margins return-from-hiatus on AI's boring questions, a couple of design and craft pieces, two Stonkstack value-investing notes, and Alec McNayr's Hulk Hogan eulogy as the closest thing to a current event. Light week, real signal where it landed.
Mind and Meaning: Buddhism Shows Up Twice
George Milton at Gross to Net ran two of the week's most-read pieces back to back. The first, "The Two Arrows: You're Shooting The Second One At Yourself", uses the Buddha's 2,500-year-old metaphor to frame self-inflicted suffering: the first arrow is the client cancellation, the missed deadline, the criticism. The second arrow is the mental story you immediately layer on top. "I knew this would happen." "Everyone will think I can't retain clients." Milton's claim is that the second arrow consistently outlasts the first and prevents you from addressing it. The framing is old, the application is current, and the piece earns its space because it names a pattern most operator-readers are running constantly without naming.
Two days later he followed with "Learn Zen Buddhism Before You Read Another Book About Optimization", making the case that founders and CEOs in their 40s should be studying Buddhist philosophy as philosophy, not religion, ahead of any productivity book on the market. He pulls Right Livelihood from the Eightfold Path and applies it to his own team at Yellowbird sauces: some joined because they believe in better food systems, others needed health insurance, most live somewhere in between. The piece sits in the same register as the Two Arrows essay: ancient frame, modern workplace, no hedge.
Sitting alongside both, Abby Falik at Taking Flight published "The Subtle Siphoning of Self", a confession piece about writing with her Claude tab open. The line that lands: "As I trust the machines more, am I trusting myself less?" She quotes a Meghan O'Rourke NYT essay on AI's "solicitous creep into our interior lives," and the phrase that sticks is O'Rourke's, that the AI-drafted email read back as "a ghost with silky syntax had colonized my brain." Falik is naming the same second-arrow dynamic Milton named, just routed through tooling instead of self-talk.
The take: three writers, no coordination, all circling the same instinct. The work this week was the work of noticing the layer of commentary you add to your own experience, whether that commentary comes from your own head or from a tab labeled Claude. The second arrow is the second draft.
AI and the Self: The Boring Questions Come Due
Can Duruk's return to Margins after a 4.5-year hiatus brought the week's only real AI industry piece. "The Boring AI Questions That Actually Matter" argues that the existential framing is the wrong altitude. The questions that actually decide the next decade are who controls the models, whether open-weight models ever catch frontier closed ones, and why some models are inexplicably better than others despite similar architectures. Duruk uses the database industry as the analog: Oracle for a few enterprise customers, open source for everyone else. Whether AI follows that pattern or stays consolidated in three or four companies is the strategic question almost no one in the popular discourse is asking.
Falik's piece, covered above, is the consumer-facing companion: not who owns the model but what happens to your voice when you use one. Together, Duruk and Falik are the week's AI conversation: one operator-level, one personal, both refusing the apocalyptic frame in favor of something more useful.
The take: the most useful AI writing in late July 2025 was the writing that explicitly turned away from the AGI debate. The market questions of control, openness, and why some models work better are the ones with operator traction. The interior question of what gets siphoned out of your writing when you offload it is the personal one. Duruk's return was well-timed.
Craft and Taste: Design as Dialogue
Emily Manges at AI Residency wrote the week's best craft piece, "Sculpture and algorithms", using Isamu Noguchi's material honesty as a frame for building with AI. Noguchi worked in open-air studios near quarries and would, by his own description, "stand in front of a rock" and listen for the voice within before making a cut. Manges argues the same posture of radical collaboration with a medium that has its own behaviors and resistance is the right one for the application layer of AI tooling. Try to control it too much and it falls flat. The Noguchi-to-vibe-coding move could have been forced; it isn't.
Ami Vora at The Hard Parts of Growth ran "A quick product simplicity test: remove all the explainers", arguing the New User Experience is the crutch product teams use to mask product complexity. The test: imagine the launch with no onboarding tour at all. Can people figure it out? She concedes the cases where NUX is necessary, including brand-new categories and navigation changes, but the default posture is to assume the explainer is hiding a design flaw. Clean argument, transferable test.
Sean Ellis at Growth ran "Growth Isn't Complicated", arguing the core playbook is widely known and rarely executed well. More reminder than revelation, but it pairs with Vora's: simple is the hard part.
signull wrote "the new craftsmanship isn't visual. it's emotional", the week's most-read short post about a friend saying "you've always had great attention to detail" and the realization that "detail" no longer means sleek UI and smooth transitions but something interior and harder to point at. Taylor Majewski at The General Partnership published "On Design Leadership with Katie Dill & Randy Hunt", the inaugural episode of their podcast with the heads of design at Stripe and Notion, with the operative line being "fewer memos, more demos."
