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.

Improving product quality requires consistent and ongoing attention. You will simply miss all of the details that contribute to low product quality if you don’t use your product every day.

It’s also common to outsource this constant checking because it takes time and it might feel like there are more important things to do, but that would be a mistake. If a senior leader doesn’t do it, it’s not important and no one will do it.

See also:

• The most effective people care a lot, they are checking and re checking and it seems to just happen.
• Being obsessed with what you are building is a competitive advantage

A survey by Visier found that 89% of employees experienced burnout in the past year. The primary factors that contributed were workload (being asked to do more work, faster, work-life balance), culture (toxic workplace, micromanagement, lack of support from managers or co-workers), and world events (COVID-19 pandemic, police brutality, climate change).

Read the survey results.

See also:

• Activities we relied on for relief from every day stress and anxiety are no longer available to us might also explain the higher burnout.
• Stress and anxiety are cumulative. For example, the pandemic is not separate from work stress—it all accumulates.
• Half of Millennials and Gen Z would consider quitting if employers don’t allow remote work

The Growth incidence curve from 1988 to 2008, also known as the Elephant Graph, shows the income growth by percentile of global income distribution. It shows two things: global inequality has declined and the middle class (80th and 90th percentile of global income) stagnated.

Lower income groups made large increases in income due to globalization (manufacturing shifted to cheaper labor and exports). The top income group benefited from an expansive global market (more people could be their customer) and advantages accrue to the leader. Middle income groups benefited from cheaper consumption, but other goods became more expensive—housing, education, and health care.

Read Globalized Talent and the Brand Grab.

See also:

• How people get rich and income inequality argues that the income growth of the top percentile is mostly fine

CDC data shows that 74 percent of breakthrough COVID-19 cases are among adults 65 or older and make up the vast majority of vaccinated people that are hospitalized.

Read In a Handful of States, Early Data Hint at a Rise in Breakthrough Infections.

See also:

• The COVID-19 Delta variant is 60% more transmissible than the Alpha variant
• Base rate fallacy shows how headlines about COVID-19 infections of vaccinated people is overblown

A speech by Theodore Roosevelt in Paris 1910 that railed against cynics who looked down on those attempting to do great things.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

See also:

• Cynicism is the opposite of optimism and pessimism
• Default optimism is rational

A distinctly American idea is that liberating oneself will result in the liberation of everyone else. This helps explain teenage rebellion (the whole system is broken so I’ll be a nonconformist and everyone else will follow), but also the behavior of anti-maskers (I value my freedom to decide what’s best so I’ll be loud about not wearing a mask and show everyone). While outwardly projecting a message that this is good for everyone, it’s deeply rooted in selfishness.

From personal experience, this explains reactions my mom (born and raised in Korea) had to some of my more rebellious friends—“they’re spoiled.”

See also:

• COVID-19 exploits this—American values are incompatible with managing the epidemic (now pandemic).

A recent meta-analysis study compared the impact of general mental ability and emotional intelligence in entrepreneurial settings and found that emotional intelligence was twice as important for explaining success.

Previous studies found that general mental ability is most important for traditional workplace settings so this study also shows that starting a business is different (what the researchers refer to as the ‘emotional roller coaster’).

Read What matters more for entrepreneurship success?

See also:

• Companies started by solo founders survive longer and generate more revenue.
• The number one job of a startup CEO is finding product market fit.

Projects that use docker for local development run into a problem when trying to use language servers with their text editor—they don’t handle multiple environments.

There are a few ways around it, but they all have trade-offs.

Running a remote language server

You can connect to a remote language server (it is a server after all) by wrapping the command in a script and configuring your text editor to use it.

For example (assuming you have docker container with pyls):

#!/bin/bash

# Runs a python-language-server in a running container for use with
# eglot in emacs.

docker compose -f /path/to/my/docker-compose.yml \
               exec \
               -T \
               myservice pyls

Everything works with the exception of jump-to-definition (at least when using Emacs eglot). That’s because the file path returned by the language server is the file path in the container, not your host machine.

