haruki zaemon

I Tried Simulating The Entire Ocean. I’m pretty much never going to need to do this (and let’s face it, the math is beyond me anyway) but I love watching the way people solve these kinds of scaling problems. I think it’s also super important to show new developers (like my kids) how the creative process is iterative, with many “failures” along the way.

A virtuous and systematic approach to sustainable organizational change. If authority relies too heavily on factors related to identity, the result will be something like an extremist cult. On the other hand, if the basis of authority focuses entirely on methodological rigor, we end up with a technocratic system that alienates the people it is meant to represent.

The “Hero’s Journey” Is Nonsense. My kids are taught Campbell’s “hero’s journey” in school. Turns out, it’s vague, ethnocentric, sexist, hetero-normative, cis-normative, and ignores the ways stories are shaped by the cultures and time periods in which they are produced.

Voyager 1 survives clogged thruster issue billions of miles away. Both spacecraft are unimaginably far away, and require ongoing manoeuvring so they can explore interstellar space. Something no one expected when they first launched nearly 50 years ago.

Why “AI” projects fail. Companies are spending a lot of time and money integrating AI for the sake of getting onboard the AI train, and not a lot of time understanding and solving real problems.

Technical Leadership. Instead of resenting non-technical people for occupying leadership positions, technical experts can (and should) develop business acumen, and interpersonal and communication skills, in order to scale their influence.

We Spent $20 To Achieve RCE And Accidentally Became The Admins Of .MOBI. The protocols underpinning the internet are old, and venerable, and riddled with holes.

Departure Mono. A monospaced pixel font created by Helena Zhang, and inspired by early command-line and graphical user interfaces.

Newly Discovered Antibody Protects Against All COVID-19 Variants. A study led by The University of Texas at Austin has identified SC27, an antibody capable of neutralizing all known variants of the COVID-19 virus, opening prospects for universal vaccine development and improved treatments.

DOJ, Nvidia, and why we restrict monopolies. We shouldn’t allow past success to enable unfettered future profits when it stifles further innovation and competition, and definitely not at the expense of society or humanity as a whole.

Facilitated Workshops Create the Problems They Try to Solve. In my experience, facilitated workshops can bring about change and make a meamningful difference to the way groups of people work. At the same time, I agree they are a form of social engineering, and can be abused to reinforce existing structures and forms of control (via Chris Corrigan).

OpenAI Pleads That It Can’t Make Money Without Using Copyrighted Materials for Free. Another from the annals of “they nearly got there…”

Why Login Security Sucks. Login security is a mess. Username/password, TOTP, HOTP, and passkeys all have their issues and aren’t universally supported. Implementing solutions that balance security and usability can become complex and costly even for simple use cases.

Is my blue your blue? Test your colour perception. My blue/green boundary is at hue 174, the population median at the time I submitted my results, apparently.

What’s the Point of Bay Leaves? I mentioned to Benji that I’d voted “does nothing” in a Mastodon poll about the use of bay leaves in cooking. I was wrong.

Are you trying to watch Rings of Power season 2 and it is way too obscure? Let Glenn Fleishman give you a pathway. No spoilers. FTR, I enjoyed Season 1, and so far Season 2 as well.

Capt. Grace Hopper on Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People. 1982! I was 10 and Grace Hopper was more insightful about information technology in general than most people today. Smart, funny, and can talk coherently for hours without notes. Part one (of two).

The secret inside One Million Checkboxes. Someone made a website game with a million checkboxes open to the public to check on and off, prompting others to secretly encode easter eggs from simple messages to images, GIFs, and more.

Bypassing airport security via SQL injection. Look, we’re all going to end up on the wrong end of some security or privacy mistake at some point in our careers–sometimes more than once–but this is seriously amateur hour stuff (via Jon Eaves).

Misogyny Makes You Stupid. Misogyny leads people down a path of increasingly irrational and extreme beliefs, making them detached from reality. We all need to question our biases and the structural forces that produce them to avoid the trap of misogyny-fueled stupidity. As Brooke says: “You don’t want to be stupid, right? Question that shit.”

Students Find New Evidence of the Impossibility of Complete Disorder. This stuff blows my mind. I can’t even begin to think in a way that would conceive of asking the right question, let alone discovering the answer.

Silicon Valley’s Very Online Ideologues are in Model Collapse. I absolutely love the idea that humans are susceptible to a kind of (mental) model collapse, analogous to the way large language models are (via Baldur Bjarnason).

No one’s ready for this. From here on in, all photos are fake unless proven otherwise.

On body count. People in medieval times had and enjoyed sex, and discussed and found the topic as challenging as we do today.

Exceptions & Rules. I thought this nicely encapsulated some of the tension I’ve experienced and observed in various organisations, between those who strive for reliability (consistent and replicable outcomes) and those who seek validity (exploiting nuance and complexity).

Quantitative Criteria for Defining Planets. Sorry all you true believers, even the latest proposed definition means Pluto misses out on being a planet (via Deborah Pickett).

The Truth Behind Rising House Prices. The shift from US houses being treated like a commodity (1890-1972) to an asset-like investment (1972-) was not driven by supply and demand factors, but rather the energy-intensive nature of housing construction, and the growth of household debt (via Steve Randy Waldman).

Have CEOs Changed? The average interviewed CEO candidate has lower overall ability, is more execution-oriented/less interpersonal, less charismatic, and less creative/strategic compared to pre-GFC.

The 4.2 billion-year-old ancestor of all life on Earth today. I find it equal parts mind-blowingly cool and unsettling to know I’m related to my cats and the trees in our yard.

Why Gov. Tim Walz Drives Them Crazy. The Democratic VP candidate shows that it’s not just possible but natural and normal to be a middle-aged white guy and not a complete wierdo obsessed with controlling other peoples lives and bodies.

The quintessential Cantonese condiment - Fried Dace with Black Bean. I absolutely love this stuff with fried rice (seriously, I want some now just writing about it), and I found the history of it fascinating (via Adrianna Tan).

From Bike Rides to Boardrooms: The Evolution of Managing Up. It’s easy to be cynical but managing up is not sucking up, it’s about building mutually beneficial relationships, and shifting those relationships from transactional, subordinate, and tactical to long-term sustainable, collaborative, and strategic partnerships.

Magic moment: Sydney aquarium filled with song after sea birds mourn death of gay penguin Sphen. I’m not crying, you’re crying.

Fighting Through Mental Struggles: Incredible Renderings Created with Only a Pencil. 10/10 no notes.

A former security architect demonstrates 15 different ways to break Copilot. Surprise! Microsoft 365 Copilot can be made to reveal sensitive information.

Namibia: Live stream in the Namib Desert. I’m yet to see any animals (that could be the times I look) however I saw a Wart Hog and Oryx drinking. Others report seeing Zebra, Wrt Hogs, Oryx, Spotted Hyena, and more (via Emma Evans).

Digital Fibre Optic Gyroscope (DFOG). I don’t claim to really understand beyond it being a form of Inertial Navigation System (INS), using coiled optical fibre that you know, senses the Earth’s rotation.

Chris Patterson on Mastodon:

The advent of LLMs masquerading as artificial intelligence has made the notion of an absurdly powerful computer, constructed at great expense, and given unseemly resources to answer a meaningful question, only to return the answer “42”, feel more and more prophetic.

How cascades of rapid change routinely sweep across families, institutions, and nations. Transformational change comes about when small, loosely connected groups, are driven by a shared purpose. As leaders, we should connect those groups, empower them to succeed, and provide them with that sense of purpose.

The AI Supply Chain Tug of War. Suppliers up the AI chain are offloading their demand risk by taking profits now while Big Tech continue to pour in capital. This is a fragile equilibrium, and Big Tech could find itself in trouble if the music stops playing.

AI Unicorns Are Running Amok. Om with a similar take, comparing GPU investment to investments made in Sun Microsystems and Cisco at the start of the dot-com boom and eventual bust.

Consenting to decisions. There is a difference (albeit a fine line) between wanting people to accept something you already thought of, and wanting to generate and buy-in to something more. That’s one of the things I love about consent-based decision-making, and structured participatory practices in general.

How the First Sports Bra Got Its Stabilizing Start. In the 1970s, sports-bras weren’t a thing (because of course they weren’t). Then three women turned a jock-strap upside down and the first prototype was born.

What Are JPL’s Lucky Peanuts? I thought this was a joke when my kids first told me but nope, since July 1964, NASA launches have gone hand-in-hand with eating good-luck peanuts.

Edgar Schein’s Humble Enquiry. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I love this so much. I have come to really appreciate how important relationship building is, and how much more effective we can be when we prioritise genuine curiosity and humility over efficient knowledge transfer and decision-making.

Crash Course Pods: The Universe. I can’t get enough of this podcast series. The most awesome Dr. Katie Mack (aka AstroKatie on Mastodon) chats with author John Green about the history and mysteries of the universe, and explores some of John’s existential crises along the way.

We unleashed Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms on blank accounts. They served up sexism and misogyny. The algorithms of Facebook and Instagram serve up sexist and misogynistic content even without any user interaction or input. The platforms’ algorithms make assumptions about young men’s interests and serve them content related to “Manosphere” influencers and misogynistic memes. The findings align with similar research on YouTube and TikTok.

When ChatGPT summarises, it actually does nothing of the kind. ChatGPT produces something more akin to an extreme abridgment (my words, not the author’s) than an actual summary. In doing so, it can omit important context and facts, and make stuff up. This matches my experience, and why I only use automated summaries to get a rough idea of the content before diving in deeper.

How Does OpenAI Survive? OpenAI’s costs are estimated to be ~US$5 billion annually, and revenue is not keeping pace. Given the current lack of clear mass-market utility for the technology, OpenAI’s business model seems unsustainable over the long-term.

Deep frying coffee beans: yay or nay? The result, according to James Hoffmann, was “surprisingly good,” and the flavour “really interesting.” I would happily pay a hipster Melbourne barista to make this for me, once (via Benji and Warren).

How Physicists FINALLY Solved the Feynman Sprinkler Problem. Dr. Ben Miles explains the solution to a problem I never knew I needed to know. Associated with physicist Richard Feynman, it actually dates back to Ernst Mach’s textbook The Science of Mechanics, first published in 1883.

Marsh Family parody adaptation of “Dancing Queen” by ABBA, on JD Vance. 10/10 use of “Tangerine.”

List of eponymous laws. I’m up to “Newton’s flaming laser sword, also known as Alder’s razor: What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating” (via David Lee).

Iceberger. Draw an iceberg and see how it will float.

4 lessons for high-quality software from a surprising place. Compliance can seem like a necessary evil for many developers, especially those coming from startups. Having worked in a number of regulated industries, my experience (and that of the author) is that tackling the reality of compliance head on actually “establishes a foundation for success for high-quality code and minimized risk that save time and money in the long run.”

Embracing clarity: Shifting away from a culture of certainty. A culture of demanding certainty leads to presenting assumptions and partial knowledge as facts, stifling innovation and deeper problem-solving. Focusing on understanding root causes and context, rather than rushing to solutions, leads to more impactful and sustainable outcomes.

The Iceberg Model: towards unraveling our patriarchal legacy. The software development industry has a gender diversity problem rooted in historical patterns and societal norms. Software development should be viewed more as a collaborative, interdependent sociotechnical system, rather than a purely technical engineering discipline. A culture of high standards, kindness, and openness to diverse perspectives can foster a creative and productive work environment.

How Slavery Inspired Modern Business Management. Growth and profit-seeking have been built upon violence, injustice, and the exploitation of human lives. The failure to fully reckon with the connections between slavery and modern business practices amounts to denial (via Warren).

LGBT and Marginalized Voices Are Not Welcome on Threads. As if I needed more validation that deleting all my Meta accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) was the right thing to do.

The Data Is In: Return-to-Office Mandates Aren’t Worth the Talent Risks. Speaking of diversity (or lack thereof) return-to-office mandates particularly impact women and minorities. When Gartner says it, maybe companies will listen?

Opinion | Donald Trump Is Unfit to Lead. Did the NYT finally grow a spine?

How Good Is ChatGPT at Coding, Really? More evidence (as if we needed it) that current “AI” is more like a digesting duck than an intelligent coding companion.

The Emergence and Dynamics of Psychological Safety Over Time. I’ve often experienced a boost in psychological safety as “the new guy.” I’ve also experienced that sense of safety decline over time as the “reality shock” hits. Unsurprisingly, being aware of this phenomenon can help us implement practices that reduce the seemingly inevitable dip in psychological safety for new hires.

The #1 block to teamwork is defensiveness. Defensiveness is a major obstacle that prevents people from working well together in teams. When people get defensive, their thinking becomes rigid and they become less effective at problem-solving. Recognising our own personal warning signs of defensiveness is crucial for being able to manage it.

Immunity to Change – 4 Steps Model to Individual Change. I became a fan of the immunity to change model after I read the book. I’ve observed people who seem quite reticent to change dismiss the concept. Personally, it’s one of the things I credit with helping me overcome my own barriers to change.

Accessing inflight Wi-Fi for free via your air miles account’s “name” field. Perhaps the least efficient way to use the internet, an ingenious person invented HTTP over Air-miles Profile (via Dan Moren).

Axe Tree Felling for Log Cabin Hand Tools Winter | 1.0. Ever since I read My Side of the Mountain as a kid I’ve wanted to live in a log cabin in the woods. I’ll almost certainly never build one myself so this is the next best thing, I guess.

What Beats Rock Game. Surprisingly addictive. I thought it was just random at first but the creators put more thought into this than I expected (via Benji).

I spent most of the day walking and tinkering with this site and not much time reading, so this is all you get.

How to Raise Your Artificial Intelligence. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT should not be thought of as intelligent agents, but rather as cultural technologies that allow humans to access and utilize information in new ways (via Benji).

A Father-Daughter Swearing Lesson | “The F-Word”. This made me smile the whole way through, then laugh out loud at the end (also via Benji).

The Real Life Bananaphone! I contemplated pre-ordering one of these when they were first announced. I’m glad I thought better of it.

Simplify update meetings. Replace the typical unproductive staff meetings that could be handled via email with participatory “mini-pitch” sessions. This format can help team members practice concisely explaining their work, ensure everyone understands the team’s priorities, enable quicker identification of issues, and promotes cross-team collaboration.

Strategy at Human Scale. Companies need standardisation, compartmentalisation, and subordination. At the same time, they need to rethink these practices to be more “human-scale” by enhancing connection to the customer in a way that makes employees feel like willing participants rather than cogs in a machine.

Path dependence and identifying seedlings. “if you’re patient, if you don’t try to fight nature too much, and if you can let go of a rigid vision of the ideal outcome in favor of allowing things to emerge […] we can learn what to nurture and what to eradicate”

The science behind DORA. I’m using DORA metrics more regularly now to measure how we’re tracking towards our engineering objectives. I’ve tried all sorts of ways to do this, and I keep coming back to DORA surveys that are so simple and grounded in a mix of scientific rigor and practical considerations.

Sequoia Capital has doubts AI will be profitable any time soon, if ever. There’s at least a US$500Bn revenue shortfall between what the AI industry needs to break even, and what the major players could even dream of generating (via The Sizzle).

Merlin Bird ID. We’re using this app on our vacation. With a location-aware catalogue and a few simple questions, it’s been almost trivial to identify all sorts of birds.

Experts vs. Imitators. Imitators don’t know the limits of their expertise, can’t answer questions at a deeper level, can only explain things using the vocabulary they were taught, and get frustrated when you say you don’t understand.

An allegory of solution fixation. The solution fixation trap is a bias that leads people to focus on proposing and evaluating solutions before fully understanding problems. High-performers take the time to gather relevant information and perspectives before discussing solutions. I’ve written previously on the need to slow down and create space to work through problems more effectively.

Top 10 Ways to Foster Psychological Safety in the Workplace. Psychological safety looks different for everyone and should accommodate diverse needs and preferences. Key practices include leveling power gradients, establishing shared team agreements, prioritizing active listening, using clear and compassionate communication, valuing and encouraging speaking up, framing work as experiments for learning, regularly reflecting on lessons learned, and defining clear behavioral boundaries.

Only a fool gets rich twice. Having a life-changing amount of money in a single stock position comes with significant stress and uncertainty about what to do. Cognitive biases like anchoring, endowment, and familiarity lead people to holding out for even more, then losing the majority of the value waiting too long. When given a chance to sell a concentrated position you should sell 20%-80%.

The Shareholder Supremacy. “Shareholder supremacy” and “financial nihilism” have poisoned the tech industry and the broader economy, and led to the proliferation of disconnected, short-term focused managers who run companies in ways that harm workers, customers, and society, while enriching themselves and shareholders. This reminded me of Roger Martin’s A New Way to Think c. 2022, and an article he wrote in Forbes c. 2011.

Doctor does actually mean someone with a PhD, sorry. I love Dr Eleanor Janega’s Going Medieval. This time … it’s historically inaccurate to claim that only medical doctors should be called “doctors.” The term “doctor” originally referred to those with a PhD, who were university professors and teachers. Originally, medical practitioners were called “physicians,” not “doctors.”

In defence of traditional swearing. This came up during a discussion on Mastodon. Needless to say, I disagree with the author.

Surfaces Concave & Convex. Concave contexts are ones in which there is natural momentum toward a positive, desirable outcome. Convex contexts are ones in which there is natural momentum away from a positive, desirable outcome. It is critical to recognise which shape you are operating on and act accordingly.

ChatGPT is bullshit. We should describe LLMs as “bullshitting” (in the Frankfurtian sense) rather than “hallucinating” in that they convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned whether anything at all is true.

Using AI at Work Makes Us Lonelier and Less Healthy. There is some research to suggest that employees who use AI as a core part of their jobs report feeling more isolated, drinking more, and suffering from insomnia compared to employees who don’t use AI as extensively.

Constant Change Is Rewriting the Psychological Contract with Employees. Employees’ willingness to support enterprise change has collapsed. While it’s fair to say that companies must focus on continuous reinvention, effort is required to support the workforce to adapt and thrive in this new world.

NASA’s ISS Spacesuit Situation Turns Grim. The spacesuits used by NASA on the ISS are over 40 years old with only 18 fully functional units remaining. There have been multiple incidents of water leaks inside astronauts’ helmets during spacewalks!

Cardiorespiratory fitness is a strong and consistent predictor of morbidity and mortality among adults. From the annals of no shit Sherlock: higher cardio-respiratory fitness (CRF) is associated with a 41-53% lower risk of all-cause mortality when comparing high vs low CRF.

I’ve been travelling for work and had quite a bit to catch up on (and still do) …

5 Things I Learned About Leadership from the Death & Rebirth of Microsoft. When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he transformed the company by changing its culture and strategy. He encouraged a growth mindset, made customer-centric decisions, and empowered Microsoft’s engineering teams.

How Good, Kind, Caring People Became The Bad Guys. A phenomenon known as “spontaneous trait transference” leads to people blaming and turning against those who try to warn them about problems or negative situations. I’ve watched first-hand as leaders become increasingly resentful towards those who point out problems. Turns out, it’s a fairly common psychological bias, one that takes deliberate effort to overcome.

Manage for congruence, harmony, and legitimacy. The key to effective organisational change is aligning on vision, problems, and the intention to address them collaboratively, rather than imposing solutions. Leaders should focus on cultivating the capability for collective observation, evaluation, and confrontation of challenges, rather than directly redesigning organizational structures.

The Pac-Man Rule. The Pac-Man Rule states that when standing in a group, you should always leave room for one more person to join the conversation. When someone joins the group, make room for one more. Such a simple way to create space for others to participate.

Seven Years Later: What the Agile Manifesto Left Out. It’s another 13 years since Brian Marick’s talk, and it still resonates with me.

Software Art Thou: Real Engineering. I’ve been watching Glenn Vanderburg iterate on this talk for what must be almost 15 years, and I appreciate it more each time.

Mathematicians Are Excited About a Newly Discovered Shape. A 2D Reuleaux triangle is a shape with a constant width but a smaller area than a circle. Mathematicians have now discovered a 3D equivalent that has a constant width but a smaller volume than a sphere of the same dimension.

What Does A Great Cup Of Coffee Taste Like? I’d pretty much watch anything by James Hoffmann and the production of this particular video is off the charts.

I accidentally created the most powerful Bond theme. I love anything James Bond and I genuinely can’t get enough of reinterpretations and remixes of the theme tune.

Everything you’ve been told about the ‘Chickenpox bomber’ is wrong. Because of course it is. While there’s some truth to the story of mathematician Abraham Wald’s survivability recommendations, many details are incorrect or exaggerated and embellished over time.

Was There A Trojan Horse Hidden In Section 230? A novel lawsuit against Meta argues that Section 230(c)(2)(B) could provide immunity for creators of middleware tools that enable users to restrict access to content on social media platforms.

Blockchain Rasputin over here is mad that moderation exists. Speaking of content moderation, I’m no fan of Jack Dorsey and the title says it all, really.

Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains The Three-Body Problem. I didn’t know what the three-body problem was until I watched this. If there are less divisive personalities who explain it equally well, please let me know and I’ll gladly share those.

The 10 Shortest Flights in the World. Spoiler: Loganair‘s flight between Westray and Papa Westray is currently the World’s shortest flight, lasting less than 2 minutes on average and covering just 2 miles.

Passkeys: A Shattered Dream. This matches my experience using passkeys. It was hard enough getting my family to use a a password manager. Harder still to get them to use a different password for every service. Passkeys are so far the worst of all worlds.

Using Legitimate GitHub URLs for Malware. Due to the way GitHub comments work, a malicious actor can upload malware and have it appear to come from the owner of the repository, even after the comment has been deleted.

Cultures of Growth - Mary C. Murphy. Mindsets are environmental/cultural as much if not more so than individual. Genius mindset cultures can crush (too soon?) even the strongest growth mindsets. I enjoyed this enough that I’m now reading her book.

Notes on Complexity - Neil Theise. Negative feedback loops are necessary to achieve adaptability in complex systems. Unconstrained positive feedback loops (like those we see in companies going for hyper-growth) lead to collapse.

Gaining depth perception. Someone regained depth perception with the help of prism glasses. Imagine not having depth perception in the first place?!

Navigating the symmetry of trust. Trust-building is intricately linked to risk symmetry: trust flourishes when perceived risks are roughly equal; is difficult to cultivate when risk is highly asymmetric; is hard to maintain when risk symmetry is ambiguous.

Novel attack against virtually all VPN apps neuters their entire purpose. Novel in the sense that it’s been feasible since about 2002 but only recently discovered by researchers.

Hierarchy is Good. Hierarchy is Essential. And Less Isn’t Always Better. I’ve been skeptical of this current trend to “flatten” organisational hierarchies. It has seemed to me more about cost-cutting and command-and-control than effectiveness. Research suggests I’m not wrong.

Seeing like a CEO. CEOs (much like administrative states) often attempt to make everything legible, to them. In doing so, they can overlook important characteristics of complex systems that make their organisation effective, adaptable, and safe.

Transformations That Work. If you’re going to continually disrupt your workforce with change, you’d better be sure it’s worth it.

The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco. Confirming all my biases about Silicon Valley. Srinivasan seems like the latest (and presumably not the last) in a long line of Musks and Andreesens.

Dieter Rams pointing at things he doesn’t like. This had me in fits of uncontrollable laugher, literally for days.

Lofi Girl. I often have this playing in the background. I listen on Apple Music but here’s a YouTube station with links off to other streaming services.

How Jess (a software developer here in Australia) created 2D pixel art water. Being a kid of the ’80s I love this style of game. Being the parent of a kid who loves to code this style of game, I’m always on the lookout for inspiration and learning material for them.

But they were doing fine: autistic burnout. We’ve absolutely observed all this in our ASD child. It was validating to learn we weren’t just imagining it.

How the codpiece flopped. I love how the “solution” to wearing individual stockings on each leg was not to sew them into one piece, but rather to wear increasingly large and ornate codpieces.

LIGO has surpassed the quantum limit. LIGO (or Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) consists of 4-kilometer-long vacuum tubes, and detects ripples in space-time that are generated by colliding black holes and neutron stars, millions to billions of light-years away.

Five minutes that will make you love Thelonious Monk. I’ve been a fan since the early 2000s when a friend introduced me to Monk’s work. Maybe this will convert you too?

David Byrne’s dance rehearsals for stop making sense. As a kid, Talking Heads was one of my favourite bands. Seeing this brought back so many great memories.

Things Ray enjoyed in 2023. Always good for some inspiration.

Designing alien alphabets for Rebel Moon. Love a good Louie Mantia breakdown of his creative process.

The gory history of barber surgeons. For centuries in Europe, barbers performed surgical procedures like tooth extractions, stitches, and amputations in addition to haircuts.

A self-enforcing protocol to solve gerrymandering. Someone just solved gerrymandering using a mechanism that doesn’t require a neutral third party as arbiter.

93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs. Who knew that ;i;c;;#\\?z{;?;;fn':.; was a valid Perl program?!

A unified theory of fucks. You only have a finite number so give them to living things (people, animals, plants) who will give them back, not institutions (companies, platforms, systems) that will suck you dry.

Why bad strategy is a ‘social contagion’. Strategy often lacks a focus on real challenges and problems due to “success theater” and ends up with everybody getting a little piece of what they want to do.

Why you’ve [probably] never been in a plane crash. Annex 13 holds that the primary purpose of an aircraft accident investigation is to prevent future accidents, over the search for liability.

Stop arguing, start debating. Decision-making skills are crucial to scaling and growing a company. Skilful debate allows you to move quickly and reliably through issues, and requires planning, structure, and discipline.

Your company’s values will be used against you. Values are trade-offs, otherwise they’re not useful for making decisions or shaping behaviour. Provide concrete examples of where company values helped make decisions, what the trade-offs were, and how the values led to better outcomes.

Toward better hypotheses. Experimentation is valuable when we already have a rich set of mental models. However, if our mental models are primitive or don’t highlight interesting variations in the landscape of possibilities, shining a light on them won’t bring much insight.

How to be a SAGE without being a snob: Remove power and authority from relationships; Make others feel included and accepted; Be generous; Create independent, self-directed learners. (Related, 7 marks of mentors who change lives.)

Why you should be afraid of ‘Great Execution’. Poor leadership treats strategy and execution as separate things. They will hand down a strategy to be executed. This leaves them able to claim credit if it succeeds; or blame you for not executing properly. Don’t fall for it.

