Quotes

How can we develop transformative tools for thought? by Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen

We believe now is a good time to work hard on this vision again. 

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Such a medium creates a powerful immersive context, a context in which the user can have new kinds of thought, thoughts that were formerly impossible for them. Speaking loosely, the range of expressive thoughts possible in such a medium is an emergent property of the elementary objects and actions in that medium. If those are well chosen, the medium expands the possible range of human thought.

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The mnemonic medium is much more like meditation – in some ways, the anti-product, since it violates so much conventional Silicon Valley wisdom – in that the benefits are delayed, and hard to have any immediate sense of.

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Avoid orphan cards: These are cards which don’t connect closely to anything else. Suppose, for the sake of illustration, that you’re trying to learn about African geography, and have a question: “What’s the territory in Africa that Morocco disputes?” (A: “The Western Sahara”) If you don’t know anything about the Western Sahara or Morocco or why there’s a dispute, that question will be an orphan, disconnected from everything else. Ideally, you’ll have a densely interconnected web of questions and answers, everything interwoven in striking ways.

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They’re a little like a person who thinks “learning the guitar sounds great”, picks it up for half an hour, and then puts it down, saying that they sound terrible and therefore it’s a bad instrument.

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it’s so much easier to learn new facts in an area we’re already expert in – we quickly form associations to our existing knowledge.

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Paivio and others investigated the picture superiority effect, demonstrating that pictures and words together are often recalled substantially better than words alone.

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In 1978, the psychologists Steven Smith, Arthur Glenberg, and Robert Bjork Steven M. Smith, Arthur Glenberg, and Robert A. Bjork, Environmental context and human memory (1978).  reported several experiments studying the effect of place on human memory. In one of their experiments, they found that studying material in two different places, instead of twice in the same place, provided a 40% improvement in later recall.

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If you want to understand a subject in any real sense you need to know the details of the fundamentals. What’s more, that means not just knowing them immediately after reading. It means internalizing them for the long term

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When people respond to the mnemonic medium with “why do you focus on all that boring memory stuff?”, they are missing the point. By largely automating away the problem of memory, the mnemonic medium makes it easier for people to spend more time focusing on other parts of learning, such as conceptual issues.

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We’ve met many mathematicians and physicists who say that one reason they went into mathematics or physics is because they hated the rote memorization common in many subjects, and preferred subjects where it is possible to derive everything from scratch. But in conversation it quickly becomes evident that they have memorized an enormous number of concepts, connections, and facts in their discipline. It’s fascinating these people are so blind to the central role memory plays in their own thinking.

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conventional tech industry product practice will not produce deep enough subject matter insights to create transformative tools for thought. Indeed, that’s part of the reason there’s been so little progress from the tech industry on tools for thought. This sounds like a knock on conventional product practice, but it’s not. That practice has been astoundingly successful at its purpose: creating great businesses. But it’s also what Alan Kay has dubbed a pop culture, not a research culture. To build transformative tools for thought we need to go beyond that pop culture.

The aspiration is for any team serious about making transformative tools for thought. It’s to create a culture that combines the best parts of modern product practice with the best parts of the (very different) modern research culture.   You need the insight-through-making loop to operate, whereby deep, original insights about the subject feed back to change and improve the system, and changes to the system result in deep, original insights about the subject.

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People with expertise on one side of the loop often have trouble perceiving (much less understanding and participating in) the nature of the work that goes on on the other side of the loop. You have researchers, brilliant in their domain, who think of making as something essentially trivial, “just a matter of implementation”. And you have makers who don’t understand research at all, who see it as merely a rather slow and dysfunctional (and unprofitable) making process. This is certainly true in Silicon Valley, where it’s common to meet accomplished technical makers who, after reading a few stories from Richard Hamming and Richard Feynman, think they understand research well enough that they can “create the new Bell Labs”. Usually they’re victims of Dunning-Krugeritis, so ignorant they’re not even aware of their ignorance.

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At the end of Norvig’s economics essay is a short afterword explaining how he came to write the essay. Shortly before writing the essay he’d heard about the kinds of economic models discussed in the notebook, and he wanted to explore several questions about them. After talking it over with some colleagues they decided to each independently attack the problems, and to compare notes. Although Norvig’s essay is, in some sense, “educational”, Norvig’s intent was to explore a set of problems he himself was genuinely curious about. The educational aspect was a byproduct.

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Concretely: suppose you want to build tools for subject X (say X = differential geometry). Unless you are deeply involved in practicing that subject, it’s going to be extremely difficult to build good tools. It’ll be much like trying to build new tools for carpentry without actually doing any carpentry yourself. This is perhaps part of why tools like Mathematica work quite well – the principal designer, Stephen Wolfram, has genuine research interests in mathematics and physics. Of course, not all parts of Mathematica work equally well; some parts feel like toys, and it seems likely those are the ones not being used seriously internal to the company. …

good tools for thought arise mostly as a byproduct of doing original work on serious problems

To Show Or Not To Show Work In Math [Education]

If a student can do it in their heads, then the work is too easy! Instead of battling over “showing work,” simply increase the complexity of the problem until the student must do the work out to get it right.

Strategies for long projects

It has been written that Walter Isaacson wrote many of his books on vacations with friends and family. He would slip away for a few hours at a time, and no one really noticed. He had a great time on these vacations and it seems like nobody was negatively impacted by his small absences.

Fast Software, the Best Software

“To me, speedy software is the difference between an application smoothly integrating into your life, and one called upon with great reluctance. Fastness in software is like great margins in a book — makes you smile without necessarily knowing why.”

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“Fast software is not always good software, but slow software is rarely able to rise to greatness.”

Origins of the Apple human interface, Riccardo Mori

Why the Z X C V keys? — They were close on the keyboard. We did X because it was a cross out (CUT). We did V because it pointed down like this [he makes a ‘V’ shape with his hands], and you were inserting; it was like an upside-down caret (PASTE). And Z was the closest one, because we figured you’d UNDO a lot. And C for COPY — that was easy.

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The way we operated was that Bill spent every night programming, and the next day we would do testing and arguing. I don’t know when he slept, actually. (Did he sleep?) And then he would do it [over] again every night.

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The difficult thing that would happen is we bring somebody in to prove that the user-interface thing they put in was absolutely right and we were totally wrong, and then the end user would usually prove we were both wrong. Both our things were hard to use and then we’d have to go back and redesign it. Or half the time the user would say, Well, why doesn’t it just work this way? — and we would look at each other sheepishly and fix it.

How Zapier Went From Zero to 600,000+ Users in Just Three Years

“A lot of people fall into the habit of reading and not doing. I think people probably read a little too much and do a little too little.

I think the most important thing is to jump in, try a few things, see what’s working and go back to the drawing board. ”

Интервью с главой JetBrains

Что касается офисов в других странах, мы, в отличие от многих других компаний, не стали локализовывать разработку продуктов по офисам. Может запросто получиться, что какой-нибудь продукт разрабатывается во всех шести. Хорошо, что изобрели видеосвязь, она нас спасает.

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То, что вы делаете сейчас, даст эффект только через полгода? Через два-три года в лучшем случае. Скорее, горизонт — пять-семь лет.

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Сначала нужно понять, что люди находят в VS Code. Мне кажется, у нас есть ответ: это простота. Инструмент исключительно проще. Мы всегда делали упор на сильные и мощные инструменты для работы с кодом, здесь нас переплюнуть сложно. Профессиональные разработчики чаще всего предпочитают наш инструмент.

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Ещё был давно большой продукт, назывался Fabrique. Это фреймворк и IDE для разработки именно серверных приложений сразу с UI. Но пока мы его делали, а делали мы его долго, обновился стэк технологий, и необходимость в продукте отпала. Мы его закрыли за несколько недель до планируемой даты релиза. Решили, что, наверное, не жилец. Конечно, можно было начать с нуля всё делать, но зачем?

Why brilliant people lose their touch

“This is not to say that skill doesn’t matter — merely that in a competition in which all the leaders are highly skilled, randomness may explain the difference between triumph and failure. Good luck plus skill beats bad luck plus skill any time.”

Zen

“When you sit in zazen, just sit, and when you work as a tenzo, just do that. It is the spirit of just sitting or just working that is common to both zazen and to the work of a tenzo.”

Flow is the Opiate of the Mediocre: Advice on Getting Better from an Accomplished Piano Player

“Weak pianists make music a reactive task, not a creative task. They start, and react to their performance, fixing problems as they go along. Strong pianists, on the other hand, have an image of what a perfect performance should be like that includes all of the relevant senses. Before we sit down, we know what the piece needs to feel, sound, and even look like in excruciating detail. In performance, weak pianists try to reactively move away from mistakes, while strong pianists move towards a perfect mental image.”

30-plus years of HyperCard, the missing link to the Web

“How did creator Bill Atkinson define HyperCard? “Simply put, HyperCard is a software erector set that lets non-programmers put together interactive information,” he told the Computer Chronicles in 1987.”

Motivation

“The first step in solving any problem is to dramatically underestimate its difficulty”

-2000 Lines Of Code

In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week.

Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementor, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.

He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw’s region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.

He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.

I’m not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.

VC

“Investors advising early-stage teams should avoid pushing for growth ahead of product/market fit. As an industry, we all know that this ends in disaster, yet the pressure for premature growth is still all too common. Startups need time and space to find their fit and launch the right way.”

Почему вы недовольны жизнью и работой

“В 2008 году экономисты Дэвид Бленчфлауэр и Эндрю Освальд выяснили, что график субъективной оценки удовлетворенности жизнью похож на букву U: в юности она высока, примерно к 45 годам снижается до минимума, а затем снова растет. ”

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“В статье 1996 года, основанной на опросе более 5 тыс. ­британских работников, говорится, что график удовлетворенности сотрудников также имеет U-образную форму, хотя здесь низший предел достигается раньше, в возрасте около 39 лет. ”

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“Смиритесь с тем, что при любом раскладе вы обязательно что-то упустите, и не пытайтесь это изменить. Помните, что наши привязанности — это противоядие от сожалений. Найдите время для занятий, несущих экзистенциальную ценность. И наслаждайтесь самим процессом работы, а не только проектами или продуктами.”

