Individual posts now have related posts at the bottom of them, leveraging the infrastructure I built for Search. I’m excited to see what serendipity this sparks. Let me know what you think!
Henrik Karlsson on Constraints. “Have you walked face-first into the wall to see if it is a chalk line?” We are all trapped in our preconceptions of what our ideal life needs to be like.
The skill of troubleshooting by Autodidacts via The Browser. A great deep dive into how to be a better troubleshooter and also a fantastic example of a meta skill that we probably all have under developed, reminiscent of Oliver Trimboli’s work on Listening. A favorite quote from the post: “Treating a system like the enemy makes it one.”
Taylor Swift's security practices around her songs before they're released are literally airgap. Ed Sheeran is one of her closest friends in the world. She didn't override anything for him. Because security is a systemic risk and he is a target.
Hobbies promote self efficacy (the believe that you can do hard things) when:
they are very serious but dissimilar to your work (e.g., a scientist that is a committed rock climber)
they are not particularly serious, but similar to your work (e.g., coding on a side project for a software engineer)
Hobbies begin to reduce self efficacy when they are too serious and too related to work (e.g., intensive blogging for a technical writer)
When written out this is pretty intuitive, but nice to see on paper. Making a personal commitment to find at least one hobby that is truly dissimilar from my work by the end of the year next year. From the Journal of Vocational Behavior via Range Widely.
Humans are not the only animal to domesticate other animals. Black garden ants keep aphids in a manner similar to how humans keep livestock. Via Kevin Kelly.
Simon Wilson on how to code with LLMs. His point around manual testing certainly matches my experience!
Musings
You don’t own the story, but you do own the execution.
A common thread I noticed between Paul Graham’s The Origins of Woke and Tanner Greer’s The Euro American Split: the importance of generational change in culture change. We are always either rebelling against or seeking the approval of our elders.
Having a new child is like meeting your spouse, having your first date, falling in love, and marrying them in the span of a moment.
Being boring is a choice.
A little bit of fun
A half baked business idea: The Anti-Recruiting Firm: You identify the lowest performers at your company; we land them plum roles at your rivals, simultaneously improving your productivity while tanking the competition.
I’ve added search. Increasingly this blog has become my scratch pad for ideas that are worth saving, a more public version of my various notes apps. Occasionally I look back for something but I can’t find it. Eventually this drove me crazy, so I added keyword search. Try it out and let me know if it works for you.
The home page is now a landing page rather than my blog directly, with the idea that it’s a softer landing spot for people who are searching for me for the first time and it’s less embarrassing when I’m in a dry spell.
Worth your time
I’ve fallen in love with Literature and History by Doug Metzger. I picked it up because it covered the Epic of Gilgamesh which is one of those things I wanted to know more about but never really wanted to read a book about. That episode was good, but the Homer episodes about the Iliad and the Odyssey were next level.
A decision coach who will make decisions for you for $247. I’m definitely going to try her out for something!
Product 101: My thoughts what you need to know if you’re starting a product role. I wrote this last year for a friend of a friend and have found myself sharing it periodically. Now I’m sharing it with you!
I was thinking about doing great work when I posted it, but it also applies to kids. Having your first child feels hard (fun, but hard), until you have a second one. Then having one seems easy in comparison, but having two seems hard. This continues with child three, which is all I can speak to from personal experience, but I assume it continues onward from there.
It also runs the other direction. If you have two kids, and one kid is away (with a grandparent), it feels like having zero kids.
The Polymerist on the Courtship of Sampling. Making a self reminder to write down my thoughts on this one at some point.
Things I learned
The only right protected in the main body of the US Constitution is the right to intellectual property (remember that the Bill of Rights were amendments added later). It seems fitting to me that in the American Brain, the right to own ones ideas is even more primal than the right to free speech. Also, the first patent examiner for the United States was none other than Thomas Jefferson. Via ChinaTalk.
People need a certain amount of structure to create bonds. You need the conference schedule to create the interactions that lead to friendships. It’s like the coral for the fish.
“It never gets easier you just go faster” - Greg LeMond
Culture and values are underrated for explaining the behavior of people and nations. This point was made by Prof. David Kang on ChinaTalk when describing why Asia doesn’t exhibit the same international relations patterns as Europe, but it also made me think of the book I’m listening to Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. When someone’s values and their material self interest align, you always know what they’ll do. When they conflict, though, often people’s values win out over what would narrowly benefit them.