A category of products and tools that enable users to create things that previously required developers to do. Examples include business websites (Webflow), chat bots (Landbot), surveys (Typeform), native apps (Thunkable), voice apps, email marketing, etc. No-code is a business model similar to Naval Ravikant’s take on making things that were previously only for rich people available to everyone (Uber is just a black car service that anyone can have).
A term of art describing a non-developer that takes the initiative to solve a business problem, often hacking together a set of tools to make it work. Citizen developers are the market targeted by no-code services.
Venture capitalists and institutional investors need big returns and therefore they fund companies pursuing a big market (investor returns follow a power law). Fund sizes have increased and investors need larger and larger returns. However, there is a tension with founders' incentives to have a wide range of exit outcomes. An exit in the $100s of millions is life changing for a founder, but not a good enough outcome for investors. Investors are incentivized to push founders to riskier, but bigger opportunities even if the set of possible positive outcomes for the founder are significantly smaller (e.g. a highly competitive winner-takes-all market). See also:
An exponential plot where the 80% of Y comes from 20% of X. See also:
A theory of management in which employees in a company are promoted until they are at a level of incompetence. For example, you get promoted for doing well at level 1 so you are promoted, but then you never get promoted again. See also:
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A compilation target for executing in a virtual machine supported by web browsers and servers (via tools like wasmtime). WebAssembly is intended to be portable between platforms and has a similar ‘write once run anywhere’ ethos as Java. WebAssembly already runs significantly faster than JavaScript in the browser and there is reason to believe the gap will widen as WebAssembly support improves. Current limitations include by native access to manipulating the DOM, compiling from garbage collected languages results in huge binaries, and performance (Firefox is the fastest). Rust has the most mature support for compiling to wasm. See also:
There are three groups of people within an organization: Sociopaths (tend to be at the top running the company, characterized by self-interest and need to control), Clueless (tend to be middle management, characterized by misplaced loyalty to the organization), and Losers (tend to be at the bottom, characterized by striking a bad economic bargain). The Gervais Principle speaks to the dynamics between these three groups with the Office as allegory. Sociopaths (who wield all the power) promote over-performing Losers into middle management thereby making them Clueless. They maneuver the Clueless to escape their own risk. For example, Michael was a top sales person before becoming a Clueless manager. Sociopaths turn under-performers into Sociopaths and fast-track them to positions of power. Losers that are self-aware (knowing they made a bad economic bargain) seek opportunities to raise their standing before they run out of time and get fired. For example, Ryan the intern who is bad at sales (his actual job) and manipulates his way into management position by David (a Sociopath). The Losers are left to fend for themselves. They find fulfillment outside of work and do just enough to get by. This is exemplified by Stanley, who knowingly plays along to the delusions of the Clueless and does enough work to never get fired. See also:
Building a business of any size takes substantial effort and is stressful. Just because a business is smaller doesn’t mean there is less work to do and less issues to deal with. If you are going to start a company, might as well strive for it to be a large one. See also:
At it’s heart, a company is a way of abstracting IP (the things or process of what you create), capital (investment, contributions, bank accounts), liability (separation from owners and employees), and ownership (how much does each person own on what terms).
The way TypeScript adds incidental complexity to using libraries undermines the two most important values of using TypeScript and JavaScript. It makes it harder to use a non-typed library which adds friction to using the wealth of libraries available in the JavaScript ecosystem. It also makes the type system less valuable when you need to hack around poorly typed libraries or incorrect type definitions by casting to the any type.
Inter-operating with libraries in the JavaScript ecosystem from TypeScript introduces incidental complexity due to packaging and types. There are (at least) four different ways to import a library[0] in TypeScript, each with subtle differences. Depending on the way the library is packaged you will need to pick the correct incantation. To get the benefit of static typing for a non-typed library, you also need to add Finally, types in a library that has TypeScript support can be done poorly. For example, I found a rather unfortunate issue in marked.js because the [0] [1]@types/name-of-lib to your dependencies. Sometimes these are no longer needed when the library adds TypeScript support as did aws-sdk which, depending on what blog post or StackOverflow question you are looking at may or may not tell you.Tokens union type doesn’t have a common discriminator property. That makes it not possible, or extremely hack-y to find a specific kind of element[1].import { Lib } from 'some-lib'
import 'some-lib';
import * as Lib from 'some-lib';
const lib = require('some-lib');
export function extractMarkdownTitle(md: string): string | null {
const lexer_output = marked.lexer(md) as marked.TokensList;
// Hack: This isn't typeable because Tokens is not a descriminating
// union type (Def and Space don't have a `type` prop)
let title: any = lexer_output.find((val: any) => {
// Without casting to `any`, this won't compile
return val.type === 'heading';
});
return title ? title.text : null;
}
A role at a VC firm where you get paid to work on your next startup and help vet deals or give advice to portfolio companies. People don’t apply to be an EIR, they are asked and are typically already successful entrepreneurs that the VC want to invest in early (although there is usually no obligation to invest or accept investment). There’s not much written about this role and it tends to be different across VC firms. See also:
Below is a list of tools for networked thought I’ve come across:
Name
Open source
Self-hosted
Publishable
Athens
Yes
?
