Remote-native Agile Product-lead; @flux_garden for digital garden hosting; SimplestThing; NetworkEnlightenment, Progress. At @billseitz@toolsforthought.social

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Joined March 2007
Thread of Product Management tweets, perhaps biased toward early-stage...
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Bill Seitz of FluxGarden retweeted
Croatian philosopher and priest Ivan Illich in a speech in Tokyo in 1982 on silence as a commons, now transformed into a valuable resource.
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Bill Seitz of FluxGarden retweeted
Y2K was remediated exactly because people were rightly worried about it. Calling that doomer reads history backwards
Dario Amodei was so worried about Y2K that his high school teacher still remembers it decades later. He’s been a doomer for much longer than I thought!
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Bill Seitz of FluxGarden retweeted
There’s an account I follow on Instagram (called Neilssciencejournal) who posts stuff like this and gets thousands of likes Probably the best example of the “cater to your niche” POV. Shits dense as hell but it wouldn’t hit with his target audience if he “dumbed it down” Super smart guy bridging math, philosophy, physics and biology Basically what he’s saying in the essay is that evolutionary adaptations, including elephants having additional copies of the TP53 tumor suppressor gene. The implication is that organisms can evolve powerful mechanisms of cancer resistance without necessarily sacrificing their size or longevity. So the relationship between cellular proliferation, cancer, and aging is more flexible than we might otherwise actually assume on the surface. I.e trade off dependent effects (Alas, my version is predictably way less interesting than his for all the reasons mentioned)
This is a non-existent problem. Especially on X. You should do the opposite of this advice You can pick a niche and cater specifically to that niche. It’s simple High-end clients generally show up, pay for a service, and judge you on the results. Meanwhile, some of the most demanding clients are the ones you gave a discount to or helped for free. They complain, nitpick, invent expectations you never promised to meet, and somehow become your biggest liability. You can basically filter those people out from you services by literally just making your content a little more dense or even lengthy The way you communicate is one of the most powerful filters you have for attracting a higher quality audience. You can deliberately position yourself to attract intelligent, discerning people who value your time and expertise. The result? You can make substantially more money while dealing with substantially fewer people (you basically shrink your contact with the most annoying and insufferable members of society) , especially the ones who demand the most of your time and contribute/pay the least. It’s always weird how often people treat audience selection as a as if excluding certain types of people from your content means you’ve somehow lost something, rather than simply attracting more of the right business while filtering out the liabilities that often come with catering to people operating at a lower paradigm (litigation being a big one). This is essentially marketing 101 (Segmentation, targeting, and positioning (or STP). The principle is simple. Good marketing isn’t just about attracting the right customers. It’s also about repelling the wrong ones. Every piece of content you put out (even the one I’m typing out now) should have this in mind. Or better yet, just put out the content that you like sharing (or would want to consume) and you’ll naturally attract the audience you want Words are a fantastic selective filter for pruning your audience. Pay attention to the quality and character of the people who enjoy your content vs the ones constantly complaining about how you communicate. The way you speak will directly influence the kind of audience you attract. I remember when I first started posting on Instagram, I’d get plenty of comments that were basically the 2016–17 equivalent of “AI word slop” or “bro’s yapping.” The quality of my clients (curious, forward-thinking, process and results oriented) improved dramatically when I stopped worrying about appealing to everyone and started writing the kind of content I would actually want to consume myself. Which also happened to filter out a lot of the annoying, insufferable people I wouldn’t want to work with anyway I can definitely say that if I had change the way I delivered content back then (had lots of friends telling me I needed to dumb down my fitness content to get more clients) I would have never met or connected with the people I did, or attracted the clients I did. Nor would I have built a sustainable audience. Even the professional athletes I worked with (many of which can be notoriously fly-by-night for those unfamiliar with the industry ) were so different from the norm. This is the problem with the “dancing monkey” instagram landscape. Many content creators have found themlseves stuck now essentially “working a job they hate”, where they have to constantly perform to get new views/followers. They have zero retention I’ve seen this with a lot of content creators recently who have 100K + followers but can’t monetize their audience. 50 members on school with 200K was the worst one I saw. Conversely, I had nearly 1000 + paid Patreon subscribers (basically all sign ups from people paying to essentially read my writing) within my first year We’re on X, guys. Not IG (which doesn’t really matter anyway, considering I built 99% of my six-figure paying audience there before I even started posting here less than a year ago) xitter.cf/fowler_fitness1/status…
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We are bringing this back
New newsletter: THE DEATH OF THE AMERICAN HOST The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has declined by 70 percent in the last 50 years. derekthompson.org/p/the-deat…
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Bill Seitz of FluxGarden retweeted
carl sagan is like pynchon in the sense that you read his work and are absolutely floored that intellectuals of that time knew the score — that the political critiques that seem so revelatory now were also obvious then, but got buried beneath layers of bullshit, as they always do
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Monotheism is a gateway brainworm to fascism.
