A fine dust of evil
On reflection, this is about right.
You don't understand. It was optimistic, fun and cross-cultural but everything was sprinkled with a fine dust of evil.
— Dark Skinned Prince (@splashmouf) March 2, 2025
Not technology but the exercise of power
Silicon Valley has changed remarkably in the intervening two decades. Its culture now centers not simply on technology but the exercise of power.
The internet was meant to be weightless
It seems to me that today’s problems were written into the original declaration of weightlessness — precisely because, for the longest time, the online economy seemed to have marginal costs as close to zero as made no odds, it expanded until the constraints became impossible to ignore.
Good, Very Good, Great
good bankers take clients to expensive restaurants, very good bankers take clients to very expensive restaurants, but great bankers meet clients for a sandwich in the pub
Agile abdicates decision-making
At the end of the day, Agile desperately needs something to fill the product strategy gap it left in its wake, and not because it failed at product strategy as much as it assumed it didn’t need to have one in the first place.
“Another” is doing a lot of work in this headline
Quartz:
AI’s thirst for energy has another nuclear plant coming online
Dimensionality
To a large extent, the debate about techne and metis, technical quantifiable knowledge versus embedded and tacit skill, is really about the curse of dimensionality.
The curse of dimensionality is about how doing things in complex (high-dimensional) spaces has different properties to doing things in simpler (low-dimensional) spaces.
Dan Davies again:
Really good racing analysts can systematically beat the odds by knowing a lot of these little rules of thumb, being really familiar with the form and having enough experience to know which statistical regularities are most salient for any given race.
That is, in complex spaces, it doesn’t matter how much techne you have, you need metis, too.
When you have enough metis you know when to rely on your techne. Davies:
They are also good at spotting which races are easiest to analyse and most likely to offer attractive odds, and good at not betting on the other ones.
Listening is the real job
When doing interviews it’s easy to ask closed-ended questions because we often know the sort of answer we’re looking for. So we bake that answer in to the question.
But you’ll get richer information, and be able to create more compelling insights if you listen.
If you’re following a script you’ll be waiting for the other person to finish their answer so you can move on to the next question. But if you’re really listening, you’ll be able to ask follow up questions which are much harder than scripted questions. You’ve got to come up with them in real time, while also listening, while also keeping the interview on track.
And that’s the real challenge.
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