Notes from 22/7–28/7
Knowt
Holy crap
Peter Kaufman on The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking: Transcript
‘To understand is to know what to do.’ Could there be anything that sounds simpler than that? And yet it’s a genius line, to understand is to know what to do. How many mistakes do you make when you understand something? You don’t make any mistakes. Where do mistakes come from? They come from blind spots, a lack of understanding. Why do you need to be multidisciplinary in your thinking? Because as the Japanese proverb says, ‘The frog in the well knows nothing of the mighty ocean.’ You may know everything there is to know about your specialty, your silo, your “well”, but how are you going to make any good decisions in life…the complex systems of life, the dynamic system of life…if all you know is one well?
And yet that’s where I got my best ideas. I would read some arcane subject and, oh my god, I saw, ‘That’s exactly how this works over here in biology.’ or ‘That’s exactly how this works over here in human nature.’ You have to know all these big ideas. Or there is an alternative, find somebody who did what I did and just get all the ideas from them.
You have to go first. And you’re going to get back whatever you put out there.
The three hallmarks of a great investment are superior returns, low risk, and long duration. The whole world concentrates on Category 1. But if you’re a leader of any merit at all, you should be treating these three as what? Co-priorities.
The secret to leadership is to see through the eyes of all six important counterparty groups and make sure that everything you do is structured in such a way to be win-win with them. So here are the six. Your customers, your suppliers, your employees, your owners, your regulators, and the communities you operate in. And if you can truly see through the eyes of all six of these counterparty groups and understand their needs, their aspirations, their insecurities, their time horizons.
Nietzsche on How to Find Yourself and the True Value of Education
Your true educators and cultivators will reveal to you the original sense and basic stuff of your being, something that is not ultimately amenable to education or cultivation by anyone else, but that is always difficult to access, something bound and immobilized; your educators cannot go beyond being your liberators. And that is the secret of all true culture: she does not present us with artificial limbs, wax-noses, bespectacled eyes — for such gifts leave us merely with a sham image of education. She is liberation instead, pulling weeds, removing rubble, chasing away the pests that would gnaw at the tender roots and shoots of the plant; she is an effusion of light and warmth, a tender trickle of nightly rain…
Education is the process of becoming.
Game Source Code Collection
Never knew the internet archive had all these!
Artificial intelligence
On the simulation (and energy costs) of human intelligence, the singularity and simulationism
Lots of assumptions and generalisations. However at the beginning it serves as a good introduction into some of the thinking behind AI research and the limitations of creating AGI.
Data
Ananas Analytics Desktop
Really useful, putting it to try.
Poli
Power BI replacement
How to build Animated Charts like Hans Rosling — doing it all in R
gganimate that’s basically it!
Data Engineering — How to Build a Google Drive Data Pipeline with Google App Script
Really very very interesting. Wonder what are some quick use cases that require data processing… maybe now you can just put it into google drive and it produces a report?
Cluster Analysis: Create, Visualize and Interpret Customer Segments
Useful method to try and use simple clustering algorithms to label data for further processing
Breaking BERT Down
Okay this is wayyy too deep. But you csn see how it has all come together. From CNN to GANs to Transformers.
My mind is just filled with a lot of ‘whys’ for every single line. Guess I’ll need to take the time to go through this proper.
Design
Generative Team Design
- Generative Learning Practices — which enable — new forms of social relations and organizing — which produces — supportive cultures and environments of and for adult development to unfold via work tasks and commitments.
- Empowering Accountability Systems — which enable — people to design and redesign their roles — which produces — an optimal match between people’s developmental capability and their work accountabilities as they evolve over time.
- Participatory Management Processes — which enable — cooperation, co-creation, and novel decision making across different inter-organizational teams and environments — which produces — opportunities for every person in an organization to truly add value via their labor and engagement.
Readers Respond: Is Design as Important as We Think It Is?
Design, by its very nature and definition, is never the problem. Bad design almost always is.
It is in these cases where advocacy and ‘getting a seat at the table’ are still quite important. I believe there is value in a company being design-led, engineering-led, or product-led. The key is making sure all perspectives are still represented so we are creating quality, human-centered products that solve a need and resonate with customers or users.
Development
Vue — Going Serverless with Firebase
It’s just a quick example on how to integrate firebase into Vue.
OverVue, a Vue Prototyping Tool.
Absolutely amazing and really useful! This is probably a great way to get started on a project just to try things out quickly.
Even better, it’s Open Sourced!
Nodes.io
Story behind this product… but it’s not publicly released yet!
Websockets simplified
HTTP Polling. The client makes repeated requests to the server and checks if there is any message to receive
WebSockets don’t need you to send a request in order to respond. They allow bi-directional data flow so you just have to listen for any data.
These are the steps involved in establishing a WebSocket connection.
- The client (browser) sends an HTTP request to the Server.
- A connection is established via the HTTP protocol.
- If the server supports the WebSocket protocol, it agrees to upgrade the connection. This is called a handshake.
