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Taken from the title of Chinese sci-fi writer Liu Cixin’s 2008 book, “the dark forest”region of the web is becoming increasingly important as a space of online communication for users of all ages and political persuasions. In part, this is because it is less sociologically stressful than the clearnet zone, where one is subject to peer, employer, and state exposure. It also now includes Discord servers, paid newsletters (e.g., Substack), encrypted group messaging (via Telegram, etc.), gaming communities, podcasts, and other off-clearnet message board forums and social media. One forages for content or shares in what others in the community have retrieved rather than accepting whatever the platform algorithms happen to match to your data profile. Additionally, dark forest spaces are both minimally and straightforwardly commercial. There is typically a small charge for entry, but once you are in, you are free to act and speak without the platform nudging your behavior or extracting further value. It is also interesting to keep in mind that the dark forest shares the same cables and satellite arrays as clearnet channels, is accessed via the same devices, and essentially all of its denizens continue to simultaneously participate in clearnet spaces (as contemporary professional protocol demands). It is therefore not analogous to legacy countercultural notions of going off-grid or “dropping out.”

A strong hint about the real future of virtual reality and a callback to the MUD era which I had a lot of trouble understanding. Seeing it on Tiktok makes it a lot more tangible in a bunch of ways.

A strong overview of the various considerations around going back to the office that will help a lot of companies who stand to make this decision right now. Particularly interesting how the German lagging context will deal with it and what consequences it will have on the commercial property markets.

An economic analysis of witch hunts in Germany that show it to be a pre-modern corrective for people who climbed out of their social position.

The organizational debt listed here is more the norm than the exception and a lot of management is dealing with unnecessarily suboptimal circumstances.

But on the other hand, it becomes a society where all the assets are in the hands of one group of people. And that group of people transmits these assets to the next generation. So I think it becomes a very interesting question, to ask whether current trends might not lead to an even more segmented and stratified society than the one we have now.

De organisatiestructuur is sowieso een kwetsbaarheid van Nederland crisisland, verzucht Arjen Boin. Allereerst is het probleem dat onze ministeries niet meer de capaciteiten in huis hebben om zelf het heft in handen te nemen. Den Haag heeft steeds meer een monitorende en coördinerende functie gekregen. Ambtenaren zijn in veel gevallen geen specialisten meer op de dossiers die ze beheren — hun specialiteit is vergaderen en managen en ze rouleren door de organisatie.Grofweg kun je als bestuur in tijden van crisis twee dingen doen: optie één is overschakelen op een crisisstructuur, zegt Boin. Daarbij centraliseer je de macht en breng je het aantal mensen dat mag meepraten terug. Dan kiezen we de mensen die namens ons de belangrijkste beslissingen nemen. Na afloop rekenen we af. Een crisisorganisatie is georganiseerd in een trechter. Aan het eind van die trechter zit de persoon die zich goed laat adviseren en op een gegeven moment zegt: ‘We gaan naar links of naar rechts.’ Uiteindelijk komt het bij de aanpak van zo’n crisis voor een groot deel aan op het politiek leiderschap

Elon Musk proving that he’s a peddler of garbage and global destruction once again.

The trimodal salary distribution for Amsterdam (and likely other cities as well) as displayed here is very useful information and will hopefully help push compensation (and innovation) in Europe closer to American levels.

The more experience you have, the more implicit authority you will have. It can be tough to understand that when you propose a silly idea over lunch when you have 5 years of experience has a very different impact than when you have 15 years of experience — someone might actually listen to you and go make it!Really, this is a great thing, a sort of influential power you gain. It needs love, care and maintenance though — always work on getting better, learning from your mistakes and improving on your experience. There’s nothing more dangerous for an organization than a person with terrible ideas whom everyone admires professionally.

[Cryptoart is] a crime against humanity.

https://hynek.me/articles/semver-will-not-save-you/

This is an interesting Instagram scam.

He believed that the ‘blood sacrifice’ of a few would regenerate the national consciousness and lead, by force of Irish arms, to the eventual withdrawal of Britain from Ireland.

And from that point on she micromanaged me, and I realized that she was fear-based, both in how she thought of her bosses and in terms of how she ran her team.

“The interesting thing about interactive media is that it allows the players to engage with a problem, conjure a solution, try out that solution, and then experience the results. Then they can go back to the thinking stage and start to plan out their next move. This process of trial and error builds the interactive world in their minds. This is the true canvas on which we design—not the screen. That’s something I always keep in mind when designing games.”

