2020-06-21 Weekly Review
No review last week due to mini vacation to crater lake. This week is more politics heavy then usual.
WHAT I'M THINKING ABOUT
- Opinions, Facts and Polarization
- Articles
- Quotes
All information is becoming weaponized. All communication is becoming performative. And on the most important topics, it now seems to be fury and sanctimony and bad faith almost all the time - Sam Harris
- Notes
- America, and the world, sounds and feels more polarized than any time I've experienced in my lifetime
- In America, it seems impossible to have a coherent conversation about the most important topics (eg. race, climate change, religion, politics)
- The process that people on both the left and the right have is starting out with a dogmatic belief and only considering the facts that correspond to that world view
- "There are differences between men and woman" feels like a radical thing to say in 2020
- Social Media, as it currently is, seems to be making the problem worse
- The only way we can make progress through these issues without violent conflict is conversation but that seems to be the one thing we cannot do
- There are people that are open to having their minds changed (eg. hedge fund managers) because they have real consequences for having the wrong facts
- What can we do to think more like those people (without all becoming hedge fund managers or tying everything to a monetary outcome)?
- Power and Accountability
- Articles
- Quotes
Instead of insisting [Facebook] leverage their power explicitly — particularly in terms of politicians that have electoral accountability — more attention should be paid to the fact that that power is completely unaccountable in the first place, and applied in so many ways we cannot see - Ben Thompson
- Notes
- Nation-states and multinational companies are today some of the most powerful institutions on the planet but their powers are largely unchecked
- Case study Trump, case study China, case study Facebook and Google
- What are better processes for enforcing accountability on these institutions when the one's we have today (elections where only half the people vote and a business duty of maximizing shareholder value) don't seem to work?
- Curiosity and Wonder
- Articles
- Quotes
Fenn posted clues to the treasures whereabouts online and in a 24-line poem that was published in his 2010 autobiography The Thrill of the Chase. Hundreds of thousands have hunted in vain across remote corners of the US west for the bronze chest believed to be filled with gold coins, jewelry and other valuable items.
- Notes
- Wonder and awe are some of the things (I think) give life meaning - we should have more of these things
- Buried treasurer, exploring the unknown, going on adventures - these are all things that captured my imagination when I was a kid and for the most part, still do now
- Is it possible to bring about collective action on the most important issues of the day in a way that inspires awe?
SYSTEMS
- Local Slack Notifications
- Notes
- Created a CLI to send arbitrary slack notifications. Use it in local build scripts to notify me when long builds get done
- Notes
- VS Code Markdown Notes
CONCEPTS
- Turing tarpit
everything is possible but nothing is easy.
- Jussi's law of programmers
The problem with programmers is that if you give them the chance, they will start programming.
- Soup Nazi feature
they've done it the way they think is best, and if you don't like it you can go somewhere else