DoingSomeThings

Paul Graham wrote a series of essays that are considered classics for startup thinking

http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

This discussion from earlier this year gives some interesting context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34750727

Way cool. Just added this to my Christmas wishlist.

As a non-techy nerd it’s a perfect niche with built in usage and no need to hack. Thank you for posting.

I use a notecard method. 365 notecards, 1 for each day of the year. Every night I write the year and 1-2 lines about what I did that day. When the next year rolls around, I add another line below

The space constraint encourages brevity and lowers the activation energy

At first it provided little value. Now, 4 years in I can look back and see how much my life has changed (or stayed the same). It's amazing how many thing I do that totally slip my mind.

This method does lose out of the "What am I thinking about" and deeper reflection. But I've often found that type of journaling just gets me into a head spiral

Further. Religion requires something to assent and belong to. That will always be a choice to some degree.

As someone who is formerly deeply Christian and left for intellectual/theological reasons. I miss the communal binding of organized worship. But reversing or getting back to that place requires either 1) letting go of intellectual integrity, or 2) finding a group who is similarly interested in dispassionate community organizing without supernatural theology.

The 1st has proven personally impossible. The 2nd seems very unlikely. All the attempts of secular church I have seen never pick up steam and trail off over time. Thus, the person who sees religious association as a broad good is left without a natural landing spot.

AoM as a publication places high value on doing things. Its general ethos says societal incentives reward abstraction while most people find more satisfaction in actually getting their hands dirty and producing something.

I like this question as a broad approach to life and careers. They really are different skills sets.

Trying to apply the paradigm to knowledge work is tricky. I'm an operator by title and trade. Best I can tell, someone can ride the operator title all the way up to exec levels. Unfortunately, as you rise in an org the high level Operator is really just a strategist managing other operators.

"Is the benefit in money and status worth the tradeoff in fulfillment that comes from doing a job you’re brilliant at and love? It’s okay to recognize that you like carrying out orders more than formulating them. And it’s okay to value the chance to practice the things you’re really skilled at more than a bigger office. "

It's a tension for me. I enjoy doing the work to keep a company up and running. But pay growth is tied to managing people and "multiplying impact".

I understand many Engineering orgs have split IC/Manager tracks. I've never seen the same thing in Support, Business Operations, or Analyst type roles.

Does the M1 14inch support 2 monitors? I was under the impression every M-based laptop only supports a single external monitor.

I've found that Kindle gives me the same effect as physical books. For narrative-driven fiction specifically & light non-fiction. Physical still wins out for reference material and things I need to flip around.

It keeps me away from "screens". My page count skyrocketed this past year when I started checking out ebooks from the library and reading before bed. Works even better with a partner who can go to sleep with lights off while I use the warm backlight.

Re "Epic Fantasy"

I'm a recent fan and discovered I enjoy the worlds. I find them engrossing. imo Sanderson could cut down 10-20% (Rhythm of War in particular suffered from length). But, I did appreciate his own defense of length in the genre.

https://www.tor.com/2014/03/04/words-of-radiance-and-the-art...

His insight seems to boil down to

1. Treat it as multiple books if you prefer. 2. "I get the chance to write what I enjoy. I understand it's not for everyone. That doesn't bother me."

1. Very cool tool. Awesome work!

2. How would one go about practicing irl to be able to play in the style of the piano covers?

This is the style of piano I would love to be able to perform. I can read lead sheets and know music theory, but I just don't have the hand chops to perform. Every piano instruction book or tutorial I run across is based on developing progressive skills for classical performance. Pop style playing is distinct and I've never known how to progress my skills.

A few years back (peak-Covid) I was working for a company helping with temp staffing. It was shocking to me to see the operational expectations for low-wage labor. Clients would pay absolute minimum wage or maybe a dollar/hr more for all sorts of roles then be dumbfounded that workers were flaky.

An airport subcontractor came to us having issues with getting enough baggage workers. Issue was they paid minimum wage, were located 30 minutes outside the city, and there was no public transport. There was no way for the workers to get to the job! The narrative was "these worker are so untrustworthy/lazy/full of excuses." So they would pay a 50% to an agency hoping gig-contractors could save them on single-day contracts rather than just putting that money to better wages or transit perks.

Contempt really does describe the management attitudes I ran into.

Someone below linked this company as an example of resiliency tools used in airfare. Interestingly, there's a testimonial from United on one of the front page videos.

Maybe not 1:1 for what you're describing, but it solution/reason, but does seem like a possible sign that they're investing in proactive tools.

https://www.slickor.com/

Incredible to see that 14 months ago there was an almost duplicate outage. Clearly the operations teams are running too lean and don't have enough slack to handle predictable weather/sickness events. Seems like something you'd plan for. Even at the 98%+ uptime range

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28823774

Agree alarm clocks are cheap, but there's a very good reason to have one. Single use devices remove another area of phone dependence. Switching from waking up to phone alarm to dedicated clock alarm has been a huge help for me. It allows me to charge my phone in another room and create at least one no-phone zone in the house.

