Just like last year’s, here is my collection of interesting things I clipped online during 2025.
Money
If you’ve been to Rome, chances are you tossed a coin into the Trevi Fountain. Fabrizio Marchioni helps collect and count them all. The proceeds in 2023 were close to 2 million euros.
What would you do with 2 million euros? A guilty pleasure of mine is watching, reading or listening to people who’ve made a ton of money.
I clipped what Sam Parr —the guy has a podcast called My First Million— called “a perfect definition of financial freedom”:
- level 1: 12 months of spending in liquid, non-volatile assets you can access within 24 hours (don’t invest in anything else until you hit this)
- level 2: 5-7 years of ideal spending in liquid assets (now you can start considering illiquid investments)
- level 3 (final boss): A portfolio generating enough cash flow to cover your lifestyle forever without touching the principal
Meme wisdom
This meme convinced me that morals have aesthetic criteria:
Design, defined
I like collecting definitions of design. And I especially appreciate efforts to define design as opposed to art.
This year I clipped a couple of nice ones, kindly translated to English by ChatGPT just for you:
“The artist works subjectively for himself and for an elite, whereas the designer works in a team for the whole community.”
“Design is both an aesthetic act of making and an intellectual activity aimed at solving the problems inherent in making.”
Speaking of activities: are you a Spanish speaker who mentors other people?
This year I learned that the Real Academia’s Dictionary does not have a noun to name what you do, but Academics (or the people running their social) were humble enough to admit they’ve found “mentoría” and “mentorazgo” used in texts.
😅 Phew.
Design for the screen
I found this lovely scan of what looks like a 1984 original proposal by Étienne Robial for Canal +, definitely one of those designs that shaped my world.
Can you think of “HBO” without hearing what I’m hearing?
TikToker James Bernard found a mistake on the digitized HBO logo and posted a video about it. The video went viral, and Gerard Huerta, who designed the original version of the logo in the 70s, reached out to him and even sent him the original paper draft. Do not miss this video.
This year, Apple launched new versions of their operating systems that feature a visual effect they call Liquid Glass, and I clipped this (probably outdated by now) tutorial to recreate it in Figma.
Note: the guy who announced it left and now works for Meta. Interpret that as you may.
Back in May 1981 —just as I was turning one— Bill Atkinson was working on graphics for the original Mac, and finally managed to get oval shapes up on an Apple Lisa screen.
But something was bothering Steve Jobs.
“Well, circles and ovals are good, but how about drawing rectangles with rounded corners? Can we do that now, too?”
Leadership
Fast forward twenty-five years. It’s 2006, and The Guardian runs a behind-the-scenes piece on Apple’s famous keynotes.
I enjoyed reading the whole article, but this paragraph really teleported me:
Objectively, Apple Computer is a mid-sized company with a tiny share of its primary market. Apple Macintoshes are only rarely seen in corporate environments, and most software companies don’t even offer Apple-compatible versions of their products.
I remember reading it two or three times, and how my initial surprise turned to nostalgia and then to encouragement — I still find it moving for anyone launching a new product nowadays.
Former secretary of state Colin Powell says that leadership is the ability to get someone to follow you even if only out of curiosity. I loved this definition and I’ve quoted it several times since I saved it.
My Goodreads tells me I read 29 books so far this year. One of them was The Hard Thing About Hard Things, by Ben Horrowitz, someone I don’t particularly enjoy quoting. But I did highligh two sentences, and I thought maybe sharing them saves you from getting the book.
Here they are:
when you are a startup executive, nothing happens unless you make it happen.
it’s much easier to add new people to old processes than new processes to old people.
AI
On February 3rd 2025, vibe coding was born:
There’s a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding”, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.
A whole industry went mad and, by June, executives were requiring their teams use AI, and even changing whole requirements for new hires. I clipped this chart of how Zapier measured AI fluency:
We map skills across 4 levels: Unacceptable, Capable, Adoptive, and Transformative.
How do we measure AI fluency at Zapier?
Meanwhile, María Álvarez challenged the concept of Intelligence in AI with this beautiful sentence:
Mistaking intelligence for language is like mistaking love for poetry
María Álvarez. El amor y los poemas
Writing and reading
With the need for clickbait, reading the news is getting harder every day. This year I learned about the Betteridge’s law of headlines:
“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the principle is much older.
If you want to do better, these Editing Guidelines from The New Yorker (circa 1937) might come handy.
Editing Guidelines from The New Yorker
(Follow the links for a full PDF).
Most journalists are generalists and don’t know much about what they’re writing. Regardless, we tend to trust what we read. It is only when we bump into something about our own domain that our spider sense wakes up and we challenge every word.
This year I learned it’s a well-known bias, and it’s called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.
Systems
I confess I gave up on Thinking in Systems, the popular book by Donella H. Meadows, but only after clipping this practical definition:
A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves some-thing.
If you look at that definition closely for a minute, you can see that a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose.
Visiting the Alhambra has been on my bucket list since I have a memory, and in 2025 I was finally able to check it off.
I went on my own, and I had a great time speaking with ChatGPT in voice mode throughout my visit. It gave me answers about the most random details and, even though I feared it was bullshitting me half of the time, I loved having a non-human personal tour guide. There’s your $1B startup idea.
As a fan of both Systems and Exhibition Design, I stared at this diagram for a while.
According to Gall’s Law, if you find yourself trying to fix a complex system, you better start over.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
And the final link gazpacho
This meme taught me horizontal lines on red Solo cups are actually measurements.
(I doubled-checked, and unfortunately they aren’t. It’s an urban legend. The lines are just structural.)
The Pudding found the mathematically optimal way to dice an onion.
Here’s the kitchen where David Lynch (maybe) diced onions on his house that went on sale after he passed away. For $15M, I say it’s ugly and tiny.
I had used this framework before, but I didn’t know it was called the Ansoff matrix.
The Ansoff matrix is a strategic planning tool that provides a framework to (…) devise strategies for future business growth. It is named after Russian American Igor Ansoff, an applied mathematician and business manager, who created the concept.
“A watched pot never boils” has a scientific background. It’s called the Zeno effect.
In 2026, I might start tagging some pages on my website as evergreen notes.
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