The early history of Smalltalk, Alan Kay

Right around this time we were involved in another conflict with Xerox management, in particular with Don Pendery the head “planner”. He really didn’t understand what we were talking about and instead was interested in “trends” and “what was the future going to be like” and how could Xerox “defend against it.” I got so upset I said to him,

“Look. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Don’t worry about what all those other people might do, this is the century in which almost any clear vision can be made!”

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“The basic principal of recursive design is to make the parts have the same power as the whole.” For the first time I thought of the whole as the entire computer and wondered why anyone would want to divide it up into weaker things called data structures and procedures. Why not divide it up into little computers, as time sharing was starting to? But not in dozens. Why not thousands of them, each simulating a useful structure?”

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“the new idea is first denounced as the work of the insane, in a few years it is considered obvious and mundane, and finally the original denouncers will claim to have invented it.”

The Most Important Writing Lesson I Ever Learned, Steven Pressfield

Nobody wants to read your shit.

1. Reduce your message to its simplest, clearest, easiest-to-understand form.
2. Make it fun. Or sexy or interesting or informative.

End-user programming

There’s an abyss to cross between using an app and modifying it with code by calling APIs. The user has to switch to a whole other paradigm including setting up a development environment. Consequently, few users take the step from using a tool to customizing or making their own tools.

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We need ways to require less abstract reasoning and less of the user’s mental bandwidth to be given to the mechanics of modeling their program and data, leaving more space for them to think about the domain of their application. One way to do this is embodiment. This is where a tool makes the elements of a working program concrete, usually via visual representations onscreen, to the user.

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It also includes the ability for the system to change itself from within, giving the end-user programmer a feeling of open-ended possibility and complete ownership over their tools.

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The user should be able to edit their programs without installing additional tools or programs. Further, they should be able to use an interface and set of abstractions that is as close as possible to the ones they use for their regular daily work. “A humane-interface principle is that the system itself should be built out of the same kind of pieces with which you are familiar from your everyday use of the system.”

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Zapier and IFTTT offer tantalizing glimpses of end-user accessible automation for the web and cloud APIs. But by the full measure of the in-place toolchain idea, these fail because, for example, the act of automating your smarthome components with IFTTT requires a completely different interface and set of concepts from using those components day-to-day.

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Our team’s instinct is the opposite: strong typing, with the right interface, can be friendlier for newcomers by making program components “snap” together like building blocks. If the blocks fit, the program will probably work.

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Our finding here is that for a living system to work, the internal and external APIs need to be mostly the same.

Architecting UIs for Change

On the flip-side, I also feel a huge sense of relief when I refactor something that was starting to slip into disorder and then manage to create the right abstraction that lets us reign it in. Doing this can be downright euphoric.

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UIs, by their very nature, are all about connecting disparate types of data!

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Don’t introduce any other sources of truth. If you’re doing the “god object” thing. By all means, don’t have multiple “gods.”

Alan Kay

""Programming languages can be categorized in a number of ways: imperative, applicative, logic-based, problem-oriented, etc. But they all seem to be either an “agglutination of features” or a “crystallization of style.” COBOL, PL/1, Ada, etc., belong to the first kind; LISP, APL— and Smalltalk—are the second kind. It is probably not an accident that the agglutinative languages all seem to have been instigated by committees, and the crystallization languages by a single person.”

Design Principles Behind Smalltalk, Daniel H. H. Ingalls

If a system is to serve the creative spirit, it must be entirely comprehensible to a single individual.

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Any part of the system that cannot be changed or that is not sufficiently general is a likely source of impediment

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A system should be built with a minimum set of unchangeable parts; those parts should be as general as possible; and all parts of the system should be held in a uniform framework.

QM

— After a while, quantum mechanics starts to affect your worldview.
— What does this mean?
— The more research I did, the less I believed.
— In quantum mechanics?
— No, — I said. — In the world.

From moms to medical doctors, burnout is everywhere these days

Ziegler defines burnout as “chronic stress gone awry.” The big three symptoms are emotional exhaustion, cynicism and feeling ineffective, according to the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), a survey designed to measure employee burnout in the workforce. Other symptoms can include frequent colds or sicknesses, insomnia and a tendency to alleviate stress in unhealthy ways, such as with too much alcohol or online shopping.

Augmentation of mans intellect, Douglas C. Engelbart

“the human mind neither learns nor acts by large leaps, but by steps organized or structured so that each one depends upon previous steps”

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“If we then ask ourselves where that intelligence is embodied, we are forced to concede that it is elusively distributed throughout a hierarchy of functional processes—a hierarchy whose foundation extends down into natural processes below the depth of our comprehension. If there is any one thing upon which this ‘intelligence depends’ it would seem to be organization.”

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“They say that a lack of words for some types of concepts makes it hard to express those concepts, and thus decreases the likelihood that we will learn much about them. If this is so, then once a language has begun to grow and be used, it would seem reasonable to suspect that the language also affects the evolution of the new concepts to be expressed in that language.” — D. E.

Design on a deadline: How Notion pulled itself back from the brink of failure

In 2015, productivity tool Notion nearly died. Its founders, Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, had built their app on a suboptimal tech stack, and it crashed constantly. Their angel investment money dwindling, they faced a brutal choice: Fire their fledgling team of 4 and start over, or run out of cash. “If you looked at the burn rate, we all would’ve died together,” Ivan says. “It wasn’t much of a choice.”

So they sublet their San Francisco office and moved to a cheaper city where they could focus: Kyoto. “Neither of us spoke Japanese and nobody there spoke English, so all we did was code in our underwear all day,” Ivan says.

The MBA Myth and the Cult of the CEO

Something about CEO:

1. MBA programs simply do not produce CEOs who are better at running companies
2. Historical performance does not appear to predict future performance
3. CEOs are often fired after bad firm performance caused by factors beyond their control
4. There is little to no persistence in CEO performance from one company to the next
5. The cult of the CEO is difficult to resist
6. Average CEO compensation at the largest firms rose from $1.8 million per year in the 1980s — roughly in line with the previous 45 years — to $4.1 million in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, it had risen to $9.2 million

Learnable Programming, Bret Victor

All state must be eliminated or shown. Either can be a reasonable design decision. An environment that does neither — forcing learners to imagine the state and make sense of functions that produce no visible effect — is irresponsible design, and disrespectful to the learner

Notes from Malcolm Gladwell’s writing Masterclass

“It’s fine for a narrative to be a little messy, as long as it’s interesting. Perfection isn’t interesting, and being interesting is more important than being perfect.”

Why Racket? Why Lisp?

“Lisp lan­guage offers you the chance to dis­cover your poten­tial as a pro­gram­mer and a thinker, and thereby raise your expec­ta­tions for what you can accom­plish”

Learnable Programming, Bret Victor

“We often think of a programming environment or language in terms of its features — this one “has code folding”, that one “has type inference”. This is like thinking about a book in terms of its words — this book has a “fortuitous”, that one has a “munificent”. What matters is not individual words, but how the words together convey a message.

Likewise, a well-designed system is not simply a bag of features. A good system is designed to encourage particular ways of thinking, with all features carefully and cohesively designed around that purpose.”

Может ли биолог починить радиоприемник, или что я понял, изучая апоптоз

“я обратил внимание, что этот парадокс проявлялся не только при изучении фундаментальных процессов, таких как апоптоз и клеточный цикл, но даже при изучении отдельных белков. Например, по мере того, как число публикаций про опухолевый супрессор р53 перевалило за 23 000, что же этот белок делает, становится всё более непонятно.”

You can’t characterize human nature if studies overlook 85 percent of people on Earth

“Vast majority of what we know about human psychology and behavior comes from studies conducted with a narrow slice of humanity – college students, middle-class respondents living near universities and highly educated residents of wealthy, industrialized and democratic nations.”

Science vs. Engineering, Richard Hamming

“In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. Of course, you seldom, if ever, see either pure state.”

General Magic tried to invent a smartphone in the 1990s. This is why it failed.

When people found out that Bill and Andy and Joanna were working on this secret project, they didn’t know what it was, what it could be, but they just wanted to work with these amazing people.

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They tried to ship perfection. I think General Magic and other companies like them led to this way that we develop today, this agile method of development, because they would work at this thing for two or three years and then, ta-dah! Of course, if no one bought it that was catastrophic, and particularly in General Magic’s case.

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To me, he represents somebody who really took the lessons of General Magic. Really, if things aren’t working, break it down, start again, iterate, iterate until it is perfect.

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I think one of it is that when you’re trying to achieve perfection, you can’t do it all at once. If General Magic had potentially iterated in a way that the iPod did, that they released a different iteration of the iPod every single year and just encapsulated new features, and that six, seven years later that iPod become the iPhone, General Magic could quite easily have done that rather than trying to put five years of work just into one device.

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they were too early and they just couldn’t ship a product that people wanted in any meaningful volume. I think, fundamentally, they lost heart. I think they really did lose heart.

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I think when you work that hard and that intensely on something — and they worked harder than anyone I’ve ever seen, I mean years and years. People pull all-nighters at tech companies, so that’s not unusual, but this was years of it. People really gave up a huge part of their lives to do this, and I think at the end of the day Tony, as I said, said, “Look, this is how I think we can make a product that will sell.” I think Andy said, “I think we’re just too …” There was a famous meeting, actually, where Andy said, “We’re just too tired and we can’t pivot. We can’t make that shift.”

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We haven’t talked about this, but I think it’s really important, and I think the magicians would admit this, that hubris played an element in it. I think you have to have this certain incredible faith in your abilities to pull off miraculous things and walk through walls when you’re trying to do something as technologically hard as they were. At the same time, there was a certain hubris where they weren’t willing to look outside of their world and their bubble. I think that really was instrumental in their failure.

