Recent content on Dominik Mayer · Products, Asia, Productivity
Events bring us into the same room, but not into each other’s lives. After years of hosting meetups, I’ve learned that when you take care of the room’s layout and how people interact, you can multiply the odds of meaningful connection.
Bill Maher visited Donald Trump at the White House, where he not only got Trump to sign sixty of the insults he’d hurled at Maher but also encountered a president who was surprisingly self-aware and willing to listen. Maher concludes:
I really enjoyed listening to Tim Cook on Table Manners . What a personal and friendly conversation.
Herman Martinus wants his products to be like a garden: That’s what I want from my products. I want to putter about, feel connected to the process, and have fun doing so. I want to make things that don’t scale. To see people tuck into them and enjoy them as people, not as stats. I’ve done this fairly successfully with JustSketchMe . We have a small, diverse, and amazing community of artists and…
The authors of The Pragmatic Programmer about users not knowing what they need: Dave Thomas: Tying in to what Andy said earlier about software having a Heisenberg effect, where delivering the software changes the user’s perception of the requirements, almost by definition, your target is moving. The sheer act of delivering the first release is going to make the user realize, “Oh,…
Cal Newport: Between this newsletter, my podcast , my books , and my New Yorker journalism , I offer a lot of advice and propose a lot of ideas about how the modern digital environment impacts our lives, both professionally and personally, and how we should respond.
Masks by Shel Silverstein : She had blue skin, And so did he. He kept it hid And so did she. They searched for blue Their whole life through, Then passed right by— And never knew.
Incorporated ERP integration service Nexova Dynamics .
The first time it happened, I was writing a paper. The paragraphs I had just typed vanished into thin air, faster than Time Machine or Backblaze could save them. Gone. The next occurrence was during app development; Xcode suddenly flagged numerous errors in previously error-free code. My recent changes to several files were erased.
After thirteen years I finally graduated from my for-fun studies. Thesis: Digital Products – The Digital Content Directive and its implementation into the German civil code
Within a few days of prototyping a game mechanic, Valve’s designers start watching users play. And they conduct playtests once a week until their games are fun and it is “no longer excruciatingly painful” to watch. On a side note: At least in 2012, when its Handbook for New Employees was published, Valve was completely self-organized.
Morgan Eua does a great job introducing Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten method for personal knowledge management. In follow-up videos with easy to understand examples she details how she implements a Zettelkasten in Obsidian .
Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running inspired Cal Newport’s theory of deep work. Newport explains: Against the advice of nearly everybody, he sold his bar, and moved to Narashino, a small town in the largely rural Chiba Prefecture. He began going to bed when it got dark and waking up with the first light. His only job was to sit at a desk each morning and…
You might have heard of Parkinson’s Law . It states, that a project will always fill the available time. If you have two weeks, it will take you two weeks. If you have two years, it will take two years. Cal Newport dug up the original article in which C. Northcote Parkinson describes how the naval bureaucracy grew after World War I was won.
Tyler Wetherall writes in the New York Times about how she helped her ex-boyfriend recover from memory loss: To break up with someone is to lose the imagined future you would create together, but you would always share the landscape of your collective past. If Sam could not remember, I would be alone in that landscape.
YouTubers MrWhoseTheBoss and MKBHD explain the techniques tech companies use to get a more positive coverage of their products.
Christopher Balding retraces Xi Jinpings rise in the 1980s and the conclusions Xi must have drawn from the collapse of the USSR: Everything the USSR did in the 1980s and 1990 was wrong. Do the complete opposite. To put it another way: whatever Gorbachev would do, do and do the complete opposite.
Swedish band ABBA announced a new album to be released in November 2021 and a virtual concert in its own arena. Listening to the interview it sounds as if all of this started with the virtual concert as a way to leave a legacy behind.
The video shows the tallest building in the world between the completion of the Singer Building in 1901 and the planned opening of the Dubai Creek Tower in 2022. Up until the completion of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the tallest skyscraper had always been in the United States. And ever since, Asia rules.
Keith Zhai, Lingling Wei and Jing Yang write in the Wall Street Journal about Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma. They quote former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao with calling himself a “serious student” of Ma’s. Current president Xi Jinping seems to be everything but a fan.
In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Anita Sircar writes about a severely ill COVID patient she treated. The man had not gotten a vaccination. He wanted to wait for full FDA approval to not be “the government’s guinea pig”.
Late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia refutes the notion that the United States are such a free country because of the Bill of Rights: But then I tell them, if you think that the Bill of Rights is what sets us apart, you are crazy. Every banana republic has a bill of rights. Every president for life has a bill of rights. The bill of rights of the former evil empire, the Union of Soviet…
In the New York Times Magazine, Samanth Subramanian describes how Singapore reclaims land from the ocean. Less wealthy nations cannot afford these measures: Kiribati, an island nation in the Central Pacific, has bought 6,000 acres of forested land in Fiji, more than a thousand miles away, hoping to resettle some of its 100,000 people if a crisis hits. The Maldives, similarly, has talked about…
Matt Blodgett: There’s a whole class of bugs that comes down to the developer followed very specific instructions without understanding the goal. And a well-meaning manager will take that to mean I wasn’t specific enough in my instructions. No! Computers need instructions. Humans need understanding.
Sir Jony Ive in the California College of the Arts’ virtual commencement for the graduating class of 2021: Being curious fuels our appetite to learn, and wanting to learn is far more important than being right.
Using a public park as an example user experience consultant Paul Boag explains how to iteratively build products. And why you should do it.
