A study performed in 2008 by UC San Diego found that American households consumed ~3.6 Zettabytes of information in a year. Between 1980 and 2008, the annual growth rate of information consumption is 5.4 percent.

Statistics from UC San Diego.

In the early stage of a startup, companies have limited resources and a wide range of things that need to get done. Founders often wear ‘multiple hats’ to build and run the company. This follows to early employees—even with a stated job role, out of necessity they will need to go beyond it. This appeals to generalists (those who can do multiple kinds of things reasonably well) and is highly valued because the startup needs to do a wide range of things with limited resources.

Contrast that to a startup that is further along (> 1000 employees) and the needs change. Organization and administrative functions are required to coordinate many people working towards a shared set of goals. This puts pressure to hire the right person for a specific role where roles are defined to help administrators make sense of their workforce. Needs become more specific, and specialists are valued more because 1) they fit the definition of what’s needed more clearly 2) deeper expertise is required to solve more specific problems immediately.

When interviewing candidates about their experiences and challenges they have encountered, you learn a lot about their employer, how they work, and the real story behind some decisions if you listen closely.

See also:

• Engineering management

The practice of being mindful about consciousness so that one can be more present and not have their mental states dictated by things out of their control. It takes deliberate effort to build the skill of recognizing the thoughts that appear and controlling our attention at will.

In the new normal brought on by COVID-19, typical activities that we rely on to recover and recharge are not available anymore due to the economic shutdown. For example, socializing with friends at a restaurant or going to the gym.

In addition, some of those previous activities that might have been restorative actually detract from overall well-being. For example, going for a leisurely walk outside raises your anxiety every time you pass someone on the street and are reminded of the virus or protecting your vulnerable household.

A way of modeling an external API provider as a compute resource for executing an agent program. Instead of making a request and getting a response (as in the usual HTTP API pattern) you submit a program that executes in the provider’s environment. This could allow users of an API to simplify their access patterns, benefit from data locality, and have stronger guarantees for execution than hosting their own infrastructure.

For example, instead of making a read request to get some data then make a write based on that data and wait for an async webhook, the requestor could submit a program that does all of that executes within the providers contained environment.

See also:

• How we should build APIs tomorrow that talks about some of the problems with the current RESTful approach

In game design and development, juice is a term for the details that make the game visually interesting and exciting to interact with. Examples include screen shakes, subtle animations, music and sound effects, personality, etc. In the talk ‘Juice it or lose it’, Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho walk through making a rudimentary brick breaker game and adding juice to make it much more appealing.

In video game programming it can be tempting to replicate a client server model similar to how websites work. This is generally a mistake because game state tends to be highly co-mingled between state and graphics. Attempting to cleanly separate the ‘backend’ game logic with ‘frontend’ visuals results in awkward boundaries between the two, which are still coupled, but in a way that requires more complicated code to manage (e.g. a message bus, event sourcing) and are probably less performant (e.g. passing json messages within a 33ms frame budget).

Stands for ‘below the line up front’ as a way leading with the conclusion from a memo. This helps save the reader time when sending a communication to a wider distribution and raises ambient knowledge of the organization.

See also:

• Always give the summarizing idea first
• The Minto Pyramid Principle

User experience research (UXR) is a function that works with users and analyzing data to learn about and test ideas. This serves as a way to avoid common biases when building products and making decisions (e.g. confirmation bias, availability bias, etc) by talking to real people outside of an organization.

See also:

• UX (user experience)

A book by Yuval Noah Harari about the history of humans and how we got to where we are today.

When given the option to start with something pre-built, developer minded users are skeptical they won’t have enough control over the implementation and run into a critical limitation or burden. This leads to the impulse to build using the lowest level control they can (e.g. API integration). However, it’s often the case that they under estimate the cost of building and maintaining their customized solution.

Examples:

• Building a checkout flow that converts well, is bug-free, supports methods users want to pay with, coupons, invite codes, prevents common user errors (e.g. address typos), etc. is actually quite a lot of work over a longer time horizon.

Users that think about your product in terms of how it will be used and what they need it to do. They imagine implementing the product and the downstream effects (like ongoing maintenance). Experience colors the developer-minded user—bad experiences in the past brings in additional decision criteria and expectations.

See also:

• Business minded

Users that frame decisions by understanding cost, benefits, and want to buy solutions. They often use ROI as a mental model for whether or not to use a product or choose between providers. When choosing a technical solution they value speed of delivery and ongoing costs. They are more likely to choose ‘plug and play’ options they don’t have to imagine.

See also:

• Developer minded

An easy way to explain a Zettelkasten system of taking notes would be to explain it as a mind map (connections between discrete concepts) combined with atomic notes (each note has a single topic). Rather than a node being a word or phrase as in a mind map, each node is a note.

See also:

• How to use Roam Research: a tool for metacognition from Ness Labs which makes this analogy to mind mapping.
• Heterarchical note taking

A tools for networked thought that allows the user to offload a process into something external to themselves. This augments one’s ability to do certain kinds of tasks. For example, a zettelkasten offloads the collection off ideas and their connections into ‘off-brain’ storage that can be queried later thereby removing the need to memorize and retain accumulated knowledge.

A photography exhibit by Eric Pickersgill which shows people in their every day life looking at their phones, but with the phone removed from the image. The effect is an eerie feeling in seeing subjects stare blankly into their hands in what should amount to social situations.

See the photo series.

White people respond with outrage over any allegation, perceived or actual, of racism because they see racist as synononymous with bad people who hurt others. This narrow view contributes to being closed off to the idea of systemic racism because it allows white people to say it’s not them it’s bad people.

Not understanding socialization

White people don’t view race as an important characteristic of themselves and dismissive of the experience of people of color.

Individualism and objectivity contribute to this and make it difficult to acknowledge societal and systemic issues and tend to blame the individual for failures.

Individuality prevents reflection on group membership (e.g. rich/poor, young/old) and unearned advantages. Group membership conflicts with objectivity–we would need to acknowledge we don’t see the world objectively, but through a group’s cultural lens.

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In mindfulness, the practice of meditation aims to deconstruct the ego by observing thoughts and trying to notice where they originate. In so doing, the concept of self disappears as just another thought appearing in consciousness because everything arises in consciousness.

People tend to conflate the ability to write code and intelligence. Like any field however, there are smart programmers and there are dumb programmers. The ability to write code is orthogonal to intelligence. In that way, coding is more like literacy.

See also:

• Emotional intelligence is more important for entreprenuerial success than general mental ability

Mercury is a better option for colonization than Mars because of the abundance of solar and thermal energy and availability of water.

Mars has less available water and would require more reliance on nuclear energy because there is significantly less solar energy and heat. This would eventually require mining although Mars is believed to have less uranium than Earth. If energy is costly and natural resources are scarce, prospects of building a sustainable colony for a large group would be very challenging.

Read the article

Most messages sent on Slack do not happen in public or private channels, but in DMs. This indicates a preference for 1:1 comminication given the option.

See also:

• Remote native companies should likely strive to have a much lower ratio of public to private conversations.

A staggering amount of energy is used to power Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two largest blockchains. The energy required for a single transaction on Bitcoin is the equivalent of powering a two person household for three months.

Source

See also:

• This comment which picks apart the argument that cost of transactions are the same as the banking industry if you factor in non-server costs
• Web3