Links and posts
[[2024-07-07]]
- Maggie Appleton paints a vivid picture of the possibilities that LLM’s open up for non-professional developers to create software tools for their own problems in Home Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers. This resonates strongly with my hope for change in the local community through locally focused efforts, echoes what Kentaro Toyama spoke about in this Technology Myths section of the [[Podcast – Work for Humans – Kentaro Toyama – Confronting Techno-optimism | podcast on Work for Humans]]
- Email like a boss – choices of words to use
- Richard Merrick’s reflections of the week include a brief riff on limits, and what they mean. Worth a ponder on this topic of limits or constraints.
- FixmyStreet.org and the team behind it are worth a gander?
- Tracy Durnell on Finding Common Ground.
[[2024-07-08]]
-
Erick Nehrlich: What are the daily habits that lead to better long-term decisions? Unlike software engineering where you can write, deploy and test code nearly instantly, leadership choices don’t afford the same feedback time.
-
Ewan McIntosh: The story they tell isn’t what you told them.. Quoting GB Shaw, "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." Comprehension is important than saying the right words, applies in the family and personal context as much as in the professional one.
-
Margaret Wheatley: Understanding organisations as living systems I had flashbacks of the ‘learning’ system I created (the talks). This sentence, in particular, is an astute description of what I attempted to do: To truly understand an organization as a living system, we need to determine what the system finds meaningful. One way to do this is to think of our “interventions” as indications of what the system notices. This method can reveal a lot about what is going on inside the system—what motivates and inspires it, and how information moves through it.
-
What to the slave is the Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass’s speech that I’d never known about until today. Have put it on my "to listen" list, because David W Blight’s persuasive explanation why this speech is such a masterpiece
[[2024-07-10]]
- Darius Foroux has a point of view on how to design a life that gives you freedom. Define YOUR concept of freedom (financial, time, emotional, physical), pick your freedom model (business, real estate, stocks, career), set your expectations (5 years? a decade?), and have extreme discipline (easier said than done, especially if you’re worried about the next meal or rent cheque, a scenario I suspect the author has never had to worry about).
- David Cain from Sequoia on the revenue from AI But we need to make sure not to believe in the delusion that has now spread from Silicon Valley to the rest of the country, and indeed the world. That delusion says that we’re all going to get rich quick, because AGI is coming tomorrow, and we all need to stockpile the only valuable resource, which is GPUs.
- Mark Cruth of Atlassian shared this EOFY reflection/self-assessment. It felt almost like he knew
[[2024-07-11]]
- Ryan Holiday: This is why you don’t want to tell yourself stories We must resist the impulse to reverse engineer success from our understanding of other people’s stories. When we achieve our own, we must resist the desire to pretend that everything unfolded exactly as we’d planned. There was no grand narrative. You should remember—you were there when it happened.
[[2024-07-12]]
- Guardian article from a couple of years ago, found in Rob Walker’s substack, recommended by Recommendo 100 ways to slightly improve your life without really trying
[[2024-07-13]]
- HT to my friend and data scientist Travis B, who shared this link on "What is Data Science?"
New words:
Unctuous: Excessively flattering or ingratiating, oily, having a greasy feel
Quotes
The artist and the entrepreneur find their authentic selves not by who they love or hate, or what they believe, or what feats they perform…(they) discover themselves by what they create. They don’t know before they create it.
-Steven Pressfield
How can you combine your strength? That’s something I would encourage everyone to think about. You will find talented people in every area of life. It’s the combinations that are rare."
– James Clear
"In every challenge or even tragedy, there is an opportunity. And if you train yourself to look for the opportunity, you will be able to take control of the situation and even turn it into a positive or if it can’t be turned into something good, at least something good could come out of it."
– Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson
Just because it feels easy at first doesn’t mean that it’s a worthwhile career path.
–Seth Godin, Kazoo lessons
My Greek friend declared, “I don’t worry about what most people think. Most people don’t think, at least not reflectively. And when they do think, they think mostly about themselves, not about me. Besides, you cannot ever know what other people really think – and you cannot trust them to tell you the whole truth if asked – we have many reasons to edit our thoughts for public consumption. Moreover, my own thinking is often so contradictory or confused or in flux that even I can’t say what I really think.”
–From a post by Robert Fulghum
"Against criticism we can neither protect nor defend ourselves; we must act in despite of it, and gradually it resigns itself to this."
–Goethe