Duckspeak Vs Smalltalk [Nocode, Fibery]

“Well, an integral part of the Xerox PARC Philosophy was to dismantle the wall between software developers and computer users, to develop systems so easy to program that doing so would be a natural, simple aspect of computer use.”

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“In one anecdote, Kay relates showing a custom system (built in Smalltalk) meant to facilitate non-expert “programming,” to executives from Xerox PARC. This system was a kind of highly advanced programming language meant to make human-machine interaction at a very high level intuitive for non-expert users. At one point during a demonstration, a vice president, after an hour of working with the system, realized he was programming”

Life-long learning

“We must think deeply about the fact that Casals, at ninety-one years old, even now practices the cello two hours every day so as not to be stagnant at even his high level of ability.

Even if someone becomes a fine person who does great works, he is not so exalted that he does not need to study. Rather the opposite is true, because he finds more and more problems to study and he has the will to grow higher and higher. He is in a world so advanced that we cannot even imitate him, but we learn that people train themselves more and reach for truer beauty.”

About Life and Optimism, Noam Chomski

Q: Your ideas, your worldview, has never really gone mainstream… Does that depress you, that you’re not living in any way kind of like the society you’d like to?

A: I never anticipated living in Utopia. If I was in the mainstream, I’d begin to ask myself what I’m doing wrong. There have been (not because of me, but many people) there has been notable progress over the years. Not uniform – there’s regression as well — but in many respects, it’s a more civilized world than it was before. …

Look, you have two choices. You can say, “I’m a pessimist, nothing’s gonna work, I’m giving up, I’ll help ensure that the worst will happen.” Or you can grasp onto the opportunities that do exist, the rays of hope that exist, and say, “Well, maybe we can make it a better world.” It’s not a much of a choice.

The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture

“Since the Industrial Revolution, parents have expected that organized educational systems will tame and modernize their children and “prepare them for life.” Such is the theory. But education — ritualized, formal education, at least — is not an all-purpose solution to the problem of inexperience and mental immaturity among the young.

I was completely unprepared for the frequency with which I heard the people whom I interviewed [musicians, puppeteers, woodworkers, others whose careers depended on unusually refined hand control] either dismiss or actively denounce the time they had spent in school. Most of my interview subjects, although I never asked them directly, said quite forcefully that they had clarified their own thinking and their lives as a result of what they were doing with their hands. Not only were most of them essentially self-taught, but a few had engineered their personally unique repertoire of skills and expertise in open retreat from painful experiences in a school system that had dictated the form and content of their education in order to prepare them for a life modeled on conventional norms of success.”

Creativity, Alan Kay

“Knowing more than your own field is really helpful in [thinking creatively]. I’ve always thought that one of the reasons the 1960s was so interesting is that nobody was a computer scientist back then. Everybody who came into it came into it with lots of other knowledge and interests. Then they tried to figure what computers were, and the only place they could use for analogies were other areas. So we got some extremely interesting ideas from that.”

Future, Gerald Jay Sussman

In the future, it’s going to be the case that computers are so cheap and so easy to make, that you can make them the size of a grain of sand, complete with a megabyte of RAM. You’re going to buy them by the bushel. You can pour them into your concrete, you buy your concrete by the megaflop, and you have a wall that’s smart. So long as you can get the power to them, and they can do something, that’s going to happen. Remember, your cells are pretty smart… they seem to talk to each other and do useful things.

Max Planck

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Education

“Teachers should prepare the student for the student’s future, not for the teacher’s past.”

The building is a computer; the computer is a building, Bret Victor

“And um they decided that they didn’t want to take the risk. That they wanted to make something that was kind of known bad instead of something that was risky but could be really good

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my style has always been: come up with things and then put it on the internet, so everybody can learn from that

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I just didn’t really have the kind of temperament for going really deep on a scientific problem. I was more of a toolmaker. I wanted to make tools that enabled other people to rally other people in the problem

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And I made a number of prototypes for that which — some of them have leaked out into other um other venues but ultimately, for various reasons, I realized that that environment of a screen based app was not the right thing to make.

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That’s why I had to create this new medium in order to create the thing that I wanted to create in it.”

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“Also, everyone, don’t try to hire Bret. He’s busy for the next 30 years.”

Software is merely a Performance Art

“I used to think “Software Design” is an art form. I now believe that I was half-right: it is indeed an art, but it has a rather short half-life: Software is merely a performance art! A momentary flash of brilliance, doomed to be overtaken by the next wave, or maybe even by its own sequel. Eaten alive by its successors. And time…”

Imagination and money, Alan Moore

“I have a theory, which has not let me down so far, that there is an inverse relationship between imagination and money. Because the more money and technology that is available to [create] a work, the less imagination there will be in it.”

100 users, Alan Kay

One of the most interesting ideas at Parc was: “every invention has to be engineered for 100 users”. So if you do a programming language or a DTP word processor, etc, it has to be documented for and usable by 100 people. If you make a personal computer, you have to be able to make 100 of them. If an Ethernet, it has to connect to 100 devices, etc.

Work smart

“Working smart” is a myth, or it’s really just about finding people who will “work hard” for you.

The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success, Albert-László Barabási

The first is that “performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success”. With competitive tennis, better athletes win repeatedly, showing superiority. But when judging wine, it’s not easy to find objective means of ranking: repeated blind tastings, even among wine experts, lead to wildly fluctuating outcomes. When quality is hard to measure, observed differences in success — judged by popularity or sales, for example — follow from network effects. People rush to buy an early leader, swayed by the mistaken belief that others’ choices tell them about standard

VC about founders

And there is nothing I dislike more than carrying on with something when I’ve lost interest, and worse, the founders have lost interest.

Slow software

“We’ll just emphasize that the single biggest source of latency on many sites is downloading stuff that users don’t want.”

…

“There is reason for this complexity, and yet we feel sad that computer users trying to be productive with these devices are so often left waiting, watching spinners, or even just with the slight but still perceptible sense that their devices simply can’t keep up with them.”

Move Slow and Make Things: Airtable’s Howie Liu Built A $1B Software Giant Emphasizing Substance Over Speed [Fibery]

“People think we’re building an Excel or Google Sheets replacement, but we’re out to build the next Microsoft or Apple,” he says. “This is a $100 billion-plus revenue opportunity.”

free energy principle in AI [AI]

In seeking to predict what the next wave of sensations is going to tell it—and the next, and the next—the brain is constantly making inferences and updating its beliefs based on what the senses relay back, and trying to minimize prediction-error signals

…

When the brain makes a prediction that isn’t immediately borne out by what the senses relay back, Friston believes, it can minimize free energy in one of two ways: It can revise its prediction—absorb the surprise, concede the error, update its model of the world—or it can act to make the prediction true.

…

The first time I asked Friston about the connection between the free energy principle and artificial intelligence, he predicted that within five to 10 years, most machine learning would incorporate free energy minimization.

To turn docs into apps, Coda had to rethink productivity from scratch [Fibery]

“Many startups wear their impatience as a badge of honor. Coda’s history to date, however, has been strikingly unhurried. Mehrotra and DeNeui founded their startup in June 2014. They had a working prototype by December, began asking friends and family to test it in May 2015, and invited a larger group of testers to experiment with an alpha version a year later. The company officially unveiled itself in October 2017 and launched a wider—though closed—beta program. At that time, it also disclosed that it had raised $60 million in funding.”

…

“when you’re developing a platform for people to develop on top of, you have to give them enough that they can build interesting things, which means you have to be relatively deep.” Speed still matters—but it’s the speed with which users can accomplish productive work with the tools you’ve created.”

Survivorship Bias

Wiseman speculated that what we call luck is actually a pattern of behaviors that coincide with a style of understanding and interacting with the events and people you encounter throughout life. Unlucky people are narrowly focused, he observed. They crave security and tend to be more anxious, and instead of wading into the sea of random chance open to what may come, they remain fixated on controlling the situation, on seeking a specific goal. As a result, they miss out on the thousands of opportunities that may float by. Lucky people tend to constantly change routines and seek out new experiences. Wiseman saw that the people who considered themselves lucky, and who then did actually demonstrate luck was on their side over the course of a decade, tended to place themselves into situations where anything could happen more often and thus exposed themselves to more random chance than did unlucky people. The lucky try more things, and fail more often, but when they fail they shrug it off and try something else. Occasionally, things work out.

Пелевин

“Пока мы орали друг на друга, мир как будто подмораживало. Мы могли какое-то время ходить по тонкому льду приблудных нарративов, забывая о зиянии, спрятанном под ними. Но стоило замолчать, как лед подламывался, и мы глубинными бомбами уходили в черные полыньи прозрения – каждый в свою.”

The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greater Than We Realized

In general, mediocre-but-lucky people were much more successful than more-talented-but-unlucky individuals. The most successful agents tended to be those who were only slightly above average in talent but with a lot of luck in their lives.

…

“even a great talent becomes useless against the fury of misfortune.”

…

in complex social and economic contexts where chance is likely to play a role, strategies that incorporate randomness can perform better than strategies based on the “naively meritocratic” approach.

New Quantum Theory Could Explain the Flow of Time

It showed that as objects interact with their surroundings — as the particles in a cup of coffee collide with the air, for example — information about their properties “leaks out and becomes smeared over the entire environment,” Popescu explained. This local information loss causes the state of the coffee to stagnate even as the pure state of the entire room continues to evolve. Except for rare, random fluctuations, he said, “its state stops changing in time.”

…

According to the scientists, our ability to remember the past but not the future, another historically confounding manifestation of time’s arrow, can also be understood as a buildup of correlations between interacting particles. When you read a message on a piece of paper, your brain becomes correlated with it through the photons that reach your eyes. Only from that moment on will you be capable of remembering what the message says. As Lloyd put it: “The present can be defined by the process of becoming correlated with our surroundings.”

Something about Netflix culture

Managers are all told to apply a “keeper test” to their staff—asking themselves whether they would fight to keep a given employee—a mantra for firing people who don’t fit the culture and ensuring only the strongest survive.

…

Many current and former employees credit it with keeping the company stocked with high performers capable of fast decision-making. This, they say, allows for a nimbleness that has helped it disrupt the global TV and movie industries.

…

Context not control: A phrase Netflix uses to describe how executives should manage their teams. The idea is that managers should give their employees the right context to make decisions themselves rather than micromanage and seek to control decision-making.”

Engelbart’s Violin [Fibery]

“When you are a teenager, alone with a (programmable) computer, the universe is alive with infinite possibilities. You are a god. Master of all you survey. Then you go to school, major in “Computer Science,” graduate – and off to the salt mines with you, where you will stitch silk purses out of sow’s ears in some braindead language, building on the braindead systems created by your predecessors, for the rest of your working life.”

News design

“The whole point of the Facebook feed tinkering is to force you to wade through a river of shit to find the nuggets you are interested in.”

Escher

“One always starts with a complication: simplicity is more difficult and can only be learned later (or never).”

Linus Torvalds

“Will everybody be happy? No. People who don’t like my blunt behaviour even when I’m not being actively nasty about it will just see that as ‘look, nothing changed’. I’m trying to get rid of my outbursts, and be more polite about things, but technically wrong is still technically wrong, and I won’t start accepting bad code just to make people feel better about themselves.”

David Graeber hit nails into the Capitalism head.

“We could easily all be putting in a twenty- or even fifteen-hour workweek. Yet for some reason, we as a society have collectively decided it’s better to have millions of human beings spending years of their lives pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes, or sit in cafés arguing about politics, and gossiping about their friends’ complex polyamorous love affairs.”

Creativity

“The workaholic doesn’t come up with great ideas”

Interview with Sam Altman from The High Growth Handbook, Sam Altman

The role of the CEO is basically to figure out and decide what the company should do and then make sure it does that.

…

It’s a lot of the same conversation again and again with employees or press or customers. You just have to relentlessly say, “This is what we’re doing, this is why, and this is how we’re going to do it.”

…

The hard part of being a good CEO is that you have to be willing to let some things fall apart. You don’t have enough time to do everything well. And in practice, what that means is that there are some urgent things that you just don’t do. Getting comfortable with that takes a long time. It’s hard.

…

If the CEO disconnects from the product, that’s usually bad. And that is something that you see happen to varying degrees as a company scales.

…

I think the most important thing is that boards hate surprises. And boards hate feeling like you’re trying to hide bad news. You want to over-communicate with boards for sure. Certainly if you have bad news, you want to get that to them ahead of the board meeting.

Phantoms in the brain, V.S. Ramachandran

“Most scientists are bricklayers, not architects; they are happy simply adding another stone to the cathedral”

…

“God is not an engineer, he’s a hacker”

…

“A tension exists in neurology between those who believe that the most valuable lessons about the brain can be learned from statistical analyses involving large numbers of patients and those who believe that doing the right kind of experiments on the right patients- even a single patient- can yield much more useful information. This is really a silly debate since its resolution is obvious: It’s a good idea to begin with experiments on single cases and then to confirm the findings through studies of additional patients. By way of analogy, imagine that I cart a pig into your living room and tell you that it can talk. You might say, “Oh, Really? Show me.” I then wave my wand and the pig starts talking. You might respond, “My God! That’s amazing!” You are not likely to say, “Ah, but that’s just one pig. Show me a few more and then I might believe you.” Yet this is precisely the attitude of many people in my field.”

After 5 years and $3M, here’s everything we’ve learned from building Ghost

“We spent a very long time trying to compete on convenience and simplicity. This was our biggest mistake and the hardest lesson to learn - because user feedback told us that this was what was most important. We deliberately limited flexibility in the product to try and make it more simple. But it ended up being still not simple enough for the average user, and not powerful or flexible enough for the professional user — the worst of both worlds.”

About VC

“People often assume that science is serious business, that it is always “theory driven”, that you generate lofty conjectures based on what you already know and then proceed to design experiments specifically to test these conjectures. Actually real science is more like a fishing expedition than most of my colleagues would care to admit. (Of course I would never say this in a National Institutes of Health [NIH] grant proposal, for most funding agencies still cling to the naive belief that science is all about hypothesis testing and then carefully dotting the “i’s” and crossing the “t’s”. God forbid that you should just try to do something entirely new that’s just based on a hunch!)”

Loosing the Signal

“Balsillie and Lazaridis had a longstanding aversion to consultants; they cost too much, didn’t understand the business, and wasted valuable time.”

…

“As Lazaridis examined the iPad for weaknesses, he found several. It didn’t have a camera or a connection port to link to high-definition media devices. It didn’t run Adobe Flash, a software and multimedia platform that supported sophisticated graphics, videos, games, and online magazines; Steve Jobs hated Adobe for slighting Apple a decade earlier. Most of all, it didn’t have RIM’s secret weapon: QNX and its elegant operating system. Lazaridis was convinced RIM could build a better machine that delivered what Apple didn’t—in less than half a year.”

…

“Did we push the teams too hard?” says Lazaridis. “Probably. Can you show me a company that doesn’t? I’d be hard-pressed to believe you. The pressure Jobs put his iPhone team through was worse than anything I ever put on my team. The fact is, that’s how business runs.”

Who Killed Nokia? Nokia Did

were afraid to publicly acknowledge the inferiority of Symbian, their operating system at the time, for fear of appearing defeatist to external investors, suppliers, and customers and thus losing them quickly. “It takes years to make a new operating system. That’s why we had to keep the faith with Symbian,”

…

Fearing the reactions of top managers, middle managers remained silent or provided optimistic, filtered information. One middle manager told us “the information did not flow upwards. Top management was directly lied to…I remember examples when you had a chart and the supervisor told you to move the data points to the right [to give a better impression].

…

As one middle manager pointed out to us, at Apple the top managers are engineers. “We make everything into a business case and use figures to prove what’s good, whereas Apple is engineer-driven.” Top managers acknowledged to us that “there was no real software competence in the top management team”.

Productivity, Sam Altman

“Doing great work usually requires colleagues of some sort. Try to be around smart, productive, happy, and positive people that don’t belittle your ambitions. I love being around people who push me and inspire me to be better. To the degree you able to, avoid the opposite kind of people—the cost of letting them take up your mental cycles is horrific. ”

Why is everyone so busy?

“Individualistic cultures, which emphasise achievement over affiliation, help cultivate this time-is-money mindset. This creates an urgency to make every moment count”

…

“He found that when people are paid more to work, they tend to work longer hours, because working becomes a more profitable use of time. So the rising value of work time puts pressure on all time. Leisure time starts to seem more stressful, as people feel compelled to use it wisely or not at all.”

…

“Life is long if you know how to use it”

Цифророждённые, Александр Кулешов [Education]

Мы персонализируем обучение. Наш «командно-персонализированный метод» не нов — мехматовские кружки в мои годы так и работали: старшие учили младших. И именно этот метод образования следует называть классическим — так строилось обучение, например, в Древней Греции: учитель лично передавал знание ученику. В каком-то смысле мы должны вернуться к истокам — к тому, как это было устроено во времена Платона.

…

Мир пришёл к массовому образованию, потому что возникла огромная потребность в людях средней квалификации. Но боюсь, время то ушло, и это страшная социальная проблема. Уже сегодня экономике всё меньше нужны середнячки, а в дальнейшем требования к квалификации тех, кого не заменить автоматикой, будут только расти.

…

Наши студенты в большинстве своём почему-то психологически гораздо менее зрелые, у них не сформирована мотивация. Поэтому механический перенос западных практик не сработает — не получится просто взять и скопировать опыт MIT.

How the $36 billion video game industry burns out its best employees

“Telltale’s mistakes — from its reliance on one monolithic vision to its inability to retain its top talent to its brutal and unending crunch — offer a cautionary tale for the wider games industry, where long hours, job insecurity, and unprofessional behavior are too often the norm”

Productivity in the US Continues to Decline

Many jobs involve work that is solitary, and the culture of collaboration bred and imposed by new systems of communication has systematically been eating into work time. Collaboration in all its forms has supplanted focused labor and caused a decline in productivity

Обучение

Обучение вообще-то неблагодарное занятие: если вы учились целые выходные с утра до вечера, то вас похвалить будет некому — это не работа, которую можно существенно продвинуть за пару дней и это всем будет заметно. Нет, придётся потратить много дней без немедленных наград.”

Cancer, Pieter Hintjens

The only way to beat cancer, really, is to die from something else first.

Conway’s Law.

The software you make looks like your organization. If you are in a shitty organization, you will make shitty software.”

Lie to Your Management, Pieter Hintjens

Maybe you have an enlightened management that knows what “open allocation” means. Or maybe they’re going to be one of your main problems. When they demand schedules, deadlines, designs, and architectures, lie to them. If you cannot do this, find someone who can. It is easier to get forgiveness for success than permission.

The business of SaaS

Many SaaS with product/market fit did not launch with it; it sometimes takes months or years of iterating to get there. The most important theme while iterating is to talk to many, many more customers than feels natural. Low-touch SaaS entrepreneurs can make an excuse to attempt to speak with literally every person who signs up for a free trial; the economics of this are unsustainable at the price point but running a SaaS company without product/market fit is also unsustainable, so it’s entirely justified by how much you learn.

How GE Went From American Icon to Astonishing Mess

“The message is that the company, even if it isn’t broken up entirely, will get smaller and simpler. “Complexity hurts us,” he said in November. “Complexity has hurt us.” He’s betting on a future where GE doesn’t require management wizardry to run properly, because wizards turn out not to exist.”

Asking the Right Questions About AI

Debugging ML systems is one of the hardest problems in the field, since examining the individual state of the variables at any given time tells you approximately as much about the model as measuring a human’s neural potentials will tell you about what they had for dinner.

…

There is a new buzzword afoot in the discussion of machine learning: the “right to explanation.” The idea is that, if ML is being used to make decisions of any significance at all, people have a right to understand how those decisions were made. Intuitively, this seems obvious and valuable — yet when this is mentioned around ML professionals, their faces turn colors and they try to explain that what’s requested is physically impossible. Why is this?

…

often the most dangerous risks in a system come, not from problems within the system, but from unexpected ways that the system can interact with the broader world. We don’t yet have a good way to manage this.

Borland Process

PW had a small core team—four people—who interacted intensely over two years to produce the bulk of the product. Prototyping was heavily used: Two major prototypes were built and discarded (the first in C; the second, called ‘‘pre-Crystal,’’ in C++). Additional programmers were added after six months or so of intense effort by the core of four. These prototypes drove architectural decisions that were discussed in frequent (almost daily) project meetings.

…

A million lines of code were written over 31 months by about eight people: that’s about 1000 lines per person per week.2 And that doesn’t include the code in the prototypes.

…

The core architecture team met daily to hammer out C++ class interfaces, to discuss overall algorithms and approaches, and to develop the basic underlying mechanisms on which the system would be built. These daily meetings were several hours in duration; from what I heard, the project was made more of meetings than anything else

Estimation

“When estimating time, upgrade the units and double the estimate (e.g. convert “one week” to “two months”).”

What Really Happened with Vista

The bet on C# and managed code was poorly motivated and poorly executed. This failure in particular can be laid directly on Bill Gates and his fruitless Holy Grail effort to create a universal storage and universal canvas applications infrastructure. This had especially long-running consequences.

…

“Windows 95 was initially Windows 93 and important target functionality was either dropped or shipped well short of the original functional target”

…

Is there a broad lesson to draw from this story? One is so fundamental as to be trite. Execution matters. There is no innovation without execution. The second is one that I took greatly to heart in my subsequent career. If you want to do broad ambitious things, you need to be accountable to articulate why it is the right thing to do. You need to be able to write down your basic thesis and the evidence behind it and then defend it. In fact, the more power you hold, the more accountable you need to be to open yourself to honest challenge on either facts or logic. This is even more critical in times of rapid change because the facts and consequential logic might change. Accountability and transparency means you are able to reassess your conclusions and react quickly.

Augmenting Human Intellect, Douglas C. Engelbart

You can integrate your new ideas more easily, and thus harness your creativity more continuously, if you can quickly and flexibly change your working record. If it is easier to update any part of your working record to accommodate new developments in thought or circumstance, you will find it easier to incorporate more complex procedures in your way of doing things.

—

“You’re probably waiting for something impressive. What I’m trying to prime you for, though, is the realization that the impressive new tricks all are based upon lots of changes in the little things you do. This computerized system is used over and over and over again to help me do little things—where my methods and ways of handling little things are changed until, lo, they’ve added up and suddenly I can do impressive new things.”

—

“I found, when I learned to work with the structures and manipulation processes such as we have outlined, that I got rather impatient if I had to go back to dealing with the serial-statement structuring in books and journals, or other ordinary means of communicating with other workers. It is rather like having to project three-dimensional images onto two-dimensional frames and to work with them there instead of in their natural form. Actually, it is much closer to the truth to say that it is like trying to project n-dimensional forms (the concept structures, which we have seen can be related with many many nonintersecting links) onto a one-dimensional form (the serial string of symbols), where the human memory and visualization has to hold and picture the links and relationships. I guess that’s a natural feeling, though. One gets impatient any time he is forced into a restricted or primitive mode of operation—except perhaps for recreational purposes.

—

A number of people, outside our research group here, maintain stoutly that a practical augmentation system should not require the human to have to do any computer programming—they feel that this is too specialized a capability to burden people with. Well, what that means in our eyes, if translated to a home workshop, would be like saying that you can’t require the operating human to know how to adjust his tools, or set up jigs, or change drill sizes, and the like. You can see there that these skllls are easy to learn in the context of what the human has to learn anyway about using the tools, and that they provide for much greater flexibility in finding convenient ways to use the tools to help shape materials.

—

Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are [AI]

With the human contributing to a process, we find more and more as the process becomes complex that the value of the human’s contribution depends upon how much freedom he is given to be disorderly in his course of action.

“The function of a neuron is defined chiefly by its connections with other neurons.”

…

“New synapses are created at a staggering rate in the infant brain. In Brodmann area 17 alone, over half a million per second are produced between two and four months of age.”

…

“Persistent spiking is the trace of short-term memory, while persistent connections are the trace of long-term memory. To store information for long periods, the brain transfers it from activity to connections. To recall the information, the brain transfers it back from connections to activity.”

“Historically, most drugs have been discovered by chance.”

Attention span

“In 2015, Microsoft Canada published a report indicating that the average human attention span had shrunk from 12 to eight seconds between 2000 and 2013. The finding was widely reported at the time and elicited some shock – for about eight seconds.”

Alan Kay

“The Parc money came from Xerox, the ARPA money came from DoD via the Cold War, but was unfettered and in the public domain. The most important difference between the “Golden Age” funders and those of today, is that the former didn’t confuse responsibility with control — they were responsible but they knew that the researchers had to control the choice of projects and methods. The funders of today — most particularly the tech billionaires, but also execs in companies, bureaucrats in DARPA and NSF, etc — think that they have to control. This winds up with bad choices for goals and projects, and bad processes. The “Golden Age” funders “funded people, not projects”.

Managers

“I once gave a talk to Disney executives about “new ways to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs”. For example, set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. Demand golden coins from the geese rather than eggs. Demand platinum rather than gold. Require that the geese make plans and explain just how they will make the eggs that will be laid. Etc.”

What Will Software Look Like Once Anyone Can Create It?

“I think software is entering a new phase with its own version of the Maker Generation—people won’t want to buy one-size-fits-all solutions made by others, they’ll want to make it themselves. To put it back in Marc’s terms of ​software is eating the world​, soon ​makers will be eating software​.”

Re: Configuring a Dynabook (was: Off topic), Alan Kay

“I think Martin Luther was one of the earliest great User Interface designers — because he understood that you have to do much more than provide function to get large numbers of people to get fluent. You should always try to start with where the end-users are and then help them grow and change.”

Large Limits to Software Estimation [pdf], J. P. Lewis

Most experienced programmers have encountered projects where an apparently trivial subproblem turns out to be more difficult than the major anticipated problems.

The Interplay of Art and Science in Software [pdf], Bollinger

The creation of genuinely new software has far more in common with developing a new theory of physics than it does with producing cars or watches on an assembly line.

On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning

We shouldn’t accept a theoretical framework that places a priority on making the model simple over making it accurately reflect reality.

Causal Entropic Forces [pdf]

Adaptive behavior might emerge more generally in open thermodynamic systems as a result of physical agents acting with some or all of the systems’ degrees of freedom so as to maximize the overall diversity of accessible future paths of their worlds (causal entropic forcing).

…

In practice, such agents might estimate causal entropic forces through internal Monte Carlo sampling of future histories generated from learned models of their world. Such behavior would then ensure their uniform aptitude for adaptiveness to future change due to interactions with the environment, conferring a potential survival advantage, to the extent permitted by their strength (parametrized by a causal path temperature, Tc) and their ability to anticipate the future (parametrized by a causal time horizon, ).

Elm Is Wrong

The thing that separates good programmers from OK ones is the ability to which they can develop abstractions. From the best programmers we get libraries, and the rest of us write applications that use those libraries

Product-User Fit Comes Before Product-Market Fit

Power users are the biggest sign of product-user fit. Making the leap from product-user fit to product-market fit is about listening to these users to evolve your product to attract more users.

Time’s Arrow Traced to Quantum Source

https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-entanglement-drives-the-arrow-of-time-scientists-say-20140416/

Using an obscure approach to quantum mechanics that treated units of information as its basic building blocks, Lloyd spent several years studying the evolution of particles in terms of shuffling 1s and 0s. He found that as the particles became increasingly entangled with one another, the information that originally described them (a “1” for clockwise spin and a “0” for counterclockwise, for example) would shift to describe the system of entangled particles as a whole. It was as though the particles gradually lost their individual autonomy and became pawns of the collective state. Eventually, the correlations contained all the information, and the individual particles contained none. At that point, Lloyd discovered, particles arrived at a state of equilibrium, and their states stopped changing, like coffee that has cooled to room temperature.

…

The idea, presented in his 1988 doctoral thesis, fell on deaf ears. When he submitted it to a journal, he was told that there was “no physics in this paper.” Quantum information theory “was profoundly unpopular” at the time, Lloyd said, and questions about time’s arrow “were for crackpots and Nobel laureates who have gone soft in the head.” he remembers one physicist telling him.

“I was darn close to driving a taxicab,” Lloyd said.

Advances in quantum computing have since turned quantum information theory into one of the most active branches of physics. Lloyd is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recognized as one of the founders of the discipline, and his overlooked idea has resurfaced in a stronger form in the hands of the Bristol physicists. The newer proofs are more general, researchers say, and hold for virtually any quantum system.

“When Lloyd proposed the idea in his thesis, the world was not ready,” said Renato Renner, head of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at ETH Zurich. “No one understood it. Sometimes you have to have the idea at the right time.”

…

 It showed that as objects interact with their surroundings — as the particles in a cup of coffee collide with the air, for example — information about their properties “leaks out and becomes smeared over the entire environment,” Popescu explained. This local information loss causes the state of the coffee to stagnate even as the pure state of the entire room continues to evolve. Except for rare, random fluctuations, he said, “its state stops changing in time.”

…

In the new story of the arrow of time, it is the loss of information through quantum entanglement, rather than a subjective lack of human knowledge, that drives a cup of coffee into equilibrium with the surrounding room. The room eventually equilibrates with the outside environment, and the environment drifts even more slowly toward equilibrium with the rest of the universe.

…

According to the scientists, our ability to remember the past but not the future, another historically confounding manifestation of time’s arrow, can also be understood as a buildup of correlations between interacting particles. When you read a message on a piece of paper, your brain becomes correlated with it through the photons that reach your eyes. Only from that moment on will you be capable of remembering what the message says. As Lloyd put it: “The present can be defined by the process of becoming correlated with our surroundings.”

