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The term “creator economy” and the lexicon around it has broad appeal—who doesn’t want to be a “creator” or a “builder”? Being “indie” is associated with being cool and (slightly) counter-culture.

It’s also aspirational. For many, I suspect the creator economy is more of a “part-time creator economy” or “dream job economy”. After all, it is one of the more difficult wealth-creation mechanisms out there.

See also:

• No one identifies as conventional minded

A good analogy might be graduating from university and getting your first job. You might have been really really great at school, studying, getting good grades, whatever, but then realize it translates very poorly to that first job. So much was taken care of without you realizing it and very little prepares you for doing the job other than, well, doing the job.

Starting a company, especially after coming from a stint at a larger company, is a lot like that.

A group of pioneers taking the Oregon Trail to California in 1847 became trapped in the Sierras due to snow storms. They ran out of food and resorted to cannibalism. Interestingly, there are many places named after them near Lake Tahoe.

See also:

• Shipwrecked boys didn’t devolve into savagery, but trapped pioneers resorted to cannibalism

One can think of depression and anxiety as two ends of a spectrum. Depression often involves ruminating on things that have happened in the past. Anxiety often involves worrying about the future where something might happen.

Being present by definition means you are not living in the past or the future. This is the space of mindfulness, being aware of the present moment and the contents of your mind without being swept away in thought.

(I’m not sure who to attribute this to, but it is not an original thought).

See also:

• Awareness is key to being present
• The rate of depressive symptoms in US adults quadrupled during the pandemic
• Stress and anxiety are cumulative

Crypto is a hotbed of scams, but we shouldn’t be so surprised. It’s not that crypto enables new kinds of scams, but it’s a forum for old scams to be used again. Eventually, legislation and oversight will kick in and it will be harder for scammers to scam. In turn, they will take their playbook of scams and reuse them someplace else.

This Twitter thread from @foone describes a “poke” scam where an NFT’s price is inflated and pawned off on an unsuspecting victim. This is a centuries old scam made new in crypto. However, it’s unlikely to persist once the IRS starts tracking transactions and taxing crypto investments (scammers will move on to the next scam or the next forum).

See also:

• Web3

I’m an optimist with anxiety—constantly fretting about the future, but optimistic that it will work out fine. This neatly sums up how I feel most days.

I suspect many entrepreneurs are a similar combination. It’s difficult to take on such an endeavor while being pessimistic.

I would go one step further to say default optimism is rational, regardless of what you do.

See also:

• Depression is living in the past, anxiety is living in the future

Driving word of mouth needed for product-led growth comes from a passion for one’s tools. This can be hard to attain for categories of products that aren’t all that interesting. Someone might brag about how one email client is better than another, but what about an ERP?

See also:

• Tools are bought, transformations are sold and transformations bring a community with evangelists
• Consumers buy products, enterprises buy platforms so maybe product led growth is not doable for enterprise software

The notion that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (Ludwig Wittgenstein) is only partially true. To a young developing mind, delays in language development hinder math (it’s hard to count above 5 without words for it) and inferring other people’s thoughts—as is the case with some deaf children. However, adults that lose their language facilities (global aphasia) do not lose other cognitive functions such as the ability to do math, theory of mind, music, and more.

Read Language Is the Scaffold of the Mind.

See also:

• While language might not limit the thoughts you writing can clarify understanding
• How might aphasia change metacognition?

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported the share of remote workers fell from 35% to 11% from May 2020 to October 2021. Data is collected as part of the Current Population Survey to estimate the impact of COVID-19 on the workforce.

An important caveat to the data (emphasis mine):

Data refer to those who teleworked or worked at home for pay specifically because of the coronavirus pandemic. This does not include those whose telework was unrelated to the pandemic, such as those who worked entirely from home before the pandemic.

See supplemental data measuring the effects of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on the labor market.

Right now my personal note taking practice is mostly structured text with a few conventions, published as a really long list. This makes it difficult to explore and uninviting.

Content types

What if there were more types of notes? Ones that included images, videos, diagrams, etc.? It would certainly make the content pleasing to the eye, but is it actually useful?

Instead of content types, notes could have tags visualized. Special tags might have their own icon and clicking them shows you other items tagged that way.

