• Use Google Groups to Fake Transactional Emails

    Building tooling for transactional emails takes time and in the early days of building a product you’re still figuring out what to build. Google Groups can be used as a psuedo transactional email tool to fake it til you make it.

    How to send email as a Google Group from Gmail:

    1. In Google Groups, create a new email group with `Who can post` set to ‘Anyone on the web’ (e.g. info@mydomain.com)
    2. In Gmail, go to Settings -> Accounts
    3. In the ‘Send email as’ section, click ‘Add another email address’
    4. In the prompt, add the group email address
    5. Confirm the request by clicking the verification email sent to the group
    6. To send an email as the group, select it from the drop down in the `From` field of the email composer

    Now you can send emails as if you were info@ or support@ right from your Gmail account without setting up any other tools.

    If you want messages sent to also appear in the group so other people can see it, compose the message in Google Groups by clicking ‘New conversation’ and select the group’s address in the ‘From’ field. Slightly less convenient than sending from within Gmail, but with the added benefit that your teammates have full visibility.

  • Turn Off Notifications on All Devices Except One

    After a large uptick in notifications, I’m experimenting with turning off notifications on all devices except one. This change helps me maintain focus and feel less overwhelmed.

    I realized this was important when sitting at my desk working and receiving four notifications for the exact same thing—desktop, phone, watch, and tablet. What was more maddening was when a notification triggered an app notification and an email, effectively doubling the noise. This created a cacophony that was maddening.

    Having one location with notifications, either the desktop while I’m working or phone (I also stopped wearing the Apple Watch) when I’m outside the house, squelches the noise. I don’t worry about missing something important (I’m not completely on do-not-disturb) and my attention isn’t constantly thrashed between my phone, watch, and desktop.

    See also:

    • Work-related notifications might contribute to the Ringelmann effect as companies grow (more notifications because there are more people gives the illusion more is happening and more likely to let others do the work)

  • Themes of Malazan Book of the Fallen

    Hot iron and cold iron When in opposition, cold iron wins every time. Cold iron is not so much cold as unyielding.

    Convergence of power Power draws together in crucial moments. However, it’s difficult to tell whether the cause of a crucial moment caused the convergence or the convergence caused the crucial moment.

  • Work Avoidance

    With so much emphasis on productivity these days, an underappreciated problem is work avoidance—not doing what you should be doing because you are doing something else. This is particularly sinister because there is often too much work to do in any given day and we reduce anxiety with activity.

    For manager, that means avoiding the right problems because it’s difficult. They are seduced by doing something that’s more immediate, or they are good at, or praised for doing (like the work of an individual contributor when time is tight).

    Over time, work avoidance severely harms a teams ability to do ambitious things.

    See also:

  • Money Is a Social Construct

    We tend to think of money as something tangible and, once you have it, it can be used interchangeably anywhere it’s used for procuring goods and services. But this is not really true.

    From Matt Levine in Money Stuff:

    But the response to the 2008 global financial crisis, and to its later European aftershocks, made it clear that something else was going on. Who has money and what they can do with it can be adjusted by the actions of central banks and national treasuries; banks can be bailed out; costs can be socialized. The fiscal response to Covid-19 reinforced this point: Money is a tool of social decision-making, not an objective thing that you get through abstract merit.

    Besides the value of money being ascribed by people (e.g. one day we collectively decided Bitcoin was worth something) it behaves more like an instrument that can be used and tuned dynamically. This has some potentially powerful effects like deterring war with sanctions (as is being attempted on a massive scale on Russia’s war with Ukraine).

  • Preview a Pdf in the Browser With Authentication

    An easy way to display a PDF preview in the browser is to use an iframe and set the src to a link to the file. However, there is no way to set additional headers on requests from an iframe so you can’t use this method if the request requires authentication or any other special headers.

    To workaround this issue, fetch the PDF in the browser then use URL.createObjectURL on the response blob to generate a src link for the iframe. This will render the PDF preview and provides control over the request for things like setting authentication headers.

