Josh's Notes About Index Random RSS Feed Newsletter Latest Notes 🍃 “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” ― Jane Goodall [[How To Make a Difference: In People's Lives, The Community, & The Wo... ➞ Sometimes people use "respect" to mean "treating someone like a person" and sometimes they use "respect" to mean "treating someone like an authority" and so... ➞ I recommend that teams receiving executive feedback try to “extract the kernel.” When you get a question from an executive, focus on understanding the insight or perspective within the question. Th... ➞ For example, let's take the simple question: "How old are you?" First, there's a single sign for "question." So for a question about someone's age, you'd use the... ➞ Physical activity decreases the risk of a network of diseases, and exercise may be prescribed as medicine for lifestyle-related disorders such as type 2 diabetes, dementia, cardiovascular diseases,... ➞ The Maui surfer girls love each other’s hair. It is awesome hair, long and bleached by the sun, and it falls over their shoulders straight, like water, or in squiggles, like seaweed, or in waves. T... ➞ • If you don’t own your content, you’re stuck. Owning your content is necessary for agency! However, it is not sufficient, because… • If you own your content, but don’t own your contacts, then... ➞ combining search and AI chat is actually the wrong way to go and I think companies are making a big mistake by assuming they satisfy the same needs. Search is about surveying an overview of sources... ➞ As these stories pop up people act like they’re an incredible marvel of AI superintelligence. They’re no doubt interesting, but I’m old enough to remember when people were sharing the same stories…... ➞ Last year I moved onto a street that had a ton of litter. I lived with it for about a month before I realized how easy it would be to walk a loop and pick it all up. For the first six weeks or so, ... ➞ I am reminded of one of Matt Mochary’s teaching: when you have to do a task, which takes away your energy, and cannot be delegated to someone else, them make it “exquisite”. Next time I have to “p... ➞ if the US government does default, that will probably cause the prices of Treasury bonds to go up , since a government debt default is a crisis and crises cause a flight to safety and the safest as... ➞ Strong commitment in design is good for dementia, where challenges in memory about time are frequently attended by confusion about space—where I am now, where I was before, where I’m headed next. M... ➞ The law states that any circulating currency consisting of both "good" and "bad" money (both forms required to be accepted at equal value under legal tender law) quickly becomes... ➞ One major purpose of dataflow analysis is observing safety constraints across reordering transformations. If a statement S writes to a variable V, S is said to define V. If statement S reads from a... ➞ The directed multigraph defined by interpreting basic blocks as vertices, and flow relationships as edges, yields its control flow graph (CFG). A start node exists for each CFG, corresponding to th... ➞ Subsequent branch-free instructions make up segments of linear code. The first instruction of the program is a leader, as is every target of a branch, and every instruction immediately following a ... ➞ I was taken with this cybernetic description of an aircraft factory from sci-fi author Bob Shaw (in his collection Tomorrow Lies in Anguish). An aircraft factory is a machine for producing aero... ➞ "It's interesting how every build system, frontend framework, programming language implements its own promise pipeline/delayed execution/observables/event propagation." This rings so... ➞ A responsibility assignment matrix[1] (RAM), also known as RACI matrix[2] (/ˈreɪsi/) or linear responsibility chart[3] (LRC), describes the participation by various roles in completing tasks or del... ➞ I designed the RAMBO Model as a simple framework to lead a great engineering organization. It was born out of a recognition that all engineering organizations are made up of the same 5 components: ... ➞ Speaking from a systems design point of view, we say that all real-world systems are "causal": that is, outputs are produced after inputs, never before. As a result, every component you a... ➞ much of science is straightforward, logical, almost rote. It's easy to ask questions; toddlers do it. It's not too hard to hire grad student lab assistants to execute experiments. It's ... ➞ the recently discovered aperiodic monotile: Monotile image Monotile image by Smith, Myers, Kaplan, and Goodman-Strauss, 2023 The monotile is a surprisingly simple shape that, when tiled compac... ➞ few days ago I did something that I never thought I’d do again, and started putting some of our more critical logs in Postgres. Never, ever do this, unless: • You’re draining only canonical log... ➞