Betterment

The product of software development is not code but a mental model, a theory: a specific way of explaining the world.

It’s better to generate some ideas, even if some don’t work, than to have no ideas because you’re afraid of being wrong.

It costs more than you think. Last month, I hit the old stock on the Avery labels in my office cabinet. I had a bunch of things to send out, and off they went. It turns out, who knew, that old labe…

Adulthood & productivity.

Hackaday was at Chaos Communication Congress last week, and it’s one of those big hacker events that leaves you with so much to think about that I’m still processing it. Just for scope, the 38th CC…

The California-based blogger Kevin Drum has a good post up today with the title Why don’t we do more prescribed burning? An explainer. There’s a lot of great detail in the post, but the bit t…

Every successful SNL sketch, every bestselling book, every landslide-winning candidate… every single one… had skeptics. Someone in the writer’s room, or on the editorial board or …

No.339 — Did OpenAI just solve abstract reasoning? ⊗ Kind and wicked learning environments ⊗ Foresight Timeline ⊗ DeepSeek outpaces tech giants

We finally saw Ridley Scott’s movie, "Napoleon" the other day. It’s a good movie, much better than we expected after hearing initial complaints that it

Almost all car crashes would be avoided if the driver were just going a bit slower. (That’s why it’s more accurate to call them “crashes” and not “accidents.”) T…

The $5M figure for the last training run should not be your basis for how much frontier AI models cost.

Sheep are not like ideas. 200 years ago, William Foster Lloyd began pointing out that if land is shared, ranchers will all have an incentive to overgraze their sheep–if they don’t, the thinki…

Listen now | Essential tools for deep work

We all know the classic Hero’s Journey. Made famous by Joseph Campbell.  Farm boy answers the call to adventure, faces many challenges, finally slays the

Want to learn how to meditate? Scientists have a new theory that might change how you practice.

Money is a story. But money is also an exchangeable commodity, valued by different people in different ways. And time is the wildcard. Situational spending is a trap that seduces us into forgetting…

The Kafkaesque surreality that is this place.

When I made breakfast this morning, I didn’t begin by making the blender. Someone else, a team with more skills, resources and scale, built the blender. I simply bought it. That seems obvious…

It can be difficult to fit self-expression into your schedule, but the benefits are huge. Jem Collins explores five fresh ways to be creative every day

It’s a new year and millions of people around the world are making resolutions to improve themselves in the months to come. A large portion of those resolution-makers are probably making the same well-intentioned vows they made last January: “This is the year I’ll get in shape…learn a new language…get the garage organized… ” But […]

The best methods are low-tech and free.

An artifact is an object that holds or signifies an idea. A book on paper is an artifact: it’s the object plus the words. Now that you can get the words in many other ways, the value of the b…

I noticed something about the way I read books, yesterday. When I start a book, it’s like I’m sitting in an empty space, completely surrounded by the fog of war. Over some number of pag…

We all make mistakes. We all do things that we then realize weren’t in our interest, or useful to the community. If we do it a second time, it’s worth taking a hard look at the system t…

Hello.

That’s the first question. The second question is, “how do we make it work better?” These two questions, patiently repeated, lead to incremental improvement and an understanding o…

Tech and culture have enabled a new sort of informality. Not simply the end of suits and ties and heels at work, but the office itself is fading away. But there’s a difference between being i…

The first time I heard about Wardley Mapping was from Charity Majors discussing it on Twitter. Of the three core strategy refinement techniques, this is the technique that I’ve personally used the least. Despite that, I decided to include it in this book because it highlights how many different techniques can be used for refining strategy, and also because it’s particularly effective at looking at the broadest ecosystems your organization exists in.