    Here’s an example React component that fetches a PDF with custom headers and renders a preview without any other external dependencies. As long as the server sends a mimetype of application/pdf, the PDF will render properly.

    export const PreviewPDF: FunctionComponent = (props) => {
  const [previewUrl, setPreviewUrl] = useState<string | null>(null);

  useEffect(() => {
    // Set up headers, cookies, or other settings needed here
    const request: RequestInit = {
      method: 'GET',
      mode: 'cors',
      headers: {
        Authorization: `Bearer ${token}`,
      },
    };
    fetch(props.url, request)
      .then((resp) => resp.blob())
      .then((blob) => {
        const objectURL = URL.createObjectURL(blob);
        setPreviewUrl(objectURL);
      });
  }, []);

  if (!previewUrl) {
    return <span>Loading...</span>;
  }

  return (
    <iframe
      src={`${previewUrl}#toolbar=0`}
      title={url}
      frameBorder="0"
    />
  );
};

    See also:

  • Investors Invest in Lines Not a Dot

    Meeting an investor for the first time and trying to get them to invest immediately is difficult. They have little information about you or the company. They have no understanding of your trajectory or the company’s. There’s no relationship that’s been built over time.

    Investors invest in lines, multiple data points collected over time, rather than a single dot or period in time because it gives them some advantages. They can lower their risk by your idea play out—if the next time they talk to you there is no progress or you fail then that saves them from making a bad investment. If there is progress it gives a brief window into how quickly it will grow.

    Read this Twitter thread from from Peter Reinhardt, founder of Segment.

    See also:

  • Proof of Worth

    When joining a new team, a common piece of advice is to “gain credibility” by doing undesirable tasks others don’t want to do. The problem with proof-of-worth is that, after a certain point, it has the opposite effect—proving no worth. Being in the habit of doing proof-of-worth tasks takes away the time needed to do high leverage work that no one else can which is likely the primary responsibility of the role anyway.

    Read the Twitter thread from Shreyas Doshi.

    See also:

  • Good Explanations Trilema

    You can spot bad explanations similar to the way you can spot bad arguments using the Münchhausen trilemma.

    For example:

    • An argument such as “we are in a simulation” which requires proof of “who wrote the simulation” infinitely regresses making it a bad explanation
    • An argument like “everything was designed by god in 7 days” is a bad explanation because it’s dogmatic and easy to vary. “Intelligent design” can be varied to match any prediction or evidence without further proof other than “because”

  • Technology Is an Expression of Knowledge, Not Knowledge Itself

    Knowledge and technology go hand-in-hand but they should not be confused for each other. Technology is just one expression of knowledge. For example, lithium ion batteries are the culmination of knowledge spanning chemistry, physics, and geology—batteries are not the knowledge itself.

    This is an important distinction because arguing against technology (e.g. techno-pessimism) often means arguing against the premise that new knowledge can be created (and therefore better technology).

  • Techno-Optimism Is Rational

    Techno-optimists believe technology can solve the world’s most pressing problems. With the right knowledge, we can find solutions to climate change like abundant clean energy. Can we acquire the knowledge to build nuclear fusion reactors? Can we do it in time?

    The Beginning of Infinity lays out a detailed argument about why we should be optimistic that we can. We’re already in the habit of transforming inhospitable environments into support systems (we wouldn’t survive a winter day in New York otherwise). We have a way of building knowledge that is error correcting and can build on itself generation after generation. In the fullness of time, all knowledge is attainable and can therefore be transformed into technology used to solve problems.

    Techno-pessimism is a parochial error. One must take the position that we lack the ability to make technological solutions to climate change or that it’s not possible in time. The only solution is to limit what we collectively do (e.g. austerity measures and degrowth) but that requires a great deal of optimism that people will work together on an extremely unpopular premise (loss aversion).

    There are many instances where technology (and technologists) went wrong—Facebook ruined democracy, nuclear power disasters, weapons, so on. But using this as a reason against techno-optimism is also a parochial error because it presumes that we won’t acquire the knowledge to solve these problems (technology is an expression of knowledge, not knowledge itself).

    See also: