It’s common in product and engineering circles to constantly ask people “what problem are you solving?” While this can be useful for focusing work on the right things, it also leads to solutions disguised as problem statements and self-referential arguments. Instead, ask “what’s the situation?”. This gives space between facts and the interpretation of those facts which makes it easier to understand and spot errors.

See also:

• This is worse with an engineering as delivery organization where problem definition is outsourced to a separate part of the org
• Taste might help to spot problems calibrated to what’s important based on the company culture
• A cathedral for creation a bazaar for growth

The org-roam-ui is a visualization and exploration companion to org-roam. The force-directed graph of notes (nodes) and links (edges) shows how concepts fit together and relate. I thought it was primarily eye candy, it’s useful for 1) spotting connections you haven’t already made and 2) identifying orphaned notes that could be linked to other notes.

By looking at a subgraph and increasing the number of neighbor nodes rendered you can see Nth degree connections to a note. This is handy for linking related notes together or simply to think about the through-line that brings seemingly disparate ideas together.

By looking at the edges of the overall graph, it’s easy to spot orphaned notes that don’t connect to anything. These are worth revisiting and linking them or maybe deleting.

See also:

• Most tools for networked thought have this kind of graph visualization, but none that integrate with emacs and org-mode.
• Browsing the graph feels a lot like walking around a garden.

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The list of ways wealth is created is remarkably short.

You can

1. Move things from place to place (e.g. shipping, exporting goods)
2. Store things (e.g. winter coats are more valuable in winter)
3. Transform things (e.g. manufacturing)
4. Farm (e.g. … farming)
5. Build buildings (e.g. real estate development)
6. Extract natural resources (e.g. mining)
7. Cure disease (e.g. pharmaceuticals)
8. Find new ways of doing 1 through 7 more efficiently (e.g. 3D printing, fertilizer, mining an asteroid)
9. Provide useful information (most of 21st century corporations) a. Match supply and demand (e.g. Google search ads, Uber) b. Figure out the rules (e.g. lawyers, consultants) c. Information to be informed (e.g. journalism, blogging)

Read A catalog of wealth-creation mechanisms from Rondam Ramblings.

See also:

• Methods of product ideation could benefit from knowing what kind of business you are in and who you should learn from
• Naval Ravikant has a “How to get rich” series that talks about personal ways of going about wealth creation
• Recent technological advancement is in simulation
• How people get rich and income inequality

An analysis by Ladders found that the percentage of high-paying job listings ($80,000+) in the US and Canada that were remote increased from 3.69% in Q4 2019 to 14.67% in Q3 2021.

See also:

• 45% of jobs can be done remotely
• Half of Millennials and Gen Z would consider quitting if employers don’t allow remote work
• Executives are likely included in “high-paying jobs” which would lend support to remote work overall. Organizational support of remote work correlates with reported productivity

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A team of engineers working together on the same project should divide up their work at the contractual boundaries. This avoids rework because choosing an arbitrary point to split up the work can be difficult to specify and more susceptible to breaking changes introduced by the other team members.

A simple example is dividing work up by frontend and backend where the API serves as a contractual boundary. It’s simple to understand which work each person is responsible for and results in less rework. (It’s still important to specify the API contact, but you can be more hand-wavy about the rest).

The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that 4.3 MM Americans quit their jobs in August 2021, up from 4MM in July. The quit rate is highest it’s been since the statistic became available in 2000.

Most of the workers quitting worked in the food services industry and hospitality (892,000), retail (721,000), professional business services (706,000) and health care and social assistance (534,000).

See also:

• One interpretation is that workers are fed up with poor working conditions related to COVID-19.
• Quit rate can serve as a measure of workers willingness or ability to leave jobs. 45% of jobs can be done remotely.
• Half of Millennials and Gen Z would consider quitting if employers don’t allow remote work.
• COVID-19 is a vehicle of fantasmic projection, I’m sure each side will be able to use these statistics to support their agenda.

A preliminary study of brain imaging taken of before COVID-19 infection and after showed a reduced amount of gray matter thickness in the frontal and temporal lobes. This seems to explain some of the symptoms like loss of smell and taste (associated with the olfactory bulb) as well as other side effects like memory loss.

See also:

• Half of COVID-19 survivors had lingering symptoms after 1 year
• Long COVID

The way to prevent a bar from turning into a Nazi bar is by nipping it in the bud. You need to ignore their reasonable sounding arguments in the moment because their end goals are so terrible. For example, the first Nazi in the bar who is nice to everyone who is getting kicked out might say, “Hey I’m not doing anything wrong!”. However, if you don’t do that, they bring their friends, and friends of friends, and eventually you end up being a Nazi bar.

Online communities function similarly—the moment you let them in the sooner you become a bastion of hate.

Read the Twitter thread.

A study found that US adults experienced significantly more depressive symptoms in 2021 (32.8%) compared to the early months of the pandemic (27.8%) and before the pandemic (8.5%). Predictors of pandemic depression include low household income, not being married, and pandemic-related stressors.

Read Persistent depressive symptoms during COVID-19: a national, population-representative, longitudinal study of U.S. adults.

See also:

• The pandemic increases the economic divide between low income and high income groups adding to inequality of remote work (although I hope not permanently).
• Low psychosocial safety is associated with a threefold increase in risk of major depression

A recent analysis from Crunchbase looked at venture-backed tech companies that went public in the last 8 months found the value increased from $1-4MM per employee to $10+MM per employee.

This begs the question, are we getting more efficient or are public investors valuing tech stocks at a near 10x multiple to maintain their returns?

Read Tech Staff Sizes Still Aren’t Rising Much, But Valuations Sure Are.

See also:

• Could be related to the stock market boom which was due to increased savings as investors were pushed to riskier assets (like tech stocks)

When something is below average to an unacceptable amount. In baseball, the Mendoza line is hitting .200 and anything below that is considered quite poor.

See also:

• An Eephus pitch is another baseball expression, but mostly meant positively

There are a few ways to get linting of prose (grammar and style, not just spellcheck) in Emacs. Unfortunately, there is no good language server implementation for the popular open-source command line tools. The best option right now is probably proselint, but vale gives better suggestions.

See also:

• Minto linter
• Organizational linter

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