articles

Imagine… Last night, lightning struck our house and burned it down. I escaped wearing only my nightclothes. In an instant, everything was vaporised. Laptop? Cinders. Phone? Ashes. Home server? A sm…

Why great things never came from comfort zones? Because the world is always changing. We need to face uncertainty to move forward.

Incorporate a weekly review in your schedule this semester and really get things done.

The antidote to overconfidence is our relationship with knowledge. The antilibrary is the solution according to Nassim Taleb.

Skepticism is a virtue. It requires a willingness to question conventional wisdom, and the guts to accept something after you discover that it’s actually true. Denialism, on the other hand, i…

The Pi Hole project adds an entire new level of performance and security to our home network. Powered by Docker and a Raspberry PI I can now block all unwanted Ads and Metrics network wide.

Follow the StarTribune for the news, photos and videos from the Twin Cities and beyond.

You’re one among millions, not one in a million.

Diana Chow is a music producer and artist based in Los Angeles. Prior to her music career, she was a Software Engineer at Twitter.

Lower the barrier and master the art of the start.

Listen now (14 min) | Plus Three other rules of thumb for real estate

Office hours, week #2

Read our article - On Needing to Find Something to Worry About — Why We Always Worry for No Reason. The School Of Life has a huge collection of interesting articles, read now.

What makes a work of art beautiful?

“Just win baby.” —Al Davis This post is dedicated to the late Al Davis. Rest in peace. Back in the bad old days when I was running Loudcloud, I thought to myself: how could I have possibly prepared for this? …

Interesting perspective sharing on what I read as really being addicted to the feed, or the new. We love the little reward we get from discovering a new video, a new post, a new whatever. Tarun sounds like they are pretty deep, but any of us that randomly pull out our phone and “pull to refresh” a feed are experiencing a very similar thing.

It’s a stepping-stone, not a compromise. The media and our culture push us to build something for everyone, to sand off the edges and to invest in infrastructure toward scale. But it turns ou…

Good overview of Getting Things Done. I’ve been a practitioner of GTD for over a decade now. I consider it a life skill, something that I will focus on and improve on over many years. What GTD gives you—when understood and implemented properly—is a foolproof system for keeping track of what you need to do, should do, or should consider to do. When your system and your trust in your system is in place, your subconsciousness will stop keeping track of all the things you need to do and stop constantly reminding you. This reduces stress and frees up precious brain time to more productive thinking—maybe it even saves real time so that you have more time for ballet lessons, painting classes, and roller-blading. I like that this highlights the true benefit of GTD. It is not a productivity system to allow you to do even more, although you may be able to. It is intended to allow you to be in the moment, focus on the things in front of you, knowing that your trusted system has you covered. That you can forget about other things and it will be there when you need it.

“Turn it off and on” is a pretty normal recommendation when a computer isn’t working. It is one I don’t like, because in some way it seems like giving up on finding the solution to what went wrong. This article walking through the various state progression of the computer is a good way to think about this. At this point, any attempt to bring your system back directly from the broken state into a working state is improvisational. We are no longer like the classically trained violist from Juilliard performing a Mozart sonata after rehearsing it a thousand times; we are now playing jazz. And in the engineering of reliable systems, we do not want our systems to improvise. So, what should we do to fix the system? Turn it off, and turn it on again. Anything else is less principled. I like the “various layers of abstraction” view. Killing a process is just a smaller version of turning it off and on again. And yet, of course, we do not throw out our computers and buy new ones every time a program does something wrong. So the story of system repair is one of “turning it off and on again” at various layers of abstraction. At each layer, we hope that we can purge the corruption by discarding some compartmentalized state, and replacing it with a known start state, from which we can enter a highly reliable reinitialization sequence that ends in a working state. The ultimate conclusion of the article is that software that is more brittle, will break faster, and thus get fixed sooner. Ultimately an overall better thing for the system itself. While it is not referenced, this is a strong argument for strongly typed languages, amongst other things.

People are very good at forecasting the future, except for the surprises, which tend to be all that matter. Let me share a theory I have about risk and the right amount of savings required to offset it. The biggest risk is always what no one sees coming. If you don’t see something coming you’re not prepared for it. And when you’re not prepared for it its damage is amplified when it hits you. Look at the big news stories that move the needle – Covid, 9/11, Pearl Harbor, the Great Depression. Their common trait isn’t necessarily that they were big; it’s that they were surprises, on virtually no one’s radar until they arrived. It’s like that every year. It’ll be like that every year. It’s been like that this year. The Economist – a magazine I admire – publishes a forecast of the year ahead each January. Its January 2020 issue does not mention a single word about Covid. Its January 2022 issue does not mention a single word about Russia invading Ukraine. That’s not a criticism – both events were impossible to know when the magazines were likely planned in November and written in December each year. But that’s the point: The biggest news, the biggest risks, the most consequential events, are always what you don’t see coming. How do you live with that? One truth is that if you’re only saving for the risks you can envision, you’ll be unprepared for the risks you can’t imagine every time. So the right amount of savings/security/liquidity is when it feels like it’s a little too much. It should feel excessive; it should make you wince a little. The same goes for how much debt you think you should handle – whatever you think it is, the reality is probably a little less. Your preparation shouldn’t make sense in a world where the biggest historical events all would have sounded absurd before they happened. Most of the time someone’s caught unprepared it’s not because they didn’t plan. Sometimes it’s the smartest planners in the world working tirelessly, mapping every scenario they can imagine, that end up failing. They planned for everything that made sense before getting hit by something they couldn’t fathom. The push to be efficient with your cash and hold as little as necessary explodes when inflation is high, because people become paranoid about losing purchasing power. But it’s times like these when people become too smart for their own good. In the drive to become efficient they try to envision exactly how much cash they’ll need in the future, and hold exactly that amount, nothing more. And then of course they’ll be unprepared when the inevitable surprise hits. It’s like that every year. It’ll be like that every year.

is it speed or certainty that you crave?

Bertrand Russell’s ten commandments for living are as relevant today as when originally formulated. Read this article to learn more ...

​ ​ ​ Against good habits This week, because I like a challenge, or perhaps just because I’m an annoying contrarian, I’d like to try to persuade you that cultivating good habits...

At the end of the day, stop somewhere fun — so it’s easier to get started tomorrow

Self-editing isn’t an optional, supplementary stage of writing. It is writing. It is in the edits, in stripping away all that is superfluous, self-indulgent or unclear, that truth begins to emerge

There's no rush.

The following is an excerpt from Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love.

Halfway through last year, I found myself overwhelmed by my schedule. There were simply too many things to do and not enough time. As we bookworms tend to do, I set out to find books that would teach me to wrangle my schedule.