Substrate

a blogging product without a publish button and create a space for collecting the dots. ​ It’s more common to think of “connecting the dots” but the truth is that you can’t connect the dots you can’t see.

So the answer and idea here is nuanced and more of an “it depends” than anything else. ​ we tend to forget that every single digit represent individual people. If you gathered them in a room, and spoke to each one, you’d probably feel a whole lot different about how large your positive impact is than simply viewing that number in a spreadsheet.

People, in general, are terrible at valuing their time, perhaps because for most people monetary compensation for one's time is so detached from the event of spending one's time. Most time we spend isn't like deliberate practice, with immediate feedback. ​ We focus so much on product-market fit, but once companies have achieved some semblance of it, most should spend much more time on the problem of product-market unfit. ​ Twitter the product/app has hit its invisible asymptote. Twitter the protocol still has untapped potential. ​ The most obvious path to this is Groups, which can subdivide large graphs into ones more unified in purpose or ideology. Google+ was onto something with Circles, but since they hadn't actually achieved any scale they were solving a problem they didn't have yet. ​ In addition, perhaps there is a general limit to how far a single feed of random content arranged algorithmically can go before we suffer pure consumption exhaustion. Perhaps seeing curated snapshots from everyone will finally push us all to the breaking point of jealousy and FOMO and, across a large enough number of users, an asymptote will emerge. ​ Seduction is a gift, and most people in technology vastly overestimate how much of customer happiness is solvable by data-driven algorithms while underestimating the ROI of seduction. ​ just because a given person's product intuition might hit on the right moment at the right point in history to create a smash hit, it's rare that a single person's frame will move in lock step with that of the world. How many creatives are relevant for a lifetime? ​ Pattern recognition is the default operation mode of much of Silicon Valley and other fields, but it is almost always, by its very nature, backwards-looking. One can hardly blame most people for resorting to it because it's a way of minimizing blame ​ In my experience, the most successful people I know are much more conscious of their own personal asymptotes at a much earlier age than others. They ruthlessly and expediently flush them out. One successful person I know determined in grade school that she'd never be a world-class tennis player or pianist. Another mentioned to me how, in their freshman year of college, they realized they'd never be the best mathematician in their own dorm, let alone in the world. Another knew a year into a job that he wouldn't be the best programmer at his company and so he switched over into management; he rose to become CEO. By discovering their own limitations early, they are also quicker to discover vectors on which they're personally unbounded.

As a fair warning to the reader, these primers are a bit more terse than what you’d find in your average textbook. I only introduce the bare minimum required to understand the main content po…

Finishing a paragraph or section gives people a micro-burst of accomplishment and reward. It helps them chunk the basic insight together and remember it for later. You want people to be going – “okay, insight, good, another insight, good, another insight, good” and then eventually you can tie all of the insights together into a high-level insight. Then you can start over, until eventually at the end you tie all of the high-level insights together. It’s nice and structured and easy to work with. If they’re just following a winding stream of thought wherever it’s going, it’ll take a lot more mental work and they’ll get bored and wander off. ​ Deliberate use of parallelism is okay and even commendable. Usually this involves using the same structure to call attention to certain differences. ​ I think this microhumor stuff is really important, maybe the number one thing that separates really enjoyable writers from people who are technically proficient but still a chore to read.

Assume your company is going to be around for 25 years, and treat the first few years accordingly. In other words, give yourselves room to change and grow, and take the lessons you learn during the next few years to heart. If something isn’t working for you, be honest with yourselves and your clients. If something is working well, keep doubling down on it until it doesn’t.

standing in a new kitchen barefoot ​ face full of wind. ​ and each one brought a delight so unexpected and profound, it made me shiver with the delicate aliveness of it all.

Swift’s generic functions allow us to explore a beautiful idea that straddles the line between mathematics and computer science

by letting go more and more of your idea of what your life should be like, and embracing the possibilities of what it is actually turning out to be like. ​ “Growth” fixation makes you less alive to the realities and possibilities of what's actually happening, and inclined to go into denial or futile activity in response to changes that you cannot undo ​ This is fundamentally why I am somewhere between skeptical to actively hostile towards it. Nothing is as self-limiting as a fixed idea of “growth” imagined by a younger version of you. ​ It is about living life in a way that you might run into versions of yourself you didn’t know were possible. ​ Life intensification philosophies boil down to just two questions: A: will you choose the unexpected more intense versions of yourself you meet along the road of life, and B: what new clothes will you wear if you do?

And in Swift 5, `Error` conforms to itself so that you can have “untyped error”

In the beginning, Crusty In 2015, at WWDC, Dave Abrahams gave what I believe is still the greatest Swift talk ever given, and certainly the most …

I believe I can have the highest impact by providing the right education infrastructure to people who are a lot smarter than me and might already work in those fields.

Existentials and universals are [logical] “duals,” which means that one can be transformed into the other without losing its structure. So `AnySequence` is a universal type (generic) that’s equivalent to an explicit existential of `Sequence` (protocol). That’s why when you run into problems with protocols, your solution may be to convert it into generic structs (or vice versa). They solve the same problems in different ways with different trade-offs. And when you see “can only be used as a generic constraint,” what the compiler is really telling you is that protocols with associated types (PATs) don’t have an existential.

We could think of type-level-abstracted return types as doing the same thing but at the type level; you give a function generic arguments as inputs, and it gives a certain return type back. ​ This roughly follows the progression of `impl Trait` in Rust, where it was first introduced only for return types, then was generalized to be able to appear structurally in both argument and return types. We think this is a reasonable first step because it directly addresses the biggest functionality gap in the generics model. After that first step, there are a few fairly orthogonal language change discussions we can have, some of which are already underway

The company is growing fast, adding roughly a million users a month, and it has lofty goals to expand far beyond its old identity as a platform for logging rides and runs. Can it succeed?

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

Personal site for John Feminella: software engineer · enthusiastic technologist · curiosity advocate

The women’s World Cup means all eyes are on the players right now, but their aesthetic has been enviable for a long time.

we may see more adults who know just the right emoji for a situation, but not the right facial expression. ​ You might expect that teens spend so much time in these new spaces because it makes them happy, but most data suggest that it does not.

Additionally, we want RC to be a place where everyone can focus their time and energy on becoming better programmers, not worrying that they don’t belong or feeling like they have to represent their entire race or gender because they’re in the extreme minority. We focus on diversity so Recursers can focus on programming.

...the evidence is that science has slowed enormously per dollar or hour spent. That evidence demands a large-scale institutional response. It should be a major subject in public policy, and at grant agencies and universities. Better understanding the cause of this phenomenon is important, and identifying ways to reverse it is one of the greatest opportunities to improve our future.

What would happen if I let myself take a break, let myself rest, gave myself some time off from the checklists and the to-do lists and the need to publicly appear productive? Maybe I’ll lose some followers, maybe I won’t be first in people’s minds when they’re thinking of someone to speak at their conference, maybe I’ll stop getting put into random lists of “Cool Thought Leaders To Follow On Twitter Dot Com.” But I’m not going to lose my job or my apartment or stop being able to pay my bills if I give myself a break from “trying to be productive literally every single day.” Realistically, I’m pretty sure I’ll still be able to find things like speaking opportunities if I want them. I’m not going to disappear if I put down my armor and let myself relax for a little while.

The message of Berlin is that not everything is set, that it has room for you.

The title was approved because at the time Cornell lacked any professional titles for people with academic appointments focused solely, or mostly, on teaching with little or no expectation of engagement in research.

@JadeMasterMath: There are lots of mathematical concepts which don’t have well written resources to learn about them. I think that explaining something in a clear way with a story arc can sometimes be enough. @jeremyjkun: Write about the topics that you learned, where there was a succinct phrase, picture, or idea that suddenly made it clear. Then arrange the whole blog post around getting the reader to that same understanding.