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Mindpunk: a fiction genre incl things like brain-computer interfaces, nootropics, new mental abilities, etc Examples: Dune's Bene Gesserit & Mentats, Asimov's Second Foundation, Bakker's Dûnyain, The Matrix's kungfu-training chair, Limitless, @ramez's Nexus trilogy What others?
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Bill Seitz of FluxGarden retweeted
Fun fact: This is in fact how the government sometimes deals with vulnerabilities
How to fix the bug affecting 70% of the internet (easy):
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Bill Seitz of FluxGarden retweeted
ppl in 2016: if your arguments are so rational why arent you winning ppl in 2026: beware their arguments because rationalists are SECRETLY the most POWERFUL group in the multi bajillion dollar AI industry ppl* never: object level takes on the arguments * except a few cool ppl
people used to say "rationality is about winning but rats aren't notably much more successful, so rationality must not all that". now many rats are v rich so the dunk goes the other way but ideally you'd agree on rationality's value in this world & a world where AI was 50y later
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Bill Seitz of FluxGarden retweeted
Replying to @RhysSullivan
you can do that with Obsidian and skills xitter.cf/kepano/status/20072236…
if you're using Obsidian with Claude Code, tell me about your workflow, and what you've used it for
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Bill Seitz of FluxGarden retweeted
A few weeks ago we packed 15 families - 29 parents & their collective 37 kids - into a giant 18-bedroom house in Tahoe, and hosted a super fun "un-conference" style retreat/gathering. very casual... social thing. run with/for friends. But thanks to an epic support crew of nannies and @Alphaschool guides, all were able to participate- most facilitate a session of some kind.. some personal, some professional, some family subjects, e.g - "building a company with your spouse" ft @clairevo & @elawless, @hsambhi & @rosie_chopra + others - @jessegenet on running her homeschool + household with local AI agents (including live appearances from the kids) -@mbateman and @nateliason on "how to start a school" - @adamgries on longevity & AI, how to live forever - @Gena_I_Gorlin on the psychology of ambition - plus "building connection" for busy married couples. - - @immad's philosophical takes on "what is money" - and raising kids to have positive relationships with it. - - @ketau on “when agents spend more than humans” / future biz models + ad supported AI - @ellenvoramd and @vimalspot on "Modern Spirituality" - building spiritual families, deep dive from Ellen on "the Anatomy of Anxiety" - also - @TomHacohen on Privacy, security, AI & and the internet; @Alicebentinck on how to spot talent, @petergyang on building distribution; life on the road and cultural immersion with @rieglobe, @abatalion & others. This was round two — first was back in 2023. Probably not going to wait three years to do it again. Maybe east coast later this year? 👀
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Bill Seitz of FluxGarden retweeted
I built a living town with Opus. It references "A Pattern Language" for the design. You can toggle architectural details to get a feel for them :)
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Bill Seitz of FluxGarden retweeted
Not a single professional was willing to give me an % chance of success, so I guesstimated a 20% chance for the full plan and 50% for a half-size plan (which would lose money) Impossible to plan around. I ended up pulling out last week. Thank God for Esmerelda and @devonzuegel
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Bill Seitz of FluxGarden retweeted
Replying to @ChrisPainterYup
It's that NIMBYs create uncertainty I almost bought a hilltop Berkeley property last month. But for the Planning Commission to even VOTE on our project we would've had to spend $1-3M on architects and lawyers and wait 1-4 years
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Bill Seitz of FluxGarden retweeted
Elon Musk found us here. We’re indigenous to this land.
If people dislike Elon Musk so much, why do they still use the platform he owns?
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So basically the entire Trump administration has been committing nonstop crimes You are ruled by a mafia
SCOOP: White House lawyers weigh preemptive pardons for large numbers of junior admin staff, as MAGA allies press for protections for lower ranking aides Under discussion is pardons everyone in certain policy, like deportation Does not seem imminent washingtonsun.com/whitehouse…
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Hotdogs are made of dog flesh. It's literally in the name of the food!
Hitler was a far left socialist. Literally in the name of his party!
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Bill Seitz of FluxGarden retweeted
Replying to @RatOrthodox
i noticed what i considered to be a deficiency of mormon prepper material and docs i've found their stuff to be almost absurdly high quality comparatively to, say, military or fema equivalents afaict they spent a few decades basically doing scientific experiments in "can we build a technological society from scratch in a post-collapse scenario using, say, a batch of missionaries + a volunteer ward with their families" with things like the united order, the riverbed community, etc, and then they packaged it all up into a walmart-esque package you can buy and keep in your closet of course mainly what they learned is that solo prepping is not viable, you need an aligned community, but that might also just be advertising propaganda for their church
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Bill Seitz of FluxGarden retweeted
It's the same pretty much everywhere with rent controls. A story from Berlin:
True in Spain too. Every landlord in Madrid and Barcelona screens the renters now. This is an obvious consequence of rent control. The most vulnerable, ostensible protected by the legislation, are in fact excluded from the rental market: if you cannot be evicted for non payment, then you are too risky a renter.
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