Recent content on Carl Baatz
I’ve been learning Rust for fun and one of the things I’ve found helpful is to mentally visualise where values are in memory and how they point to each other. The mental model I use is a section of byte-addressable memory split into four regions: code, globals, heap, and (thread) stack(s): 
 
 

 To make these easier to illustrate, I split them out on their own rows…
We rightly admire hard work. That ability to endure present pains for the sake of future pleasures that Russell said distinguish the civilised man from the savage. Prudence. Forethought. Effort. Perseverence. 
 But hard work doesn’t always look like hard work unless you look closely. It can be tempting to think that hard work must generate noise and commotion, huffing and puffing,…

 

 Back in 2015, Jan Sramek and I had just finished working on a learning platform for enterprises ( Better ). We had approached that from an interest in how to accelerate learning with technology. After failing to scale the business, we sold the platform and were left wondering if we might have been better off working on a consumer app trying to solve a problem we had ourselves…
Model summary: An inert idea is an idea that exists in someone’s mind without being used. 
 
 
 
 In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call “inert ideas” — that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations. 
 
 
 
 Alfred North…
There are two kinds of morality: a morality of intentions and a morality of results. If you have a morality of intentions you judge people by what they intend to achieve; if you have a morality of results you judge them by what they actually achieve. 
 
 
 Drool hung from his lip as he tried to spit the sand out of his mouth. He must have said something like, “I’m…
Economics should determine how and how much you test your software. Your tests must provide more value than they cost, not just to write, but to modify, debug, and run. That means your testing strategy will change over the course of product development – through design, prototyping, construction, iteration, deployment, and maintenance. 
 For example, much software is written…

 
 In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time – none, zero. 
 
 
 Charlie Munger
 
 
 
 
 This is the best advice I can currently muster: read plenty of non-fiction books. 
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 I enjoy fiction too, but find non-fiction more useful because it helps me build an…
If you want people to buy your product you need to position it in their minds as the best way to solve a problem they care about. 
 To get a product 
 … 
 
 
 
 A gadget, a service, a company, an institution, or a person.
 
 
 
 bought (or used), making it good is not enough; prospects must know about it and believe that it’s the best solution to their…
Feeling relatedness, competence, and autonomy is essential to well-being and self-regulated motivation . 
 Most of us want to be happy, active, and productive – we want our motivation to be regulated by an internal sense of purpose, not by external threats of punishment or promises of reward. We want happy and active productivity for ourselves, for those we care about, and for those we…
Motivation varies not just in amount, but in how it is regulated. It can be regulated by external factors such as conditional rewards and threats or by an internal sense of volition, interest, and personal values. 
 To be motivated means being moved to do something. A student can be motivated to study for a test because she will be punished by her parents if she gets a poor grade; or because…
The CEO’s job is to grow owners’ capital by growing the value per share or by paying out dividends, even if that means shrinking or selling parts of the business. 
 It’s easy to assume that the CEO’s job is to be an operator – the person in the company ultimately responsible for hiring, brand building, corporate culture, product development, sales, compliance, and…
The intrinsic value of a business is the discounted value of the cash that can be taken out of it during its remaining life. 
 What’s the value of a business? One possible answer is: whatever someone is willing to pay for it. But what someone is willing to pay fluctuates more than the intrinsic properties of the business because of the psychology of the buyers and the inefficiency of the…

 
 In their hunger for a single statistic to measure risk, however, they forget a fundamental principle: It is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong. 
 
 
 Warren Buffett on academics, Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s Chairman’s Letter 1993
 
 
 
 
 Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have built a literal fortune on the premise of…
Why does the quality of your mental models matter? Because good mental models are distinguished from bad by their ability to predict the future. And whether you’re making investments, building a car, ruling a country, curing cancer, or marketing shampoo, how you think the world works guides your actions. If your mental models predict the wrong thing, you are far less likely to achieve your goals.…
From CEOs to line managers, management is responsible for making other people productive. One team under different managers can differ dramatically in productivity, but what is it that great managers do that make such a difference? 
 Great managers do three things well: they cultivate culture, they create clarity, and they focus their team. They do this regardless of where in the…
When pondering how much time and effort it takes to become good at something, I’ve started to think of activities in terms of depth and difficulty: 
 
 Depth : the amount of theoretical or conceptual understanding required to consistently produce great results. 
 Difficulty : the amount of practice required to develop a high level of skill. 
 
 Deep, difficult activities are…
In 2012 I co-founded Better 
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 The name Better is a story in itself. The reasoning behind it was that our users would get better by using our platform – our slogan was Better than yesterday . It has caused some confusion though and it makes some sentences sound odd. One of our developers spoke to Jony Ive at a convention and when he heard the name he apparently…
A stint in management consulting after university was interesting and educational in ways I hadn’t expected. I found a note on some observations I made shortly after I left (about seven years ago now) and I think they still hold up. 
 
