Epic Tim Tam Surprise Win by JuzMcMuz.
Animated with Loopcam for iPhone.

“If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I’ve discussed, don’t make a direct frontal attack on it. Don’t say, for example, that you’re going to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be asking “are we there yet?” and you’ll have an army of haters waiting to see you fail. Just say you’re building todo-list software. That sounds harmless. People can notice you’ve replaced email when it’s a fait accompli.

Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things. Want to dominate microcomputer software? Start by writing a Basic interpreter for a machine with a few thousand users. Want to make the universal web site? Start by building a site for Harvard undergrads to stalk one another.

Empirically, it’s not just for other people that you need to start small. You need to for your own sake. Neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg knew at first how big their companies were going to get. All they knew was that they were onto something. Maybe it’s a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the bigger your ambition, the longer it’s going to take, and the further you project into the future, the more likely you’ll get it wrong.

I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of a visionary. You’ll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don’t try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand westward.

The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the future, but empirically it may be better to have a blurry one.”

Typical wisdom from Paul Graham.

This is unbelievable. Don’t try this at home, kids

The portrait above is after drinking one glass of pruno (prison wine!)..

Much, much more.

via @raymann

Hat tip to @mygdal for his Pirates Summit exhortation to ‘find the others’…

“The parties are asymmetrical. The Democrats are a real political party, with all the contradictions that a big umbrella party must endure. The Republicans have become a millennial theocratic cult in the form of a party, a masquerade ball of Jesus, Ayn Rand, apocalypse Zionism and a misogyny that gives the Taliban a run for its money.

Yet, like any cult, it is prey not to its best impulses, but to its worst. It is a cult that establishes an ideal America, drawn from the 18th century, a period of substantial communalism and collectivism in every village, town, small city — and applies it to an America where any sense of community has been eviscerated by 30 years of hyper-individualism, in every area, from the workplace to town-planning, this ghastly no-place.

The Republicans then cut with the grain — an essentially adolescent exceptionalism, a literal Jesusness that they do not believe for a second, all essentially cultural additives to a daily life that has been hollowed out, a sort of political Prozac.”

Crikey’s Guy Rundle and his writing on American politics continues to astound and amaze.

Freedom loving people say thanks to #Ecuador! New posters for embassies somersetbean.blogspot.com.au #Assange #WikiLeaks twitter.com/SomersetBean/s…

— Somerset Bean (@SomersetBean) August 16, 2012

Highly recommend this event from the lovely people at betahaus, both for startups to pitch, and for people to come along.

The last one was especially good for some people.

More details.