Bravery in Research - by Amitai Cohen - Rhythms of Research Wiz’s Amitai Cohen

Writing Is Magic - Marc’s Blog

How to write like Malcolm Gladwell - by Henry Oliver

On maximizing leverage – Mike Crittenden

http://mhpo.woz.com/letters/

CHARLIE MUNGER ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HUMAN MISJUDGMENT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNxsAhc6sk8

We have far more to fear from stupidity than evil - Big Think

Want Better Sleep? This One Piece of Advice Seems to Work For Almost Everybody : ScienceAlert

What you can learn about sleep from truckers

The sneaky economics of Ticketmaster

“It’s Going to Be Epic”: The Oral History of James Cameron - The Ringer

How Being Bullied Affects Your Adulthood

How to Get Better at Asking for Help at Work

Kill Your Identity - Erik Torenberg

Dangerous Embedded Assumptions

GitHub Business Card

iPhones Have A Built-In White Noise Feature That No One Knows About

How to Set Healthy Boundaries – and Stop Letting Anxiety and Guilt Get in the Way of Living Your Life

(26) Sahil Lavingia on Twitter: “Pick the company you work for based on the company you want to start. If you want to start a coffee shop, work for a coffee shop. If you want to start a startup, work for a startup. If you want to start a farm, work for a farm.” / Twitter

Falling Fruit

How Michael Goguen Got Conned How one billionaire with a savior complex and a voracious sexual appetite got conned by his best friend, who saw him as the perfect mark.

Comprehensive Academic Workflow from Reading to Writing in Markdown

How Long Would Society Last During a Total Grid Collapse? — Practical Engineering

The Perks of a High-Documentation, Low-Meeting Work Culture

Remove backgrounds from images on Mac - 9to5Mac

Turning goals into growth loops: the PARI system of mindful productivity

The Top 3 Most Effective Ways to Take Notes While Reading

Git Notes: git’s coolest, most unloved­ feature - Tyler Cipriani

tweetback/tweetback: Take ownership of your Twitter data and get your tweets back

The science of motivation: how to get and stay motivated - Ness Labs

Portmanteaur

How to Tell if You Really are an InfoSec Professional

Morgan Housel turned parking lessons into a finance book that’s sold 2M copies - MarketWatch

Why Your Brain Isn’t Into the Future - Nautilus

How to stop taking things so personally : Life Kit : NPR

So long and thanks for all the bits - NCSC.GOV.UK

• (30) Jack Cable on Twitter: “Good read from departing @NCSC Technical Director Dr Ian Levy, including: - Stopping blaming users for poor cybersecurity - Addressing the cause, not the symptoms of insecurity (read: memory safety, for one) - How to learn from cyber incidents https://t.co/3w0avYKDNU” / Twitter
• (20) Ciaran Martin on Twitter: “Parting thoughts from Dr Ian Levy as he steps down as @NCSC’s Technical Director, a post he’s held since it was set up in 2016. Brilliant, insightful & challenging as always: a must-read for everyone in cyber security 1/3 https://t.co/2cVcgmfnsC” / Twitter

Advice That Actually Worked For Me

https://www.wired.com/story/date-me-google-docs-and-the-hyper-optimized-quest-for-love/

(20) GREG ISENBERG on Twitter: “I asked 1 billionaire, 1 PHD math professor and 1 99 year old man what self-reflection questions they asked themselves Their list of the questions to make you feel more fulfilled in life, love & career Ask yourselves these questions today:” / Twitter

OODA Loop - Cybersecurity is an Infinite Game TODO

The Mirage of Mandiant: Post-Acquisition Follow-Up

Don’t overreact to weak signals - The Marketplace Guide

The Social Recession: By the Numbers - by Anton Cebalo

Lefsetz Letter » Blog Archive » The Billboard Article

The Technium: 99 Additional Bits of Unsolicited Advice

How to organize your apps and email TODO

How I Have Time For Everything (From A Principal At Amazon) - YouTube

Friction: The Hidden Force Holding You Back - Farnam Street

Microsoft CMO Chris Capossela’s time-management hacks from Bill Gates

Esther Perel on the Art of Relationship Expectations - YouTube Esther Perel: The Power of Relational Intelligence - YouTube

Getting Senpai To Notice You

Why Reading Before Bed Could Be The Key To A Good Night’s Sleep

(19) Dark Crystal Frasier on Twitter: “Netflix has this strange habit of producing or funding genre-redefining animation, then burying it on their app with zero promotion. I want to point out some of the animated gems you’ve probably missed. These are either great series, or do something remarkable and different. https://t.co/v79lZHQR8b” / Twitter

How to make networking events less intimidating and awkward : Life Kit : NPR

Old Maps Online

The Doodle House - YouTube

Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers

(20) The Azodo on Twitter: ““Don’t Chase Unicorns” & 6 Other Lessons I Learned from the book “The Minimalist Entrepreneur” by @shl” / Twitter

Explore Successful Businesses - Starter Story

Your Work Matters. Build Your Schedule Accordingly. - Study Hacks - Cal Newport

(20) 🔎Julia Evans🔍 on Twitter: “a debugging manifesto https://t.co/3eSOFQj1e1” / Twitter

What do executives do, anyway? - apenwarr

Bored People Quit – Rands in Repose

Esther Perel’s Blog - Letters from Esther #31: Inviting Vulnerability

If You Try To Do Everything, You Won’t Do Anything - RyanHoliday.net

Say It With A Condom - Condoms Custom Designed

(19) David Perell on Twitter: “28 short pieces of life advice: 1. Block off 90 minutes in your calendar every morning to work on the most important thing. Wake up early if you need to. Don’t compromise.” / Twitter

