1 | Snow Crash
The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it.
A glimpse into the future of VR and the Metaverse, and dangers both physical and digital. The character, Hiro Protagonist, is a bit of a Gary Stu, but indicative of the value of technical skills and working on your own projects.
2 | Compress to impress by @eugenewei
What Jeff understood was the power of rhetoric. Time spent coming up with the right words to package a key concept in a memorable way was time well spent.
About the deliberate crafting of a right turn of phrase to package an idea. That makes the concept timeless and robust, even if it turns viral.
3 | How Harvard’s Star Computer-Science Professor Built a Distance-Learning Empire about @cs50
...Malan became the first Harvard instructor to make an entire course available, for free, in audio and video formats.
I fondly remember CS50 as the most challenging course I have taken, among the introductory modules done at university.
This is how the course has been steered to a frontier of online education, with the traditional resources provided for self-directed learning, and a wealth of other materials to augment that learning.
4 | The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office” by @ribbonfarm
…if you over-perform at the Loser level, it is clear that you are an idiot. You’ve already made a bad bargain, and now you’re delivering more value than you need to...
Reflection of our relationship with work, and how it mutates to become a lopsided exchange between employer and employee.
5 | relationships are challenging by @visakanv
....the thing nobody quite tells you about marriage is: you’re choosing the person in life who’s going to upset, disappoint, annoy and frustrate you more than anybody else.
The practical aspect of relationships, and making it last beyond the honeymoon phase. This again another reminder that picking a partner is one of the most important long-term decisions to make.
6 | The Digital Maginot Line by @ribbonfarm
We have to move away from treating this as a problem of giving people better facts (...), and move towards thinking about it as an ongoing battle for the integrity of our information infrastructure....
On an ongoing shadow war waged in cyberspace, that we are barely aware of, and yet collectively are a key piece in the field. What role do you want to play in it?
7 | beware fuckarounditis by @visakanv
Do the specific things that will take you the farthest– squats, deadlifts, bench press, pullups. If you aren’t doing those things, and you aren’t doing them heavy and hard, then you’re probably fucking around.
Consistently do the things that get us the farthest to where we want. It’s a struggle to keep doing those things, because they are hard.
8 | The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness by @EricJorgenson, on @naval
Foundations are key. It’s much better to be at 9/10 or 10/10 on foundations than to try and get super deep into things.
Full of timeless wisdom on wealth, health and happiness.
9 | You and Your Research on Richard Hamming
If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.
A vital question: Are we working on the important problems of our field?
Maybe even taking one step back: Do we know the important problems in our field?
10 | A tweet on the types of hard work by @vgr
It’s kinda confusing that we use “hard work” to refer to both actually difficult work that not everyone can do, and easy work that you need to do in exhausting amounts.
An exploration of the different types of output ‘hard work’ refers to, this sparked a reflection on how my own time and attention is being used.
11 | Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System by Donella Meadows
The ability to self-organize is the strongest form of system resilience. A system that can evolve can survive almost any change, by changing itself.
Just like a life is a set of projects, every organisation or process can be modelled as a system. This high-level view provides some timeless advice on how to intervene in them.
12 | Scaling tacit knowledge by Nintil
Expertise cannot be taught using only explanations. Acquiring expertise can be accelerated by means of being exposed to a large library of examples with context.
Enjoyable deconstruction of how to scale distribution of knowledge and expertise.
The relevance: Selecting the correct medium to create teaching resources for the different skills.