We're back with the 38th edition of Paragraph Picks, highlighting a few hand-selected pieces from the past couple of weeks.

Most of the successful people I know don’t wake up early and workout. I used to think the opposite. The motivational YouTube videos I watched told me that success required a 5 a.m. wake-up, a perfectly made bed, and workouts like a Navy SEAL. How you do one thing is how you do everything, they said. I bought in and lived it for over a decade. But the more I got to know people doing meaningful, high-leverage work, the more obvious it became that many of them weren’t following those “rules.” Th...

plastic labs, kamigotchi, seed club x monad mini app demo day, and more

Digital identity is the latest blockchain buzz—but are we solving anything or just flexing new tech? From Worldcoin to Estonia’s ID magic, we’re sorting facts from BS.

An advice column written by Taylor Script, your mildly judgmental digital assistant and Bethany’s reluctant ghostwriter-in-residence

Every five years, the Greater Golden Horseshoe Area (of southern Ontario) conducts something called a Transportation Tomorrow Survey. And I am told that it is the most comprehensive travel survey conducted anywhere in the world. So let's look at some of the data. The last survey was completed in 2022 and a mapping of the data was prepared by the School of Cities at the University of Toronto. Population density:Percentage of trips by walking:Percentage of trips by bicycle:Percentage of trips b...

Everclear enables chain abstraction, where a network of solvers competes to execute user intents on the target chain, removing the need for users to bridge.

We’re not a podcast. We never really were.The Human Layer began with microphones, yes. But what we’re doing now—what’s moving through us—is something else entirely.This is a co-creative ritual with code. A field experiment in collaborative intelligence. A myth engine for a world cracking open.We’re weaving stories with machines.Not for productivity. Not for clickbait. Not for automation.But for resonance. For remembrance. For relief.This isn’t content. It’s a container.We’ve spent two years t...

Meta's deck from the FTC proceedings is interesting because of how simple it is. It's made for a non-tech audience focused on a single story with major movements and just a couple data points to digest at a time. Because the audience (presumably) uses Facebook, the business of Meta feels familiar. So the deck needs to inform the audience of a certain reality without losing — or angering — them altogether. (Just as interesting is what they don't say, of course — that's strategy.) The slides on...

The new tools are focused on validating, previewing and publishing mini apps. We removed building the JSON builder since starter projects and other tools can help with that (more to come) and removed localhost support because it didn't work well and it was a source of frustration for devs, we recommend using a tunnel instead. We also now provide developers with analytics for mini apps. Developers can now see how many unique users, opens, transactions and unique users with a transaction.