Do they run their own hardware?

Why did they do that? Any good source here?

Or the modern self-employed producer, which we see more and more of (gig work, internet creators etc). You generally have more choice today in your form of employment. It is not just about consuming.

Indeed. Being forced to have children out of material necessity is no good basis for societal growth.

How do those concepts fit thogether? Individualism means valuing yourself -- so there you are valuing something. Does it mean not caring about larger institutions then?

Yes, because we rarely make progress in other aspects. For technological problems there's a clear solution that people will buy if it works. Deliberate sociological change you may have to force, which is never a good basis.

Are China's politics cutthroat? As an ignorant western person it appears their government is always acting in unison, much more so than in the US for example. Definetely worth reading more on.

Exactly. He effectively created his algorithm on the training data set, and can't independently verify the results.

Notably, the words used in the game are meant to be guessed by humans -- so using an optimal strategy that considers every english word should perform fairly well.

I think the explosive social growth comes from this simplicity. You are not told how well you did or get to try multiple examples. The only way to find that out is to share the product.

Probably an unintentional effect, but a powerful one.

Not just "why we are afraid of big numbers", also why we do not intuitely understand exponentials (as referenced earlier in the article). Exponentials appear in nature, but humans rarely had to deal with them until a few thousand years ago.

The core of this hypothesis: Approximating things (e.g. numbers) is an innately human instinct, while precise computation using abstract symbols evolved only recently. In nature there's rarely a large difference between 1.0 and 1.1.

It's applied to the big number problem in the next paragraph.

Or very small numbers, like understanding how atoms work in order to synthesize stronger materials. Or in general, attempting to understand things that are outside our direct field of view and intuitive understanding.

I like the author's argument. Reasoning about big numbers is reasoning about what we don't know -- the first step of getting to know it.

Meaning, you can come up with a solution to an NP problem in polynomic time (something represented by an exponential), if you take the optimal choice every time there is a choice (non-deterministic). Which is the same as verifying that a given solution is correct, by just following it's steps.

It's about finding the best representation of big numbers, not thinking of them.

Interestingly, I enjoy reading the articles more when I stumble upon them browsing their home page, rather than through a newsletter subscription. There's something to exploring vs. consuming.

But it makes sense that they want to optimise for newsletter subscribers.

That's the best feedback you can get if you want to be truly independent.

A similar read on the topic: https://www.oliverburkeman.com/time

That's not neccesarily the ideal for all people. But it should at least be a choice what to do with our time.

What a well-written intro!

But production per day must have slowed down since you always had less people working at once. It's an interesting way to increase utilization of industrial equipment -- you don't have to increase capacity, but can use the same things longer. Assuming you rotated 2 rest days within 7 day weeks that would mean you need 2/7 = 28% less workplaces for people (maybe ore smelters for example), which could be significant.

Here's a great example of one such study into life science research, which seems to be directly inspired by Progress Studies: https://guzey.com/how-life-sciences-actually-work/

What do those "better management practices" entail, and what does "productivity" mean here?

Did they enable more individual agency to allow for more innovation, or was is simply a better technical process for organizing labor?

This is the key, to ground the study in practical results.

Fragmentation isn't inherently bad -- there's more duplicated effort, but also more experimentation and beneficial randomness. Having the same policies and conditions everywhere would not be learning from history IMHO.

I'm intuitively sceptical that having more policies and management practices creates more innovation or "progress". Though even having less policies and more individual agency is a "policy" in some sense. So I agree that we should study / observe what works best to enable progress, or at least more explicitly focus on it.

What does "delegate authority" mean in this context?

Which suggests that pockets of innovative effort are extremely rare, and appear almost randomly in different places. We can and should replicate beneficial conditions developed there after the fact, but doesn't the seemingly random distribution of innovation suggest that we can't force it?

I would argue that progress only comes from smaller advances. For every major innovation you see, you don't see the experiments that enabled it. Which is even more reason to study the progress, because innovation is a process.

I would drop the "still" -- for me the essence of human endeavor is striving for progress :)

I wonder why this model has seemingly failed us now.

