Why Are U.S. Transit Projects So Costly? This Group Is on the Case.

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Storytelling — The American Tradition
America arguably lacks a folklore proper, in the old-world sense of a body of narratives that explore the philosophical themes of the everyday life of commoners with significant mythological license
Unlike traditional folklore, American industrial folklore is a realist, literal tradition, with the presumption of factuality, and a preference for first-person telling of recent or contemporary events over retellings and handed-down lore
the cowboy western went straight from epic to commercial theater without spending any time simmering as a folklore.
The American hero of folklore, then, is a grifter who tells the tale of his own redemption. Only, he (it is nearly always a he) is a grifter with a heart of gold who might pull little cons to get ahead, but stays true-hearted and noble where it actually matters.
A Well-Trained Mind
Keep Your Identity Small
Politics,
like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise
for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.
what religion and politics have in common is that they
become part of people's identity, and people can never have a
fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity.
By definition they're partisan.
When people say a discussion
has degenerated into a religious war, what they really mean is that
it has started to be driven mostly by people's identities.
If people can't think clearly about anything
that has become part of their identity, then all other things being
equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as
possible.
mirrors
My path to merging onto the VC highway involved exploring basically every other option before finally circling back to reconsider this route with renewed appreciation
I’m a generalist at heart — I know I can do most things decently well (or at least figure them out) but what I actually excel at is understanding people, packaging their stories, and making them feel seen. What kind of craft is that?
Without a product in mind ‘company’ never seemed right and ‘non-profit’ felt unnecessarily limiting.
most advice bestowed on young people overrotates on being someone far before we have enough data points to know who that someone should be
most advice bestowed on young people overrotates on being someone far before we have enough data points to know who that someone should be.
I think most people live the majority of their lives trapped in place by a fear of rejection that probably feels worse to stew in than actually experiencing the rejection they fear so dearly itself.
Finding Sooyoung Park and the Asian Americans in Indie Rock’s Pre-Internet Heyday
WebChoices: Digital Advertising Alliance's Consumer Choice Tool for Web US
Evolution of AR and VR: UX inspiration from history
Our web design tools are holding us back ⚒ Nerd
With photoshop we could come up with things that we couldn’t build with CSS. But nowadays we can build things with CSS that are impossible to create with our design tools. We have scroll-snap, we have complicated animations, we have all kinds of wonderful interaction, grid, flexbox, all kinds of shapes, and so much more that you won’t find in the drop down menus of your tool of choice. Yet our websites still look and behave like they were designed with photoshop.
Classic HCI demos
Build Personal Moats
If you were magically given 10,000 hours to be amazing at something, what would it be? The more clarity you have on this response, the better off you’ll be.
Scott Adams popularized the idea of finding the intersection of 2-3 things you’re best at even if you’re not best at any of them individually. He wasn’t neither the best cartoonist nor the best writer nor the best entrepreneur, but he was the best combination. It could be a combination of expertise, relationships, sensibilities, and skills that you’ve accumulated over the years. If you’re just starting out, ideally it picks up where your childhood left off. Now, I spent my childhood trying to make the NBA. So if like me, you misallocated your childhood in the skills department, you have to be more creative. Later on, I realized I could apply the self-discipline and systems thinking I deployed when trying to be good at basketball into other fields, and found some that better fit my natural abilities.
If you’re a generalist, you want to be the best at the intersection of a few different skills, even if it’s a few disparate things. The challenge is it's easy to lie to yourself & say that you're a generalist when in reality you've tried a bunch of things and you've flaked out when things got hard and then tried something else.
Some people who you think are generalists have also specialized. Malcolm Gladwell for example writes about lots of topics, but he's mastered the art of translating academic work for a mass audience. Tyler Cowen self-defines himself as specializing as a generalist, but he spent a couple decades going deep on economics.
A personal moat is a set of unique and accumulating competitive advantages in the context of your career.
Like company moats, your personal moat should be a competitive advantage specific to you that's not only durable, but compounds over time.
