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.

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.

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