More precicely, I believe he wanted to study the principles leading to practical knowledge? So to be more practical coming from purely abstract study, and to be broader than purely technical experimentation. Exactly the same motivation the authors suggest in this article.

"The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Institute_of_Technology#Foundation_and_vision

That's a so refreshingly sensible practice, instead of rejecting things just because your identity is tied up in it.

That's what they value -- independence and maintaining strong family bonds, not success defined by arbitrary things like education, job, salary etc.

Pictures: https://www.google.com/search?q=amish+buggies

I'd call them "carriages" more than "buggies".

And we, the people living in the future, are sceptical of genetic crops for how unproven they are and what they might do to farmers.

For all the understanding of their motivation, that's a hack to avoid saying that your rules are outdated (similar to orthodox Jewish practices). In my opinion, nothing is worse than not being clear to yourself what you believe.

A sensible idea. I can't imagine many modern people leaving behind electricity now, but it's almost common to limit screen time at least.

I wonder if we will see more people splitting off, and building communities around the rejection of addictive new things.

That's a really thoughtful idea.

"possible to co-opt", "useful functions", "healthy market economy", "more complete concept", "new method of truly global collaboration"

I'm already inclined to skip this article for the great mass of vague, overly broad wording of these first paragraphs. That's not how you explain web3 concept to the average person :)

Honestly, I'm already tempted to skip this article for the great mass of buzzwords and vague, overly broad wording of these first paragraphs.

Isn't that a bad sign, that the value and application of web3 to real world problem is too contrived? Looking forward to seeing if the author succeeds with the explanation in this article.

I think that's a great conclusion to this thorough article. Things are not as they appear on first sight (because people find their way around problems), and any drastic action will upset this state (which works surprisingly well, as the author wrote). Change small things we can actually change, the rest will take care of itself.

Edward Boyden, a neuroscientist at MIT who seemingly developed a now widely-used research tool called "Optogenetics".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Boyden

Not if the other parties are acting rationally, and see through your over-promises (you will always detect thing that don't work later). This financial and reputational motive to believe in your own work is the basis of capitalism :) Maybe the main problem is over-promising marketing.

Assuming that people and public bodies spend money on what is valuable to them, judging researchers by the funding they attract (thus results they produce to stakeholders), is not bad.

What valuable kind of research gets suppressed as a result of this?

Everyone fights for themselves. Probably we should have both sizes of labs?

Interesting. It's usually the opposite elsewhere -- small companies can experiment more than established businesses (which have little reason to experiment).

I would have liked the article to go deeper into this. If they are "senior authors", does that mean most of their research is actually done by others, and they mostly provide the publicity and direction? In this case, isn't the system working as expected?

Are the published results really biased as a result? It seems like the commented is someone not part of this group.

IC just means that somebody is not a manager. Specifically, there often are "Staff" and "Principal" engineering roles you see more experienced people inhabit. They usually write project proposals, kickstart new efforts, and shape the culture through their work, in addition to (less) actual engineering work.

IMHO the role is just about finding a fitting place for people with experience to contribute in the best way they can, if they don't want to do management.

Because PIs attract new funding, while research scientists do not?

So they will just do the "CEO" job, and delegate the actual research to younger people, as written earlier. The point of having research "co-founders" here is about creating more independent projects?

Is it a challenge to stay in research and not be kicked out? Or is this point mainly talking about progressing in your career?

"if you're truly capable" will not apply to most people, particularly those who complain :)

Maybe this is something about scientists being presented with compelling facts (to hire someone), or with them knowing the state of things after going through them.

Which is X's function in this arrangement, and people in the industry seem to understand that. Maybe the problem is other media, who attributes new results to individuals instead of groups of people?

"The Research Project (R01) grant is an award made to support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing the investigator's specific interest and competencies, based on the mission of the NIH."

Seems to be a fairly generic form of funding, I suspect other grants have more restrictions.

https://grants.nih.gov/grants/funding/r01.htm

That's the function of any policy -- to get people working towards it. Maybe the real problem is that there's little funding dedicated to different goals?

