Substrate

I came in from my 10-foot commute once and my 3-year-old looked up from his snack and said, “What did you make today, papa?” It took me by surprise, as I had always assumed that when I was out of sight I was out of mind. (I now know that children seem to be most interested in you

“We humans tend to overlook a very useful fact: every experience does go, at some point. Every sight, sound, taste, or feeling you’ve ever had is gone, except what’s happening right now as you look at this screen.” “Let it come, let it be, let it go.”

“You go back in time and give yourself one piece of advice about engineering. What is it?🤔 I’m putting this question to @Twitter engineers from around the world who are in San Francisco for #oneteam this week. Here’s what they have to say👇”

“The problem with teeth is that the larger they are, the more likely they are to break the skin.”

“One streamer I spoke to who spent three months without an audience, MaverickRPDM, says that they kept live streaming games with zero viewers because they saw it as a form of self-improvement. “Streaming has made me more interesting, more quick witted, more outgoing and extroverted,” MaverickRPDM says. “It has helped make me feel more comfortable being myself, and by virtue of that has made me be more myself, more often, even outside of the stream.””

“Our relationship to the browser has changed. It is not about reading the content of one page and going on to the next. It is about gathering the relevant data in the sea of nonsense, and leaving the tabs open, «in working memory», until the gathered data is processed. The browser became a space of research, an instrument of externalized cognition and memory.”

a few things to talk about in 1:1s with your manager pic.twitter.com/GSc1LB87AE— 🔎Julia Evans🔍 (@b0rk) September 5, 2018

if you do 1:1s with your manager's manager: what do you talk about?— 🔎Julia Evans🔍 (@b0rk) September 5, 2018

“Proprietary data is precious to technology companies, yet some of the most valuable data lives solely in the minds of engineers.”

On Volitional Philanthropy (a short essay!) T. E. Lawrence, the English soldier, diplomat and writer, possessed what one of his biographers called a capacity for enablement: he enabled others to make use of abilities they had always possessed but, until their acquaintance with him, had failed to realize. People would come into contact with Lawrence, sometimes for just a few minutes, and their lives would change, often dramatically, as they activated talents they did not know they had. Most of us have had similar experiences. A wise friend or acquaintance will look deeply into us, and see some latent aspiration, perhaps more clearly than we do ourselves. And they will see that we are capable of taking action to achieve that aspiration, and hold up a mirror showing us that capability in crystalline form. The usual self-doubts are silenced, and we realize with conviction: “yes, I can do this”. This is an instance of volitional philanthropy: helping expand the range of ways people can act on the world. I am fascinated by institutions which scale up this act of volitional philanthropy. Y Combinator is known as a startup incubator. When friends began participating in early batches, I noticed they often came back changed. Even if their company failed, they were more themselves, more confident, more capable of acting on the world. This was a gift of the program to participants [1]. And so I think of Y Combinator as volitional philanthropists. For a year I worked as a Research Fellow at the Recurse Center. It's a three-month long “writer's retreat for programmers”. It's unstructured: participants are not told what to do. Rather, they must pick projects for themselves, and structure their own path. This is challenging. But the floundering around and difficulty in picking a path is essential for growing one's sense of choice, and of responsibility for choice. And so creating that space is, again, a form of volitional philanthropy. There are institutions which think they're in the volitional philanthropy game, but which are not. Many educators believe they are. In non-compulsory education that's often true. But compulsory education is built around fundamental denials of volition: the student is denied choice about where they are, what they are doing, and who they are doing it with. With these choices denied, compulsory education shrinks and constrains a student's sense of volition, no matter how progressive it may appear in other ways. There is something paradoxical in the notion of helping someone develop their volition. By its nature, volition is not something which can be given; it must be taken. Nor do I think “rah-rah” encouragement helps much, since it does nothing to permanently expand the recipient's sense of self. Rather, I suspect the key lies in a kind of listening-for-enablement, as a way of helping people discover what they perhaps do not already know is in themselves. And then explaining honestly and realistically (and with an understanding that one may be in error) what it is one sees. It is interesting to ask both how to develop that ability in ourselves, and in institutions which can scale it up. [1] It is a median effect. I know people who start companies who become first consumed and then eventually diminished by the role. But most people I've known have been enlarged. Note, by the way, that I work at Y Combinator Research, which perhaps colours my impression. On the other hand, I've used YC as an example of volitional philanthropy since (I think) 2010, years before I started working for YCR.

Some days back I was having a conversation about the importance of memos and documents in an agile/fast-moving startup company. The person…

“A more interesting question, a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.” “If you find yourself wanting something month after month, year after year, yet nothing happens and you never come any closer to it, then maybe what you actually want is a fantasy, an idealization, an image and a false promise. Maybe what you want isn’t what you want, you just enjoy wanting. Maybe you don’t actually want it at all.”

“The mistake commonly made is in thinking that their deliverable is “work” and everything else is “not work”. The critical thing about collaboration and team projects is that the deliverables matter but the connection of one person’s deliverables to another is what makes or breaks a project — and those connections can only happen by meeting, talking, listening, and planning. That’s why those activities are as much work as typing code or talking to a potential customer.”

The window to write this, I know, has passed. The subject has been exhausted, what happened has happened and we are here. The day after, I walked through a North Carolina airport in a determined daze—crying and deliberately looking any stranger who would let me, right in the eyes. I was manic and furious and the task felt aggressive. It felt like my right. More people than you would think met my sobbing gaze. Each time, I would look away first.

“I've been thinking a lot about the term "calculated vulnerability". I've seen a lot of my peers write after the resolution of a something hard (overcoming an illness, shutting down a startup, IVF etc) after a happy ending, neatly packaging their vulnerability in a bow. But what if that happy ending doesn't come? Do you just stay in a purgatory? Do you just stay in silence? I've been wondering about what my "resolution" will be so I can start publishing again. This self-imposed hiatus is basically me waiting for a satisfactory resolution in order to start writing again.”

“Sometimes I think back to some of the single actions that ended up changing my life forever.”

“But if I have learned anything in the past year it is how to change, and if I can turn into a runner I must be able to turn into anything else.”

“Often it’s not the expectations of other people that burn us out and make us miserable, but those we place on ourselves.”

“The trope is “Change is scary.” It’s actually not. It’s uncomfortable”

A few years ago, I woke up and took a look at my work calendar. Back-to-back meetings from 10am to 5pm. Sigh. I rolled out of bed, checked…

or, how I think about long-term success

On September 12, as far as Facebook is concerned I won’t exist. Yesterday, I permanently deleted my Facebook account. I let go of 300,000 followers, 1200 friends and the blue seal of authenticity. …

“From my perspective, this shift from “You’re buying stuff that’s already created” to “You’re funding the creation of ongoing content” has been a clear evolution in Memberful.” “Also, from a philosophical perspective, our number one core behavior — some companies have values, Patreon has behaviors, we like that word because it’s something you can do — is “Put creators first.””

One of my unpopular beliefs is that many meetings in companies should have more cc's, not fewer as is the common complaint everywhere I've been. We underestimate how much observational knowledge transfer occurs.

kept the city in a hostile sepia the way the calendar rips itself away from your grasp.