I tend to work hard and take my work seriously. When things aren’t working exactly as planned, I take it personally. When the work is difficult I internalize it and it becomes more difficult.

Someone much wiser said to me, “you can be ambitious and work really hard, but what if you could take the struggle out of it?”. Beating yourself up provides no advantage. Being kind to yourself doesn’t make you less ambitious. You can be high-performing without all the struggle.

See also:

• Self-compassion is one way to be kinder to yourself
• Mindfulness helps you feel less self-conscious and so much of the struggle is internalizing what you think other people will think
• Being a better judge of early work inoculates you from skepticism
• Working hard is required to do great work
• Struggle switch says pain is inevitable, but suffering is not

The 10-year treasury bond is a benchmark for investors and recently signals the end of Fed stimulus efforts. When bond yields rise tech stock prices fall because bonds are lower risk and tech stocks are expensive for their respective returns.

See also:

• This has the opposite effect of lowering the federal funds rate which causes all asset classes increase in value and makes riskier investments more attractive.
• The stock market boom during the pandemic is due to increased savings

Using TypeScript with eglot in Emacs is fiddly to set up. I also prefer using eslint as a plugin to typescript-language-server so no other setup is required. Together, this makes for an extremely portable setup with minimal fuss which is the whole point of the language server protocol to begin with.

Install the typescript-language-server:

npm install -g typescript-language-server

Install the eslint plugin for typescript-language-server:

npm install typescript-eslint-language-service -D

Add the plugin to your config’s compilerOptions:

{...
  "compilerOptions": {
     "plugins": [{
      "name": "typescript-eslint-language-service"
    }]
    ...
  }
 }

In init.el, tell eglot how to locate your tsconfig.json (otherwise your TypeScript project configuration won’t be picked up and eslint won’t work):

;; I'm not sure why this is needed, but it throws an error if I remove it
(cl-defmethod project-root ((project (head eglot-project)))
  (cdr project))

(defun my-project-try-tsconfig-json (dir)
  (when-let* ((found (locate-dominating-file dir "tsconfig.json")))
    (cons 'eglot-project found)))

(add-hook 'project-find-functions
          'my-project-try-tsconfig-json nil nil)

(add-to-list 'eglot-server-programs
             '((typescript-mode) "typescript-language-server" "--stdio"))

See also:

• Unfortunately TypeScript doesn’t work when using a language server in a docker container (or I haven’t figured it out yet)

The removal of the average weak tie does more damage than the removal of the average strong tie when it comes to diffusion of information in a social network. Often the shortest and only connection between different nodes in social network are weak ties.

Consider a rumor being spread only among a group of close friends (strong ties). It would invariably be heard multiple times from different close friends. Compare that to a rumor spread only through acquaintances (weak ties), it will spread much further because acquaintances act as bridges between groups that wouldn’t have been connected otherwise.

See also:

• The Strength of Weak Ties
• The underlying principle to the effect is that all bridges are weak ties
• Remote work creates fewer weak ties which can damage informal information networks as is the case with firm-wide remote work at Microsoft.

Most package managers have some form of a lockfile which freezes the exact version of a installed libraries. This makes building the environment again reproducible (with some big caveats around system libraries) so you won’t suddenly encounter a breaking change from an upstream library or dependence changing from yesterday to today. Lockfiles don’t fix the problem of breaking changes, but it allows you to choose when you have to deal with it (at upgrade time).

Typing on a mechanical keyboard is like writing with a fountain pen. It’s completely unnecessary (many alternatives are good enough), but lends itself to a much more pleasing experience. As such, switching to a mechanical keyboard is an underrated way to improve productivity.

See also:

• Improving the ‘hand feel’ of software engineering

Wokeism is a cultural export. Nearly every country now has a woke movement that seeks to right a wrong, argues that people should be sensitive to it, and purge wrongdoers. While some (like the French) see wokeism as a means to spread American influence, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If the world ends up caring more about women’s rights and black lives that’s a good thing.

Read Why Wokeism Will Rule the World by Tyler Cowen

See also:

• Why Is Everything Liberal touches on why corporations now lean more left (they have to)
• Everything is political and wokeism highlights trying to be “non-political” is political

Rather than spend months building an MVP, which might not work, you can test a startup idea incrementally. Minimum viable testing is when you create a real-life test of the riskiest assumptions you are making about an idea. If it fails a test, you can disqualify an idea or iterate on it. It can be done faster than building an MVP and give more confidence that your idea will work so you can skip the MVP and move directly to company building.

How it works:

• Identify your value proposition
• Find the atomic unit of the idea (e.g. “a search”)
• List the riskiest assumptions that if they don’t turn out to be true would invalidate it
• Design a test to determine if the assumption is correct.

Read The Minimum Viable Testing Process for Evaluating Startup Ideas by Gagan Biyani.

See also:

• Build an initial product a small group of users love
• Methods of product ideation
• A minimum remarkable product is obviously better
• lean startup

Public APIs are default closed due to security and abuse concerns. As a result, the most common pattern for building an API is to expose only what is strictly necessary and incrementally add to it over time. This additive process means public APIs today are always a small subset of what they could do.

See also:

• Hyperlinks lack transclusion

Hyperlinks are a reliable way of connecting content together. However, they are not a solid foundation for distributed knowledge that can be added to over time. Without the properties of transclusion, it’s not possible to build on top of it.

