Reading up on Substack
10 deep · digging since nov 22, 25
- The End of Code Review? Or an Opportunity to Rethink it?
The article argues that AI‑driven code generation will make traditional code review untenable, urging a rethink of its indirect benefits and alternatives.
- How to Stop Wasting Your Life - by Dr. Dominic Ng
The article explains how dopamine’s response to uncertain rewards fuels compulsive phone checking and provides a practical protocol to reclaim attention and break the habit.
- The ‘Do or Die’ Days - by A.M. Hickman
Author reflects on his creative block, financial windfall, and dilemma over investing in rural New York revitalization amid isolation, taxes, and community risk.
- The View from RSS
Using RSS feeds reveals the hidden structure of online content, including SEO articles and paywall circumvention, contrasting with curated homepages.
- Open Source in the age of AI
AI is enabling rapid cloning of open source codebases, as demonstrated by Cloudflare rebuilding Next.js in a week, challenging the value of software licenses and the premise of open source.
- The For You page is killing Social - by Nic Carter
X's algorithmic For You page optimizes for time spent over creator-follower linkage, driving creators to platforms like Substack for reliable reach.
- How to stay sane in a world that rewards insanity
A Hacker News discussion critiques the article's centrist framing, arguing that social media polarization stems from platform scale, manufactured consent, and vocabulary misalignment rather than individual insanity.
Takes
@firstadopter I built something for myself to solve exactly this It's a pipeline that ingests every source I follow (podcasts, YouTube channels like CNBC, substacks etc) and then: summarizes each piece on its own (screenshot attached) [Contd]
@Advait_Ruia
I'm kinda known as an SEO guy. So this is a little painful to admit: Our best marketing channel at Exploding Topics is... a weekly email. Here's the story: When we asked customers where they learn about trends, we expected them all to say "social media!". But we noticed the same channel come up again and again: newsletters. A huge amount of trend content is sent out via email. In fact, a lot of the top Substacks are focused on trends in ecommerce, tech, and investing. The bad news? We were a trend company.... without a newsletter. So we started a weekly newsletter ASAP. It's called Exploding Topics Tuesday. Nothing fancy. Every Tuesday we send out a handful of interesting trends and why they're growing. That newsletter has grown to over 155,000 subscribers. And at one point it was driving approx 25% of our total MRR (!). The funny thing is, you don't need an MBA for this sort of insight. Our customers were reading newsletters, so we started a newsletter. Sometimes business really is that simple. 👍🏻
@BrianEDean
I wanted to see if I could make a book from my 36,000 tweets. So I downloaded my twitter archive and asked Claude to turn it into a feature-rich library Features include: • AI search • "Dark academia" color scheme • Filters & sorting for date, engagement #s, length, etc • A Tinder-style swipe view for curation (like/superlike/pass) The most useful feature has been Claude's assigning of tags based on topic & type. This lets me see that, for instance, I have 272 tweets on aesthetics, so perhaps there's a book to be made on this topic. Eventually, I realized that – since I was using the app to do curation – I could also use it to recirculate my best material across Substack, Bluesky, and other platforms. So I asked Claude to build a queue for scheduling longform content on these platforms and another for scheduling shorter tweets. These last two features aren't fully finished yet. But if you want to build your own, you can grab my Markdown file from the Github link in my reply. Just copy-paste it to your Claude. No technical expertise needed (I certainly don't have any)
@TylerAlterman