Sins of Memory - Brain Pizza by Shane O’Mara

Amplifying a point from Dan Gross

On ranking things

TBM 41/51: Why Goal Cascades are Harmful (and What to Do Instead)

Back to the office

(21) Charity Majors on Twitter: “I wrote a long and rambling post on why the hierarchy is bullshit (and bad for business). Includes digressions on * the big lie of hierarchy (higher is always better) * why hierarchy endures as a data structure * why it sucks (we imbue it with dominance) https://t.co/wsR3kXW1Jn” / Twitter

HACKING GOOGLE: Series Trailer - YouTube

Google has released a new six-part documentary series profiling various Google security teams including the Threat Analysis Group and Project Zero among others. TODO

Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity

On productivity

Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles

swanandx/lemmeknow: The fastest way to identify anything! https://twitter.com/_swanandx

How to Reach Software Engineers through Social Media – console.log()

Learning is Remembering

Announcing Turnstile, a user-friendly, privacy-preserving alternative to CAPTCHA

Cloudflare has built a service called Turnstile to enable people to securely bypass CAPTCHAs. For Apple users it’ll be even better, allowing you to automatically bypass CAPTCHAs using iOS 16. Apple made this possible with the iOS 16 release, but it required that sites made changes to get it to work. Cloudflare’s new service lets sites avoid that work by just calling an API—and they don’t even have to be a Cloudflare customer. Hell yeah. Killing CAPTCHA annoyance—well done. If you’re trying to make us forget Kiwi Farms, it’s kind of working. Now do cookie popups. MORE

DETAIL ON TURSTILE

HOW TO ENABLE IT

I spent two years trying to do what Backstage does for free - Stack Overflow Blog

devops-kung-fu/hookz: Manages client side git hooks resulting in the ability to create git action pipelines.

How to Brush Your Teeth Properly, According to a Dentist TODO

GitHub - hahwul/deadfinder: 🏴‍☠️ Find dead-links (broken links)

Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities

http://paulgraham.com/users.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/fn.html

The Kitchen in the Cabinet

How I Have Time For Everything (From A Principal At Amazon) - YouTube

On the Art of Selling to Cybersecurity People TODO

(20) Federico Maggi on Twitter: “I’m releasing my OPML in a GitHub repo, to which anyone is welcome to contribute. After about 3 years consuming news from several #infosec #RSS and #Atom sources, I’ve decided to reduce the amount on time I spend on my reader and use newsletters more. https://t.co/j29imTzXEb https://t.co/hc2l9eu9hv” / Twitter

Why You Feel Cranky on Your Rest Days (and What to Do About It)

Solve the most important problem that you can personally impact - Inverted Passion

Team led by Japanese researchers reveals best way to put crying baby to sleep - The Mainichi

“The Suck” (Learning Anything by Writing It Out by Hand… Word-for-Word)

Putting Amazon’s PR/FAQ to Practice - Commoncog

#102: Are You Not Entertained?

How James Clear is Writing His Next Book - Superorganizers - Every

How to Maximize the Life of Your Social Battery

(18) Kieran Snyder on Twitter: “As a leader, there may be no skill more important than emotional self-regulation. I struggled with this for a lot of my career (which of course as a woman, made me extra worried about being a trope). Thread >>” / Twitter

DonDebonair/slack-machine: A simple, yet powerful and extendable Slack bot

Travis McPeak on Twitter: “I angel invested in my 20th startup today. One surprising thing I learned is that few companies send regular updates to angels. These companies may be in trouble, and I might have the perfect thing to help. I won’t know without updates. Updates don’t have to be time-consuming.” / Twitter

Pay Attention to Deviations from Mainstream Incentives - Commoncog

Habit trackers: does tracking your habits actually work?

The Free Trial Database - Trialforfree.com, Movies, Music and More

EarthQuest - A Random Adventure Generator

(25) Gergely Orosz on Twitter: “Someone who did an economics degree at a well-known university and started their first job at a tech company emailed me to ask: “Why can’t tech companies compete for & hire employees like Starbucks competes for & hires baristas?” Sent them this article: https://t.co/m31Pw6LAV7” / Twitter

The Fast-Foodification of Everything

Why You Are Lonely and How to Make Friends - YouTube

On Being Rich-ish: Lessons I learned becoming suddenly middle-class

Asian excellence is not a myth - by Diane Yap

America’s most remarkable kid died in Newcastle, Utah — his legacy never will
An absolutely incredible story.

At 14, he had just published his autobiography. He was making plans to expand his 350-acre farm to buy up surrounding farms to convert to regenerative agriculture. He was saving money to build a house for his parents and another for his autistic older brother. He was polishing a movie script and a series of children’s books teaching business literacy for kids. He was looing for a celebrity to endorse his line of luxury toiletries made from the milk of his goat herd. He was breeding heritage turkeys. He was writing guest essays for notable bloggers higher up the political food chain. And, in his spare time, he had the task of grading the road to his farm using the John Deere tractor he bought new for himself for his 11th birthday.

Choosing Happiness - HumbleDollar

JSON Crack - Crack your data into pieces

Learn Japanese (For Real) With Your Favorite TV shows | Iago https://www.producthunt.com/products/iago

(21) Jaleh Rezaei on Twitter: “As head of marketing at Gusto I shifted us from “growth at all costs” to profitable growth. ARR grew 100x in 4 yrs while CAC <12 mos. Now every company is asked to do the same. I shared how we did it in a recent talk to @ycombinator & @sequoia founders. Here’s the summary:” / Twitter

Netflix Codes: find hidden categories on Netflix (full list)

For farmer Dave Brandt, being a meme is honest work

jetpack-io/devbox: Instant, easy, predictable shells and containers.

Spoken • Never overpay online

(20) Kevin Shen on Twitter: “8 Things Your Video Setup Says About You … and how to fix them In 100 milliseconds, people decide if they like & trust you. How you look on camera says everything. https://t.co/Ouwotv3IZC” / Twitter

Global VC Funding In COSS: $24B+ Raised From Jan 2020 to August 2022 - COSS Community 🌱

PLINK! - by Dinahmoe

Tyler Cowen on reading fast, reading well, and reading widely - Driverless Crocodile

The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online - David Perell

Five Ways to Write Like The Economist

(10) Bob Wachter on Twitter: “I’m not doing indoor dining, and I still wear a mask in crowded indoor spaces. While most in US have chosen to be less careful, in this 🧵 I’ll review the logic & math behind my decisions, hoping that some of you will find them useful in navigating today’s Covid landscape. (1/25)” / Twitter

How Segment Found PMF @ Today I Learned

We Are All Nerds: The Literary Works of Neal Stephenson

(8) Gagan Biyani 🏛 on Twitter: “Company off-sites are becoming more regular and we just had ours at Maven last week. Thought I’d share a bit about what we do to make ours special. 3 rules: 1. 50% fun 2. In person isn’t critical for company ops 3. 80/20 rule A bunch more details on how we run them…” / Twitter

What to Actually Do About an Unequal Partnership

The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism

Steve Martin on His Late Career Surge and Contemplating Retirement – The Hollywood Reporter

IM — The MKUltra Evolutions IM — The MKUltra Ecology

Time Boxing: A Productivity Hack for Entrepreneurs

MrBeast Shares What It Really Takes To Become THE BEST On YouTube (Interview w/ MFM & Hasan Minhaj) - YouTube

Jaleh Rezaei on Twitter: “In the last 10 years I have hired over 300 people. I have found that it’s WAY HARDER to recruit senior women leaders, even as a female CEO. Here’s my playbook for how to get great senior women to join your company:” / Twitter

Why More Money Won’t Lead to Financial Independence - Darius Foroux

Vibely

Stop Ghosting and Start Saying No

How I do (and don’t) prepare a talk for a tech conference – Chelsea Troy

(20) Paul Graham on Twitter: “If you think people have scar tissue, you should see organizations. Each time there’s a disaster, they create a process to prevent future disasters of that type. Eventually they accrete a thick layer of these processes that prevents them from moving. Then they die.” / Twitter

ADD / XOR / ROL: Essays about management in large(r) organisations (1): Process and flexibility

Improve your mental resilience with the Finnish concept of sisu

Reverse Mentoring for Businesses

Gamma

Good conversations have lots of doorknobs

FORCIBLE ENTRY REFERENCE GUIDE TECHNIQUES AND PROCEDURES

Free Movies, Cartoons and Documentaries - Cinetimes

Electronic library. Download books free. Finding books Z-Library lets you access and download PDF versions of books and articles.

Learn Postgres at the Playground

Mastering Eshell - Mastering Emacs

The value of owning more books than you can read - Big Think

How I wish I could organize my thoughts

Bad Visualisations/

Flux

(3) JACK BLY on Twitter: “If you sleep less than 8 hours, read this:” / Twitter

Rules for weird ideas

Daily boundaries help us guard our energy. Here’s how to set them : Life Kit : NPR

(19) Noah Desai Weiss on Twitter: ““Hybrid” SaaS has taken off. Companies like Atlassian, Shopify, and Zoom have built SMB-focused product lines without sales people. At Slack, we’ve scaled our “self-service” biz to hundreds of thousands of customers and hundreds of millions in ARR. 🧵 8 hard-earned lessons: https://t.co/HLYAvgPTqa” / Twitter

Mid-Year Reflection and Planning - MacSparky

Grow 1% every day!

The Types of Business Structures and How To Choose

https://blog.hubspot.com/the-hustle/ask-the-hustle-how-do-you-grow-a-social-media-following-without-buying-followers

Building Stronger, Happier Engineering Teams with Team Topologies - Docker

(19) 𝕎𝕖𝕤𝕝𝕖𝕪 𝔽𝕒𝕦𝕝𝕜𝕟𝕖𝕣 on Twitter: “I’m going to share the one thing that the ultra-successful people who practice #DevRel know and do. Once you understand this, so many other things will click into place. 🧵⤵” / Twitter

Taking leaps, not steps – Charlie’s blog

To Become Wise, Do Less! - by Jideofor Onwugbenu

“Who Should Write the Terraform?” – zwischenzugs

An outsider assessment of Spotify Engineering Culture by an insider

How Scientists Are Using Cake to Share Their Research - Gastro Obscura

What Is Talent in Higher Education?

Failure to Cope “Under Capitalism”

Ultimate list of Japanese Vegetable Cutting Techniques - The Chef Dojo

On being tired - Jukka Niiranen

Operating well – what I learned at Stripe

13 Books That Will Actually Make You Laugh Out Loud

The Economic Principle That Helps Me Order at Restaurants - The Atlantic

One Weird Trick to Forget About the Housing Crisis - Hell Gate

Saw it on TikTok! – sawitontiktok

The Cooking Skill That Can’t Be Taught - YouTube

p People Are Flooding LinkedIn With Strange Stories. We’re Calling Them Broetry.

The Managers Handbook – The Manager’s Handbook

(23) Nathan Baugh on Twitter: “Jeff Bezos said: “There is no way to write a six-page narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.” Here’s the writing framework Bezos uses (that you can too):” / Twitter

Creative Problem Solving: from complex challenge to innovative solution

Prambanan: Architectural Magnificence — Google Arts & Culture

The arrival fallacy: why we should decouple our happiness from our goals

The productivity tax you pay for context switching

How to build resilience for tough times

DALL-E + GPT-3 = ❤. Update: Follow up article by… | by glan1k | Aug, 2022 | Medium A brilliant combination of story prompts and images that go with the narrative

Cumulative loneliness and subsequent memory function and rate of decline among adults aged ≥50 in the United States, 1996 to 2016 - Yu - Alzheimer’s & Dementia - Wiley Online Library

• A longer duration of loneliness was associated with accelerated memory aging.
• The association was stronger among women than men and among older adults than the younger.
• Reducing loneliness in mid- to late life may help maintain memory function.

Never Gonna Shut Me Up - YouTube Last Week in AWS’s Corey Quinn

Nathan Barry: 18 tips, tricks, and misconceptions about money

• Tips & tricks: Use active income to buy passive income, how to convert your hourly wage to an annual salary, avoid lifestyle creep, climb the ladders of wealth creation, identify what shaped your relationship with money, automate your finances, teach your kids about money, set aside 25-30% of income as a freelancer, making money is a skill, donate appreciated stock, pay yourself first, how to contribute to a Roth IRA after you’ve exceeded the income limit
• Misconceptions: Banks front-load interest on mortgages, donating $1 will save you $1 on taxes, you need an LLC to take tax deductions, life insurance > disability insurance, you can’t access your 401k before 59.5 without penalty, earning more money is bad because you’ll pay more in taxes

If you haven’t already read Nathan’s Ladders of Wealth Creation Twitter thread or blog post, it is excellent.

Stanford’s War on Social Life

Human Attention has become a Marxist commodity — Matthew Eric Bassett, Ph.D.

A New VR Experience Takes You Into a Museum of Stolen Masterpieces

This Is The Best Career Decision You Can Possibly Make - RyanHoliday.net

Application Architecture: A Quick Guide for Startups

How Kubernetes Broke Git — Matt Rickard

People Spend Too Much Time On Decisions with Equally Satisfying Outcomes

Mosquitoes at Disney World: why do you (almost) never see them?

The problem with big innovations

Leadership Sync - YouTube

Nobody optimizes happiness

Fig

Explordle

This game shows you a short video clip, then asks you to guess where in the world it’s from. Play the daily challenge or check out random clips.

How To Spend Money to Buy Happiness - YouTube

We don’t know how to fix science - Works in Progress

How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the “Seinfeld Strategy”

Stray - A cat-based adventure game | Product Hunt

Stray is a third-person cat adventure game set amidst the detailed, neon-lit alleys of a decaying cybercity and the murky environments of its seedy underbelly.

The third-person indie adventure game that took the Internet by storm recently follows the story of a homeless cat roaming a robot-filled cyber-punk world. If this isn’t enough to whisk you away, the cat is cute (but equally ferocious) and ginger.

Without giving away too much, it seems like some of the game’s popularity stems from it catering to both hardcore gamers and those of us who can only think of The Sims when we hear video games. The endearing story has players exploring a post-apocalyptic city, as well as completing missions and tasks. Still, you don’t feel the same sense of impending doom as you do with most adventure games. You also get an unlimited number of lives, which leaves you time to take in the enthralling visuals.

Stray was developed by BlueTwelve Studio, an indie game team from the south of France, who spent six years perfecting the storyline, graphics, and meows. Reviewers are raving about it on Metacritic. So are critics. Alyse Stanley, Editor at Washington Post’s Launcher shares that “‘Stray’ is an enrapturing experience, the kind of game that doesn’t leave your brain after the credits roll.“

(3) Jason Warner on Twitter: “Ok, let’s actually talk remote/hybrid/in-office work for tech (not VCs) There are likely some better suited to talk about this than me though the number isn’t high, particularly execs. Been remote since 2010 for Canonical (started in Australia), Heroku & GitHub (Victoria)” / Twitter

Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee
Coming August 24th. Through raw, revealing footage and interviews with fugitive tech pioneer John McAfee, this documentary uncovers new layers of his wild years on the run.

How to deal with work stress — and actually recover from burnout

Why You Should Befriend the People You Admire - The Atlantic

Lifestyle creep: What is it and how to avoid the seductive thrill of spending : Life Kit : NPR

(16) Jasper Polak on Twitter: “McKinsey makes $500,000+ on a single presentation. You can learn their simple framework below (for free):” / Twitter

Standard Ebooks: Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover.

What is spoon theory?