Visualize subgraphs

One thing I really like about org-roam-ui is how you can select a subgraph and see adjacent nodes N hops away. The overall graph is intimidating, but a subgraph of < 20 items is approachable. Maybe you could see a sparkline of a graph and click on it to see it’s connections to explore right there.

Hover to see summary of linked notes

Wherever there are links to notes, show a short summary on hover without having to click. This prevents some of the issues with gardens where you “lose the path”.

Show click history as you navigate to more notes

Embed a history of the notes you visited so you can see your path and go back to specific notes without losing your place. Could this all be done statelessly?

A trait of digital gardening is to include metadata in a post to indicate how confident the author is in the post. This is a neat way of making space for half-finished ideas and works-in-progress.

For example, confidence tags in gwern.net.

Read A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden by Maggie Appleton.

See also:

• The Garden and the Stream describes many ways digital gardening is different than a stream of well manicured posts
• Privacy is the right to be imperfect, epistemic status is like the public version of it
• The easiest person to fool is yourself so being mindful of your confidence level helps to keep you accountable

My dad used to tell me about an old car he used to have—the Chevrolet Chevette. It was an inexpensive compact car with rear-wheel drive from the late 70s. As he described it, “all the thrills of high-speed driving at low speeds.”

That’s how I feel about the JavaScript ecosystem sometimes. There are so many dependencies and libraries that dealing with breaking changes, performing security updates, and figuring out subtle bugs between versions is a high-scale activity. The problem is, you have all the thrills of high-scale software development even on small-scale projects.

(Although maybe it’s more of Pinto which had a habit of exploding into a fiery mess when rear-ended).

See also:

• Frontend JavaScript toolchains trade off ease of adding dependencies over bundle size
• TypeScript undermines the value of the JavaScript ecosystem and static typing

The founder of Startmate, who went on to found Australia’s best venture capital firm (Blackbird VC), always gave what he called “the Godzilla speech” to people when they joined. His whole idea was that you get one chance to try to put a dent in a path. People join a job, an organization, and they take a linear path. Through the Godzilla speech, he would say, “Look, all these fucking giant lizards were once tiny, and you might think you’re tiny, but you have to pretend to be giant.”

https://www.theobservereffect.org/mikecannonbrookes.html

See also:

• Status quo preserving behavior
• Startups value generalists early, specialists later

OSHA issued an emergency temporary standard (ETS) that requires large employers (100+ employees) to enforce COVID-19 vaccination and testing. This is a major step in mandating vaccination although it does leave open the possibility of getting a weekly negative COVID-19 test instead.

Interestingly, OSHA doesn’t have a way to enforce this thoroughly as there are not enough agents to check every large employer. That means they are probably prioritizing audits based on complaints made against a company.

Read the OSHA ETS summary.

Low retention products eventually die, even if they grow really fast to begin with. Spammy invite mechanisms no longer work (invite 100 people from your contacts).

Virality requires retention and engagement. A better model for today’s world is that a viral feature is used by a % of users, used multiple times, over the course of % of users that are retained. Without engagement, no one will use the viral feature. Without retention, the number of sessions where someone uses the viral feature doesn’t happen.

That’s why the highest retention products are also the most viral.

Read Why the best way to drive viral growth to increase retention and engagement from Andrew Chen.

Dictator Book Club: Orban from Astral Codex Ten describes the rise to power of Viktor Orban, dictator of Hungary.

Viktor started out as a leftist liberal, rebelling against the Soviet Union. After a brief stint as an MP (and with no experience or political skill), he lost his election.

He switched from a liberal democrat to a far-right nationalist. (Having power can easily override idealists, see Robert Moses and The Power Broker). Remade himself as a religious man with traditional family values—completely counter to his previous political identity.

He fostered nationalist appeal, drawing on a proud history of steppe nomads, how they were humiliated throughout history, and how they would rise. Orban briefly became Prime Minister and led the Socialist party until he lost control.

Orban found an opening by targeting the socialist party leader. With a leaked speech, he started rumors that socialists were liars. When they bit and denied it, he showed the leaked speech. He organized a massive protest during a Hungarian parade that injured hundreds and destroyed property. He and his party won a 2/3rds majority in 2010.