Roam
No
Yes (via public database)
org-roam
Bring your own org-export
Obsidian
No
No
Yes (via plugin)
Logseq
Yes
No (but plans to)
?
neuron
Yes
Yes
Yes
The Archive
No
No
?
Notion
No
No
Yes
TiddlyWiki
Yes
Yes
Yes
Dendron
Yes
Yes
Yes
Silverbullet.md
Yes
Yes
Yes
In traditional media, writers write and readers read. On the internet, publishing is nearly free and readers can easily respond in comments, forums, blogs, and so on. This leads to more disagreements merely because it’s easier to say something and people tend to get angry when they disagree on the internet. See also:
In Shape of Stories, Kurt Vonnegut discusses story arcs as peaks and valleys from good to bad. It reveals that we don’t know enough about real life to judge whether something that happens is a good thing or a bad thing. He uses Hamlet to illustrate—throughout the story each event is neither good nor bad, despite the tragedy (and murder) Hamlet and the world appear no better and no worse.
A lecture from Kurt Vonnegut about how to analyze and critique fictional stories. By graphing the plot along two axes, Good to Bad and Beginning to Entropy, you can visualize the story and compare their shapes to other stories. It also shows that stories seldom tell the truth that we don’t know what the good news is and what the bad news is. Watch Shape of Stories via YouTube. See also:
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Good magic just works. It’s invisible and you quickly forget that it’s there. Bad magic works sometimes. It’s mysterious and hard to understand. Good programming abstractions are the right kind of magic. You can depend on them and build on top of them with confidence. Bad programming abstractions are the wrong kind of magic. It’s equally a mystery when it works as when it doesn’t work. They’re leaky and you end up spending more time cleaning up after the magic than benefiting from it.
The airplane test measures the (often binary) ability to write code in a specified programming language while secluded on an airplane with no internet access. It shows the programming language’s capability to unblock the programmer and is an indicator of productivity. Typed languages (such as rustlang) fair better because it’s easier to reason about code and jump to a definition when you need to understand what’s going on. However, other contributing factors include the legibility of error messages and stack traces, quality of documentation, quirks in the language, tooling, and whether it is ‘batteries included’. In this way, typed languages can also fail the test (e.g. TypeScript’s quirks with interoperating with JS libraries and Webpack generally requires access to StackOverflow).
Modern websites rely on strict hierarchy of pages to help users navigate. This uses central pages to send users back to once they’ve completed reading an article. However, this rigidity does not optimize for serendipitous discovery and many important pages on a website can be inadvertently orphaned (either because it doesn’t fit neatly into a hierarchy or users don’t know to look for it). Digital gardens on the other hand eschew strict navigation and rely on hypertext linking to allow a wide range of paths to content in a self-directed way. This comes with a trade off of overall coherence between content nodes. Read ‘The limits of structure’ by East Gate.
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You can run queries directly on the org-roam database directly (it’s just a sqlite database) to get interesting stats about your Zettelkasten. The location of the database can be found by evaluating Note: file names have the date embedded in it formatted as (Updated for org-roam v2) Total notes (not journal entries) Notes per year (not journal entries) Notes per month Links per note Notes per day Words written for a given year
Counting words written in org-roamorg-roam-db-location.yyyy-mm-dd so taking a substring is the easiest way to group by dates.select count(*) from files where file not like '%journal%';
select substr(files.file, 24, 4) as year, count(files.file)
from files
where file not like '%journal%'
group by year
order by year desc;
select substr(files.file, 24, 7) as month, count(files.file)
from files
group by month
order by month desc;
select substr(files.file, 24, 7) as month, round(cast(count(links.source) as real) / cast(count(distinct files.file) as real), 2)
from files
join nodes on files.file=nodes.file
join links on nodes.id=links.source
where links.type = '"id"'
group by month
order by month desc;
select substr(files.file, 24, 7) as month, round(cast(count(files.file) as real) / cast(count(distinct substr(files.file, 24, 10)) as real), 2)
from files
group by month
order by month desc;
Adding dates to content like a blog post provides value when the content can best be understood by the relationship with when the content was created. Otherwise having a ‘Posted on: yyyy-mm-dd’ does little more than to signal there is activity here and that you are the kind of person that writes regularly. Evergreen content does not need a date to be understood and it’s context is derived by the content around it (content as topology rather than content as serialization). In fact, a heuristic for telling if a piece of content is evergreen would be to remove the date and see if it still makes sense to someone in the future. See also: