Let's bucket workers into three categories: 1. ICs 2. (Front-line) Managers 3. Execs+ and then two dimensions: whether youre judged on inputs/outputs, and whether youre directly responsible for something ICs: directly responsible, but judged in inputs Managers: directly responsible, judged on outputs Execs: not directly responsible, judged on outputs By reducing friction to generating work, the…
U-shaped caring When people aren't doing well economically, they care a lot about what others think about them. This makes sense because you might need ask for help from others/give to others if they ask. While on the come-up, you care little about what others think, because you're focusing on the economics. But once you've made it, eventually revert back to phase one again. Less out of material…
1. Increasing common knowledge 2. Lowering status 3. Doing something super weird, especially physically
1. The easiest way to get better is also the funnest, which is to listen to the music 2. Don't coach during the dance 3. If you're offtime, stop and restart 4. Start understanding how different people prefer different pressure 5. Prevent personal hygiene issues 6. New moves will soon stop being the primary measure of progress 7. Wear earplugs
Successful companies have a 4th factor. Product, market, and founder fit are well-known. But a differentiated hiring source is just as important. The default-case for early-stage companies is to take whomever they can get. But a differentiated source gives you inside access to the right people, at the right time. The easiest way is to hire your college friends. Nvidia/Netscape early hires came…
Some heuristics Cuban Comes from Cuba, movement is more circular. The dance/music are alternatively referred to as Timba/Casino. Popular song in 2026 Example dance Example areas where this is the dominant style San Francisco, Cuba, Barcelona Linear Comes from Puerto Ricans in New York ("Nuyorican"). Variations include On-1/On-2/LA . Also called "salsa linea" Popular song in 2026 Example dance…
"Reforms by advances, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for. They by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time…
...on a conservative estimate, a third of my cases were really cured, a third considerably improved, and a third not essentially influenced. Even Carl Jung only had a 66% success rate
Applying for Global Entry shows this checkbox O3 says this is the result of the CAN-SPAM act. But Global Entry is operated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which, according to Gemini 2.5 search isn't subject the CAN-SPAM act. Who is hallucinating here? Asking ChatGpt a second time produces an obviously wrong answer
1. People these days have it easy 2. No one knows how to write anymore 3. Everything is political now
Will be continuously updated: Usain Bolt Andrej Karpathy
Yes, if you're Adam Smith. For him the emotional intensity in pair conversations has an equilibrium in the middle, and also that it's harder for strangers to empathize with negative emotions ("...they'll go on eating their dinners"). Therefore it's one's goal to dissipate one's negative feelings, then venting to a stranger and reacting to their lack of reaction would be rational. Ian Betteridge in…
Half the time in Seoul, people would greet me in Korean, but the other half people would directly use English. It wasn't clear initially how the latter group could tell I wasn't Korean. Turns out what mattered was that in cold (~10F) weather I wore a hat. Why? Because no real Korean would mess up their hair for warmth.
Don't ask someone who skips leg day to spot you: because even when explicitly told otherwise, they inevitably assist with the lift too soon. As for why...
An unexpected occurrence of mood affiliation was when I saw the musical Hadestown. I enjoyed it and looked forward to the tax of listening to the soundtrack on repeat for the next few weeks. But interest dwindled after just a couple days. At least in my bubble this is a recurring theme. One hypothesis is that it's because the songs shift moods much more than most[0]. And because most people are…
Uber drivers proactively start a conversation significantly less than before Covid. Two reasons I can think of are a self-selecting population as well as a change in socialization preference (buoyed by Covid). The first is that there may be a specific self-selection. Given drivers are paid less by Uber, all drivers have an incentive to work other jobs, and the extroverted ones would have more…
From his Only the paranoid survive I can’t help but wonder why leaders are so often hesitant to lead. Iguess it takes a lot of conviction and trusting your gut to get ahead of your peers, your staff and your employees while they are still squabbling about which path to take, and set an unhesitating, unequivocal course whose rightness or wrongness will not be known for years. Such a decision really…
I was on the bus talking shop with a friend who works as a tech investor. We eventually reached our stop, got off and started walking away when the bus driver called to us. At first I thought we had left something on the bus when the driver clarified they wanted an "AI stock pick". We gave a recommendation and continued on our way.
Keith Rabois gave a talk in YC's startup class . Among many interesting things, I'll focus on his idea that since athletes do fine with salary transparency, maybe it could be more successful in tech too. However for three reasons I don't think the example of athletes generally translates to programmers[0]. Abstraction Athletes have agents to negotiate on their behalf, but programmers negotiate…
And whereas it must, of course, be the task of the historian, archaeologist, and prehistorian to show that the myths are as facts untrue -- that there is no one Chosen People of God in this multiracial world, no Found Truth to which we all must bow, no One and Only True Church -- it will be more and more, and with increasing urgency, the task of the psychologist and comparative mythologist not…
"he knew better than to allow his countrymen to be stoked up after his departure from Paris [to the Italian theatre]. Angry that the newspapers there were claiming he had predicted he would capture Milan within a month, he wrote on May 19, ‘That is not in my character. Very often I do not say what I know: but never do I say what will happen.’ 12 He ordered that ‘a jocular note’ to that effect be…
As a Marginal Revolution reader, I wanted an Android App. Then one day I realized, wait a second, I'm a programmer -- why not just make one myself? I couldn't think of a good reason not to, so I did. It went better than expected, and resulted in Fractional . Here are five reflections on the process. The 97.5 Percentile Libo , my sibling, was home for the holidays and recommended I use Flutter (a…
Use the repeated flag -e. For example, grep -e foo -e bar myfile.txt searches for lines in myfile.txt with either foo, bar, or both in them.