This article on the Huawei corporate culture is one of the worst possible ways to treat employees I’ve ever seen.

https://buriti.ca/6-lessons-i-learned-while-implementing-technical-rfcs-as-a-management-tool-34687dbf46cb

There’s going to be a need for operations in companies however much of their infrastructure they outsource and it’s going to be increasingly interesting and valuable work.

I immediately understand it but I’ve never seen it articulated as explicitly as here by the Singapore Civil Service College: “The main value in software is not the code produced, but the knowledge accumulated by the people who produced it.”

When it comes to software development most of these are good opinions and you can take them as yours without spending the six years Chris Kiehl needed (or the many more I did).

A very concrete framework with an example of how to give feedback at work.

Talking about tech debt is so unspecific and confusing that maybe it’s better not to use the term at all and instead talk about it in these terms (specific goals, business outcomes, incremental delivery).

A useful perspective on the leadership career path and what skills you need to keep leveling up.

but I like working with PMs who went into it through channels other than the official ones, and are motivated out of their passion for building things and solving problems. Not because they feel it’s something they’re supposed to do, or because they think it’s prestigious, or because it is the default path from whatever elite school they went to.

What is weird is that organizations that purport to be against risk will often do their projects exactly in this very risky way. Within an institutional logic, it often seems like there is no alternative but that is up to a few people to change.

It’s nice that these startups guys take a public schooling so well. It would be nice if we could see more of that on Clubhouse instead of the endless rows of bad panels.

When I still did photography, I read everything I could find about how cameras work and this is the mental model I built up back then.

World 2.0 — “There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen”

> Perhaps this was one of those things which would have been better off left to legal professionals, rather than being put to trial-by-Clubhouse. > both peddling books which really should have been tweets > While both women make passing references to social movements, neither are particularly interested in the terrain of collective struggle. > reparations isn’t an individual white person giving money to an individual Black or brown person (apart from when I personally am broke and want a cocktail, in which case it’s very much that) > Rather it has intensified their consumption of political content — particularly material which equates white guilt with anti-racist solidarity.> The influencers have invented intersectional Thatcherism.

“This is all to say that Paul Graham is an effective marketer and practitioner, but a profoundly unserious public intellectual. His attempts to grapple with the major issues of the present, especially as they intersect with his personal legacy, are so mired in intuition and incuriosity that they’re at best a distraction, and worst a real obstacle to understanding our paths forward.”

I’m just thinking of moving away from Chrome but for somebody who’s as heavy a tab user as I am, this looks useful and also scarily confronting.

It’s by no means easy to find let alone hire a good PM but if you want to try, here’s a good guide of how to interview for one.

https://www.conordewey.com/blog/barrels-and-ammunition/

Hugely thought provoking charts of how much time fathers and mothers have spent with their children in various countries.

I am immensely happy to see two friends launch Branch, a magazine about creating a sustainable internet. The way they put the magazine together mirrors the best practices of the future we should live in right now.

It sounds like a great idea here by Albert Wenger to force all major web properties to provide full read and write access to their APIs and in doing so promote the much needed competition.

A lovely interview about the magic bus and the hippie period in Istanbul revolving around the Lale Pudding Shop which is still in business.

“So if, as a product leader/CEO, you think your team isn’t 1 working on things that truly matter, or 2 achieving results that justify the investment, it is first ON YOU to figure out which of the 4 strategy problems you have, and fix them.”

Apple is not a company where general managers oversee managers; rather, it is a company where experts lead experts. The assumption is that it’s easier to train an expert to manage well than to train a manager to be an expert.

Drastically lowering the voting age as Germany is considering here would solve a huge amount of problems (which is why it will of course not happen).

A Django API server in a single file of 70 lines is quite a statement.

How Taiwan’s Unlikely Digital Minister Hacked the Pandemic

An explanation of how it’s possible to program withoutusing your hands using eye-tracking and voice recognition.

The problem isn’t just that infections have risen, it’s that the authorities’ response is increasingly muddled.

“The right people, the right time, the right context.”

A fair part of my childhood was spent in gecekondu buildings exactly as the ones depicted here.

A crucial part of effective teams is introducing slack like in this case removing the entire concept of a hand-off (which causes misalignment at best).

“Ultimately the truly great product manager ensures that everyone in their organization feels connected to the business, and shares an equal level of urgency and commitment to the customer’s needs.”

A fractal treatment of the various level of engineering management.