The Genius Neuroscientist Who Might Hold the Key to True AI https://www.wired.com/story/karl-friston-free-energy-principle-artificial-intelligence/ [AI]

Free energy is the difference between the states you expect to be in and the states your sensors tell you that you are in. Or, to put it another way, when you are minimizing free energy, you are minimizing surprise.

…

In seeking to predict what the next wave of sensations is going to tell it—and the next, and the next—the brain is constantly making inferences and updating its beliefs based on what the senses relay back, and trying to minimize prediction-error signals

…

When the brain makes a prediction that isn’t immediately borne out by what the senses relay back, Friston believes, it can minimize free energy in one of two ways: It can revise its prediction—absorb the surprise, concede the error, update its model of the world—or it can act to make the prediction true.

…

When the brain assigns too little or too much weight to evidence pouring in from the senses, trouble occurs. Someone with schizophrenia, for example, may fail to update their model of the world to account for sensory input from the eyes. Where one person might see a friendly neighbor, Hillary might see a giant, evil crow. “If you think about psychiatric conditions, and indeed most neurological conditions, they are just broken beliefs or false inference—hallucinations and delusions,” Friston says.

…

After all, according to the free energy principle, the fundamental drive of human thought isn’t to seek some arbitrary external reward. It’s to minimize prediction error. Clearly, neural networks ought to do the same. 

…

The first time I asked Friston about the connection between the free energy principle and artificial intelligence, he predicted that within five to 10 years, most machine learning would incorporate free energy minimization.

Computing is Everywhere: Bret Victor and Dynamicland https://postlight.com/trackchanges/podcast/computing-is-everywhere [Fibery, Self]

And um they decided that they didn’t want to take the risk. That they wanted to make something that was kind of known bad instead of something that was risky but could be really good

…

my style has always been: come up with things and then put it on the internet, so everybody can learn from that

…

I just didn’t really have the kind of temperament for going really deep on a scientific problem. I was more of a toolmaker. I wanted to make tools that enabled other people to rally other people in the problem 

…

And I made a number of prototypes for that which — some of them have leaked out into other um other venues but ultimately, for various reasons, I realized that that environment of a screen based app was not the right thing to make.

…

That’s why I had to create this new medium in order to create the thing that I wanted to create in it.

…

Also, everyone, don’t try to hire Bret. He’s busy for the next 30 years.

General Magic tried to invent a smartphone in the 1990s. This is why it failed. https://www.vox.com/2018/7/30/17628766/general-magic-smartphone-apple-iphone-documentary-sarah-kerruish-matt-maude-kara-swisher-podcast

When people found out that Bill and Andy and Joanna were working on this secret project, they didn’t know what it was, what it could be, but they just wanted to work with these amazing people.

…

They tried to ship perfection. I think General Magic and other companies like them led to this way that we develop today, this agile method of development, because they would work at this thing for two or three years and then, ta-dah! Of course, if no one bought it that was catastrophic, and particularly in General Magic’s case.

…

To me, he represents somebody who really took the lessons of General Magic. Really, if things aren’t working, break it down, start again, iterate, iterate until it is perfect.

…

I think one of it is that when you’re trying to achieve perfection, you can’t do it all at once. If General Magic had potentially iterated in a way that the iPod did, that they released a different iteration of the iPod every single year and just encapsulated new features, and that six, seven years later that iPod become the iPhone, General Magic could quite easily have done that rather than trying to put five years of work just into one device.

…

they were too early and they just couldn’t ship a product that people wanted in any meaningful volume. I think, fundamentally, they lost heart. I think they really did lose heart.

…

I think when you work that hard and that intensely on something — and they worked harder than anyone I’ve ever seen, I mean years and years. People pull all-nighters at tech companies, so that’s not unusual, but this was years of it. People really gave up a huge part of their lives to do this, and I think at the end of the day Tony, as I said, said, “Look, this is how I think we can make a product that will sell.” I think Andy said, “I think we’re just too …” There was a famous meeting, actually, where Andy said, “We’re just too tired and we can’t pivot. We can’t make that shift.”

…

We haven’t talked about this, but I think it’s really important, and I think the magicians would admit this, that hubris played an element in it. I think you have to have this certain incredible faith in your abilities to pull off miraculous things and walk through walls when you’re trying to do something as technologically hard as they were. At the same time, there was a certain hubris where they weren’t willing to look outside of their world and their bubble. I think that really was instrumental in their failure.

Henrik Joreteg, Architecting UIs for Change https://joreteg.com/blog/architecting-uis-for-change

On the flip-side, I also feel a huge sense of relief when I refactor something that was starting to slip into disorder and then manage to create the right abstraction that lets us reign it in. Doing this can be downright euphoric.

…

2-5 years after the initial build someone comes along as says: “this is all garbage, we need to re-write it.”

…

UIs, by their very nature, are all about connecting disparate types of data! 

…

Don’t introduce any other sources of truth. If you’re doing the “god object” thing. By all means, don’t have multiple “gods.”

Aimee Groth, Is holacracy the future of work or a management cult? https://qz.com/work/1397516/is-holacracy-the-future-of-work-or-a-management-cult/ [Organization Design]

“We were focused so much on how we were working, we were failing our customers.”

“Google has a very effective team culture,” he says. “Holacracy is designed to work in a dysfunctional organization, which Google most definitely is not. So my teammates are asking, ‘Why are we doing that? We’re not broken.’” Following the set meeting format prescribed by holacracy felt awkward for members of the Cloud team, as it does for most everyone, especially in the beginning. “The structure that holacracy imposed was foreign to our habit of open discussion,” he said.

“In the beginning, you feel that the human element is lost completely,” Jamie Naughton, Hsieh’s chief of staff, told Quartz previously. “I remember sitting in meetings wanting to scream at the founder of holacracy, ‘You don’t get it, you don’t get it at all!’ He said, ‘You’ve got to trust the process.’ And I thought, ‘This sucks.’ You just have to wait your turn to speak your opinion.”

Holacracy is “so difficult and so complex,” said Harvard’s Lee. “One of the things that I think is underappreciated is that holacracy and systems of self-management introduce a lot of complexity into the organization. That complexity can be overwhelming. Hierarchy is very simple. Some argue [holacracy] requires greater levels of consciousness to deal with complexity.”

Paul Graham http://paulgraham.com/pow.html [Self]

People who are powerful but uncharismatic will tend to be disliked. Their power makes them a target for criticism that they don’t have the charisma to disarm. That was Hillary Clinton’s problem. It also tends to be a problem for any CEO who is more of a builder than a schmoozer. And yet the builder-type CEO is (like Hillary) probably the best person for the job.

I don’t think there is any solution to this problem. It’s human nature. The best we can do is to recognize that it’s happening, and to understand that being a magnet for criticism is sometimes a sign not that someone is the wrong person for a job, but that they’re the right one.

Angela Duckworth, Grit http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows-college/grit/angela-duckworth-grit.html [Self]

The gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon; his or her advantage is stamina. Whereas disappointment or boredom signals to others that it is time to change trajectory and cut losses, the gritty individual stays the course.

…

The gritty individual not only finishes tasks at hand but pursues a given aim over years Grit is also distinct from dependability aspects of conscientiousness, including self-control, in its specification of consistent goals and interests. An individual high in self-control but moderate in grit may, for example, effectively control his or her temper, stick to his or her diet, and resist the urge to surf the Internet at work—yet switch careers annually

…

As we predicted, more educated adults were higher in grit than were less educated adults of equal age.

…

Our intuition is that grit grows with age and that one learns from experience that quitting plans, shifting goals, and starting over repeatedly are not good strategies for success. In fact, a strong desire for novelty and a low threshold for frustration may be adaptive earlier in life: Moving on from dead-end pursuits is essential to the discovery of more promising paths. However, as Ericsson and Charness (1994) demonstrated, excellence takes time, and discovery must at some point give way to development.

…

First, children who demonstrate exceptional commitment to a particular goal should be supported with as many resources as those identified as “gifted and talented.” Second, as educators and parents, we should encourage children to work not only with intensity but also with stamina. In particular, we should prepare youth to anticipate failures and misfortunes and point out that excellence in any discipline requires years and years of time on task. Finally, liberal arts universities that encourage undergraduates to sample broadly should recognize the ineluctable trade-off between breadth and depth. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, the goal of an education is not just to learn a little about a lot but also a lot about a little.

Someone [AI]

In response to this challenge, neuroevolution researchers have explored a different class of genetic encodings called indirect encodings (as opposed to direct), where the number of genes can be much fewer than the number of connections and neurons in the brain. In other words, the “DNA” is a compressed representation of the brain. 

Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence https://distill.pub/2017/aia/ [Fibery]

But while using a cliched interface may be easy and fun, it’s an ease similar to reading a formulaic romance novel. It means the interface does not reveal anything truly surprising about its subject area. And so it will do little to deepen the user’s understanding, or to change the way they think. For mundane tasks that is fine, but for deeper tasks, and for the longer term, you want a better interface.

Ideally, an interface will surface the deepest principles underlying a subject, revealing a new world to the user. When you learn such an interface, you internalize those principles, giving you more powerful ways of reasoning about that world.

The purpose of the best interfaces isn’t to be user-friendly in some shallow sense. It’s to be user-friendly in a much stronger sense, reifying deep principles[20] about the world, making them the working conditions in which users live and create. At that point what once appeared strange can instead becomes comfortable and familiar, part of the pattern of thought

…

Interface design means developing the fundamental primitives human beings think and create with

Ben Fathi, What Really Happened with Vista: An Insider’s Retrospective

https://medium.com/@benbob/what-really-happened-with-vista-an-insiders-retrospective-f713ee77c239 [Software Development]

By far the biggest problem with Windows releases, in my humble opinion, was the length of each release. On average, a release took about three years from inception to completion but only about six to nine months of that time was spent developing “new” code. The rest of the time was spent in integration, testing, alpha and beta periods — each lasting a few months.

 Different teams were responsible for code bases in various states of health resulting in a model where “the rich got richer and the poor got poorer” over time — teams that fell behind, for one reason or another, more often than not stayed behind.