I'd guess each person interpolates from their own life to the entire industry, thus misses some aspects (but is not necessarily wrong).

That should probably be clarified to "areas of study that are based on opinions" (like investigating the state of an industry). If studying is about rational deduction from facts first-hand, or learning those explanations second-hand, I don't see how spending more time makes you more wrong generally.

You may overestimate your ability, but it doesn't make you more wrong to hear more facts. We can only trust our mind. I'm looking forward to reading the linked article though.

Principal investigators, the "lead researchers" for research projects.

I wonder if there are actual source for this, or if the author (or other authors) are making this up because it fits the story.

Mhh, I don't really agree. Say you have a good that goes bad (e.g. rotten food), then it has lots it's use and nobody will buy it from you. So its previous value gets multiplied by 0.

The number zero developed out of placeholders for positional number notations, which were invented to make values more precise.

Before that, noone had any "practical use" for the concept of "nothing".

TIL base 10 numeric systems likely originate from the fact that we have 10 digits on both hands.

As a non-native english speaker I did not know what this phrase meant. It seems to imply someone is "mad or that their behaviour is very strange": https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/fruitcake

Curious to see what people thought about going into year 2000.

I assume drivers also feel safer accepting rides by people with good ratings, since they are less likely to be assaulted, disrespected etc.

For me, the article failed to address the main question of why platforms should implement different rating systems. With with two (or three)-sided marketplaces, it isn't clear which services are the "best" -- and the "best" isn't available for everyone.

Another problem happens for products with very few reviews. If you sort by "rating" on Amazon it shows you products with 1-2 5 star reviews. Any of the actual best products may have a few 4-start reviews, so their average is less than 5.0.

Here's an approach to deal with that problem, essentially creating a probabilistic function to find the real average given the number of ratings available: https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html

I wonder which part of the paper the authors reference here. From the abstract: "We argue that reputation mechanisms used by platform markets suffer from two problems. First, buyers may draw conclusions about the quality of the platform from single transactions, causing a reputational externality across sellers. Second, for a variety of reasons we discuss, reputations will be biased."

I totally agree, I'm so glad someone put this frustration into words.

Examples: It's becoming impossible to tell apart Amazon products by their ratings or reviews, every Uber rating <5 starts means you did something weird, and in general the default anywhere is to five "5 stars" for things that did what you expected.

Is it? Email notes will just stay within the email app, and are not accessible from anywhere else. That avoids clutter, but you won't be able to connect ideas across domains, or even move email providers.

I would argue there are also notes without predefined trigger condition -- thoughts you want to expand in the future. Tagging notes per topic, or putting things in a list represents a trigger, but there's also value in unplanned inspiration for connections you only make later..

This is the right scientific attitude in my opinion. Study and use data trends for specific purposes (e.g. offsetting a sexist bias to appeal to more readers), not because you morally think (or are told) one is "good" or "bad".

Which problem should we fix specifically? Humans in general are biased and have sexist stereotypes, and that's what the algorithm in the article finds.

Should we offset this existing bias when creating algorithms? Isn't that yet another bias on the side of the programmer (imprinting his world view on the data)?

I would be really interesting to explore the value of being original / deciding for yourself what to learn as part of the risk diversification idea.

My personal theory is that in those places, information content is not the main metric (marketing, social connection, status, or feeling part of a group is).

Aren't most things in the end based on personal experiences (e.g. the best books)?

Why are they your favorite places to learn? Because they are free?

I really like this diversification idea applied to learning. Might be worth expanding on it with a few sentences (e.g. you want to have some security to take advantage of random events).

I think that's a great example of how learning something new led to things you didn't expect at all before.

BTW I'm personally beginning to think this is the core of spending time well consuming information, and doing any original work. So not accepting filters others impose on you (like having to follow news, or work on this specific thing), building our own filters (interestingness) and trusting them. It's interesting to think about with your T-shaped risk / ROI framework...

What do you mean by library here? Things we are curious about to read, things we are reading, or things we have already read?

