Stratechery

Over the last few years I've made a habit of trying to understand others as much as possible. Historically I only read left-leaning sources but after exposing myself to more, it became clear that I was blind to the other side's perspective. I've found that there was typically validity to multiple views on most topics, and that selection bias (what news sources choose to cover) was a big problem. So these days I visit a number of sources, which is easier today because there are sites that try to represent views from different parts of the spectrum. Staying informed does take time (at least an hour a day), money (supporting news via subscriptions), and effort (takes away mental energy from other things).

Apart from the list below I also read and subscribe to a few different local news sources. Over the last several years, local news has been dying (financial issues) and I think that's a bad thing because it means you miss things happening around you that affect your life more so than national news, and because you only get a homogeneous national perspective (often reduced to a left versus right axis) instead of the more diverse issue-to-issue variation that is possible locally. I recommend identifying a few local sources near you if you have the time to read!

UNCATEGORIZED

1. Hacker News (I check the first couple pages several times a day)

2. Matt Taibbi (https://taibbi.substack.com - investigative reporting by a former Rolling Stone journalist)

3. Glenn Greenwald…

Honestly, if she’s ready to graduate High school and enter college, she’s old enough to be researching those questions on her own (not that you can’t too). She should be, too. Learning how to learn in your industry is an actual skill to learn. Learning what the “pulse” of the industry is will also be valuable for her during studies and beyond, and she’ll also meet peers who can have those discussions with her.

That said, I think for many this forum is actually the place to learn about the industry. It’s too broad an industry to find more specifics without knowing her interests. Does she like startups? Does she care more about the business side? Financial tech? AI? App development? Does she not know?

This site is honestly a great mixed aggregator of other sites. Find interesting ones and see the other posts. She’s in HS so the bar is low on deep technical knowledge and expectations. She should probably focus less on intense research topics unless she has an actual interest in a more academic side (simply because academic research is less approachable to someone without much academic experience).

If she doesn’t have an answer to those questions, I would say she just start googling things that pique curiosity. “How does X work” is how I started. That’s how I learned which buzzwords and jargon mattered to me. Probably more approachable for a younger person earlier on the journey.

Here are some newsletters I follow. My interests skew towards business.

Bits About…

By the harness I believe he means the entire end-user product experience, not specifically the harness code. I’ve mostly stuck with codex because their Mac app is better and I’ve gotten used to running automations through it. The more workflows they can build around this (design tools, collaboration, etc), the better chance of lock-in.

He talks about this in another recent essay
https://stratechery.com/2026/anthropics-safety-superpower/

> If you own the user touchpoint, then you have meaningful lock-in, and the best way to own the user touchpoint is to be the canvas for everything they need to do. This, by extension, means that the frontier labs are on a collision course with software companies: it’s software that owns the user touchpoint, and it’s in the frontier labs’ long-term interest to not simply be a commodity input into software but to simply replace software outright.

Just to be clear, you're neither giving Subscriber Only nor the authors your payment details. All of that is handled by Stripe. Their core service is handling this kind of sensitive data.

I can certainly understand not liking recurring payments but it's a pretty standard business model. On Subscriber Only, you can choose between monthly and yearly subscriptions and you can cancel them at any time. You can look at it a sort-of automation of what you're already doing with one-time donations.

Don't quote me on this -- I have no data -- but I think monetizing a personal blog is pretty tough. Unless you'd consider Strachery <https://stratechery.com/> a personal blog. If you want to get paid writing, I suggest specializing in a niche of a niche. E.g. Don't write about the tech industry, write about semiconductor manufacturing in Germany.

But hey, you won't know until you try!

“This is a point that bears repeating: because U.S. open weight model makers must follow the frontier labs’ terms of service, they (1) are worse than Chinese alternatives and (2) end up distilling the distillation, just with a detour through Chinese labs. Wouldn’t it be better if western open weight model makers could go to the source?

…

The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service that forbid distillation, for U.S. companies at a minimum. Stopping distillation — which is literally just querying the API — is nearly impossible; the U.S. should go the other way and lean into a new copyright policy that both indemnifies the labs and also guarantees that what they learned fuels further innovation for everyone else” [1].

[1] https://stratechery.com/2026/whos-afraid-of-chinese-models/

maybe i was harsh but how do we know the seller is informative? He just said the things that made swizec purchase items. Perhaps he was, but he has an ulterior motive.

I will still gladly ask for recommendations, and still refuse them. This salesperson ignored the customers original request, Swizec seems not to care, to me, that means the saleserson is making it obvious he/she is putting himself and his/her sales infront of making the customer happy,

Also, was this worth it for the salesman? If he could've sold $100 pair of gloves in 5 minutes, instead of $1500 over 2 hours. a 15x multiplier on sales but also a 40x multiplier on time...

> Once upon a time, it was articles on business fundamentals like this that drew me to HN.

I think https://stratechery.com/ is now closer to what you are looking for.