The response, not surprisingly for a wildly successful platform, was to dig its heels in and keep incrementally improving the existing system — innovator’s dilemma in a nutshell. The more code we added, the more complexity we created, the larger the team got, the bigger the ecosystem, the harder it became to leapfrog the competition.

Windows was a victim of its own success. It had penetrated many markets successfully and each of those businesses now exerted some influence on the design of the operating system pulling it in different, and often conflicting, directions. Trying to deliver on all of those disparate requirements meant not satisfying any one of them completely.

The best thing we could have done was to enable incremental and friction-free delivery of new cloud based services to an ever-simplifying device. Instead, we kept adding features to an existing client-based monolithic system that required many months of testing before each release, slowing us down just when we needed to speed up. And, of course, we didn’t dare remove old pieces of functionality which were needed in the name of compatibility by applications already running on previous releases of Windows.

In hindsight, Linux has been more successful in this respect. The open source community and approach to software development is undoubtedly part of the solution. The modular and pluggable architecture of Unix/Linux is also a big architectural improvement in this respect.

Dev and test teams were often at odds, the former pushing hard to get code checked in while the latter was rewarded for finding ever more complex and esoteric test cases that had no earthly resemblance to customer environments. The internal dynamics were complex, to say the least. As if that weren’t enough, at least once a year we had a massive reorg and new organizational dynamics to deal with.

[Education]

Dave Evans was not a great believer in graduate school as an institution. As with many of the ARPA “contractors” he wanted his students to be doing “real things”;

Implementing VisiCalc https://rmf.vc/implementingvisicalc [Fibery]

I started to program VisiCalc in November 1978 and we shipped the first production copy in October 1979.  In November of 1978 I started to prototype VisiCalc. We eventually shipped that prototype.

The goal was to give the user a conceptual model which was unsurprising — it was called the principle of least surprise. We were illusionists synthesizing an experience. Our model was the spreadsheet — a simple paper grid that would be laid out on a table. The paper grid provided an organizing metaphor for a working with series of numbers. While the spreadsheet is organized we also had the back-of-envelope model which treated any surface as a scratch pad for working out ideas.

The original method for copying formulas was too complicated so we just changed the design rather than try to explain it.

Note that it was always “recalculate” — the first calculation was just an unimportant special case.

Before discussing keyboards, it’s worth noting that back in 1979 people viewed the keyboard as an impediment to using computers.

There were neither interrupts nor a clock. If the user typed a character before the keyboard input buffer was emptied, it would be lost.

This was also one reason we didn’t allow people to give the cells themselves names. The bigger reason was that it wasn’t necessary and the most proficient users, those who would most value such a feature, seemed to be very well served without them. But we did consider allowing the use of labels instead of cell names but, given the limits of the Apple ][, it never became an issue.

There were a small number of commands in VisiCalc and we used the / as the “command key”. Remember that there were no function keys. The legacy of the / lasted long after VisiCalc and people used to expect / to be the command key on the IBM PC even for word processors.

The / itself was chosen because it seemed obvious to me and was otherwise available. But it was also a good choice for Dan whose fingers just happened to be a little crooked and were predisposed to reach that key.

One of the early applications for VisiCalc was my 1979 tax form. I created @lookup for that purpose.

One guiding principle was to always have functioning code. It was the scaffolding and all I needed to do was flesh it out. Or not. Since the program held together omitting a feature was a choice and it gave us flexibility.

I was lucky in that basic architecture was viable. Well, after programming for 15 years I did have some idea of how to write such a program so it was more than luck. 

Patrick McKenzie https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/business-of-saas [Startup]

Bootstrapped SaaS businesses often take 18 months before they’re profitable enough to be competitive with reasonable wages for the founding team. After achieving that point, bootstrapped businesses have a wide range of acceptable outcomes for growth rates; 10~20% year over year growth rates in revenue can produce very, very happy outcomes for all concerned.

…

The rule of thumb for growth rate expectations at a successful SaaS company being managed for aggressive growth is 3, 3, 2, 2, 2: starting from a material baseline (e.g. over $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR)), the business needs to triple annual revenues for two consecutive years and then double them for three consecutive years. A funded SaaS business which consistently grows by 20% per year early in its life is likely a failure in the eyes of its investors.

…

Churn rates, though, are closely clustered: roughly 10% annualized churn is reasonable for companies in their early years. 7% is an excellent churn rate.

HyperCard Manual [Fibery]

HyperCard™ is a new kind of application-a unique information environment for your Apple® Macintosh™ computer. Use it to look for and store information-words, charts, pictures, digitized photographs-about any subject that suits you. Any piece of information in HyperCard can connect to any other piece of information, so you can find out what you want to know in as much or as little detail as you need.

Frank Halasz http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.124.2308&rep=rep1&type=pdf [Fibery]

NoteCards is fully integrated into the Xerox Lisp programming environment. It includes a widely used programmer’s interface with over 100 Lisp functions that allow the user to create new types of cards, develop programs that monitor or process a network, integrate Lisp programs (e.g., an animation editor) into the NoteCards environment, and/or integrate NoteCards into another Lisp-based environment (e.g., an expert system).

…

This generic nature of hypermedia systems is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because it allows hypermedia to be useful in a wide variety of task domains and user populations. It is a curse because generic hypermedia is not particularly well suited to any specific task or style of use. Thus, hypermedia users are faced with a tool that is clearly useful but not particularly well adapted to the specific task at hand.

The problem is that each new NoteCards user is faced with a significant database design task. The user has a familiar collection of information that must be translated into some NoteCards structure. This representation task is not always straightforward since the familiar structure of the information may be very different from the cards, links, and fileboxes provided by the system. For example, in a legal application the user might have entities such as cases, briefs, evidence, citations, etc. that need to be filed and interconnected in accordance with a standard set of legal relationships. To the casual user it is not obvious how to do this. Should each case be a text card or a filebox? Should evidence be stored in the same card as the case or in a separate card connected to the case by a link? What type of link? In large database systems, such design problems are usually assigned to a professional database designer. In hypermedia systems, these problems are frequently left in the laps of individual users.

…

Despite its success, the NoteCards programmer’s interface failed to meet one of its explicit design goals: that minor changes to NoteCards should be achievable with a small amount of work by casual, nonprogramming users.

Someone at HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10753028 [Fibery]

Just an idea to share, from someone who’s been building business apps using Knack’s visual builder for the past year, I think a killer combination would be fieldbook’s friendly UX for the database with a “marketplace” of front-end “plug-and-play” UI modules. So in fieldbook I would create and save views for the database with your current UI but then I could plug ready-made UI modules on top of that database view and then customize the front-end UI. Ideally these UI modules would be free or pay web-based or native.

Andrew Catton, Currently Twitter formerly Dabble DB https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Dabble-DB-never-get-any-traction [Fibery]

While doubtless the product could have been even better than it was, our solid conversion & retention rates* suggested that it wasn’t ease of use or difficulty understanding databases that limited Dabble’s growth to OK-but-not-hockey-stick numbers. Rather, the problem was on the big end of the funnel: there just aren’t that many people searching for something as generic as an “online database”. More likely, they are trying to solve a very particular problem like “track my team”, or “plan my wedding”. With a generic product, even with the help of domain-specific landing pages or template apps, you are still competing with other more specific offerings on their own terms: on the product, marketing, and price point fronts. Also, while we certainly had some success with word-of-mouth spread, since this sort of tool tends to be problem-driven (you don’t care about it until you have a problem it solves), the viral effects were muted.  One of the great benefits of a generic tool like Dabble was that you could learn it once and apply it to many problems. This became apparent to many once they became users, and we were great at turning casual users into heavy users. However, given the marketing problems, a limited number of users were ever in a position to realize this benefit.  *It’s likely also true that our difficulties in marketing a generic tool made our customers somewhat self-selecting, such that our conversion/retention numbers would be artificially inflated.

Zhao, Co-founder of Notion [Fibery]

“There was a lot more diverging in the early days. We were studying the history and all the dead products on the path. But it’s fundamentally about solving people’s problems. Do we make them more productive at work? Do we solve their daily needs?” — Ivan

Щедровицкий [Fibery]

“Когда мы кладем асфальт, то мы определённым образом организуем процессы, канализируем, направляем их. Англичане делают так: они сажают газон в парках, люди ходят, протаптывают дорожки, потом через некоторое время протоптанную дорожку асфальтируют. Что здесь происходит? Я описал бы это так: сначала дают возможность процессуализировать материал, образуются естественные дорожки, после этого их организуют асфальтом. У нас же сначала организуется пространство, исходя из идей симметрии и ещё каких-то абстрактных принципов, а потом начинается борьба этой организации с соответствующим процессом.”

The Paradigms of Programming, Robert Floyd

1
The state of the art of computer programming was recently referred to by Robert Balzer in these words: “It is well known that software is in a depressed state. It is unreliable, delivered late, unresponsive to change, inefficient, and expensive. Furthermore, since it is currently labor intensive, the situation will further deteriorate as demand increases and labor costs rise.”

2
Again from Kuhn:
The older schools gradually disappear. In part their disappearance is
caused by their members’ conversion to the new paradigm. But there are
always some men who cling to one or another of the older views, and they
are simply read out of the profession, which thereafter ignores their work.

In computing, there is no mechanism for reading such men out of the profession. I suspect they mainly become managers of software development

3
If the advancement of the general art of programming requires the continuing invention and elaboration of paradigms, advancement of the art of the individual programmer requires that he expand his repertory of paradigms. 

4
A paradigm at an even higher level of abstraction than the structured programming
paradigm is the construction of a hierarchy of languages, where programs in the highest level language operate on the most abstract objects, and are translated into programs on the next lower level language. Examples include the numerous formula-manipulation languages which have been constructed on top of Lisp, Fortran, and other languages. Most of our lower level languages fail to fully support such superstructures.

5
I believe that the continued advance of programming as a craft requires development and dissemination of languages which support the major paradigms of their user’s communities. 