You put this quote here to mean that it's worth learning some fundamentals from timeless content? And that makes filtering content more important?

Do you suggest picking a "safe" technology with low risk but reasonable reward, or high risk but outsized ROI?

Being T-shaped about something that doesn't matter seems bad, but so does having exact same skills as someone else.

Or at least you have a significant advantage over others if you have deep domain knowledge (could mean technical skills, knowledge of product area, personal network etc etc).

I really like this sentence as conclusion of the intro.

Why is recognising high quality content important (and hard) noawadays? What do you mean by curation?

... so we need to learn constantly?

Interesting thesis -- why does following content creators you like help to get more high quality information? (I think I agree).

In the case of COVID, these insights could conceivably save millions of lives.

Perhaps it's not a nice topic to talk about, for anyone involved?

Wording that subtly suggests you to question this motivation before knowing anything about it.

As someone who was extremely sceptical of the idea, I would recommend reading further as well.

But please watch the language in this article, and don't jump to the conclusion the author states pretty forcefully (so much for "decide what you think").

Controversial take: While the facts in this article convinced me that a deliberate virus manipulation (for the good cause of research into better vaccines) is a realistic and possibly likely cause of Omicron, I am going to stay away from COVID news even more than before. People's identity is so tied up in this topic that everyone bends the facts somewhat.

"we need to tell our friends and families, to use whatever platform we might have, big or small, to promote the end of this research."

That's a concerning conclusion after spending maybe 10 minutes reading one article about the topic.

Why the us vs them mentality? A more credible conclusion would be that we need to gather more facts and present them to the people who believe otherwise (like the referenced tweets above suggest).

Not having a stake in the result doesn't make people more credible. In that case they could talk about anything without repercussions from bad predictions (as we see so often nowadays).

A sure measure that someone believes in something is when they spend their life / career on realising it.

I'm assuming this number is overall, not just from Omicron which this article discusses (again, bending the facts unnecessarily).

He did not say "highly improbable", only that a deliberate manipulation is more probable.

Please don't bend small facts like that, the story would be strong enough without manipulations like that. It makes me wonder how many other information in this article was adjusted to fit the narrative (e.g. the very suggestive wording of the delta lab leak above).

Well, we haven't seen the variations in between. That could be caused by non-uniform testing for example, a deliberately manipulated version is not the only explanation.

Is this meant as a complement or criticism to Knuth? On one hand the whole TeX ecosystem is incredibly complex, on the none of the tools would exists if he simply type-setted his book by hand. Plus, many of the underlying languages and font setting likely didn't exist before.

Why does the current state of TeX need to compile every historical document? You could go back in the version history to always find a version to render each document. Are there really modern features or styling that you need for old text documents?

That's funny. I wonder how they calculate their version increases, if they converge to solve specific number, they must have a measure of how close they are to the perfect product?

According to Wikipedia, TeX was released in 1978. So that algorithm has been used for 43+ years. Some problems rarely change.

That's a wide point beyond web3 -- to avoid the problems with big tech, we need to make software / products easier to create. Then there's little to gain by increasing scale beyond network effects (which is a separate topic web3 aims to solve).

I think we're already beginning to see this decentralization, if not in software then for YouTube & TikTok creators, indie makes etc in comparison to old media companies.

That's a great conclusion. He doesn't condemn the innovation that's taking place, just points out concerns about its directions and ways we can deal with them.

Great twist on the common refrain we hear everywhere. There's always an opposite to every argument.

Important quote. OpenSea builds its own features not just to build a monopoly to make money, but also because the protocols don't allow for rapid innovation.

Interesting point about writing, I have not realized this before. Maybe seeing curiosity and authenticity is refreshing amid all the marketing and news we see.

I think there is a wider point here. We often conflate "new" with "relevance" -- e.g. following the latest news events but not understanding what important trends took place in the last decade.

Maybe blogs and posts on the internet are especially prone to this because there's so much more available content than before.

Not writing about things that were seemingly already written about may be a mistake. I at least found that I'm sometimes consciously avoiding some articles because I want to think about the topic (and maybe write about it) myself.