Science as a source of social alpha - Marginal REVOLUTION

Useful utilities and toys over DNS

(16) 👑 Alyssa Miller 🦄 on Twitter: “I’m fully of the opinion now that the “market creator” strategy #infosec vendors are following these days makes us less secure. If you don’t know what I mean, its this behavior of creating a product that is only marginally different than other available products but… 1/” / Twitter

Short stories: How much do you make? How do you sell one? How long does it take to write?

book notes | Derek Sivers
~330 book notes

SYN Ventures Deep Dive

(19) Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on Twitter: “One of my dearest friends is a trauma therapist. I recently asked her for some resources that I could share out broadly for people dealing with trauma. Because these are traumatic times. So a few things. 1/x thread.” / Twitter

Remote Development at Slack - Slack Engineering

Words matter: AI can predict salaries based on the text of online job postings
TODO

a brief history of one line fixes

Magic Sketchpad
Draw things with machines! Every time you lift your pen up, a machine learning algorithm tries to finish that stroke and match the category you’ve selected. Try drawing multiple categories on the same page!

fermyon/spin: Spin is an open source framework for building and running fast, secure, and composable cloud microservices with WebAssembly

The Golden Age of the Aging Actor - The Ringer

(15) Erika Heidi 🌵✨ on Twitter: “✨ 1️⃣0️⃣ Tips for giving feedback in technical reviews ✨ Content review is an important part of technical writing. It can be intimidating to provide actionable feedback, so here are some tips to facilitate that process while keeping professional and friendly vibes 🧵” / Twitter

Why Everyone Needs a Blog - Daniel Miessler

Just Copy What Works - Daniel Miessler

Luck Surface Area: How to Get Lucky In Life - Frontera

The Arc of the Practical Creator

Clipdrop - Image upscaler

Meta VR Prototypes Aim to Make VR ‘Indistinguishable From Reality’

Amazon’s workforce turnover is so high that it could run out of people to hire by 2024 - Vox

Amofit S - Wearable for sleep and reducing anxiety

The Musk of steamy romance: You know Elon and Kimbal Musk, but have you heard of Tosca Musk? She’s the third Musk sibling who is also an entrepreneur. In 2017, she co-founded Passionflix, a Netflix-esque streaming platform and production company that specializes in erotic, softcore adaptations of romance novels. Here’s how Tosca Musk has tapped into one of the largest, most rabid and opinionated fan bases in the film industry. (The New York Times)

Prof Galloway: Trustless

The financial system in particular is scaffolded by an elaborate set of safeguards — incentives, regulations, relationships, rule of law, fiat currencies — ensuring trust that we can move our capital without fearing it will disappear en route. In 1867 the cost to transfer assets, via stagecoach, from San Francisco to Omaha was roughly $10,000, adjusted for inflation. Today, Wells Fargo transfers money much, much faster and at near-zero cost. The value driver is not SWIFT, CHIPS, or the Fedwire system, but our trust that a transfer will actually happen.

It’s estimated that the cost of maintaining trust accounts for 35% of employment in the U.S. In financial and professional services, that number is 48%.

But beware of tech bros preaching decentralization. Technology has been promising to eliminate the middleman for decades, only to present new middlemen — in this case, new actors asking you to transfer trust and wealth from one institution to theirs.

Middlemen are inevitable. We depend on them to provide more than just trust: security, convenience, customer assistance, and so on. They make user interfaces intuitive and navigable. They help you recover your belongings when you forget your password or your keys. These services provide value, and that comes at a price. Competition and innovation can reduce the cost of trust (stagecoach vs. SWIFT), but they do not eliminate it.

The web3 ayahuasca Big Gulp led us to believe we could innovate away the tiresome and expensive infrastructure of trust. But as we wake from that trip, it’s worth asking history’s central question: Who to trust?

The benefits of trust apply to nations as well as individuals. For every standard deviation increase in a nation’s trust, bilateral trade increases 90% to 150%. In countries with low levels of trust, investment skews disproportionately toward projects with short time horizons. Lower trust is also correlated with lower GDP per capita. Put it this way: Over the long term, fomenting trust can make you rich.

CLINT Call out Ollie’s newsletter, bunch of links from that this week

I like Mormon Boys and I cannot Lie

The beauty of Unix pipelines

Just Copy What Works - Daniel Miessler

Look Scanned

Freeze- Control your Netflix & YouTube with your fingers! (Right Hand Only)

Wanna pause the Netflix & YouTube without soiling the keyboard with your greasy pizza-finger?

My students cheated… A lot • crumplab

My 2022 New Mac Setup

Infosec Twitter famous – HACK.XXX

14 Amazing Books Summarized in One Minute (Or Less)
Mark Manson The Body Keeps the Score 00:44 The Paradox of Choice 01:26 The Blank Slate 02:31 Getting the Love You Want 04:09 The Denial of Death 05:12 Influence 06:07 Atomic Habits 06:53 The Elephant in the Brain 08:01 Nonviolent Communication 08:53 The Coddling of the American Mind 10:14 So Good They Can’t Ignore You 11:22 The Psychology of Money 12:42 The Second Mountain 13:31 Democracy for Realists 15:03

Tandem Shower - Showering with your partner doesn’t have to suck

Birdland is an interactive coming-of-age story set at summer camp — and in your character’s dreams, which may involve being the sheriff of a town populated by bird people. https://birdland.camp/?utm_content=null&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Thursday%20Email&utm_term=4ABCD

https://twitter.com/lcamtuf/status/1439022998640480257 There are two types of companies: the crusty old guard, the suit-donning IBMs of the world; and the hip disruptors with LEGO bricks strewn across the floor and the promise of a more enlightened way of running a company.

All too often, they are the same, just 20-30 years apart.

(7) lcamtuf on Twitter: “Thread: creative software is increasingly subscription-based. I figured some folks might appreciate a list of good, old-school apps that let you dabble in the arts without racking up monthly bills or chaining you to a server in the cloud.” / Twitter

(7) Lesley Carhart 🏳️‍🌈 on Twitter: “Shrink wrapping luggage - the canary token of the airport world.” / Twitter

BICEPS — PALOMA MEDINA https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1O52S17dnujZPLa8QKVe2DTFX2ojrM1KuumwJ8-CVqfE/edit#gid=1859281101

The UX on this Small Child Is Terrible
Another good article from McSweeney’s. I can also imagine this article coming unironically from a Bay Area person in Product.

Not only am I VP of Reproduction for this household, but I’ve also been the end-user of this Small Child for over three years now. I’m going to give it to you straight. The user experience is terrible. Overall, the Small Child is under-designed, unintuitive, and frequently fails to meet even the most relaxed ease-of-use standards.

https://vault.fbi.gov/reading-room-index https://vault.fbi.gov/Colonel%20Harlan%20Sanders

Brickit

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1472958096309850112

some of us were not playing-pretend when, at age 7, we were deeply persuaded that we too could serve the species at the scale of centuries, and at age 17, swore a solemn oath to live lives of glorious passion. Some of us truly meant it and are all-in until death

Food Timeline: food history research service

The Public Domain Review – Online journal dedicated to showcasing the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright works available on the web

It’s aliiiiiive: Xenobots are robots made with frog stem cells. They can reproduce on their own in a way unlike any plant or animal, which is totally fine and not at all scary.

https://lingyourlanguage.com/ Ling Your Language is a game where you listen to someone speak, then try to guess the language. You can also use the site to learn about languages.

How To Directly Connect Your Twitter Profile With 88 Email Newsletter Services Using Revue And Zapier
From Daniel Miessler

How to get newsletter subscriber signups from your Twitter profile
H/T Kolby Hatch

Sahil Bloom on 20 interesting subreddits you may not have heard of

Web Publications — LaTeX Style

syncfast/clockwise

Clockwise is a meeting cost calculator designed to encourage more efficient meetings.]

Matches (2021.01.24-2021.08.09) - YouTube

• very cool stop motion

Regex Generator

alda-lang/alda: A music programming language for musicians.

semiosis/pen.el: pen.el is a package for prompt engineering in emacs. It facilitates the creation, ongoing development, discovery and usage of prompts to a language model such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 or EleutherAI’s GPT-j.

websites from hell

Calculus Made Easy

https://github.com/faressoft/terminalizer

https://github.com/dandavison/delta#installation

How Wall Street Bought Up America’s Homes
2019 article from the Atlantic discussing how institutional buyers are purchasing huge amounts of single family homes and squeezing the people in them, who can’t afford to buy. You know, the people who may have had their savings devastated from the Great Recession, that big finance caused. CLINT not building equity, feudalism, servant class, …

(141) The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck - Summarized by the Author - YouTube

Zoom Escaper

https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.macos

(90) [1209] This Tiny WiFi Camera Owns Kwikset SmartKey (LockTech LTKSD) - YouTube

The Design is the Implementation

https://usebetter.recipes/

Could lab-grown plant tissue ease the environmentapl toll of logging and agriculture?
“If you want a table, then you should just grow a table.” Early stages, but interesting work.

Who Will Control the Software That Powers the Internet?

The idea that an internet service could have an associated coin or token may be a novel concept, but the blockchain and cryptocurrencies can do for cloud-based services what open source did for software. It took twenty years for open source software to supplant proprietary software, and it could take just as long for open services to supplant proprietary services.

But the benefits of such a shift will be immense. Instead of placing our trust in corporations, we can place our trust in community-owned and -operated software, transforming the internet’s governing principle from “don’t be evil” back to “can’t be evil”.

OnlySponsors.dev
Project by Eduardo San Martin Morote to help open source developers build a salary via GitHub Sponsors by, similar to Patreon, having subscriber exclusive content. Hm, there are a bunch of open source projects I’m a huge fan of, I should create a site called OnlyFans or something 🤔

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/onlyfams

https://www.partnershiponai.org/aiincidentdatabase/ H/T C.J. Mills in Unsupervised Learning Slack - [email protected]

https://twitter.com/sentdex/status/1248974090460954624?lang=en https://nnfs.io/

https://www.nbr.org/publication/chinas-vision-for-a-new-world-order/

https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/testimonies/SFR%20for%20USCC%20TobinD%2020200313.pdf?mc_cid=2d1527ee53&mc_eid=cc1b4fe73e

https://twitter.com/pry0cc/status/1318982439189008385 Copy and paste OCR

https://twitter.com/PrasoonPratham/status/1318456216801046528

• technical interview prep

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~bjc63/Crime_is_boring.pdf

https://execsecurity.com/news/threat-de-toilette-cyber-security-perfume/ https://mashable.com/2017/03/10/cybersecurity-perfume/ https://jezebel.com/a-cybersecurity-company-is-selling-perfume-for-people-w-1793202462

navi
An interactive cheatsheet tool for the command-line. Displays useful help info, argument suggestions, etc. Pretty cool.

Amazon Twitter Snark

Amazon Twitter Army Handpicked for “Sense of Humor”
The Intercept described an Amazon internal program to have employees defend Amazon on social media. Maybe it’s just me, but if you’re paying your employees to try to convince outsiders that they’re not in an abusive work environment, maybe errr that’s not a good sign? Has anyone ever said, “Being an {anything} is dignifying for me” and meant it?

