Recent research shows that Machu Picchu was purposely constructed on top of two intersecting fault lines. The area is very remote, even from the nearest city where the emperor lived, that the location seems like an overly difficult choice. However, the fault lines provide convenient access to granite and channels that carry fresh water from the mountains (convenience is king). See also:
Charlie Munger calls the lollapalooza effect a combination of several elements all acting in concert to create an even greater outcome. In investing, you are looking for outsized gains and you should look for these effects. Richard Hamming gets at a more specific example in You and Your Research–in order to make important contributions you need the right problem, with the right approach, at the right time.
In rust, a variable is declared as mutable or immutable and all of it’s fields (in the case of a struct) are declared the same–you can’t mutate a field while also making a borrow of another field. This presents a problem for self-referential data structures. For example, in game programming it’s typical to have a top level The solution to this access pattern is interior mutability, wrapping fields you need to mutate in a See also:GameState object that is mutated each frame which often requires reading from a field while mutating another which would cause a borrowck error (trying to take multiple references of GameState).RefCell. This provides runtime borrow checks with the ability to mutate a field while holding a reference to the struct.
Cell to explain how it works
The stock price of a corporation being added to an index fund increases along with it’s competitors that are also included in the index fund. There is less motivation to compete with each other because the owners across all the competitors are the same. See also:
Prominent investor and founder of Berkshire Hathaway, known for thoughts about good decision making and applying a ‘latticework of mental models’ from a wide range of academic fields.
A measurement of cardiovascular fitness and endurance by measuring the max oxygen the body can consume during exercise. Higher VO2 max is better.
Computer scientist and musician that designed the Clojure programming language. Has given many influential talks about functional programming. In the three tribes of programming, Rich is firmly in the ‘poet’ camp favoring concise, beautiful code. See also:
Beats per minute when not doing any activity. A normal resting heart rate for an adult is ~60 bpm, high resting heart rate (tachycardia) >100 bpm, and low resting heart rate (bradycardia) <60 bpm. Trained athletes have a low resting heart rate.
A lisp functional programming language designed by Rich Hickey. The core philosophy is to organize programs around the transformation of values using pure functions and isolated side-effects.
Make it obvious: Journaling is the first thing I do in the morning after I take the dogs out. That provides the cue that it’s time to add to my notes as I reflect on the previous day. I can also look at the list of notes I took which sparks the desire to record them. Make it attractive: Very satisfying to do with a mechanical keyboard, getting to type at full speed. Habit stacking with journaling. Make it easy: Make it satisfying: This follows how Atomic Habits recommends structuring a new habit.
Lighthouse is a set of automatic checks performed on a website that measure overall web performance on mobile and desktop. It’s useful for spotting opportunities to squeeze out better page speed and measuring UX. At time of writing, this website has a score of 100.
A long list of ships is neither useful nor effective without a way for the team to conceptualize the main ideas and how it adds up to achieving a set of goals. Themes help the team (and stakeholders to a lesser extent) see the big picture and connections between ships. This supports a clearer understanding and leads to better local decision-making by the people fulfilling the roadmap. See also:
When designing a review processes within an organization, tease apart the different functions of how the process works then ask which parts are more like ‘spell check’. Anything that is more like spell check should be automated and human reviewers can focus on a higher level concerns. See also:
Roadmaps turn strategy into discrete units that will be worked on to accomplish a set of goals. By drafting a roadmap, you are turning something abstract into something more real. Adding detail makes it more real and drives healthy discussion about whether it’s possible to do it all (i.e. resources, staffing, timeline) and whether it will actually accomplish your goals (i.e. back of the napkin estimates of each ship should roughly add up). See also:
An automated system that eliminates a class of feedback when reviewing a work product. Similar to how code formatters like prettier work to remove code style comments during code review, an organizational linter can take an opinionated, repetitive form of feedback and automate it. This frees up time because automating cooperation decreases the cost of coordination. See also:
We tend to find supporting arguments for the mindset we are in. That’s why re-framing is effective in changing our relationship with the situation or environment. For example “I have to” vs “I get too” where the latter is a more positive mindset which leads to positivity. See also:
Users choose which podcasts they want to listen to and manually curate them into a listening experience on their own terms. They can pause, stop, remind, skip, etc. which is a way of scripting over content to suit their needs. Compare this to traditional radio which is engineered to reach the maximum general audience and provide listeners to advertisers. All content is fixed and the songs play on repeat.
Shared resources used by individuals with no ownership end up depleting it. Common examples include fishing (over-fishing) and forests (deforestation). One way that has been shown to combat this phenomenon is to create collaboration and shared risk/reward. For example, a fishery that grants shares to a lake where fishermen now benefit from the improving the value of the resource and start collaborating on rules and policies to conserve it. See also:
When comparing recent technological advancement with the previous century, most of the biggest changes are simulation versus physical. For example, railroads and airplanes compared to networking and computers. The most valuable companies use software to create efficiencies and network effects. Even the physical goods they produce are often to support more simulation (e.g. mobile phones). This change alters the relationship people have with the physical world. Facebook profile pages aren’t heirlooms to be passed down from generation to generation. The orientation of technological advancement of simulation creates more detachment from the physical world and leads to shorter term thinking. See also:
Funnel metrics tend to decline with each successive cohorts as a company grows and saturates segments that have strong product market fit. On closer inspection of retention, this reveals adjacent users (not the power users or what you think of as the primary user persona) who struggle to adopt or continue using your product. Adjacent users have different needs and present opportunities to unlock new audiences. For example, Instagram noticed many international users logging out or using fake email addresses because they prefer text messages, use pre-paid internet cards, and were worried about using bandwidth. They made it easier to log back in (rather than harder to log out) which helped them better retain international users. To acquire more adjacent users, one should also consider the sequencing of which user so that it’s additive and makes it easier to get other adjacent users.
A fictional device from the essay As We May Think, written in 1945 by Vannevar Bush, which both stores knowledge (books, notes, annotations, conversations) and connections between them allowing someone to follow trails of associated knowledge. A memex is an example of a tools for networked thought that builds on top of existing knowledge. See also:
In our day-to-day lives we use a collection of products and homegrown tools to do our work. One approach to solving a problem is to attempt to be a complete solution that fully solves the problem, but there is a tradeoff–the more complete the solution the less useful it becomes in more situations. In order to solve something completely, the solution needs to assume more about your problem or become really complicated in trying to solve every corner case mucking up the experience (see user experience entropy). A workflow approach is more useful to a wider range of variations by assuming you are applying one or more pieces of functionality to solve a problem. Done well, components are useful independently and can be recombined and applied to more problems. However, finding the right level of abstraction that meets that criteria is difficult (especially compared to solving a single complete problem).
A company tends to design systems that mirror their communication structure e.g. ‘shipping the org’. You can see this in large scale software where the UX feels clunky, compartmentalized when it ought to work together as a unit.
When doing an activity that requires peak performance, strive for 85% of what you believe is your best. This results in doing better than if you were to try to hit your maximum. You relax more, your form improves, and you are more consistent throughout the performance. This seems applicable to more than athletics—allowing yourself to underachieve or fail in advance removes some of the ill effects of overthinking or being too ‘in your own head’ which is vital for creative work. See also: