Performance critical contributions by humans will stay what they are: an edge case. In 99% of software it does not matter that you could’ve written a faster algorithm or picked a better data structure.
No software tells me quite as much about your org as the choice of video conferencing software. Meet vs Zoom vs Microsoft Teams vs Citrix vs Jitsi are all picked for very different reasons.
The value of a degree is in question, as tuition costs have increased in the last few decades while the college premium-the expected benefit from getting a diploma-has flatlined and possibly even declined in the last few years.
common failure mode is picking the tech that gives you the fastest early ramp, riding that steep curve, feeling like you're winning, projecting that, you know, steep slope into the future and feeling like the sky is the limit, and then hitting the plateau, and discovering that the technology path that you picked actually flattens out way before the performance that is required by your product.
You know, I think a lot of parents think that dropping out is very risky and impune your reputation for the rest of your life and so forth. And as far as I can tell, nobody has ever cared.
I feel like a relevant insight in learning was um recognizing that like who matters more than what. So, like advice to any college student when they're choosing what courses to take. Uh, care a little bit less about your pre-existing interests because they're kind of arbitrary right now. and care a little bit more about whether like the person teaching it is a good educator and someone you resonate with.
if if I got to pick one if I get to pick one thing that you do as CEO, I'm going to pick that you're right. So even if you don't, you know, even if you don't operate the ship or the factory that well, I'd rather that you picked the right product, the right strategy than you were phenomenal at execution or inspiring people or managing because, you know, being in the right body of water matters more than the right boat.
my kids are in this educational system that is trying to prep them to get into a good college and to be a knowledge worker and I know that game is over
I I definitely think I'm so aware of the fine line between success and failure, especially on your first company. And and and it's so it pains me how much founders and es especially I see it in men, not all men. And I have four sisters and a bunch of daughters. But I would say I see it in a lot in men and and friends, college friends, people I've grown up with that if they had an initial failure, if they had failures, they get attached to it and they start feeling defined by it
In fact, multiple analyses we do suggest that the genome is vibrating with natural selection, and uh there's all sorts of weaker effects that are there that would be picked up in larger studies even than we've done. Uh and that uh in fact, almost every position in the DNA is uh correlated to a position that in being dragged in one way or the other uh by natural selection. Instead of being quiescent, natural selection is everywhere.
Everybody thinks our schools are in crisis all the time because they’re being forced to do something they were never meant to do, which is to make everyone college-ready, and they’re being forced to do that because we have seen jobs that provide a living wage without a college diploma evaporate.
And I realized it was the first one on the list and I thought, huh, I wonder if people are just picking the first one. So then then we randomized the list so everyone saw a different order of the list and now all the items were picked equally
I last picked up Stendhal’s The Red and the Black a decade ago. I wasn’t certain that the novel, which I keep calling my favorite, would hold up on re-reading.
I first read it in college and recently, as we approach this milestone, decided to re-read it and was amazed about how fresh and vivid it felt, as well as how nuanced and humane it is.
He might have amazing attention to detail, he might be able to understand, have an enormous capacity to remember units and where they are on a map, but he was only a half corporal in the First World war. He’s never been to staff college.
UX design has been steadily improving over the last 50 years and is now reasonably good. The low-hanging fruit of terrible usability has long since been picked.
Despite misleading statements by mainstream education economists, college attendance in particular is not a good career investment for most of the population.
I picked this book up, and I liked it. On the surface, it's about wizards and magic, but there's more to it. Every now and then, Ursula Le Guin sprinkles in some wisdom.
I mean, if that’s right, that means the Maya and the people of Mesoamerica will all share it together, when they thought about, “We need a count of time for us,” they didn’t look up into the heavens, they looked into their bodies. “What’s the first cycle that we actually go through as humans?” and they picked this nine-month thing. It really is our cycle, and no other culture on the planet looked inside themselves to create their calendar like that.
Challengers (US) 2.6 Drove 30 minutes to the theater. Sat through 15 minutes of commercials and 15 more of loud in-your-face trailers. Then within 60 seconds I knew I had picked the wrong film. Unpleasant characters, phony “Hollywood” dialogue and a really annoying musical soundtrack.
Decoded is a semi-autobiographical book that tells Jay-Z's story growing up and finding success in hip hop. It also helps you deeply understand the inner-city ghetto struggles (Jay was actually a drug dealer until age 27). In organized sections of hand picked songs with RapGenius-style lyric explanations (note: Decoded came first), you see through his eyes the difficult choices he and so many others faced while listening to some of his best tracks.
This is what I wish I learned from in my freshman year of college. The part of it about linear algebra is one of the best linear algebra resources out there, and remainder shows you how those tools apply to non-linear mathematics.
The skills US workers learned in the process of becoming an industrial giant helped set the US up for technological leadership over the rest of the century.
Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: A masterwork from 1979 that focuses on how cognition can emerge via a variety of hidden neurological mechanisms. I always regretted blazing through GEB in college for a class. This is the summer when I finally get to reread it slowly and carefully.
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