Baboons are really good at finding water. Baboons also really love salt. A bushman trying to survive in the wild can use a baboon’s innate ability to find water when it’s too scarce to find.

They set a salt trap by digging a small hole and put salt in it. The baboon sticks their hand in to grasp the salt, but can’t remove their hand without letting go of the salt thus becoming trapped. The bushman captures the baboon and then gives it all the salt it will eat (a lot). The baboon gets thirsty. The bushman lets the baboon out and follows it. The baboon, thirsty, immediately goes and finds the nearest water source.

From Dave Chappelle’s interview on CBS This Morning where he used this as an analogy for being trapped by fame and fortune.

Some people argue that there is no such thing as “good taste” in art. However, you can prove that it exists by trying to prove that it does not.

If you take the position that good taste does not exist then you must accept that there are no differences in the quality of judgment of art between people and therefore any art is good art. If any art can be “good art” then everything is equivalent and there must not be a difference between artists. Therefore there is no such thing as a “good artist” either.

From Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste? by Paul Graham.

See also:

• Taste, as it exists for designing products, is a refined sense of judgement and finding balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole.
• good taste is an intuition about power

Good taste is a closeness between what you perceive as power vs what is power, independent of who is observing it. This understanding of the difference between real and represented is an intuition of power.

Read the comment by motohagiography.

See also:

• Taste is the refined sense of judgement and finding balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole
• Good taste must exist because good artists exist

A sales narrative is a cohesive story that explains why customers need your product.

What makes up a problem-solution-specifics narrative?

• Identify the problem, who has it, and what it costs
• What’s changed in the world to make this solveable in a new way and what that means for the problem
• How the new solution works to solve the problem
• Proof that validates your solution

From Founding Sales.

See also:

• A sales pitch is the opposite of a VC pitch, it’s less about you and more about them
• Sell solutions not software and describe the solution in terms the buyer uses to evaluate it
• Developing a sales narrative is an iterative process, it might also help identify product problems
• Shape of Stories

There was a meme in on Twitter that you should unfollow VCs and follow artists. With the advent of NFTs however, art Twitter is now filled with crypto hawkers that can be quite grating. (Photographers seem to be immune to this so far—is there not NFT photographs?).

Updated advice for making Twitter more enjoyable in 2021? Unfollow artists and follow archaeologists. They’re content is fascinating with great pictures of ancient artifacts and architecture.

See also:

• Living a rich digital life means not having ads blasted at you constantly

When things are going poorly it feels like you are pushing your users. Sales are harder, finding new users is harder, etc. When things are going well it feels like users are pulling you. Users are driving you to get what they need, everything feels easier.

See also:

• Pull helps you build an initial product a small group of users love
• Pull is closer to product market fit
• High retention products are the most viral, it’s difficult to imagine a completely sales oriented (push) product that would also be high retention

Read the full transcript

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.

GitHub powered (Commentor needs to oauth GitHub to comment)

• Utterances uses GitHub issues
• Gitalk uses GitHub issues
• Giscus uses GitHub discussions

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.