Jocko on Episode 135 of the podcast talks about not trying to hog credit and: So, the reason [extreme ownership] works, is because I'm not out there doing it for me. That's the big difference. So if you're out there, thinking "Ah, cool, I'm gonna learn these tactics so I can get further in my life and I can get things out of the world." It's like, no, it's not gonna work out well for you. On the surface, because I'm gonna tell you … (Continued)
Troy Hunt is the creator of about Have I Been Pwned, his website that can tell you when your email or password is included in a data breach when a company gets hacked. It has become the biggest player in the market. Now, it's grown so large that he's having trouble managing as a one-man project and he's started looking for a company or non-profit to help take over managing it. On his weekly update podcast this week, he took a little time to recap the history of the project, starting at about 3: … (Continued)
Goodhart's law is an adage named after economist Charles Goodhart, which has been phrased by Marilyn Strathern as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." If you know the rubric you will be graded on, in a sufficiently competitive landscape, it becomes adaptive to spend less energy seeming to comply with the rubric than actually doing the work the rubric measures.
Inkdrop is a service that's a bit like Evernote for programmers. All the notes are in markdown instead of a WYSIWYG editor and it magically syncs them all to their cloud. But what really caught my eye was this section on the pricing page: Particularly this part: If lowered the pricing[sic], you would get more customers. We would like to provide good, quick and warm user support. If we got a lot of users we won't be able to support them all. Turns out the app is the full-time job of o … (Continued)
Seneca, Letter 22: Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long.
I graduated from NC State University in 2011, so I still see news about it come across my feed, like this item talking about leveling and rebuilding the main gym on campus, right across the street from the student center that was also just leveled and rebuilt. What surprised me was the way that the renovation was being spun. “Yes, we do need new fitness space, but it’s more than that. Our design has been very purposeful. New meeting spaces will allow us to invite more campus partners who su … (Continued)
Satisfaction and happiness comes from moving in the right direction, not being in the right place. No matter where you are, if you try to linger there, you will eventually stop being happy. You have to keep moving in the right direction to keep being happy and satisfied. Likewise, no matter how far you feel you are from a good place, you will feel better as soon as you start heading the right way, even if it feels very far away. Learning to notice that feeling of moving in the right direction … (Continued)
From The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll: Someone at NSA had leaked word my research to the Department of Energy. In turn, they were pissed that they hadn't heard earlier--and more directly. Roy Kerth stopped me in the hallway. "DOE is going to reprimand us for not telling them about this incident." "But we did tell them," I objected. "More than two months ago." "Prove it." "Sure. It's in my logbook." Roy wanted to see it, so we walked over to my Macintosh and … (Continued)
I mentioned in the previous post in this series that I was looking forward to working on this blog like it was a car, and that has turned out truer than even I expected. This website is barely two weeks old as I write this, and I'm already modifying the source of the blogging platform to fix tiny details that are just... bugging me. I'll admit it was a slippery slope to live-editing the source of the CMS, but it didn't start there. The first step down the slippery slope was uploading a custom … (Continued)
Scrolling through Instagram Stories today, I caught a live, impromptu Q&A by the drummer from Coheed & Cambria, a band which I enjoy quite a lot. Most of the questions were regular fare, about life on the road and what songs they are playing on the tour. As he was talking about how they will practice songs even when they are on the road and touring, and change up the set list when they feel like they are playing a particular song well, he started talking about the process of them learning and … (Continued)
I found this 99% Invisible episode about The Automat enlightening, mostly because it is a reminder to be humble and not assume your knee-jerk reaction that something is being caused by technology when it actually may be that what you're seeing is a novel incarnation of something very old. The technology is just the shiny new wrapper: A new restaurant called Eatsa opened up a few years back in downtown San Francisco It was designed to be a high-tech affair where people order on iPads and the … (Continued)
Eric Hoffer: > "It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into the blood stream."
Depending on how you count it, this is the fifth or sixth blog I've contributed to, and the first running on Ghost. The first was on Blogger (I never did have a LiveJournal), and the rest of them have been WordPress, which has been the reigning champ of the blogging world for a long, long time. But WordPress is... old. It uses PHP and CGI scripts, which are perfectly functional but dated. Nobody with a choice would use those technologies to start something new and modern. Practically speakin … (Continued)
I use my phone when I need what my phone does. I use my watch when I need the time. I like being on time, I like knowing where I stand in the hour, in the morning, in the afternoon, in the day. I look at my watch a lot, and I just love that it doesn’t look back. Why wear a watch when I have the time on my phone? by Jason Fried
On a recent episode of Econtalk, the host interviewed Maurico Miller, who wrote a book called The Alternative: Most of What You Believe about Poverty Is Wrong.... based on his years of running social assistance programs. But what he learned is unique because his programs didn't directly help people. The programs were entirely focused around building a community that would keep each other accountable and help each other out. It was not about handouts or means-testing people. There was no idea of … (Continued)
