Since I actually know how long tasks take me, I’m better at planning my days. ​ Some time tracking tools automatically track what you do on your computer, which would certainly be even more accurate than the program I’m using now. However, even though Toggl can’t tell if I’m on Twitter, the timer forces me to actively choose to work or not work. If that timer is running but I’m on Instagram, I know that I’m cheating. It’s a neat psychological tool for holding myself accountable.

Only spend time on people and activities that could break your heart. Otherwise, even if you win, will it have been worth it?

Ad blockers come with an important asterisk: while they do benefit a ton of people in major ways, they also hurt some, including many who don’t deserve the hit. ​ I got to engage the technical part of my brain and make something great that doesn’t hurt anyone, with no asterisks or qualifications. That’s my peace.

One of my first interactions with a Principal 1 at Amazon was a design review for a design owned by a team that was not mine, merely adjacent to mine. Because I was 21 and a dumbass, I thought that this older guy would hew closer to a PM or a manager and say some sort of irrelevant/ignorant set of remarks rather than a bunch of clever, reasonable, and forward-looking things, and of course the latter is what he did. Amazon’s flavor of title to designate “extremely distinguished engineer” ↩

It's my fault, sorry. In the early days of Swift, we had a closure syntax that was very similar to traditional Javascript, func (arg: Type, arg: Type) -> Return { ... }. While this is nice and regular syntax, it is of course also very bulky and awkward if you're trying to support expressive functional APIs, such as map/filter on collections, or if you want libraries to be able to provide closure-based APIs that feel like extensions of the language. Our earliest adopters at Apple complained about...

Maybe the credential store (culprit 1) is so cumbersome, that the growth oriented team (culprit 2) had to build something sketchy to meet their managers’ (culprit 3) KPIs!

Most profound thing I've learned in the past eight years is the difference between behavior and intention. Behavior is what someone is doing, intention is why they're doing it.You judge yourself based on your intention, and everyone else based on their behavior.— Sahil Lavingia (@shl) March 21, 2019

That’s what we think the world should be like, but we all know it isn’t. You can’t make a living making music. Or art. You can’t even make a living taking care of children. I think this underlies many of this moment’s critiques of capitalism: there’s too many things that are important, even needed, or that fulfill us more than any profitable item, and yet are economically unsustainable.

this I think relates to what I consider a fundamental problem with software... that it all depends on running on top of something else. that has the unfortunate side effect of meaning some other entity can control it a lot more easily than traditional products Random House can’t do a damn thing to the books of theirs that I own after I buy them. They’re mine.

instead what seemed required was a kind of ironic disavowal of disavowal with regard to our online presentation: The tone foregrounds the idea that we all must put on an act that fools no one. ​ Among the historical antecedents, ​ They reinforce the idea that people should always be working by providing another arena for invidious comparison, self-branding, and optimization. But something more subtle may be happening as well. Social media platforms, like all technologies that mediate the self, “heighten consciousness,” in media scholar Walter Ong’s words. But if earlier technological developments, like writing, heightened consciousness to extend the self, newer technologies may heighten it to a point where it no longer sustains the self but undermines it. ​ writing — the “technologizing of the word,” as Ong described it — distanced us from the flux of immediate experience and expanded consciousness into space and across time. The diary could be considered paradigmatic: It makes subjectivity an object of reflection, both in the moment of composition and for future readers as well. ​ is to see at least some aspect of yourself suspended in time and space. ​ The audience’s resulting dispersal through space and time leads to a sporadic and unpredictable set of interactions, which can anchor habits of continual checking or an intensified susceptibility to push notifications (part of how platforms try to elicit compulsive engagement). The result is that we can’t help but be aware of ourselves through these platforms as continual performers, moment by moment. ​ What kind of self derives from this condition? Imagine a wedding photographer who circulates, trying to capture candid images of spontaneous or unscripted moments. “Act naturally,” they might joke, before encouraging everyone to “pretend I’m not here,” ironically vocalizing the impossible possibility to diffuse some of the pressure of doing as they say. Now imagine that you are that photographer, but that it is also your wedding. And imagine also that the wedding never ends. ​ To borrow sociologist Erving Goffman’s terminology, broadcasting on social media amounts to a substantial expansion of what he called our “front stage,” where we are consciously and continually involved in the work of impression management ​ But they have really mastered the art of transforming the backstage into another front stage. ​ We can understand backstage experience, then, as a respite not only from the gaze of an audience but also the gaze we must fix on ourselves to pull off our performances. ​ The algorithms that ostensibly reveal what your “true” or “authentic” self would choose for itself feed off the very exhaustion that the platforms generate, offering refuge from the burden of identity work in the automation of the will. ​ Life needs the protection of nonawareness.

platforms have to act as though their algorithms work and don’t work at the same time, and this equivocation fosters a paranoia about how algorithms work. The point of advertising, after all, is not to nail down what people are, as if that were static; it’s to shift currents of demand, to alter behavior patterns. But the logic of data profiling uses the past to repeat it as the future. This mystification is not an unfortunate side effect; it’s the value Facebook adds. Users are isolated from each other so they can feel as though they are the implied subject of all the discourse they experience on the site — so that they can be targeted in “one-to-one brand building” campaigns. Users get to feel important, singled out, worthy of decoding, and at the same time they get to interpret whatever they read through the lens of “Why did the algorithm choose this for me? What does this say about me and my tastes?” But that works only through an effort of disavowal: You have to feel that the algorithm is right enough to cater to you but not powerful enough to control you (even while it controls all those “indoctrinated peers”). In this London Review of Books essay about Brexit,William Davies offers this description of accelerated finance: The mentality of the high-frequency trader or hedge fund manager is wholly focused on leaving on better terms than one arrived, with minimum delay or friction in between. To the speculator, falling prices present just as lucrative an opportunity as rising prices (given the practice of ‘shorting’ financial assets), meaning that instability in general is attractive. As long as nothing ever stays the same, you can exit on better terms than you entered. The only unprofitable scenario is stasis. In a sense, platform paranoia is akin to market volatility; it reflects and promotes a high-frequency trading of sorts in various propositions, accelerating cycles of belief and skepticism as we churn through a much higher volume of information. Advertising is more likely to be effective amid these conditions, where it seems that everybody and not just marketers is being manipulative and deceptive. How we are targeted is always incomplete and inaccurate, but these inaccuracies in themselves can still drive and reshape behavior. Being targeted itself affects the targets, regardless of what is targeted at them, or if anything hits. They want to sell control over that connection, the moment at which your feelings become actions in the world. (Advertisers understand that link between feeling and acting entirely as a matter of “conversion rates” — when you actually buy something.) When we remember our lives authentically, we ask a fundamental question: Why did I remember this thing, at this moment? The “Why now?” question gives memory its meaning. Facebook randomizes and decontextualizes memory and detaches it from our current self. And why would I want to know what I looked like 10 years ago?

Hello everyone! Thank you for subscribing to my new newsletter. I have become a houseplant authority in the past few months. Last year, I came back from a 4...

A blog on the intersections of computer, history, and art. Plus some personal stories.

Uhlenbeck, who was born in 1942 in Cleveland, was a voracious reader as a child, but she didn’t become deeply interested in mathematics until she enrolled in the freshman honors math course at the University of Michigan. “The structure, elegance and beauty of mathematics struck me immediately, and I lost my heart to it,” ​ Mathematics research had another feature that appealed to her at the time: It is something you can work on in solitude, if you wish.

It can be more than just a creative endeavor: Newsletters can make a fine one-person business. ​ To be clear: I don’t intend to give up my low-grade Twitter addiction. I have built meaningful friendships on the platform, and it’s been a pathway for people to discover my work. ​ Instead, I’ll save it for my newsletter following — the one that belongs to me.

Even as I grew out of midday naps, I had to find creative ways to stay up reading past my bedtime. ​ As a young bookworm, almost nothing could stop me from reading when I was supposed to be doing anything else, sleeping included.

muscle recruitment mostly...this is heart of why observed peak VO2 consumption in cyclists runners nordic skiers. More muscle recruitment = higher absolute VO2 max uptake.

A little struggle never really hurt anyone, but too much struggle can strangle anything. Even a 30-year relationship. My parents argued constantly about bills for the last 20 years of their relationship, maybe especially when the argument wasn’t about the bills. I watched their marriage burn until it fizzled out into two adults who lived under the same roof and only communicated through their four kids. ​ The things people forget about when they try to tell you money can’t buy happiness. ​ Really, in the end, all I want is enough money to never worry about money. I just don’t know if that amount exists.

The secrets data won't tell you It’s become standard to lean on quantitative, experiment-driven design, especially when decisions must be made quickly and with very little time and resources. But this method often only reveals surface-level themes and not much about your users’ true intentions. In this onboarding case study, Vicki will walk you through how we learned to design using intuition, blending science and design research to create a solution that met our users’ needs. About Vicki Vicki is a Product Designer at Headspace, creating experiences to guide new users towards a healthy meditation practice. Previously, she was at Lyft, optimizing the passenger ride experience, and at Google, designing tools for reducing bias and predicting outcomes. Prior to Google, Vicki was at Stanford School of Medicine coordinating research studies in Pediatric Oncology. She holds a degree in Behavioral Psychology from the University of California, San Diego.

lacks a canonical standard way to do things we don’t really know how to do?

“(like it says in the thing, this is an in-progress piece of something much longer/bigger I'm working on and a lot of these ideas are still me spitballing/working through stuff, so if it feels incomplete, well, that's the fun of a newsletter I guess)”

Her thinking is simultaneously wild and careful — a wonderful combination.

“Meritocracy -- granting access to valuable resources on the basis of impartial tests of competence like the SATs -- is not egalitarian, because financial resources can be put towards getting better at any skill. The rich will tend to do better than the poor by default.”

This changes how impact is calculated, and how you should think about opportunity cost. If you aren’t considering pace, you will be misled into thinking that time isn’t relative, which is an expensive miscalculation (sort of like in Interstellar, when they get stuck on the water planet and 1 hour = 7 years). ​ What used to take days, now took months. What used to take a conversation, now took six meetings. I had no choice but to quit, as every additional day was actually costing me months (relative to working on the outside).

“The thing that's so unsettling about it is this feeling of sort of losing control of your own identity as you're immediately forced into a number of glib, competing narratives by people who know nothing about you playing to their audiences.”

Caught in the vicious adulthood cycle of flaking on social events then agreeing to more social events a few weeks away out of guilt.— Kane 謝凱堯 (@kane) March 18, 2019

RxSwift & MVVM: Your First Steps by Shai Mishali (Hebrew, english Subs available) Come and learn how to get started with RxSwift and MVVM. What _is really_ an architecture, and what MVVM aims to solve over the standard usage of MVC? Why is RxSwift such a wonderful companion for employing MVVM? Learn all this and more, in this talk. This presentation also includes actual live coding for building a basic MVVM-based login screen. Slides at: https://speakerdeck.com/freak4pc/rxswift-and-mvvm-your-first-steps You can reach Shai as freak4pc on Twitter, GitHub and Gmail. https://twitter.com/freak4pc https://github.com/freak4pc