We don't need to do everything in the most efficient way, and understanding only comes from thinking ourselves.

Beautifully said.

The stated goal in the last paragraph is "use the next 25 minutes in the most worthwhile way that seems feasible". If I enjoy what I'm working on but am finished after 5 minutes already, idling for the next 20 won't be the best you can do. It means spending time on the tasks that seem worthwhile, not on the ones that actually are.

For me that's the key -- we can't and should not attempt to do everything, but only the most important things. As far as I understand the article, Pomodoro seems to help with realizing that.

Interesting that he even chose to leave 2 months before his initial equity vesting, and likely gave up his signing bonus as well. The author really believes in what he's writing down here.

So the author's reason for leaving is very personal, other people might be looking for this "release management" role with broader room for initiative. That's not criticism, I left my last job for a similar reason.

But I'm wondering how much this article serves as a general criticism of Amazon. You always hear people being not happy in their role, but with thousands of employees that's probably expected.

Maybe he wanted to get into web development?

Isn't solving a problem partially better than not solving it at all? Getting started helps you to figure out the actual core problem too. That applies at least to startups -- but maybe having to deliver results for every project at big companies is a different environment.

Sometimes incentives even conflict between people of the same role -- e.g. there are only so many new large projects to lead, but much more unglamorous or uncomfortable work that doesn't get you a promotion.

I like this as a general policy -- that way you can criticize an idea without it being personal.

Isn't nearly every employer always in a hurry to hire? Maybe we should normalize quitting a job after 1-2 month, after you actually know what it will be like.

I wonder how different the returns are between equity and (capped) revenue share investments. Maybe the top VC funds have no incentive to change their ways, but as Courtland wrote, there's an increasing market for a different kind of funding.

It's crazy how much culture changes like that in just 10 years. Now it seems like we all see the downsides of hypergrowth and spending billions on marketing (e.g. Uber), and often swing to the complete opposite -- taking no funding at all.

A good book on the topic is "The E-Myth", about the reason most people start small companies (not to manage a business, but to not have a boss). It's hard to truly get independence when you have to manage the business side, and adding VC board seats should only make it worse.

Interestingly, in 2005 Paul Graham suspected the nature of large VC funds to be source of huge valuations and investments. http://www.paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html

The VC model should also work with smaller deal sizes, but maybe the insane wealth generated by the tech monopolies + the need to generate billions in returns for large VC funds makes shooting for unicorns the most profitable investment strategy.

Here's another article by the same author going a bit more into this: https://future.a16z.com/the-web3-playbook-using-token-incentives-to-bootstrap-new-networks/

IMHO tokens as a tool for bootstrapping networks is their most promising application.

Ha, it's not a magical solution as it sometimes seems nowadays. Web3 tokens are a tool to design network incentives that has to be used carefully.

That's a core point. Companies restrict other companies access to their network because it's their property and leverage -- they want users to use only their service because that maximizes value capture. That incentive should still be present between different tokens -- e.g. one developer being reluctant to support a service that does almost the same thing as he's writing.

But any new token or smart contract grows the utility of the underlying network (e.g. Ethereum) -- there's more functionality to connect to, leading to more users and rewards, leading to improvements of the network, leading to better services.

Smart contracts are also fundamentally composable, so the openness of collaboration between tokens or services is enforced at the network layer. Developers have no choice but to use open standards and let others build ontop their work.

I'm sceptical about attributing the entire rise of walled garden to smartphones. They are just a symptom of the appeal of Facebook and other networks like it. People gave up open standards because the proprietary networks were just too useful.

Why should the token incentives disappear the larger a network grows? There will be less price speculation, but wouldn't users be rewarded for the value they provide (except if the token is purely an equity equivalent)? Since the network effects and user base will be larger, users might even be paid more later.

What could be examples of such networks? Anything based on social communication should also work at a small scale -- since human desires were formed by millennia of living in small groups. Maybe he's thinking more about technical networks, like data storage or distributed computing?

What turns me off about web3 projects is that everyone only seems to care about making money from tokens. But that's a feature, not a bug -- incentivizing users to bootstrap networks like owners. Maybe we're numb already to traditional marketing done by companies, but not by users.

The lesson: see web3 monetary incentives as a tool to boostrap social networks.

Maybe the best VCs are less needy, but aren't they still incentivized to invest large sums for their returns?

Maybe partly because of PG's influence, the new tech VC firms brand themselves as "founder-friendly" and seem to rarely force CEO changes now. I wonder how many other effects from this article also don't apply anymore.

To incentivize performance, VCs should get rewarded based on their returns. So to make more money they must increase their returns or manage more total funds. The latter method seems easier to pull off, so we see the effects PG describes here.

What if VCs & fund managers would only get rewarded based on their returns, maybe also with a strict deal size limit? I'm not sure why they would willingly give up management fees, but wouldn't it resolve many of the side effects pointed out in this essay?

The following process didn't work for me with macOS Big Sur. Installing the same uncompressed dictionary from https://github.com/mortenjust/webster-mac worked though.

I'd guess the most popular dictionaries are written for people who want to learn english, and not use a dictionary as writing aid.

If you don't know what will happen, how can you prepare for the unexpected events that have large consequences?

You set yourself up to be more adaptable (robust as called here), e.g. by saving money or having good health.

Totally agree. The point is not to get obsessive about each decision and try to think through every consequence, but to be aware that big things could happen because of it.

That also works in the positive direction -- e.g. tweeting often probably won't get you a large audience by itself, but potentially you become a person who connects well with people, that builds a great product, and build an audience as a result of that. Just one example of the many things that can happen by doing things with some uncertainty.

I like this idea -- you don't know what second order effects there will be, but you know there will be some.

Splitting text into lines is usually the first step of most text processing code. Doing the wrong things more technically efficient helps with nothing. Most things don't need to run as fast as grep.

But if performance proves to be an issue, the tricks in this article are useful for low-level code.

The reason I use React / Next.js for all projects is that it speeds up development significantly, especially if you want to gradually add more interactive features. If you don't do anything very performance intensive, the page will work on most devices.

That's a genuine and broader problem about not emphasising with users enough.

That's something only a software engineer can come up with.

Since a lot of the online information is written to sell you something, and we're bad at separating quality from attention.

This is IMHO the core of innovation. Only the results matter, the process you used to get there should not be important (within reasonable bounds).

At least, we should not obsess over the process (e.g. agile, or open development) over the results it produces.

Why is this article so obsessed with wood as energy source? We could use radiant heat to reduce energy consumption without burning wood.

The article is from 2008, I wonder what the author refers to here. Possibly using more environmentally sustainable energy sources? Or using less energy in general?

But again, those will only heat one room. Most warmth will still come from other heating systems.

That's the core of the article. We don't need to heat up all the air in a room, only ourselves.

I wonder what "research" in this context means.

Tangential to the article, but this seems like a powerful idea. I wonder what the best importance filter is if thinking is faulty.

Possibly it's time that creates concrete evidence for importance. But connecting past dots is thinking, and you can't notice reoccurrences of something you don't know. You need to believe something is important to prove that it really is.

Maybe the quote is not such a powerful idea after all, just a reminder to question our heuristics sometimes.

The forth reason people quote things may be that it's easy to copy ideas that seem proven. You read about an idea in a book a nobel laurate wrote, so it must be correct right? The source of the idea is an integral part of why such quotes are useful and remembered.

I think nobody wants to do that. The common approach is summarising or connecting existing ideas, but I agree creating deliberately different melodies leads us forward more directly.

I wonder what "we all" means here, what sources on philosophy or business Derek did not want to replicate.

For people outside our bubbles, is contrarian writing more or less useful? Concise essays are so powerful and lead to independent thinking if they allude to ideas we already encountered before, so they do require context.

I wonder if this means that no information is ever lost. Say we come across a giant mirror in space someday and could watch past life on earth with incredible detail.

But then, why would we need this much detail? Time itself is an information filter - thing that work will stick, others disappear.

