There’s another season of Historical Love Island on The Rest is History podcast.

Last year’s episodes are belters too.

Jeremy Keith:

Right now, there’s a whole bunch of social networks coming (Blewski, Freds, Mastication) and one big one going, thanks to Elongate.

Me? I watch all of this unfold like Doctor Manhattan on Mars. I have no great connection to any of these places. They’re all just syndication endpoints to me.

Jeremy uses Micro.blog to effectively syndicate his posts elsewhere. I hadn’t thought of using the service like that.

Jason Cohen:

The trick—useful everywhere in life—is to estimate values using only orders-of-magnitude, a.k.a. powers-of-ten. No “low/high ranges,” no precision, not even any digits other than a 1 followed by a quantity of 0s.

Kate Leto:

Emotional self control is “the ability to remain calm and clear-headed during a stressful situation or crisis.” In other words, it’s the ability to handle our own disruptive emotions—not to ignore or deny them.

…

Emotional self control is also linked to resilience. When we have more emotional self control, we can more easily bounce back from negative situations. And again, we’re sending the signal to our teams that setbacks are inevitable, but we have agency over how we respond and adapt to them.

Csaba Okrona:

burnout is a specialized, clinical syndrome, recognized and categorized by very distinct symptoms. It’s a chronic state of being, a silent whisper of desperation that builds up over time, often unrecognized until it becomes a deafening roar that one can no longer ignore.

I’d listen to either of these blokes read the phone book.

They go deep and I’m here for it.

Ryan emphasizes the effectiveness of the copy-paste method in rapidly exploring alternate options.

He also mentions some shaping and analysis tools including Interrelationship diagrams and Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) Four Forces Diagrams.

A key point that struck a chord with me was his perspective on multiplayer tools like Miro. These tools are primarily valuable during simultaneous brainstorming processes like retrospectives.

Actual shaping typically involves a collective thought process, with a single individual transcribing the outcomes. This concept holds true even when using traditional methods like a whiteboard.

Farnam Street:

The key lesson here is that if we are to intervene, we need a solid idea of not only the benefits of our interventions but also the harm we may cause—the second and subsequent order consequences. Otherwise, how will we know when, despite our best intentions, we cause more harm than we do good?

Farnam Street:

Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.

Christoffer Stjernlöf:

The perspectives needed for good engineering (And good management, for that matter):

1. Trust the people doing the work.
2. See the problem for yourself and accept reality.
3. Attend to the big picture.
4. (Work with interactions and trade-offs.)

Roger Martin:

Why on earth spend resources to serve these customers with those stripped-down offerings? It is because the company isn’t sufficiently confident that if it repurposed those resources to increasing penetration of its best segment, it would increase revenues and profitability — even though current penetration was pretty darn low.

…

Every time you are tempted to do more things, recognize that it is most likely a sign of lack of confidence, not a manifestation of confidence. When the temptation strikes, before jumping, ask why you are so underconfident in your current business that you feel the need to channel investment out of it into the new thing — whatever that new thing is.

James Clear:

Not being busy is a competitive advantage. Most people are so strapped for time they can’t take advantage of lucky opportunities or quickly resolve unexpected problems. Maintain a bias toward action, but leave room for the unexpected.

From a leaked internal Google document:

While our models still hold a slight edge in terms of quality, the gap is closing astonishingly quickly. Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable. They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that we struggle with at $10M and 540B. And they are doing so in weeks, not months.

Julia’s posts inspire me to write more.