#045: Coping With Not Being Smart, Drake's High Tech Website, Benjamin Franklin on Persuasion

Hi All!

We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com.

This week, we will take a look at how to cope with the feeling of not being smart, rapper Drake and how he built his newest high-tech website, Benjamin Franklin's principle about persuasion, and more. Let's dive in:

How Do You Cope With Not Being Smart?

At some point in our lives, we may feel inadequate with our mental abilities. It's easy to compare ourselves with people who seem to have it 'figured out'. Some things come naturally to others, while it may require a little more effort from us.

​@pavedwalden recently shared a thread that caught my attention, where they explain how they saw a tweet from someone struggling to read through a dense text. The individual asked the question 'how does one cope with being not that smart' - PavedWalden's response was perfect.

They go on to explain how they once listened to a monologue from singer Henry Rollins, who himself thought he wasn't smart enough to finish In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (a notoriously challenging book to finish, and over 4,200 pages!). Rollins refused to give up, and sometimes would spend hours on just a few pages. He now lists it as one of his favorite books of all time. PavedWalden said this gave them the belief, that 'if he is stubborn enough to finish In Search of Lost Time, I can read any book too'.

PavedWalden then goes on to to describe the Portia spider, an animal with only 600,000 neurons in its tiny body, whose behavior suggests it's capable of learning and problem solving at a rate that rivals intelligent mammals. It's a beautiful thread about perseverance, and believing you are capable of learning anything you set your mind to.

Patrick Collison's 'Vague Tech Canon' of Books

​@Scholars_Stage recently posed the question: "What are the contents of the 'vague tech canon'? If we say it is 40 books, what are they?"

The most comprehensive responses came from Stripe CEO and co-founder Patrick Collison and Coinbase CEO and co-founder Brian Armstrong.

Collison's list includes some familiar classics such as The Beginning of Infinity, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!, The Sovereign Individual, Zero to One, Paul Graham's essays, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and over 30 more books.

Armstrong endorsed Collison's list, and provided a few additions: High Output Management, Atlas Shrugged, The Outsiders, Good to Great, The Master Switch, The Singularity is Near, and says there are probably lots more.

If you're interested in the literature that influenced many of those in Silicon Valley, these lists are a great place to start.

Drakes Surprisingly High Tech Website

Canadian rapper and global superstar Drake may have taken an L in his beef with Kendrick Lamar earlier this year, but his newest website release 100gigs.org, is a technological W.

​@calder_white made the astute observation on Twitter: "has anyone noticed how responsive the..website is?? They're serving self-hosted, high-quality, videos with 0 latency. Looks like they are using gcloud"

This naturally made us curious as to how exactly Drake built the website, and it appears that they are using a combination of Mux, a video API, who is partnered with Google Cloud Platform. If you host videos on your website, Mux looks like a fantastic option for near instant response times.

Coding So Easy, an 8-Year Old Can Do It

New AI tools pop up everyday, but some grab our attention more than others. We especially notice when trusted individuals talk about using a tool and integrating it into their everyday workflow over the course of a few weeks. That is the case withCursor AI.

Cursor is an AI Code Editor that is 'built to make you extraordinarily productive'. What stands out to us, is the ease and familiarity it seems to have with your existing codebase, along with the ability to edit in natural language. It let's you write code using instructions like 'parallelize this because the api is slow' - crazy!

If interested, @wenquai provides a fantastic tutorial going through the 4 core features and how to integrate them into your workflow. Still not convinced? Here is a condensed video of an 8-year old who built a custom Harry Potter chatbot in 45 minutes with the assistance of Cursor.

Charlie Munger and Benjamin Franklin on Persuasion

​Founder's Podcast by David Senra is one of our favorite listens during long drives, and his Twitter is well worth a follow. Recently he shared a short snippet from Charlie Munger talking about persuasion, who quoted Benjamin Franklin's famous 'Poor Richard's Almanack':

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