 
 Individual incentives move the world. 
 We can fight incentives with idealism for a while, but it’s a struggle that’s likely to…
Good discussions can improve our understanding of the world, clarify our values, and develop the concensus required for taking action as a group. Bad discussions aggravate, alienate, and confuse. Great products, businesses, and policies rest on a foundation laid in good discussions. 
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 Discussions are not debates. Debates are for the benefit of an audience and…
I’ve been pondering how to split (or not as the case may be) code between separate Git repositories. Say we’re developing a web-application that consists of three modules: a SQL database schema, a Haskell web server, and a web client built using Node. We could put this code into repositories in different ways; for example: 
 
 Three separate repositories, one for each module.…
Programmers rely on models and abstraction to manage the complexity of software. If we can’t easily reason about the program, we struggle to understand bugs, we are prone to add accidental complexity, and we take longer to build features. To mitigate this, we use abstraction to hide details behind simpler interfaces and we use models that define clear rules about how a process should behave.…
I was never particularly happy with CSS styling because I didn’t have a good way to think about it. BEM , OOCSS , and SMACSS all provide useful tactics on how to make CSS more manageable – BEM has good ideas about visual decomposition, SMACSS promotes base/layout/module/state/theme separation, and OOCSS highlights the importance of composability – but none provided the clear…
With reactive programming / dataflow ( RxJS , Bacon.js , Kefir ) and immediate mode UI rendering ( React , Mercury ), we now seem to have all we need to create simple, functional-ish client architectures 
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 Elm combines reactive programming and immediate mode rendering with static typing, immutable data, abstract data types, and a much neater syntax. Definitely worth a…
In the Warrior Elite , Dick Couch follows the training of a group of young men on their way to become US Navy SEALs (pre-9/11). I’m fascinated by the training of special forces. Not so much the physical aspects – impressive as those are – as the overall process and approach. The effort and resources dedicated to training each individual are unheard of in other professions, save…
How much does your product cost? \$10? \$2,000? If that’s all you think your customers pay, you’re missing two key aspects of the full cost: 
 The full personal cost to your customer is the sum of the money, the time, and the discomfort required of them to get the value your product aims to provide. 
 Discomfort is anything that your customer would rather not do: remember yet…
Every day, we interact with hundreds of things designed for a particular purpose – kitchen utensils, tax forms, shoes, ticket machines, school curricula, mobile phones, websites, water taps, houses, hamburgers, washing machines, laws, and APIs. Some are so good they give us little rush of satisfaction; others are so bad they make us clench our jaws in frustration. Doing good design is…
We designed and implemented this approach at Better 
 … 
 
 
 
 As in “Better than yesterday”.
 
 
 
 where I ran Engineering and Product as CTO. PDF version of this write up. 
 
 

 Corporate online learning is built on legacy technology. Many courses are completely custom-built using PowerPoint-like tools that encourage…
When we discuss design, we often use terms that people ascribe vague or conflicting meanings to. One particular favourite stands out: simplicity. 
 The term “simplicity” is common and commonly misused. It has been defined by example, by the methods used to achieve it, with words like elegant or beautiful , and by how intertwined things are, to name some examples. I prefer the…
Minimalism is a style that values having as few things – objects, edges, components, or patterns – as possible. I think that is a rubbish criteria for choosing or designing something. Sometimes, people justify minimalism on aesthetics grounds, but that is just the result of unrefined, or badly refined, taste. 
 Instead, use functionality as your criteria for choosing or designing…
You need principles to lead a good life. If you always tried to figure out what to do and say based on your core life goals and moral convictions, you’d be slow as a snail; conversely, you can’t pre-determine and remember precise rules for every possible situation; and with no guidance at all you would likely act against our stated goals and beliefs. 
 Good principles are rules of…
Resilience is a property that profoundly affects how the world works. It refers to the ability to avoid permanent damage when the environment changes. How resilient is your body to novel germs? Or the financial system to people promising what they can’t hold? Or the Internet to censurship? Or food supply to a pandemic? 
 Those are questions whose answers say something deep about our risk…
Written as an instruction manual for improving one’s tennis game, Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis covers far wider ground; not only does it present an attractive theory of learning, but it becomes a compelling (albeit implicit) argument for a Stoic approach to life. 
 Its learning theory states that the subconscious is not only capable, but better off, performing complex…

 John Kay, inventor of the Fly Shuttle, is fleeing rioters breaking in to smash the loom. People do not take threats to their livelihoods sitting down. Painting by Ford Maddox Brown in the Manchester Town Hall . Source: Wikipedia
From the recent Pirate Bay sentence : 
 
 Att upphovsrättsintrång genom illegal fildelning är ett samhällsproblem som på senare år spritt sig likt en löpeld framstår enligt hovrätten i det närmaste som ett allmänt känt faktum. 
 
 
 That copyright infringement through illegal file-sharing is a societal problem that in the last few years has propagated like wildfire appears,…
When does quality matter? Is it worth paying for? It depends. Things are either used 
 
 by end-users – pizza, music, pencils, books, or software applications – or 
 in systems – screws, microchips, conveyor belts, or software libraries. 
 