This tweet references YugaLabs. An entirely different company/ecosystem than BlockFi.

BlockFi does indeed appear to have gone totally dark with all customer assets frozen.

I stopped halfway through book 4. Was content with the first sub-trilogy and found it lost a lot of the appeal as I got deep in. They started to feel like totally different books the further in I got.

Ecclesiastes is my favorite book of the bible. Timeless in the questions it poses.

Even post-Christianity, I still revisit it. Is everything actually meaningless?Even if so, it's still worth living life today.

Agree on the Three Body Problem. The Sci-Fi elements were interesting enough to finish the book. But the prose and characters are mediocre at best.

Fiction - I started reading the Cosmere universe by Brandon Sanderson.

Mistborn Trilogy, Stormlight Archives, and Warbreaker.

Pick 1 - Start with Warbreaker or Mistborn.

I'm new to fantasy fiction and his writing totally hooked me. I think of "hard" fantasy as a puzzle. The world has a unique physics and the plot of the story is based around characters figuring out how to operate inside of those physics... what are the bounds, how can it be manipulated, etc?

What I've loved about Sanderson is the plot turns are never Ex Machina. Every new development fits inside the rules of the world and deepens your understanding of what can be.

I've been thinking about this a lot with the current congressional action. I need a new roof ~now. But I have a lingering fear that huge product improvement will happen in the next 18 months due to added government money. I don't know enough about the industry to weight in that possibility.

Glad to hear that! Best of luck! If that ever happens and you remember this message, DM me. I'll throw some cash your way :)

A small note - This podcast with Amanda Litman of "Run For Something" was inspiring for me. I know you aspired to make big change. But I wonder if running for a local political office would help scratch that itch? Those roles have direct impact on the lives of your neighbors, and don't have to be full-time gigs. There's whole orgs that provide resources to help make it happen.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas... https://runforsomething.net/

This is an interesting description of ADHD. I've long wondered if I met the diagnosis. I have an incredibly difficult time knocking out small tasks, but very prone to hyperfocused rabbit holes. They're just generally rabbit holes about topics totally unrelated to me "real" responsibilites, job, etc.

Is that actually a part of adhd? Obv not asking for a diagnosis online, but curious about the phenomenon.

This resonates. It feels like a cliche, but I genuinely feel like I've peaked in life. I excelled in HS. Top of class. Award winning marching band. Full ride to a decent state school. Helped run some student organizations, did great in classes. I took a total detour post-undergrad for a few years to do service work.

But now I'm in my 30's and 5 years into a "real career". I work long days in Operations at a tech marketplace. It's fun problems and I like working with data/product, but it hardly feels like I've living up to the potential I had thrown on me earlier in life. I'm far from the top 1% performer I was in High School / College.

I play a lot of video games and read a never-ending stream of miscellaneous articles. I go to the gym a few days a week and . Maybe once a month I pull out my guitar. I checked off my "adult" milestones -- Married and have a house. But seems like lots of days I just wake up, work, then stare at a TV. It's not all bad -- But reading this list and the failure to start, so many possibilities but I never do anything idea just rings true to me.

Thank you for this link. I had never heard of the ancient mechanical clock mechanisms. "The arc of progress" really is a fiction. Human knowledge needs to be passed down and nurtured. Same with culture.

This is similar to the concept of miswanting. Sometimes, the things we think we want aren't always what's good for us. Staying at home is easy and seems attractive, but is actually making us more isolated. Reducing effort sound attractive, but in the end removing friction doesn't actually bring happiness. Effort is difficult, but makes us better off in the end.

Not parent, but yes. This describes my life to a T. High successful when I actually do work, but constantly frustrated at the small % of my time actually operating at the high-level output.

From a tech perspective, I find it highly concerning that Grindr provides enough data to vendors to enable this.

If a small investigative team can track down an individual with the data, I can only imagine what more robust reporting organizations could do with the same data.

"Commercially available app signal data does not identify the names of app users, but instead correlates a unique numerical identifier to each mobile device using particular apps. Signal data, collected by apps after users consent to data collection, is aggregated and sold by data vendors. It can be analyzed to provide timestamped location data and usage information for each numbered device."

I've started following two sources to help address this for myself.

Tangle is a daily newsletter that provides links to coverage from both sides. VERY fair reporting. Ground News highlights stories that have been covered by only one side of the aisle.

https://www.readtangle.com/ https://ground.news/

I've received allergy shots in the past. Seems to be a relatively common treatment in the south. It's just inconvenient due to office visits.

Looks like the innovation here is the move the serum from intradermal to a liquid, oral treatment?