Fix the system problem, not the people problem. The next time you see a proposal for a restructure, ask if there’s been any attempt to tackle the underlying causes of the problem. Look for any changes to the actual system. If you can’t see any – it’s doomed to fail.

The worst programmer I ever knew. Don’t try to measure the individual contribution of a unit in a complex adaptive system, because the premise of the question is flawed.

Forgetting is actually a form of learning. In experiments with mice, memories were not truly lost, but rather the brain cells encoding them could no longer be naturally reactivated due to interference from new information and experiences. However, the scientists were able to reactivate the forgotten memories by stimulating the brain cells that stored those memories.

I’ve been sitting on some of these for a quite a while (and I have enough in the backlog for checks notes another 8 of these posts!):

Reward collaboration, not individual work. Focusing on collaboration over individual credit leads to faster work completion at a sustainable pace without accumulating technical debt.

From reactive to creative leadership. Reactive leadership operates from a place of fear and defensiveness, while Creative leadership operates from openness, possibility, and passion.

The cult of the founders. While potentially inspiring, the prophetic leadership style is immature and inadequate for leading a company at scale.

5 tips for leading successfully in a global environment: Embrace change; Master async comms; Empower local employees; Amplify customer voices; and Build relationships.

Some hard truths about soft skills. Hard skills might get you a job, but soft skills like curiosity, emotional resilience, and learning ability can help you excel in the job.

The strategic benefits of randomized decision-making. In highly ambiguous environments, random decision-making can provide strategic advantages like: getting to market sooner, faster learning, less predictability, and reduced biases.

Obliquity as a strategy for learning. Focusing on helping people understand how they learn, rather than deep strategy or techniques, may help people thrive in complex situations.

How software companies can avoid the trap of Product-Led Growth. Eventually even the best PLG companies will need an enterprise sales strategy, which takes years to develop properly.

The hidden potential of eliminating failure demand. While some types of failure demand are simply unavoidable, reducing failure demand can improve customer satisfaction, reduce operating costs, and increase employee job satisfaction.

Value engineering and build vs. rent. Companies should focus their engineering efforts on building capabilities that are strategically important to their core business and customers, rather than generic systems that are readily available from vendors.

Are OKRs improving or inhibiting decision making? OKRs are not a substitute for strategy, and may be less effective in complex domains with low validity or predictability.

Do OKRs hinder decision making in radically uncertain environments? Goal setting constrains decisions to a “known end, unknown means” scenario and boxes thinking into a single approach rather than exploring alternatives.

Are OKRs overprescribed? Goals can trigger escalation of commitment and overinvestment even if the initial assumptions prove wrong.

Exposing the vulnerabilities of Large Language Models in Low-Resource Languages. Turns out, you can bypass GPT-4 safety measures by using a language other than the dominant languages used for training.

Kudurru is a network that actively blocks AI scrapers. To prevent them from scraping content without permission. We’ve started using Cloudflare but Kudurru seems to go one better and actively poison the well from which AI drinks.

Silicon Valley’s biggest AI developers are hiring poets. Partly to improve the style and credibility of their content, and partly to avoid potential copyright issues that could arise from training on copyrighted books and stories without permission.

Knowledge graphs improve generative AI. I’ve practiced concept mapping for perhaps 15 years, since reading Novak’s paper, and been into graph databases since the early days of RDF, so this is genuinely fascinating.

Generative AI exists because of the transformer. By moving away from sequential processing and focusing on “attention” mechanisms, the Transformer model significantly improved the efficiency and effectiveness of machine learning in language tasks.

With DALL-E 3, you can now get high-quality images that depict complex scenes, by default. I don’t have access to DALL-E 3, yet but from all the reviews I’ve seen, it sounds like I might be able to switch from using stability.ai’s DreamStudio.