Or an answer you simply heard and retrieved from your associative memory without thinking.

He probably means debates in the formal sense. The best way to argue for something is to show it, for example building a business out of something other people scoff at.

This. If you don't yet know what opportunity to take, you need to try / commit a little to more things.

I don't think this is possible for all things, for example for software tools or social networks. You could argue those are bad opportunities to work on, but I'm not sure if that's constructive advice.

Building small technical tools can also be a way to prove demand.

This is saying very little, and commits to nothing - exactly what you'd expect from large co' communications.

Not terribly surprising, but Meta is bottlenecked on recruiting after taking advantage of less hiring during COVID last year (also 53% senior eng offer accept rate in the Bay Area vs 81% in London)

It's fun to see internal large company posts with actions that say very little and commit to nothing:

"We need to communicate better", "Misson Control is exploring", "we need to build the muscle to become great", "working on a plan to better navigate"

Benefit of long-term thinking - being antifragile agains disruptions like COVID.

If the core teams are located in the Bay Area that's understandable. They should move large overall orgs to other locations (e.g. the metaverse efforts).

Interesting insight into how tech companies provide information to the media without being accountable for it (e.g. if some people react negatively).

If you see "sources familiar with the situation" in any article, as yourself where the information is coming from, and who benefits from it

Very resonating read on how you gradually adopt to bad situations that seem normal and hard to change. Your eventual solution will be to quit, without having a clear reason why.

Learnings:

• Really think about WHY complex processes exist. Even if you know how to deal with them, they'll get to you over time.
• Fresh perspectives are especially value to uncover issues everyone is hurting from. Don't teach them that these things are normal.

A famous Google-internal video about their complicated deployment process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI

Terrifying story of a pretty ordinary heroin addiction.

My thoughts:

• Most terrifying about drug addictions is that they destroy your ambitions in life. Which is the only things that can get you to change.
• We’re all aware of shitty parts of life, and the good parts that make it worth it. It’s chance really if you get opportunity to find some good parts before making bad decisions.

Thoughts:

• There are different kinds of content: "fast" and "slow". These are often mixed on social media platforms, but each have their own value and purpose.
• Which type of content a site houses is part result of what the UX incentives, part what the community expects. There's a wide range of possibilities to adjust these factors to get the content you want.

There are so many fast, in the moment comments on site like Twitter that I go elsewhere for thoughtful content. It's just too difficult to separate mixed content on the same site.

I'm wondering if there needs to be a platform which does everything.

Author arguments:

• There's a "bookish" quality to physical books that's not present for ebooks, which is why many people prefer the former. It's partly about tradition / nostalgia, partly missing features.
• Ebooks cater to specific users who read many books, and care less about the form. Annotations and bookmarks (which should be the prime feature of ebooks), are somewhat neglected.
• But this doesn't matter too much, because we can just continue reading physical books.

My thoughts:

• I like physical books primarily because they get me away from a screen, and because I can place them in bookshelves. That's in a way "bookishness".
• But I think digital annotation features would really add to the reading experience if done right. I'd be interested in indexing notes more easily, or what passage my friends thought especially good.

Learnings:

• There's some nostalgia about print books that people associate with worthwhile long form reads. Maybe this is a form of inner rebellion against the modern noisy world.
• Current (Kindle) Ebooks are made for popular best-selling genres. They are not made for heavy highlighting, note-taking, or bookmarking. That's an opportunity.

I like having books as a reference, and to re-read great ones carefully and slowly. But from an economics perspective, it would make sense for Amazon to prioritise the consumption of as many books as possible.

For me, the reason I like physical books more is that they present a few hours away from a screen of any kind, and the irrational desire pleasure of filling my bookshelves.

Which I guess relates to this "bookish" definition. Physical books have the same content, but in the cozy tried-and-tested form which rejects the modern noisiness of our digital world.

The basic physical form of books may be the same, but it got more and more efficient to produce them at scale.

This means the content of books and how we threat them has changed. They've gone from being the only place to record information, to the only mass media, to long-form content as a refuge from the noisy modern world.

Diversifying personal rewards.