Menus, Metaphors and Materials - Milestones of User Interface Design
Whenever Facebook changes its interface, it has an impact on how millions of people communicate. In this sense, user interfaces are cultural artefacts.
callings
by Molly Mielke
What is our purpose on this planet? Do we have a responsibility to one another? Who even are we?Answering those questions alone is asking a lot of a person. The easier option is to choose from the platter of social-strata-acceptable possibilities we’re presented with for education, occupation, geographical location, personality, etc, and call it a day.
if you spend all your time constantly sketching (probably quickly outdated) pictures of your thinking on the bigger questions we’ve all been tasked with answering, you neglect the actual doing that would reveal answers with richer hues
incredible opportunities are unlocked by constructing a digitally consumable caricature of yourself that makes you legible to literally anyone in the world. It’s probably the most far-ranging bat signal possible to find people who think and feel similarly to you.
There’s simply so much friction in the process of turning belief into action online — meaning that most of the time all you actually get from internet attention is internalized impossible-to-attain expectations for yourself and an extremely confused ego.
If you care about personally choosing the shape, scale, and direction of your impact on the world, you might find that playing off-the-shelf games turns out to be a remarkably risky bet. There’s just no money/time-back guarantee that any of the off-the-shelf options will continue to fit you as your desires evolve. And maybe that’s ok — but continually reinventing yourself is a tiring and time-consuming task that too often leads you away from the real “calling”-finding-and-defining work.
In my book, big things are only worth committing to if the answer to the question “would you do this thing even if no one was watching?” is an immediate and unequivocal yes
Creating interface studies
Avoid getting too specific at a feature level. For example, it's too specific if you say "Page navigator" and it's too high level if you try to explore "A blog builder app." The sweet spot to go for is something that is conceptual where you can explore an interaction for a concept, such as, "Exploring spatial viewing of pages".
The real fraud is "election fraud."
Modern MacOS Upgrades Require Significant Free Disk Space — Pixel Envy
It is sort of miraculous that modern video codecs like H.265 have made it possible to fit videos of increasing quality and resolution into shrinking amounts of space. But when it comes to software, the pattern is exactly backwards.
Should we embrace nuclear energy?
Global Warming and Climate Change skepticism examined
An (actual) explanation of climate change.
Jony Ive on Life After Apple
Movies about lower class people of all genres
Building software to last forever
Optimize For Nothing
Students who grew up with search engines might change STEM education forever
the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
Hey Jude - Dirt Magazine
What made me love the wretched thing was its tender and intimate portrayals of friendship, how friendship can, if not save a life, make it bearable and offer innumerable joys for those who are shut off from the traditions of marriage and family.
Juliette Han PhD I Biotech on TikTok
Middle income earners behind rising racial tensions, research suggests
The Poisonous Employee-Ranking System That Helps Explain Microsoft’s Decline (stack ranking)
Is It Cringe If You Can Monetize It? - Garbage Day Newsletter
these reactions seem to signal that our understanding of virality is evolving. When people first started going viral online, there was a real curiosity about what to do with these people. For a while they were basically just a new kind of America’s Funniest Home Videos contestant. In fact, Tay Zonday and Rebecca Black actually performed on America’s Got Talent in 2011. But about five years ago, right around when TikTok was first taking off in the US, we started to view virality with assumption that you could make money on it — if you went viral in a good way. And, now, I think it’s possible that as users continue to learn how to attention-hack on TikTok, we’re going to see more creators who just don’t care what kind of attention they’re getting as long as people are watching. Which makes sense. These newest creators have never known a non-viral world. And the algorithms that put this content in front of us don’t care how it makes us feel, as long as we feel something. So why should we, right?
Diminishing returns - Wikipedia
A common example of diminishing returns is choosing to hire more people on a factory floor to alter current manufacturing and production capabilities. Given that the capital on the floor (e.g. manufacturing machines, pre-existing technology, warehouses) is held constant, increasing from one employee to two employees is, theoretically, going to more than double production possibilities and this is called increasing returns.
If we now employ 50 people, at some point, increasing the number of employees by two percent (from 50 to 51 employees) would increase output by two percent and this is called constant returns.
However, if we look further along the production curve to, for example 100 employees, floor space is likely getting crowded, there are too many people operating the machines and in the building, and workers are getting in each other's way. Increasing the number of employees by two percent (from 100 to 102 employees) would increase output by less than two percent and this is called "diminishing returns."