The take: craft writing this week converged on the same point from four different directions. The detail that matters is no longer the surface polish. It is whatever interior coherence makes a product, an essay, or a piece of furniture feel honest. Noguchi knew this in 1964. The question is whether software teams can hold it in 2025.
Value Investing Fundamentals: Stonkstack Doubles Up
The Stonkstack ran twice this week, and the second post is the better one. "KOM.WA is dirt cheap again" is a quick portfolio update on Komputronik trading at 22% of book value and 51.2% of NCAV, a position note more than an essay. But "Deep Value 101: Important And Knowable" is the framework piece: the Jimmy's-lemonade-stand thought experiment that ends with the buyer overthinking macro conditions and lemon elasticity while passing on a stand making $200 a year offered at $300. The Munger pull is the load-bearing line: "Don't overlook the obvious by drowning in minutiae." The mental model Stonkstack borrows, Important And Knowable as a 2x2 for where to spend analytical attention, is one of the cleaner framings in value-investing pedagogy.
Brianna Zuniga at Circular Architect ran "The Sovereign Stack", a longer essay on infrastructure as a condition for agency. The thread runs through Latin American founders building mobile wallets for the unbanked, credit systems that work without formal ID, and AST SpaceMobile's satellite-to-smartphone broadband bypassing terrestrial infrastructure entirely. Her frame is technologies designed around volatility, fragmentation, and constraint, which she calls a sovereign stack. Adjacent to value investing in the sense that both disciplines ask what is durable and underpriced.
The take: the investing writing this week shared a posture with the craft writing. Stonkstack's "important and knowable" 2x2 and Zuniga's "infrastructure as agency" both refuse the speculative middle in favor of asking what is actually load-bearing. Munger's drowning-in-minutiae line is the one to carry.
Grace Notes
Alec McNayr wrote the week's only news-adjacent piece, "RIP Hulkster", a eulogy for Hulk Hogan as the rule-of-three closer after Malcolm Jamal-Warner and Ozzy. The 1980s Hulk Hogan as American hero, separated from the bronzed semi-problematic Floridian reality-TV version, is the read: McNayr writes from the angle of a pasty Mathlete from Oregon convinced he too could come back from the brink. He paired it earlier in the week with "The Minor Discomfort of a Trip to Europe", a family travelogue with the standout being his insistence that his kids speak broken French and German for the discomfort of being a beginner.
maalvika wrote "compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting", a short piece on the wave of "can u summarize" replies to a book recommendation. Adjacent to the second-arrow theme: the impulse to compress is the impulse to skip the experience. Piera Luisa Gelardi at Noomalooma ran "7 Ways to Bring Play Into Your Adult Friendships", the most usable how-to of the week. Gabby Lord at OMGLORD wrote "Clueless closet goals for maximalist clowns" on digitizing her wardrobe via Indyx. Maggie ran the inaugural "Leo Season Horoscopes", art-world scopes timed to the zodiac. Aditya Bhargava at Ducktyped wrote "A colorful controversy" on whether ultramarine is a warm or cool blue, a watercolor lesson that ended in a Munsell color-system rabbit hole.
Milton's third piece of the week, "The End is Near for the Traditional Supplement Aisle", broke from the Buddhism arc to argue the $179B supplement industry is structurally doomed by personalization: Bioniq can generate 5 trillion unique formulations from its ingredient libraries against CVS's 2-4 facings per SKU across 9,800 stores. The planogram is the enemy of personalization.
Three Takeaways from the Week
The week's strongest through-line was the second arrow. Milton named it explicitly via the Buddha, Falik named it via her Claude tab, maalvika named it via compression culture. The shared instinct was suspicion of the layer of commentary you reflexively add to your own experience, whether that commentary is self-talk, AI-assisted, or the impulse to summarize away the thing itself. That is the frame to carry forward.
The week's only live industry conversation was Can Duruk returning to Margins to ask the boring AI questions. The piece is short and the questions are right: who owns the models, do open weights ever catch frontier, and why are some models inexplicably better. The popular AI discourse is still pricing the existential risk; the operator-level questions Duruk is asking are the ones that decide whose infrastructure you build on for the next five years.
If you only revisit three pieces from the week, I would suggest George Milton's "The Two Arrows" for the cleanest mental frame, Can Duruk's "The Boring AI Questions That Actually Matter" for the cleanest operator read, and Abby Falik's "The Subtle Siphoning of Self" for the post most worth sitting with on a slow weekend. Light inbox week. Heavy interior week.