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.
WebUtils is a browser-only way of converting images between various formats and compressing them using WebAssembly. Most services like this require a request to a backend server which you can’t inspect what’s going on. Doing all the processing client side is more private and (maybe) somewhat safer.
A fence is a man made object that takes cost and effort to construct. They tend to be placed with some forethought as to what they are building a barrier from or to. To remove the fence without understanding why it’s there can have unintended consequences. See also:
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:
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).
An easy way to display a PDF preview in the browser is to use an To workaround this issue, 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 See also: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.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.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"
/>
);
};
A clock is base 12 (a 12 hour clock) and base 60 (an hour contains 60 minutes). Since they are divisible by each other you can use minute markers only to tell the hour by looking at the position of the hour in minutes and dividing by 5. For example, at the 15 minute position the hour is 3. At the 30 minute position the hour is 6 and so on. See also:
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:
For new knowledge to be created, there needs to be an error correcting mechanism. This makes it the most important knowledge for progress and innovation. Traditions of criticism provide the environment needed to find the knowledge to detect and eliminate errors. Without it justificationism stifles new ideas and no progress can be made. See also:
Founders that are willing to take on problem areas that are unappealing because it seems like a lot of work is a moat. Schlep blindness, as Paul Graham calls it, is mostly subconscious and causes hackers to choose easier, but more competitive areas. This explains why you see thousands of todo list apps, but not a thousand employment compliance companies. See also:
A Pew Research Center Survey found that 61% of remote workers who have a company office say it’s their choice not to work from there. This is significant because the prior reason for working remotely was 38% of people said it was because their workplace was closed. 60% of remote workers say that when the COVID-19 pandemic is over, if they have the choice, would like to work from home all or most of the time. See also:
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:
Visionaries pushing some form of utopia are defined by their pessimism. Their belief that utopia can be achieved means they don’t believe things could ever get better, nor their idea of what is best. Unless new knowledge stops being created and all relevant knowledge is known, utopians exhibit the same parochial error as someone who believes the sun revolves around the Earth. See also:
We do not yet know what we have not discovered and trying to know the unknowable (prophesy) leads to pessimism. A Malthusian catastrophe ends up being wrong because it does not predict knowledge that resulted in efficiency of food production. Similarly the pessimism of energy economics is error laden because it can not predict what new discoveries we will make in social and political systems or new defenses. Why does prophesy lead to pessimism? Trying to make a prediction based on knowledge bounded by what is currently known, then extrapolating, will result in plenty of examples to be pessimistic about. The problem with these kinds of predictions is that it’s based on unknown knowledge which can change the course of things entirely. See also:
A good churn rate for a B2B company serving small and medium businesses (SMB) and mid-market businesses (< 1000 employees) is 2.5% - 5.0% per month. A great churn rate is less than 1.5% per month. A good churn rate for B2B company serving enterprise customers (1000+ employees) is 1-2% per month. A great churn rate is less than 0.5% per month. Read What is good monthly churn from Lenny Rachitsky.
You can spot bad explanations similar to the way you can spot bad arguments using the Münchhausen trilemma. For example:
All problems are soluble with the right knowledge. That doesn’t mean we know the solution already, but that the pursuit of good explanations will lead to progress towards one. It also doesn’t mean that all problems are solvable—there exists undecidable problems too (like a mathematical proof that proves something is undecidable) but even that provides something soluble (the absence of a solution) and new knowledge can be created (what if this undecidable theorem were true?). See also:
The essence of problems is when two ideas come into conflict with each other. Sometimes that’s the conflict between an explanation and a better explanation. Other times it’s the conflict between the current state of being and what you want. Without conflict, there is no problem. See also:
There’s a Finnish saying that the “dogs are barking but the train keeps going” meaning that people will always be talking about you but it doesn’t matter. There will always be haters and naysayers but they can’t do anything to you—the train does not consider anything else on its path. See also:
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-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:
It can be difficult to empathize with others without direct experience. Those who are not sensitive to noise and are good at ignoring others are seldom aware of their own noise and nuisance. If you’ve never noticed an annoying neighbor before (especially while in tight living quarters), it’s likely that you are the annoying neighbor.
As products and services become commoditized, distribution and companies that help distribution become more important. Marketing and branding is one way to grow, but finding channel partners that already have a relationship with the target market is more effective. I suspect that’s why sources of revenue for mature companies shifts to channel partnerships over time and why platforms like Shopify (platform close relationships with businesses) and Stripe (platform that helps others distribute a capability) are growing so quickly. See also:
The user is complaining that our boat is leaking through the windows, it’s unstable, and too slow. Sometimes you have to remember that some users will never be happy with your product because they decided to take an airplane into the water. I heard this indirectly from Geoff Belknap. See also: