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Redundancy Reconsidered
We somehow appreciate the inherent comedy in how engineers systematically over-provision, create fallbacks, fail-safes and redundancies at every possible corner.
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A River Of Tears
I remember one of my first hangovers. I was on a beautiful beach surrounded by friends. They’d baked me a cake, but I didn’t have the stomach for it.
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The Funny Thing With Smart
When the thermometer was invented, nobody really understood what temperature was. The same is now true of intelligence; we can measure it, but its nature remains a mystery.
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One Hell of a Book
Learning to love yourself in a country where you’re told that you’re a plague on the economy, that you’re nothing but a prisoner in the making, that your life can be taken away from you at any moment and there’s nothing you can do about it – learning to love yourself in the middle of all that? Hell, that’s a goddamn miracle.
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Why We Keep Referencing The Past To Feel Good About the Future, or: A Brief History of Skeuomorphism
Why did the disciples of Bauhaus love to hate Parisian metro stations? And is VR really virtual?
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The Cost of Optimism
I recently read two novels where the protagonists happened to be gay men living through the AIDS epidemic of the 80’s, who didn’t dare to take the test. Their reluctance reminded me of my own sentiment with regards to global warming.
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Disruption Disrupted : How Big Tech Keeps Innovative Startups at Bay
Everyone who read Clayton Christensen *knows* that startups will eat incumbents for breakfast. That’s why they call it disruption!
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Preparing For the Next War
Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital by Carlota Perez studies the intersection of technology and innovation. Reading her feels like looking at one of those images optometrists use to diagnose colour blindness; where before there was just a jumble of dots, patterns emerge.
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What Doing Looks Like
It’s rather wonderful, I’d like to be a bit more like Mrs. Whiting myself. I think there are two things she does really well. She knows exactly what she wants, and she has the ability to turn that crystal clear vision of where she wants to go, into manageable chunks of action. In the words of productivity guru David Allen, she knows what doing looks like.
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Making Sense of the World
Here are two of the best science books I’ve come across in a good while: Explaining Humans by Camilla Pang, and Skönheten i Kaos by Julia Ravanis. Reading them back to back I came away with an impression of perfect symmetry.
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The Subtle Art of Giving a F*ck
In order to be a great boss you have to offer guidance that is extremely direct. For that to work (=not be brutal) you must invest massively in the relationship, far beyond what’s typically thought of as professional.
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Life in the Machine
Close to the Machine : Technophilia and its discontents by Ellen Ullman chronicles the dawn of the Internet from the point of view of a freelance programmer. I loved it intensely.
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Girly Stuff
The system has always worked hard to hide the fact that women are just as brilliantly ingenious innovators as men are.
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Creative Doesn’t Mean Nice
Culture can be a company’s most valuable asset, but creative a good one is hard. As with any aspect of leadership, it’s a matter of striking just the right balance.
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Product Spells D-E-V-I-C-E + S-E-R-V-I-C-E
Marketing should be seen as civilised warfare and segmentation is one of its most discussed and least understood concepts.