6
If I ask another professor what he teaches in the introductory programming course, whether he answers proudly “Pascal” or diffidently “FORTRAN,” I know that he is teaching a grammar, a set of semantic rules, and some finished algorithms, leaving the students to discover, on their own, some process of design.

You and Your Research, Richard W. Hamming

Courage
One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can’t, almost surely you are not going to. 

Age
Most mathematicians, theoretical physicists, and astrophysicists do what we consider their best work when they are young. It is not that they don’t do good work in their old age but what we value most is often what they did early. On the other hand, in music, politics and literature, often what we consider their best work was done late. I don’t know how whatever field you are in fits this scale, but age has some effect.

Drive
You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode’s office and said, “How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?” He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, “You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.” I simply slunk out of the office!

Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.

The misapplication of effort is a very serious matter. Just hard work is not enough - it must be applied sensibly.

Commitment
It comes down to an emotional commitment. Most great scientists are completely committed to their problem. Those who don’t become committed seldom produce outstanding, first-class work.

If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there’s the answer.

Problems
If you want to do great work, you clearly must work on important problems, and you should have an idea.

Most great scientists know many important problems. They have something between 10 and 20 important problems for which they are looking for an attack. 

By changing a problem slightly you can often do great work rather than merely good work. 

Open/Closed Doors
Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.

Selling
There are three things you have to do in selling. You have to learn to write clearly and well so that people will read it, you must learn to give reasonably formal talks, and you also must learn to give informal talks.

Educate your boss
Now you might tell me you haven’t got control over what you have to work on. Well, when you first begin, you may not. But once you’re moderately successful, there are more people asking for results than you can deliver and you have some power of choice, but not completely. I’ll tell you a story about that, and it bears on the subject of educating your boss. I had a boss named Schelkunoff; he was, and still is, a very good friend of mine. Some military person came to me and demanded some answers by Friday. Well, I had already dedicated my computing resources to reducing data on the fly for a group of scientists; I was knee deep in short, small, important problems. This military person wanted me to solve his problem by the end of the day on Friday. I said, “No, I’ll give it to you Monday. I can work on it over the weekend. I’m not going to do it now.” He goes down to my boss, Schelkunoff, and Schelkunoff says, “You must run this for him; he’s got to have it by Friday.” I tell him, “Why do I?”; he says, “You have to.” I said, “Fine, Sergei, but you’re sitting in your office Friday afternoon catching the late bus home to watch as this fellow walks out that door.” I gave the military person the answers late Friday afternoon. I then went to Schelkunoff’s office and sat down; as the man goes out I say, “You see Schelkunoff, this fellow has nothing under his arm; but I gave him the answers.” On Monday morning Schelkunoff called him up and said, “Did you come in to work over the weekend?” I could hear, as it were, a pause as the fellow ran through his mind of what was going to happen; but he knew he would have had to sign in, and he’d better not say he had when he hadn’t, so he said he hadn’t. Ever after that Schelkunoff said, “You set your deadlines; you can change them.”

After all, if you want a decision `No’, you just go to your boss and get a `No’ easy. If you want to do something, don’t ask, do it. Present him with an accomplished fact. Don’t give him a chance to tell you `No’. But if you want a `No’, it’s easy to get a `No’.

Anger
Another fault is anger. Often a scientist becomes angry, and this is no way to handle things. Amusement, yes, anger, no. Anger is misdirected. You should follow and cooperate rather than struggle against the system all the time.

Summary
In summary, I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don’t succeed are: they don’t work on important problems, they don’t become emotionally involved, they don’t try and change what is difficult to some other situation which is easily done but is still important, and they keep giving themselves alibis why they don’t. They keep saying that it is a matter of luck.

on Brainstorming, Richard W. Hamming

Question: Is brainstorming a daily process?

Hamming: Once that was a very popular thing, but it seems not to have paid off. For myself I find it desirable to talk to other people; but a session of brainstorming is seldom worthwhile. I do go in to strictly talk to somebody and say, “Look, I think there has to be something here. Here’s what I think I see …” and then begin talking back and forth. But you want to pick capable people. To use another analogy, you know the idea called the `critical mass.’ If you have enough stuff you have critical mass. There is also the idea I used to call `sound absorbers’. When you get too many sound absorbers, you give out an idea and they merely say, “Yes, yes, yes.” What you want to do is get that critical mass in action; “Yes, that reminds me of so and so,” or, “Have you thought about that or this?” When you talk to other people, you want to get rid of those sound absorbers who are nice people but merely say, “Oh yes,” and to find those who will stimulate you right back.

For example, you couldn’t talk to John Pierce without being stimulated very quickly. There were a group of other people I used to talk with. For example there was Ed Gilbert; I used to go down to his office regularly and ask him questions and listen and come back stimulated. I picked my people carefully with whom I did or whom I didn’t brainstorm because the sound absorbers are a curse. They are just nice guys; they fill the whole space and they contribute nothing except they absorb ideas and the new ideas just die away instead of echoing on. Yes, I find it necessary to talk to people. I think people with closed doors fail to do this so they fail to get their ideas sharpened, such as “Did you ever notice something over here?” I never knew anything about it - I can go over and look. Somebody points the way. On my visit here, I have already found several books that I must read when I get home. I talk to people and ask questions when I think they can answer me and give me clues that I do not know about. I go out and look!

Colin Ware [Visualization]

The power of a visualization is that we can have a far more complex concept structure represented externally in a visual display than can be held in visual and verbal working memory

Ben Shneiderman [Visualization]

The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures.

How Ravelry Scales To 10 Million Requests Using Rails

The database is always the problem. Nearly all of the scaling/tuning/performance related work is database related. For example, MySQL schema changes on large tables are painful if you don’t want any downtime. One of the arguments for schemaless databases.

The Black Team

A group of slightly above-average people assigned to do what many considered an unglamorous and thankless task not only achieved success beyond anyone’s wildest expectations, but undoubtedly had a great time doing it and wound up becoming legends in their field.

Class Warfare: Classes vs. Prototypes, Brian Foote [Software Development]

Class-based architectures can impose a degree of structural rigidity on a system that can stifle its evolution. This is because they do not allow the kind of dynamic system reorganization that prototype-based architectures permit. This rigidity can be particularly harmful in mature, successful systems that must then evolve further to meet a host of new requirements. It is essential that the structure of a system be able to evolve in such a way that it matches that of the problem itself. (Form must continue to follow function.)

Tom DeMarco on project control

This leads us to the odd conclusion that strict control is something that matters a lot on relatively useless projects and much less on useful projects. So, how do you manage a project without controlling it? Well, you manage the people and control the time and money. You say to your team leads, for example, “I have a finish date in mind, and I’m not even going to share it with you. When I come in one day and tell you the project will end in one week, you have to be ready to package up and deliver what you’ve got as the final product. Your job is to go about the project incrementally, adding pieces to the whole in the order of their relative value, and doing integration and documentation and acceptance testing incrementally as you go. Consistency and predictability are still desirable, but they haven’t ever been the most important things.

Embrace edge of chaos, Chris Jones

Chasing silver bullets and big/easy leverage points is human nature, I suppose, especially in business. And I think the western world equates certainty with survival, or at least success. Uncertainty seems the path to failure, a sure ticket to the great smelter. No wonder most people cling to any amount of certainty when the pointers of complexity science are all going the other way. In western thinking, people want the last chord to resolve. Newton resonates. Simple formulas are reassuring in a world that’s revealing its complex nature.

What OOP isn’t Benjamin Supnik [Programming]

Bad programmers have proven to be surprisingly resourceful at writing bad code given virtually any programming idiom

Steve Jobs [Organization Design]

the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not

Solitude and Leadership, William Deresiewicz

1
That’s really the great mystery about bureaucracies. Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities?

2
I promise you that you will meet these people and you will find yourself in environments where what is rewarded above all is conformity

3
No, what makes him a thinker—and a leader—is precisely that he is able to think things through for himself. And because he can, he has the confidence, the courage, to argue for his ideas even when they aren’t popular. 

4
And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.

5
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom

6
Marlow believes in the need to find yourself just as much as anyone does, and the way to do it, he says, is work, solitary work. Concentration. Climbing on that steamboat and spending a few uninterrupted hours hammering it into shape. Or building a house, or cooking a meal, or even writing a college paper, if you really put yourself into it.

7
You have to be prepared in advance. You need to know, already, who you are and what you believe: not what the Army believes, not what your peers believe (that may be exactly the problem), but what you believe.

Don’t start too big, Eric Sink

In any software company, it’s important to find a way to keep your 1.0 cycle as short as possible while still building a product which will generate revenue. This is a delicate balancing act, I admit. If your 1.0 release is light on features, fewer people will buy it. If you build the product that will appeal to the bulk of your market, it will take too long. Where’s the happy medium? … The purpose of 1.0 is to help pay for the development of 2.0, and so on.

Risk in Projects: The Total Tool Set, Thomsett

One of the most destructive behaviors in project management is the “unjustified optimism” that many less experienced project managers, many stakeholders and executives seem to hold on to when planning projects.

Hyperion

‘Do you think it’s ready?’ I asked.
‘It’s perfect … a masterpiece.’
‘Do you think it’ll sell?’ I asked.
‘No fucking way.’

Gerrit Noordzij, Education

“The playing child explores space and time. Education is the part of others in this play. Soviet pedagogists restrict education to the influence of authorities. This is, indeed, a good reason for me to reject Soviet pedagogy: In education the others are parents and teachers, but playmates and lovers as well. Education is everything that takes the child seriously in its play. The rest, pedagogic in its pretensions or not, is not education but terror”

Andy Grove, CEO, Intel

“None of us have a real understanding of where we are heading. I don’t. I have senses about it. But decisions don’t wait, investment decisions or personal decisions and prioritization don’t wait, for that picture to be clarified. You have to make them when you have to make them. So you take your shots and clean up the bad ones later. I think it is very important for you to do two things: act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction; and when you realize that you are wrong, correct course very quickly.”