In Emacs, you can hack around this in eglot (albeit in an inelegant way) by redefining xref-make-file-location like so:

;; HACK: If the xref file doesn't exist, it probably came from a
;; remote LSP server using eglot. Try mapping it to the local
;; file system. Maybe someday it will be supported in eglot.
;; See: https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot/issues/350
(eval-after-load "xref"
  '(defun xref-make-file-location (file line column)
     (if (not (file-exists-p file))
         (make-instance 'xref-file-location :file (format "~/your/host/file/path" file) :line line :column column)
       (make-instance 'xref-file-location :file file :line line :column column))))

Edit files in the remote language server container

To get around the compatibility issues that comes from running in two different environments (the host machine and the container), you can edit the files remotely in the container that is running the language server (in Emacs you can use docker-tramp). This keeps the environment consistent, but it’s a bit clunky when you need to remember where the files are and flipping back and forth (e.g. when doing a `git commit` from the host machine).

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A study in China of COVID-19 survivors (median age 59) who were hospitalized found that half had a persisting symptom one year later—Long COVID. That includes shortness of breath, fatigue, and mental health issues such as anxiety depression. It also found a higher prevalence of problems with mobility and pain and discomfort than the control group.

See also:

• The increased transmissibility of the Delta variant could greatly increase the number of people with Long COVID.
• Herd immunity from the Delta variant is now out of reach so Long COVID is a certainty for many people to come.

The new law turns enables a tourist visa for up to one year with proof of stable income and medical insurance. This is meant to attract digital nomads to spend more time in Costa Rica and thus spend more money there.

See also:

• Remote work does not mean being a digital nomad (working from a permanent home is more likely).
• If Topeka Kansas is any indication, Costa Rica will likely have a great return on this new visa.
• Employers of remote workers are unsure they are remitting taxes correctly

When using refresh tokens to enable clients to get new access tokens one danger is that the longer-lived refresh token can be stolen and used to grant access to your application by an attacker. This is especially tricky in the browser where CSRF and XSS are commonplace.

An added layer of security is refresh token rotation where a refresh token can only be used once. If a refresh token is used more than once—a sign the refresh token was stolen—all refresh tokens in the chain are revoked automatically and the user must log in again.

Read A Critical Analysis of Refresh Token Rotation in Single-page Applications.

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One way to mitigate CSRF attacks is to only allow cookies to be forwarded along with a request if they are from the same site, SameSite=Lax or SameSite=Strict. However, not all browsers support this setting yet.

If you are relying on this browser behavior then you need to block requests from old browsers—roughly 10% of the market. Otherwise, someone could perform a CSRF attack using an old browser.

See also:

• One way to secure web-based refresh tokens is set it in a SameSite cookie

When nine hikers were found dead under unknown circumstances on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl, many conspiracy theories sprouted up. Some involved the KGB, a secret weapons test, and even a Yeti.

In 2019 the case was reopened and a new investigation concluded that the experienced hikers died due to an avalanche. Their camp was made on a snow shelf that caused snow to crash down on them. Those that survived were unable to reach any equipment or get evacuated so they died of hypothermia.

This best explains what happened, but it’s fun to think about the other theories.

Read Mechanisms of slab avalanche release and impact in the Dyatlov Pass incident in 1959.

See also:

• The Donner Party got stuck in the Sierras and resorted to cannibalism
• Shipwrecked boys don’t devolve into savagery

A list of tasks to complete does not contain sufficient information to describe a multi-party process. For example, if you were to describe ‘pick up the milk’ to an extraterrestrial you might say 1) go to the store 2) buy milk 3) check out 4) go home. However, this hides the complexity of interactions.

Sticking with the example, what actually happens is that you get into the car and turn the ignition. The car turns on or not. If it doesn’t turn on then you are blocked (a terminal state). If the car turns on you drive to the store (ignoring the interactions between cars, traffic lights, etc. for brevity). Once at the store you find the milk and go to the cashier. You hand the item to them. They place it in a bag. They tell you how much to pay. You pay them. They accept the payment, they give you a receipt. You take the bag. You go to your car (repeating the process earlier) and go home.

If you were new to buying milk from the store, the checklist from the first paragraph would not help you because it hides complexity by making it seem like a single-party sequence rather than a complex set of interactions between multiple parties. It lacks context and therefore would not be repeatable.

See also:

• This is relevant when trying to outsource work and finding that the tasks are more complicated than you realize
• Reading is the transformation of a linked list of ideas into a tree