Joy & Curiosity #18

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

Here we are, here we are. Feliz Navidad is upon us.

Eight years ago, nearly to the day, I was at a Christmas market with my colleagues. We were talking, drinking mulled wine, shuffling around to keep our feet warm. A month earlier I had started selling my book and someone asked me: so, did you make some money? Yeah, I said, the launch went well, sold more copies than I thought I would.

You should invest it all in Bitcoin, one of my colleagues suggested. Since it was Christmastime, we told him to shut up and that he’s a fool. Bitcoin, get outta here.

Then another colleague — I swear this is true — said that, no, I should invest it all in Tesla stock. We looked at him as if he had just said “I’m an even bigger idiot than the other guy” and laughed. You’re an even bigger idiot than the other guy, I think one of us told him. It was Christmastime.

What I’m trying to say is this: I don’t have financial advice for you, I only have a bag of links here. Enjoy.

• I’m a sucker for company handbooks so was quite happy to see that there’s now “the highest quality publicly available version of the Little Red Book”, the book that “distilled Facebook’s ethos—breaking things, thinking big, and moving fast—into a manifesto”.

• Jimmy Miller is doing an Advent of Papers. I have to admit that I haven’t read a single paper here, but get fun out of following Jimmy’s commentary. I mean, one post is titled: “Google's Awful Paper on Technical Debt”

• If you aren’t one of the 8.5M people who have done so already, I recommend watching this lecture on the “Craft of Writing Effectively”. It’s very good. It’s the writing equivalent of ABC monologue in Glengarry Glen Ross. When Baldwin says “get them to sign on the line which is dotted”, it also means: “Here’s what your writing does. It helps a particular set of readers understand better something they wanna understand well. That’s what its job is. All this other stuff — being structured, being creative, being written, dealing with subject — is how you fulfill the function.”

• Apparently how they made slides at Apple. Love “one idea, one slide” and the “font size 30 or above” rules.

• After you watched both videos, read this Jason Pargin piece (ignore the URL, ignore the title, ignore the pictures). I re-read that 2-3 times a year. Seriously.

• Don’t know what to think about this post about working at an art gallery yet. But I keep thinking about it. I’m not sure yet whether it falls into the “huh, why didn’t everyone figure out this thing that I, a humble person, figured out immediately” genre, which I’m not a fan of, but I liked this: “something that became clear to me at the gallery, and from working with people like A and B who did art at a high level, is that you simply can’t afford to do good stuff if you don’t figure out the funding part.”

• I shouldn’t be surprised, and yet I am: people are modding microphones.

• Roaming RAG means to “put the LLM assistant to work. Let it navigate through the documentation and find the answers.” Dude.

• I’ve only skimmed it, but Michael Nielsen asking “How to be a wise optimist about science and technology?” is very interesting.

• This Tumblr post is constantly on my mind: “If your solution to some problem relies on ‘If everyone would just…’ then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.” That might just be the biggest lesson I’ve learned in my career. Learned at a startup that tried to get people to use their cars less. Even if everyone says they would, no, everyone is not going to just.