So fun to partner with @manuscriptwishlist.bsky.social to help create the new smart search!

For example: x.com/nbashaw/stat...

I think I’m more active on Twitter because A) inertia—it still has 10x more people there that I want to keep up with, and B) I think occasionally I can use my platform there to nudge things in a good direction

🥹 thank you

Summary of what we’ve learned

12 months since we launched paid plans for Lex!

Feel very lucky I get to work on this

New in Lex: Rewind 🎉

Viewing document history is now easy as scrubbing through a video.

Try it now at lex.page

🥹 thank you

That would probably not be something most top authors on Substack would want to opt into

Does anyone else do this?

- find an album you like a lot
- listen on repeat while working
- a few weeks later move on to the next one

I kinda love this because it allows me to create really strong associations between music and projects and it’s a fun form of memory

Thanks and sorry I was a bit grouchy :) haha

Thanks! And like tbh I don’t think it’s obviously going to be easy or necessarily even likely, but I also don’t think it’s as crazy as it might seem. Trade book publishing is like $17B per year.

To put it in your terms, I think the plan is to 1000x their customer base and 1x the value extraction. I am pretty sure they will keep more or less the same model and try to grow by attracting more creators / larger creators.

And they won’t and don’t need to “extract three orders of magnitude more value,” from their current market, they are (attempting to) expand their market.

I think there’s a spectrum of changes ranging from “gaming co pivots to slack” (fundamental pivot) to “uber adds another city” (natural extension) and to me Substack having more video and podcast creators feels somewhere in between.

B) Agree or disagree with Substack’s ideology, it was already aligned with a16z before they invested. So in that sense it’s nothing like X.

It’s pretty wrong

A) The bet is that more than just text will be on Substack - plenty of media businesses have scaled past what Anil is claiming if you look beyond text.

Under-appreciated feedback loop:

- AI improves with more data
- Improved AI causes more data to exist

(e.g. because LLMs are useful, a lot of tacit knowledge has been written; because cars can drive themselves, a lot more driving footage has been captured, etc)

Holy shit is “feeds” the “bring your own algorithm” product I’ve been dreaming of? 🙏😭

First time using this in awhile! Impressed by the progress. Much more polished than I remember.

Impossible to know! Either way I’ll change it

I think most people aren’t surprised by this given the description above the text input (also we have never had anyone react the way you did just now) but probably could make it a bit more obvious! Thanks again for the feedback and zero pressure to use Lex

I just realized I forgot to come back and update you — we fixed this! All docs are private now by default even if someone somehow gets the link

Yikes I think that is a bug that we may have just shipped thanks for flagging!

Ahh I’m so sorry for the name typo! 😅

Totally agree we should make the expectation more clear, and give users the option to set a global default.

How big is the chance to get a Java UUID.randomUUID collision? I need to create some uniques files in Java and i plan to use UUID.randomUUID to generate their names. Is there any chance to get a collision for this? Should i do something like bellow os I should...

I should also point out that these URLs are UUIDs that are more secure than 99% of user’s passwords. More info on that here: stackoverflow.com/questions/24...

Our original goal with this design was to avoid the problems that happen all the time with Google docs where people share links and forget to add people to the doc, or the person they add is logged in with a different email.

Hey Oliver thanks so much for flagging this! I’m the founder of Lex and you’re right, we should change the way we handle this. Will follow up here when we’ve done so!

Perhaps the ultimate form of “touching grass” is swimming in the ocean

Did that today for the first time in a long time and forgot how good it feels

The existence of “technical debt” implies the existence of “technical equity”