 Systems can be part of other systems and so on; eventually there’s an end user. Things could be used by end-users…
To change my mind according to reason. To welcome evidence, uncomfortable or not. That Occam’s Razor is fundamental. That consistency is fundamental and hard. To listen carefully, but to take nothing on authority. That neither truth nor good is established by vote. To admit mistakes swiftly and sincerely, to others and myself. To appreciate reasonable people willing to argue opposing views.…

 If by happiness be meant a continuity of highly pleasurable excitement, it is evident enough that this is impossible. A state of exalted pleasure lasts only moments, or in some cases, and with some intermissions, hours or days, and is the occasional brilliant flash of enjoyment, not its permanent and steady flame. Of this the philosophers who have taught that happiness is the end of life…
Human memory is unreliable and costly to fill and alter. Pilots diligently use checklists in both normal and exceptional circumstances to ensure consistency and quality. Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto (recommended to me by MB and JS) is an engaging story about their recent adoption in medicine. It discusses one aspect of creating reliable and effective processes (which The E-Myth…
Excel is powerful, but complexity challenged. Up to a point, Excel lets you do interesting things easily; mainly thanks to: 
 
 
 Being declarative. You specify what a cell is , not how or when to calculate it (VBA macros excepted). You don’t have to worry about control flow or side-effects (much). 
 
 
 Having a tight read-evaluate-print loop. You see immediately…
Ericsson’s excellent and highly readable article The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance from 1993 started what in the last 5 years or so has bubbled up to the surface 
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 Gladwell’s Outliers played a key role in popularising deliberate practice and the 10,000 hours meme, but I’m not a fan of Gladwell’s…
In Vilhelm Moberg’s classic novel series The Emigrants ,
the brig Charlotta sets sail for New York from Karlshamn in Sweden on 14 April 1840. Its passengers hope to escape starvation and hardship for a better life in the new world. Among them are Kristina, her husband Karl-Oskar, and their children. 
 
 Det var de djärvaste som först bröt upp. Det var de oförvägna som först gav…
In 1994, Steve Jobs told Rolling Stone: 
 
 I’m a tool builder. That’s how I think of myself. I want to build really good tools that I know in my gut and my heart will be valuable. And then whatever happens is… you can’t really predict exactly what will happen, but you can feel the direction that we’re going. And that’s about as close as you can get.…
Security is a trade-off; it comes at the cost of money, time, convenience, capabilities, and liberties. That’s the gist of Schneier on Security , a collection of essays and articles on security. 
 Schneier’s arguments are clear, sensible, concise, and convincing: most security initiatives in the wake of 9/11 have been counterproductive or ill-advised; civil liberties provide safety…
Doctorow’s right, Apple (that is, Steve Jobs) should have opened up the iPad. The iPad will not foster revolutionaries; it won’t be the tool for those who think different. It optimises what we have – email, Internet browsing, watching films, and other established applications. At that, I think it will excel; I think it will sell; I think it will improve the user experience in the…
Tufte ’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is considered a classic in information design. It is refreshingly defiant of pointless convention and concretises its discussion on graphical excellence brilliantly with historical examples. 
 
 Graphic showing how the size of Napoleon’s army shrank during his invasion of Russia in 1812. Source: Wikipedia 
 
…
Most, if not all, creativity can be explained as novel combinations of pre-existing ideas or objects. In the early 20th century, a varied combination of representational art and technical drawings (viewing objects from different angles) gave birth to cubism. Shortly thereafter, Coco Chanel combined the practicality and silhouettes of menswear with women’s haute couture. And then Pollock…
Giving points is really about mapping a high-dimensional performance space to one dimension – a single, simple, goal. 
 Football player Freddie Ljungberg needs to make hundreds of difficult, subtle choices to score a goal, but he’s not thinking “Boy, oh, boy, how do I handle all this complexity?”, he’s focused on what needs to happen in the world to get to that…
The industrial revolution mechanised physical labour. In 200 years that saw unprecedented innovation, we went from using machines to grind flour to assemble phones. But the holy grail of machanisation remains: thought. 
 As mechanisation relieves workers from manual labour, the human workforce moves towards more sophisticated work. Sophisticated work takes time to learn; since the industrial…
In my life so far, I’ve focused on understanding – figuring out how, roughly, things work and interact. I’ve done OK; no doubt I grasp but a fraction of what’s out there, but I have a framework for understanding the world that I’ve yet to find holes in. (The main bits being: an epistemology based on Baysian probability theory, evolutionary psychology, computational…
Taste is sometimes thought of only as an assessment of aesthetic qualities, but it does more than that. Taste is a subconscious assessment of value. Someone with refined taste can quickly, accurately, and consistently assess how qualities like durability, scarcity, status, functionality, sustainability, personal relevance, and efficiency of something match their personal values. That is, good…