Travel+Leisure portraits Anan’s Peter Cuong Franklin and Å By Tung’s Hoang Tung and mentions a couple of other fine dining restaurants. Having been to Anan twice I’ll add some of the other places to my list.
Emirates Global Aluminium explains how Bauxite is mined and refined. And some footage of an aluminum smelter:
Paul Simon explains how he wrote Bridge Over Troubled Water and Mrs. Robinson. I like this line: Everywhere I went, led me where I didn’t wanna be, so I was stuck.
Over at A List Apart Matt E. Patterson describes HTML-over-WebSockets: What about multi-user chat? Or document collaboration? In classic frameworks and SPAs, these are the features we put off because of their difficulty and the code acrobatics needed to keep everyone’s states aligned. With HTML-over-the-wire, we’re just pushing tiny bits of HTML based on one user’s changes to every other user…
China expert Michael Schuman describing his disappointment with where China is headed: Xi’s vision for “a community with a shared future,” as he calls it, is like a neighborhood where a man beats his wife every night, but anyone who tries to help her is “intervening in his internal affairs.” In order to show you are not “prejudiced,” you invite the guy over for pool parties, and smile as if…
Paul Horowitz describes on OSXDaily how to add currency exchange rates to the iOS stock app: All you need to do is search for a ticker symbol containing the two currencies, USDEUR=X , for example. In the four years since the article was published macOS has gained support for Stocks as well and you can show the exchange rate in a notification center widget.
Director Clint Eastwood’s soundtrack to Changeling .
Every Chinese New Year , Apple commissions a short film. This year it’s about the mythical Nian. Wikipedia explains: Once every year at the beginning of Chinese New Year, the nian comes out of its hiding place to feed, mostly on men and animals. During winter, since food is sparse, he would go to the village. He would eat the crops and sometimes the villagers, mostly children. […] The…
DER SPIEGEL correspondent Bernhard Zand: Deep in Siberia, at the same latitude as Hamburg, China begins. It only comes to an end some 4,000 kilometers away, on the beaches of the tropical island Hainan. Both are places of great beauty.
Bert Hubert dives into the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 vaccine: The code of the vaccine starts with the following two nucleotides: GA This can be compared very much to every DOS and Windows executable starting with MZ, or UNIX scripts starting with #! . In both life and operating systems, these two characters are not executed in any way. But they have to be there because…
For VnExpress Phan Anh retraced how Vietnam successfully contained the Coronavirus in the first and second wave. It all started way before other countries realized what was going on: Despite its best preventive efforts, Vietnam recorded its first Covid-19 cases on January 23 in HCMC: two Chinese nationals, a father and a son, who were quarantined at Cho Ray Hospital after testing positive.
“What’s the danger with Vietnam’s motorcycle helmets?”, asks Govi Snell in the Southeast Asia Globe . “What isn’t?”, I would reply. But it’s not that easy. From the article: Vietnam’s first helmet law, which passed in 2001, required motorcycle drivers to wear helmets on specific roadways. With limited enforcement of this legislation, the use of helmets was…
Nicholson Baker writing for the New York Magazine: What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more…
Former Evernote CEO Phil Libin shares his simple but elegant model of tracking (and converting) different user types. Also interesting are his remarks about how to create a well aligned business model.
When a promoter booked the rock band Van Halen they needed to provide a bowl of M&Ms, having all brown ones sorted out. Julie Zeveloff: As lead singer David Lee Roth explained in a 2012 interview, the bowl of M&Ms was an indicator of whether the concert promoter had actually read the band’s complicated contract.
John Pasden at Sinosplice shares this cute conversation between a bilingual kid in the US and a Chinese adult: Adult: 你最喜欢跟家人做什么？ Child: 椅子。 In English: Adult: What do you most like doing with your family? Child: Chair. John explains: The key to understanding this exchange is knowing that 做 (zuò), the verb meaning “to do,” sounds identical to the verb 坐 (zuò), which means “to sit.” Add into this…
James Clear in his 3-2-1 newsletter : If a decision is reversible, the biggest risk is moving too slow. If a decision is irreversible, the biggest risk is moving too fast.
Donald Trump bragging about his cognitive exam: "Person, woman, man, camera, TV" - Trump 2020 pic.twitter.com/MqmcwPWNv1 — Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) July 23, 2020 In a cartoon version: pic.twitter.com/3kh81WYNTu — The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 24, 2020
James Currier , Managing Partner at NFX, lists 23 success factors of B2B marketplaces.
Ben Thompson suggests blocking TikTok in the US: This is, without question, a prescription I don’t come to lightly. Perhaps the most powerful argument against taking any sort of action is that we aren’t China, and isn’t blocking TikTok something that China would do? Well yes, we know that is what they would do, because the Chinese government has blocked U.S. social networks for years. Wars,…
Denis Shiryaev upscaled and colorized footage “from the dawn of film taken in Tokyo, Japan from 1913-1915”.
Ars Technica: Today Ars Technica brings you inside the pilot’s seat of an F-15C Eagle fighter jet to break down every button in the cockpit. Join retired United States Air Force pilot Col. Andrea Themely as she walks you through everything at your disposal, from emergency features and communication controls to navigation features and weapons and defense. With 1100 hours of experience piloting…
Joshua Drummer on Twitter : Wife trying livestreaming on Douyin. Comes over to me in the middle of a stream and puts me on camera. After about a minute, notice pops up saying that foreigners are not allowed to appear on livestreams “without permission”.