Subscribe
13 posts

Quote

Durable Connections

Listening to Moxie Marlinspike on JRE, around 1h39m: "In a sense, I'm glad those things [social media] exist, because they're sort of what we wanted, but I think we underestimated how important the medium is, like the medium is the message kinda thing. What we were doing at the time, of writing zines and sharing information, I don't think we understood how much that was predicated on actually building community, and actually building relationships with each other, and that just... what we didn' … (Continued)

Natural Endings

Meditations 6.1 Nature is pliable, obedient. And the logos that governs it has no reason to do evil. It knows no evil, does none, and causes harm to nothing. It dictates all beginnings and all endings. So long as the ending is natural, it cannot be evil. It is simply the symmetric ending to a beginning set in motion years ago.

To be rather than to seem

The virtues of copper: “Sleek and shining stainless steel doorknobs and push plates look reassuringly clean on a hospital door. By contrast, doorknobs and push plates of tarnished brass look dirty and contaminating,” she wrote at the time. “But even when tarnished, brass—an alloy typically of 67% copper and 33% zinc—[kills bacteria], while stainless steel—about 88% iron and 12% chromium—does little to impede bacterial growth.” Ultimately, she wrapped her paper up with a simple enough conc … (Continued)

Gains in Computer Hardware

From Unix: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan As an example of how computing hardware has become cheaper and more powerful over the years, a 1978 PWB paper by Ted Dolotta and Mashey described the development environment, which supported over a thousand users: "By most measures, it is the largest known Unix installation in the world." It ran on a network of 7 PDP-11's with a total of 3.3 megabytes of primary memory and 2 gigabytes of disk. That's about one thousandth of a typical lapt … (Continued)

Attention Spans and Perfection

Excerpts from an interview with Tom West and Tracy Kidder, three years after the publication of The Soul of a New Machine: West: If somebody walks into your office after five minutes of staring at a sheet of paper and asks: "Should we make this register sixteen bits wide or thirty-two bits wide?" you know the answer to this question if you have been through it over and over and over again. So you can tell him the answer, and he goes back and puts it in. The he sits around for another five m … (Continued)

Trust and Risk

"Trust is risk, and risk avoidance is the name of the game in business." Tom West quoted in The Soul of a New Machine (p.131), by Tracy Kidder. The business always wants to avoid risk. The hidden downside to this is that low-risk businesses also tend to be very un-trusting. This is dissatisfying to people who value autonomy. If you insist on low-risk, eventually they remove themselves from your labor pool.

Jocko Willink on Putting Others First

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)

Goodhart's Law

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.

Seneca on Living Nobly

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.

Clifford Stoll on Keeping Good Notes

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)

Josh Eppard on the Path of Mastery

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)

Unused Talent

Eric Hoffer: > "It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into the blood stream."

Why wear a watch?

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