STATE My Path: 2 Explore Others’ Paths: 3 Move To Action: 1 Start With Heart: 0 Learn To Look: 2 Make It Safe: 3 Master My Stories: 3 Zero to three, higher is better.
“But we don’t need a secret police to turn us into atomized, isolated souls. All it takes is for us to stand by while unbridled capitalism rips apart the temporal preserves that used to let us cultivate the seeds of civil society and nurture the sadly fragile shoots of affection, affinity, and solidarity.”
I’m very impressed by this design research blog by Maike Klip about the digitalization of Dutch government services and how to maintain a human connection.
Will Larson (whose new book is lying on my desk at work) writes a welcome long view on the technology career, something we will increasingly need to think about and come to terms with.
The necessity of physical fitness to create peak mental performance has been a well-known fact in esports. Useful to see the documented effects of pushing yourself cognitively within the chess world.
A couple of years ago, I remember seeing at IST airport advertisements for connecting flights to Erbil (أربيل). The city seems to have continued growing and by now developed a vibrant nightlife.
My colleague Jiro Minier is featured in the Dahrendorf Foresight Project on European Security with a scenario that is both dystopian and scarily prescient. I read it as a call for more European collaboration and investment.
As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty . . .
“Sometimes when he walks, I swear I can hear it, the depression. It’s a liquid sound. I can hear the cortisol sloshing around in his veins. I can hear the adrenaline drip-drip-dripping down the twisted cord of his spine.”
Piketty is back with a new book but his policy proposals are already there and should be implemented immediately and in full. The only reason we will have to fight for them to pass is because our governments do not work for the people.
I had kinda forgotten about Soigneur, but then I ran into this amazing set of photos of racing bikes in the city. That new race bike seems to be getting closer and closer.
I don’t really know why we have this debate, but the following is a thorough and definitive argument against technocracy by Glen Weyl: “Technocracy divorced from the need for public communication and accountability is thus a dangerous ideology that distracts technical experts from the valuable role they can play by tempting them to assume undue, independent power and influence.”
An interesting reversal here where I once said that any application could be delivered through the chat medium, now Kevin Kwok signals a tendency for one chat platform to permeate all applications.
I think everybody (myself included) can and should get better at managing up. This guide by Claire Lew has some helpful tips that mostly boil down to: “context”.
An interesting bit of news did the rounds last week but I’ve personally heard of multiple cases where people leaving online reviews have been faced with legal action.
Working in organizations, it’s essential to be able to differentiate between things that are under your purview, and things that you should let fall on the floor. Camille Fournier writes a guide here about how to decide what to fix and how to fix that.
Berlin is finally thinking of fixing its totally and utterly broken website. That’s good news but a shame that we have had to use this monstrosity for the past ten years.
Oatley is by far our favorite plant based milk and I’m glad to read that they are seeing explosive growth (also animal milk consumption in the Netherlands has already dropped 14%).
BMW thinks it’s a funny marketing gimmick to paint one of their worst cars in Vantablack. Dark coloured cars have been proven to be more likely to cause accidents. Black cars should be forbidden to participate in traffic, that should be what people are talking about here.
Marty Cagan’s piece on product vs. feature teams yielded more than enough stuff to reflect on and discuss. I wouldn’t mind having a ‘true‘ product manager. Where do you get one of those?
I’d say a lot of this criticism of React is fair but because all frameworks have jumped onto components, I don’t really see a realistic workable alternative either.
This lament on SF does not sound that far off from where Berlin is. The city is a lot bigger and less boring, but without measures, it could go the same way when it comes to property prices and hollowing out of public services.