Alex Rainert

Recently, many government norms we’ve taken for granted as “how America works” have been exposed to be just that - norms. They’ve proven to be malleable (and in some cases optional). For those of us who only know this country, it can be challenging to know what to make of it. While we’ve learned about other democracies’ deterioration and collapse through history, those moments feel far removed from the 🇺🇸 Democracy 🎇 we‘ve enjoyed here.  Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic, is on

Over the past year, I’ve regularly switched between the different LLMs for my day-to-day work to keep up with their evolution. While they’re quickly getting more capable, I feel their incredible value remains inaccessible to normal people. I expect that over the next 6-12 months, we’ll see many companies focus on the experience layer that sits between the user and the LLM. This is where users have a clear path to this new value without needing to know the what the model is doing behind the scen

Earlier this week, I took my mom to see The Wild Robot and I loved it. It explores aspiration, acceptance, and resilience in a funny and moving way, and the visual storytelling is beautiful. I'm a sucker for both animal and robot-with-feelings stories, so this film is right in my wheelhouse. This movie hit hard as a parent who regularly thinks about our kids (now 14 and 11) growing up and heading out on their own. I hadn't read the book it's based on, but I'm happy to learn there are two

CVS certainly isn’t alone in this but my experience attempting to unsubscribe from one of their emails over the weekend made me frustrated enough to want to vent here. This “Oh no! Our unsubscribe button must be broken” is so transparently shady to me. I love that I’m welcome to call Customer Care. Call someone?! To unsubscribe from an email?! No thanks! I’m left with no recourse other than smashing that Gmail Spam button and just wait for the next newsletter that I can’t unsubscribe from to sho

Last week my son and I saw Transformers One and both really enjoyed it - and not just because I went in with pretty low expectations based on the live action Transformers movies I’ve seen. It legitimately does a great job telling the origin stories of Optimus Prime and Megatron and as someone who grew up in the 80s during the Transformers action figure heyday, it felt new while also staying true to that original IP. Watching it also reminded me of the original Megatron action figure that transf

Lenny Rachitsky has, over the past 5+ years built what I consider to be the best community and content around "Product" writ large - covering various aspects of the craft of product management, strategies for product growth and finally, and often most interesting to me, valuable perspectives on the psychology of being a product manager/product leader. It all started with a great subscription newsletter and a subscriber-only Slack community. The subscription only costs $150 per year and if being

Last week Jason Kottke shared this awesome <10 minute video on how tattoos work (hint: it’s all thanks to your immune system 🫡 ) While I do have a passing interest in tattoo art (here's a fun piece from The Atlantic that explores The Words People Write on their Skin), the reason this video made such an impression on me is the stunning animation and storytelling in service of learning. I did a little digging and the creator, Kurzsgasadt, has other great looking videos covering Why We Need to R

Stompers is a social step-counting app I've been enjoying for about a month now. The concept is simple, quirky, and ultimately has been effective at getting me to do something valuable we all need to do more of - move. The app has a distinctive, decidedly lo-fi cartoony comic book visual style. Like many step counters before it, Stompers does a good job of reflecting the amount you move every day. However, this is not intended to be a single-player game. Stompers is fun because you do it with y