Mark Ayers

Selling a business four times without buying it back, losing control, or giving up ownership—and calling that “pretty special”—operates first as understatement and second as a riddle.

Eddie Jordan, the Irish Formula 1 team owner known for his irreverence and sharp eye for talent, once offered what might be the most concise summary of Bernie Ecclestone’s genius ever spoken: “Anyone who has had a business, sold it four times, has never b…

There is no consciousness; there is only being conscious of something.

Indecency in public life is not new.

We know the least about that which we do the most.

Larkin’s voice is post-war British, library-dwelling, no-bullshit about the genteel lies.

A wealthy American said recently, in an interview, “if the Dems ever have a president again or if we ever have a free election again.”

Kalbeth was a war-captain for the Orbital Authority, a veteran of skirmishes against the Outer Colonies.

Honor in a dishonorable world costs more than it pays—by any conventional measure.

Conflict is not failure.

Give everything away constantly.

I have recently listened to lectures by Feynman and Watts.

Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience; it is the ability to see again what most of us have forgotten how to see, but now fortified by the ability to translate some of that vision into words, however inadequate.

“This Is Not America” occupies a strange corner of David Bowie’s catalog.

A bicycle for the mind once felt sufficient.

At Ranger School, we force-ranked one another at the end of each phase.

I catch myself saying “things used to be better” and forgetting how bad things were.

Why were you born?

Mediocre thinkers who overestimate their abilities now predict AI will eliminate work for people like themselves.

A faithful paraphrase of Montaigne’s “Of the Art of Conference” (Book III, Chapter VIII), tightened and modernized for a mid-21st-century reader.

The medieval Japanese rōnin is a structural anomaly.

“I don’t think he’s mad, just devious in his sanity” inverts the usual moral logic.

Martin Fowler coined Semantic Diffusion in 2006 with this definition: Semantic diffusion occurs when you have a word coined by a person or group, often with a good definition, but then spread through the wider community in a way that weakens that definiti…

Thought only becomes real when you put it into words others can use.

The huge moments in life seemed like they should have more ceremony and effects.

Broad human cooperation is a luxury of abundance and security.

AI serves your intent.

Ian Anderson’s “Aqualung” reads as a character study of a homeless man in unflinching detail, a portrait that refuses both sentimentality and contempt.

Is it true?

The tempting lesson from Rome is numerical: republics last about two and a half centuries.

Before industrialization, most people worked land, crafts, or household trades.

Commands Are Not Instructions In Claude Code, a command is not a script, macro, or thin wrapper around a tool call.

A decision-making heuristic popularized by Derek Sivers: tepid enthusiasm indicates misalignment, not compromise.

AI agents transformed the mathematics of wasted time.

Quoting Claude: That’s the mechanism, isn’t it.

Goal pursuit probability at time $t$: $$ P(A_{t}) = V \times (1 - e^{-s \times t}) \times e^{-c \times t} \times (1 - \frac{I_{t}}{I_0}) $$ Four forces shape persistence.

I asked Anthropic’s Claude (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus; Sonnet with two different projects instructions, and Sonnet deep research) to Explore the idea(s) embedded in this short statement: To remain invisible, inconsequential, or to become dangerous?

Nordstrom’s Innovation Lab Empathy Open-ended Questioning - avoid yes/no answers Why?

The story goes like this: in the garden, there was one tree we weren’t supposed to touch.

We’ve been here before.

A frost touched yesterday, rain followed this morning.

Measurements Coffee: 30g medium-coarse grind (slightly coarser than table salt) Water: 480g filtered water (16:1 ratio) Temperature: 205°F (96°C) Process Prep: Heat water.

Walking around in baseless existential misery while the world bursts with life is one of the most precisely human conditions there is—and the word “baseless” is where the real pressure lives.

My method of scrambling eggs involved preheating the pan, adding some butter, then cracking whole eggs directly into the pan.

Mix 14ml of an ingredient with 1L of water Sip it and consider the ingredient’s qualities Take notes Repeat I use this method with bases, bitters, liquors, juices, and syrups.

Once upon a time in a corporate environment, this was my always-on out-of-office message: I do not check email frequently.

Dr.