- Now that the handshake is complete the initial HTTP connection is replaced by a WebSocket connection that uses the same underlying TCP/IP protocol.
- At this point, data can flow back and forth freely between Client and Server.
5 Key Principles of Software Architecture
Some simple principles that hinge on ease of learning (for future maintainers) and clarity in development.
Life Optimisation
How I coach myself — Learning lessons and making real changes
Really interesting way to set up some sort of self-reflection. Especially like the concept of sending email reminders to yourself
How to Improve Communication Frequency With Your Remote Team
- Purpose: connecting the why of daily work for our teams so they are excited to learn and grow with our businesses.
- Focus: prioritizing the highest reward work so our organizations and clients will be highly satisfied. Reserve new ideas until current ones are done.
- Guide: leading teams from any performance state to a higher one, so excellence is a constant goal.
- Change: developing our ability to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Then lead, execute, and thrive in changing environments. Follow up on new methods daily.
- Growth: growing team members to become experts in their craft so they can become leaders in their field, then build more leaders.
- Relationships: building capacity to work with others so we can influence the adoption of new ideas up, down, and across all levels of the organization.
Project Planning Tips and Tales for Makers
Hilarious read with some really good tips and tricks built up over yeras of experience. Helps you see beyond the current issues that every project faces and helps with decisions.
Open Source
India has a pretty thriving open source ecosystem.
Open-Source Software Has Changed The Way Software Is Developed. Here’s Where The $33B Industry Is Headed
Product Management
De-risking New Products: Steps to Product Formation and Validation
- Shape product by making it desirable (contextual and relative), able to generate a profit in the long run (differentiated, focused and ingenuous to solve needs)
- Validation (defined opportunity, product calibrated, go-to-market)
“Unit of Value” and Finding the Right Pricing Model for a SaaS Start-ups
How you price your product affects the conversations that revolve around selling it.
The ‘unit of value’ is how much one is willing to pay for specific features that provide value.
Product Management Mental Models for Everyone
- Figuring out Where to Invest
Limited team bandwidth, you want to maximise impact to customers for evey unit of resources
Ship early
Optimise for your time horizon
Aim for the expected value and optimise accordingly (a bit decision theoretic)
Work backwards from a perfect solution to know how to get there
The confidence you have in i) the importance of the problem your solving, and ii) the correctness of the solution you’re building, should determine how much you’re willing to trade off speed and quality in a product build.
Know when you start and end the experience so the entire thing is great
Prove as you go along
Understand cause and effect
Positive/negative cycles
Don’t beat a dead horse
If you’re stuck in a place where incremental improvements create no customer value
You’ll learn most about the customer after you launch the product
Consider the negative outcomes that could be achieved also. Don’t just focus on the positives.
The 4 Goals of a Product Manager — Acquisition, Activation, Retention, and Monetization
- Pick your Goal(s)
Decide which of the above 4 goals is/are important to your business in the current cycle. - Discovery
Discover changes you can make to your product that result in the highest return on investment for the selected goal(s). These changes can involve building a new product, a new feature, or improvements to an existing feature. - Development
- Measurement and Optimization
Measure the impact of your changes on the goal(s) you picked and optimize their implementation until you achieve the desired outcome.
Very early on, it was decided that Chrome would “sandbox” each tab into its own process. This approach solved multiple problems. One, it prevented one tab from crashing another, resulting in a more stable browsing experience. Two, it made individual processes faster so multiple processes could be run concurrently. Three, it aligned much more strongly with where the web was headed. Apps, not pages.
One could argue that Adblock Plus, a single extension developed by a single publisher, helped give rise to the subscription model we see everywhere today, from streaming entertainment services to SaaS. Adblock was immensely popular, so much so that it literally helped change how the Internet works. This is what makes extensions so powerful.
Google claimed that its “identity consistency between browser and cookie jar” would make it easier for users to move files and data between Google services. In this regard, Google was right — it was more convenient for some users. It was also a lot easier for Google to datamine users’ browsing habits, search history, and email, giving it a much more complete picture of users’ behavior that it could then sell to advertisers. Google later backtracked and implemented a control that allowed users to more easily disable automatic Chrome sign-ins.
- What are the biggest challenges people have with the existing products in your market?
- What will your product do differently? Why will your product succeed where others failed?
- Looking at your product roadmap, in what areas is your product vulnerable to competing products? Put another way, what are the weakest areas of your product, and how might another company solve your customers’ problems better than you can?
Programming
Map, Filter and Reduce — Animated
Animation was quite unncessary
array.map: map all values to an expression defined previously
array.filter: keep values matching a condition
array.reduce: convert entire array into one value based on a rule (add etc)
Security
Cyber-Harm and Who Would Want to Be A CSO/CIO?
In this case meaning that the chief in charge of digital technologies have to weather the massive backlash and continuous stress
When It Come Down To It, Cybersecurity Is All About Understanding Risk