That’s where they tightened the noose. They changed the constitution to remove road blocks to power. They passed laws to nationalize schools. He made favorable deals to his cronies, rewarded loyalists, and stamped out dissent (he could fire any civil servant, most media outlets were owned by loyalists, etc.).

When the party was threatened due to a far-right platform that wanted to disallow refugees from the Syrian War, Orban co-opted it—keeping his party firmly in control and eliminating a rival party in one fell swoop.

Thus he became an American far-right hero by pulling off what Trump could not. Orban erected a border wall, stopped migrants, and instituted all manner of political maneuvering needed to stay in power. Republicans cozying up to Orban include Steve Bannon, Mike Pence, and Rod Dreher, envious of a unambiguously far-right dictator.

Sometimes there are topics that are triggering, even tweets from people you follow that you genuinely want to see. Heavy use of mute words significantly improves the day-to-day experience.

As of writing, it’s in Settings -> Privacy and safety -> Mute and block -> muted words.

This can be particularly useful if you enjoy following artists on Twitter, but don’t want to be bombarded by NFT spam.

Unfortunately, a hack to mute things like suggested content and topics no longer works.

See also:

• Living a rich digital life

An analysis by Fidelity found that women, on average, earn 0.4% more than men annually when investing. Women bought and sold half as much as male customers.

Fidelity’s analysis covered 5.2 million customer accounts (some people had more than one), from 2011 to 2020. It looked at individual retirement accounts, 529 plans and basic brokerage accounts that individuals (not financial advisers) controlled, but not workplace accounts like 401(k)s. No strategies were excluded: Those who traded individual stocks were tracked along with those who stuck to mutual funds.

Read Women May Be Better Investors Than Men. Let Me Mansplain Why.

An essay from Richard P. Gabriel that argues that worse tools and solutions can actually be better in some cases.

Read The Rise of Worse is Better.

With remote teams, it’s not like you can look over someone’s shoulder or visibly see if they are struggling—the only observable information is the outputs. That’s why remote team management needs to be centered around saying what you’re going to do and then comparing that to the output.

This is difficult for most teams to do because estimation is hard and course corrections are required. Still, this must become a core skill for a remote team or you won’t make the right adjustments that are needed to become a high-performing team.

See also:

• Remote teams need to be more deliberate about everything
• Engineering management

A recent paper analyzed the causal effects of delays in updating unemployment insurance systems written in COBOL. States that used COBOL to process UI claims had a 4.4% decline in total card consumption compared to states that didn’t use COBOL. The author’s Fermi estimate is a $181B decline in real GDP due to COBOL.

Read COBOLing Together UI Benefits: How Delays in Fiscal Stabilizers Impact Aggregate Consumption.

See also:

• It’s rare to see tech debt quantified so directly (let a lone tech debt that impacts GDP!)
• The Lindy Effect can be extremely expensive

When everyone gets the same thing, the smallest differences become status symbols.

For example, on Twitter everyone gets the same platform, the same profile template, and so on. As a result, single word usernames and having a “blue check” are status symbols—they convey belonging to an exclusive group that is not accessible to others. People naturally try to raise their status.

See also:

• Value signaling and signaling as a service
• The internet has American values encoded, is status inadvertently one of them?
• Identity is a powerful motivator for behaviors

With so much of our time spent with computers and the internet, we ought to think about the quality of our digital lives. What makes for a good digital life? How do you achieve it? What should we do to improve it?

Wealth is usually described as an abundance of tangible things. Fancy cars, a big house, a boat, and lots of money—that sort of thing. Wealth as it relates to our digital lives though is different.

Few limitations exist on the contents of our digital life. Information on pretty much anything is available instantly. Communication is possible with anyone, nearly anywhere, at any time. The internet is available to billions of people (and growing) and access to broadband connections is increasing. That’s not to say it’s equitable, but it’s not like there’s an internet only for Billionaires.

What does it mean to have a rich digital life when there is already abundance?

See also:

• Signaling as a service
• Digital status symbols arise from homogeneity
• Our digital lives are siloed
• The internet has American values encoded
• Black and Hispanic people have less access to broadband internet than White people
• The metaverse is the ultimate company town
• Stock and flow