Without transclusion built in, there’s no way to ensure that 1) the linked content will be there 2) it hasn’t been altered 3) other programs can access it’s content programatically (APIs are default closed).

See also:

• The internet is a disjointed memex
• Memex device

In The trouble with capitalism, Edward Feser argues that the moral failings of today’s capitalism is caused by fixation on wealth. For example, we prepare young people for a career so they can acquire wealth, we define “being successful” as having wealth, and m the American dream is the right to pursue wealth for oneself.

See also:

• Universal income is capitalism 2.0
• How people get rich and income inequality

A paper published in Nature on Sept 9, 2021 that studies the effects of shifting from office work to remote work at Microsoft.

Read the paper.

A study that analyzed anonymized employee-level (email, calendar, etc.) found that the sudden shift from the office to remote work resulted in a silo’ing effect—employees spent more time with strong ties and less time with weak ties from December 2019 to June 2020.

This is presents a challenge as weak ties are important for dissipating information and ideas in an organization.

See also:

• From the paper The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers
• Remote work creates fewer weak ties

A hapax logomenon (“being said once” in Greek) is a word that only appears once in the written record of a language, author, or single text. This makes it difficult to determine it’s meaning and must be derived from context.

Examples include “epiousios” which appears in The Lord’s Prayer and has come to mean “daily”, but is not known for sure.

Given two people and a set of all persons with ties to either of them, the stronger the tie between the two people the more overlap exists between their friendship circles. Put another way, overlap between two networks is least when there is no tie between those two people.

See also:

• This hypothesis (dyadic ties) comes from The Strength of Weak Ties

When it comes to network diffusion of information or influence, all bridges (a line in a network graph that represents the only connection between two points) are weak ties.

Why? Because the stronger the tie between two individuals, the more overlap they have in friendship circles therefore no strong tie is a bridge.

This also means that weak ties are important because they can be the only way in which information or influence can travel. Indeed, removal of a weak tie does more damage than a strong tie.

See also:

• The Strength of Weak Ties

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A study of a global manufacturing firm found that scientists and engineers who often walked by one another in the office were significantly more likely to end up collaborating at the beginning of projects.

A researcher that studied the effects of spontaneous work-related communication and found less idea generation for groups that were located in different places. However, being located in different places did not matter for later stages of a project.

Read A Model of Potential Encounteres in the Workplace.

Read Flexible Work and The Effect of Informal Communication on Idea Generation and Innovation.

See also:

• Remote work creates less weak ties which is important for diverse collaboration and creativity.
• Organizational support of remote work correlates with reported productivity

Remote work naturally leads to more communication with people you collaborate with regularly. There are less opportunities for chance encounters—the proverbial water cooler conversations. However, these weak ties are important for innovation—work informed by a diverse set of perspectives is more creative.

Read When Chance Encounters at the Water Cooler Are Most Useful.

Read the paper The Strength of Weak Ties.

When the primary means of collaboration is asynchronous (as is the case of remote work), the rules and norms of a remote team need to be more deliberate. Social time for the team to bond and have impromptu conversations need to be scheduled since they don’t happen spontaneously with people in the same office (e.g. tea time). Chance encounters need to be intentional (e.g. random coffee chat pairing). Even working hours and setting norms for when people work can be necessary.

See also:

• Remote work creates less weak ties which is important to counteract for product teams.
• Organizational support of remote work correlates with reported productivity—another reason to be deliberate and thoughtful.

When asking questions about things that happened in the past, it is significantly easier for someone to confirm whether something is true or not rather than retracing a series of past events.

This is useful to keep in mind for the UX of onboarding flows. Asking a user when something happened is 10x more difficult than asking did something happen.

See also:

• The average American consumes 34 gigabytes and 100,000 words of information, getting them to recall anything is difficult.
• User experience entropy contributes to making it more difficult to accomplish a task.

To make emacs more modern looking in v26, you can enable a “natural title bar” (the color of title bar matches the color of the buffer).

Compile emacs with the right flags (using railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport):

brew install emacs-mac --with-natural-title-bar

Add the settings to your init.el:

(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(ns-transparent-titlebar . t))
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(ns-appearance . dark))
(setq ns-use-proxy-icon nil)
(setq frame-title-format nil)

Hide the document icon:

defaults write org.gnu.Emacs HideDocumentIcon YES

Restart and enjoy a modern looking emacs.

There are two common elements of economic superstars. First, there is a close connection between personal reward and size of the market. Second, there is a tendency for market size and reward to be skewed to the most talented people in the field.

Read the paper.

See also:

• Another way to describe this observation is that tournament like fields with asymetric and convex payouts favor high-variance strategies.
• Superstars grow (or at least stay superstars) because advantages accrue to the leader.
• More generally, the Pareto principle applied means the rewards are always skewed.
• How people get rich and income inequality reveals how quickly this can happen due to technology.

A study published in Nature found that dogs can tell the difference when a human makes an intentional action versus an unintentional one.

In the experiment, dogs received three conditions: intentionally withholding a reward, unintentionally withholding a reward due to being clumsy, and unintentionally withholding a reward due to being physically prevented (a clear barrier with no opening).

Dogs waited significantly longer before approaching a reward when it was withheld intentionally than a reward that was unintentionally withheld due to clumsiness or physical barrier. This shows that dogs interpret these actions differently.

Read Dogs distinguish human intentional and unintentional action.