Some Amazon employees thought an official account had been compromised when it was sending snappy comebacks to members of Congress.

To be fair, this is a good point: if the tax code allows massive corporations to minimize their taxes, of course they will, it would be dumb of them not to.

Yuval Noah Harari: Lessons from a year of Covid | Free to read | Financial Times

2020 has shown that humanity is far from helpless. Epidemics are no longer uncontrollable forces of nature. Science has turned them into a manageable challenge.

Why, then, has there been so much death and suffering? Because of bad political decisions.

In the war between humans and pathogens, never have humans been so powerful.

Moving life online

Alongside the unprecedented achievements of biotechnology, the Covid year has also underlined the power of information technology. In previous eras humanity could seldom stop epidemics because humans couldn’t monitor the chains of infection in real time, and because the economic cost of extended lockdowns was prohibitive.

In contrast, in 2020 digital surveillance made it far easier to monitor and pinpoint the disease vectors, meaning that quarantine could be both more selective and more effective. Even more importantly, automation and the internet made extended lockdowns viable, at least in developed countries. While in some parts of the developing world the human experience was still reminiscent of past plagues, in much of the developed world the digital revolution changed everything.

In the US, only about 1.5 per cent of people work on farms, but that’s enough not just to feed everyone at home but also to make the US a leading food exporter. Almost all the farm work is done by machines, which are immune to disease. Lockdowns therefore have only a small impact on farming.

Imagine a wheat field at the height of the Black Death. If you tell the farmhands to stay home at harvest time, you get starvation. If you tell the farmhands to come and harvest, they might infect one another. What to do?

In 2020, global trade could go on functioning more or less smoothly because it involved very few humans. A largely automated present-day container ship can carry more tons than the merchant fleet of an entire early modern kingdom.

True, cruise ships with hundreds of tourists and aeroplanes full of passengers played a major role in the spread of Covid-19. But tourism and travel are not essential for trade. The tourists can stay at home and the business people can Zoom, while automated ghost ships and almost human-less trains keep the global economy moving. Whereas international tourism plummeted in 2020, the volume of global maritime trade declined by only 4 per cent.

It is often said that every civilisation is just three meals away from barbarism. In 2020, the delivery people were the thin red line holding civilisation together. They became our all-important lifelines to the physical world.

The internet holds on

As humanity automates, digitalises and shifts activities online, it exposes us to new dangers. One of the most remarkable things about the Covid year is that the internet didn’t break. If we suddenly increase the amount of traffic passing on a physical bridge, we can expect traffic jams, and perhaps even the collapse of the bridge. In 2020, schools, offices and churches shifted online almost overnight, but the internet held up.

After 2020 we know that life can go on even when an entire country is in physical lockdown. Now try to imagine what happens if our digital infrastructure crashes.

It took several months for coronavirus to spread through the world and infect millions of people. Our digital infrastructure might collapse in a single day. And whereas schools and offices could speedily shift online, how much time do you think it will take you to shift back from email to snail-mail?

What counts?

The Covid year has exposed an even more important limitation of our scientific and technological power. Science cannot replace politics. When we come to decide on policy, we have to take into account many interests and values, and since there is no scientific way to determine which interests and values are more important, there is no scientific way to decide what we should do.

For example, when deciding whether to impose a lockdown, it is not sufficient to ask: “How many people will fall sick with Covid-19 if we don’t impose the lockdown?”. We should also ask: “How many people will experience depression if we do impose a lockdown? How many people will suffer from bad nutrition? How many will miss school or lose their job? How many will be battered or murdered by their spouses?”

Even if all our data is accurate and reliable, we should always ask: “What do we count? Who decides what to count? How do we evaluate the numbers against each other?” This is a political rather than scientific task. It is politicians who should balance the medical, economic and social considerations and come up with a comprehensive policy.

Fighting the epidemic is important, but is it worth destroying our freedom in the process? It is the job of politicians rather than engineers to find the right balance between useful surveillance and dystopian nightmares.

Second, surveillance must always go both ways. If surveillance goes only from top to bottom, this is the high road to dictatorship. So whenever you increase surveillance of individuals, you should simultaneously increase surveillance of the government and big corporations too. For example, in the present crisis governments are distributing enormous amounts of money. The process of allocating funds should be made more transparent. As a citizen, I want to easily see who gets what, and who decided where the money goes. I want to make sure that the money goes to businesses that really need it rather than to a big corporation whose owners are friends with a minister. If the government says it is too complicated to establish such a monitoring system in the midst of a pandemic, don’t believe it. If it is not too complicated to start monitoring what you do — it is not too complicated to start monitoring what the government does.

Third, never allow too much data to be concentrated in any one place. Not during the epidemic, and not when it is over. A data monopoly is a recipe for dictatorship. So if we collect biometric data on people to stop the pandemic, this should be done by an independent health authority rather than by the police. And the resulting data should be kept separate from other data silos of government ministries and big corporations. Sure, it will create redundancies and inefficiencies. But inefficiency is a feature, not a bug. You want to prevent the rise of digital dictatorship? Keep things at least a bit inefficient.

Over to the politicians

But today humankind has the scientific tools to stop Covid-19. Several countries, from Vietnam to Australia, proved that even without a vaccine, the available tools can halt the epidemic. These tools, however, have a high economic and social price. We can beat the virus — but we aren’t sure we are willing to pay the cost of victory. That’s why the scientific achievements have placed an enormous responsibility on the shoulders of politicians.

It is the job of politicians rather than engineers to find the right balance between useful surveillance and dystopian nightmares

Unfortunately, too many politicians have failed to live up to this responsibility. For example, the populist presidents of the US and Brazil played down the danger, refused to heed experts and peddled conspiracy theories instead. They didn’t come up with a sound federal plan of action and sabotaged attempts by state and municipal authorities to halt the epidemic. The negligence and irresponsibility of the Trump and Bolsonaro administrations have resulted in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.

The early months of 2020 were like watching an accident in slow motion. Modern communication made it possible for people all over the world to see in real time the images first from Wuhan, then from Italy, then from more and more countries — but no global leadership emerged to stop the catastrophe from engulfing the world. The tools have been there, but all too often the political wisdom has been missing.

Foreigners to the rescue

One reason for the gap between scientific success and political failure is that scientists co-operated globally, whereas politicians tended to feud. Working under much stress and uncertainty, scientists throughout the world freely shared information and relied on the findings and insights of one another. Many important research projects were conducted by international teams. For example, one key study that demonstrated the efficacy of lockdown measures was conducted jointly by researchers from nine institutions — one in the UK, three in China, and five in the US.

In contrast, politicians have failed to form an international alliance against the virus and to agree on a global plan. The world’s two leading superpowers, the US and China, have accused each other of withholding vital information, of disseminating disinformation and conspiracy theories, and even of deliberately spreading the virus. Numerous other countries have apparently falsified or withheld data about the progress of the pandemic.

The lack of global co-operation manifests itself not just in these information wars, but even more so in conflicts over scarce medical equipment. While there have been many instances of collaboration and generosity, no serious attempt was made to pool all the available resources, streamline global production and ensure equitable distribution of supplies. In particular, “vaccine nationalism” creates a new kind of global inequality between countries that are able to vaccinate their population and countries that aren’t.

It is sad to see that many fail to understand a simple fact about this pandemic: as long as the virus continues to spread anywhere, no country can feel truly safe. Suppose Israel or the UK succeeds in eradicating the virus within its own borders, but the virus continues to spread among hundreds of millions of people in India, Brazil or South Africa. A new mutation in some remote Brazilian town might make the vaccine ineffective, and result in a new wave of infection.

in the present emergency, global co-operation isn’t altruism. It is essential for ensuring the national interest.

In the age-old war between humans and pathogens, the frontline passes through the body of each and every human being. If this line is breached anywhere on the planet, it puts all of us in danger. Even the richest people in the most developed countries have a personal interest to protect the poorest people in the least developed countries. If a new virus jumps from a bat to a human in a poor village in some remote jungle, within a few days that virus can take a walk down Wall Street.

If Covid-19 nevertheless continues to spread in 2021 and kill millions, or if an even more deadly pandemic hits humankind in 2030, this will be neither an uncontrollable natural calamity nor a punishment from God. It will be a human failure and — more precisely — a political failure.

Chaos Engineering

DevSecOps and Security Chaos Engineering - Aaron Rinehart

Culture

https://p16.praetorian.com/team-survival-guide/2017/index.html#page/1

TODO netflix guide + book

The Transcending Nature of a strong Company Culture

No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer.

GitLab Team Handbook
Massive public handbook from GitLab (over 3,000 pages of text when printed) on everything from their values and culture, to hiring, engineering, marketing, sales, finance, product strategy, and more.

Life at 32F: Why Structure Eats Culture for Lunch

https://about.sourcegraph.com/handbook

https://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201909

https://medium.com/@bchesky/dont-fuck-up-the-culture-597cde9ee9d4

https://scottberkun.com/2014/critique-dont-fuck-up-culture/

Hire people who give a shit. - Rational in the Fullness of Time

Creating Interactive Fiction Games

Twine: an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.

• You don’t need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you’re ready.
• Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere. Anything you create with it is completely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes.

Writing web-based interactive fiction with Ink
Ink was designed as a pluggable component that integrates into a traditional game engine. Has been used by a number of respected indie games, including two that were nominated for IGFs in 2018.

Writing

rubymorillo/pocket-tech-writing-list: A small but formidable list of technical writing resources for developers

See also “on writing more” from braindex

notes-on-writing/notes_on_writing.md at master · mnielsen/notes-on-writing

How to write in plain English

Technical Writing Courses
“This collection of courses and learning resources aims to improve your technical documentation. Learn how to plan and author technical documents. You can also learn about the role of technical writers at Google.”

SEC402: Cybersecurity Writing: Hack the Reader
Free course by SANS covering topics including the five “golden elements” of effective reports, briefings, emails, and other cybersecurity writing, hands-on exercises from common security scenarios, the key topics that are important to address in security reports and other written communications, practical checklists for writing clearly and effectively, and more.

How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written

Interesting example of using a metaphor / personal story to make a blog point 8 Disney’s Carousel of Progress & Facebook see prof-galloway.md

https://boz.com/articles/communication-is-the-job https://boz.com/articles/eli5 Thx Colin Greene @libber

A Few 80/20 Tips for Writing

(183) LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively - YouTube

https://adaged.blogspot.com/2020/04/good-writing-is-business-advantage.html

https://www.mcls.io/blog/encouraging-a-culture-of-written-communication

You Might as Well Be a Great Copy Editor