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Articles to Read.
Have We Lost Our Tolerance For a Little Boredom?
The more I advise students, the more I notice a growing lack of tolerance for this sensation. At the first sign of boredom, we reach for e-mail or refresh a Facebook feed. A shockingly large amount of schoolwork gets done in a last minute frenzy, fueled by the adrenaline of an impending deadline, and proceeding in a confusing, inefficient slurry of short work bursts constantly interrupted by quick hits of boredom-busting stimulation.
This reality worries me.
Exceptional things — be it ideas, writing, mathematics, or art — require hard work. This, in turn, requires boring stretches during which you ignore a mind pleading with you to seek novel stimuli — “Maybe there’s an e-mail waiting that holds some exciting news! Go check!”.
This all brings me back to that unavoidable, meddlesome question fueling this entire line of inquiry: If our generation loses its tolerance for boredom, will we lose our ability to produce things of exceptional quality? Have we lost the art of serious self-education and self-inquiry? Have I lost these abilities?
These questions worry me, especially when, after just a few minutes of pondering their truth, I find myself tempted to see what’s on TV.
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It’s 2020. Why Do Printers Still Suck?
I HATE PRINTERS. Just when we need them the most, with print shops locked down, online schooling in session, and everyone working from home, they fail to step up.
Printers have been my enemy ever since I can remember. My first office job involved an evil printer that suffered daily paper jams. Tasked with fixing it, I suffered frequent burns and paper cuts. It had a door you had to close just so, or it would immediately break again with the dreaded phantom paper jam. It tormented me for months, completely indifferent to my cries. There isn’t even any paper in it!
More than two decades later, printers haven’t improved at all. It feels like printer companies stopped innovating sometime in the ’90s when sales stopped climbing. In fact, it's almost as if they’ve regressed. Manufacturers tempt with unbelievably cheap deals on printers and then nail you on expensive ink. To make sure they get their pound of flesh, they focus an inordinate effort on making sure printers only work with proprietary ink cartridges.
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Attention Is My Most Valuable Asset for Productivity as a Software Developer
Like a tightly written function, I prefer to exit early if no work should be done.
My high-level workflow looks something like this: identify the problem to solve; think on the problem and let ideas percolate; research, discuss, and experiment with these ideas; implement and test the solution; deliver and maintain the solution.
This cycle could repeat many times in a day. Or I could spend days stuck on a single cycle step. Every step in this cycle requires attention. The more attention I can devote, the more cycles I can complete, and the more productive I am.
How long you can focus on a task varies by person. Some people are very good at it out of the box, some people, not so much. Regardless of the hand you were dealt, I believe that focus (the act of devoting your attention) is a skill, and like any skill, can be improved with practice.
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I get a few calls every week these days from folks wanting to buy a small farm, start growing food, and even maybe settle down there now or later. This is a lot from folks around Bangalore, but there’s been lots of calls from Delhi, Indore, Chennai, Hyderabad and elsewhere too. Am writing this as a collection of my personal views, thoughts and learnings that have been shared over these calls over time — think of it as a primer or an FAQ to run through before you decide to buy a piece of land somewhere and dive in.
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Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world.
This has a nice sound to it, but it isn't true. Google's founders were willing to sell early on. They just wanted more than acquirers were willing to pay.
It was the same with Facebook. They would have sold, but Yahoo blew it by offering too little.
Tip for acquirers: when a startup turns you down, consider raising your offer, because there's a good chance the outrageous price they want will later seem a bargain.
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Programs are a prison: Rethinking the fundamental building blocks of computing interfaces
We often hear that Apple's ecosystem of apps (or Microsoft's, or Google's) are "walled gardens". But what about the individual applications themselves?
In fact, individual programs are even more harmful walled gardens - a stifling barrier to true expressiveness, productivity, freedom and consistency of computing experience.
Think about adding up some numbers in a tabular structure. That's straightforward with most programming languages. But what if that same table is in a web page, or a mobile app, or a PDF? It's right there on the screen, it's probably encoded as a table in the markup. So the data is there. And yet, we can't query it.
Maybe if we copy-and-paste it we can query it. Or maybe we can download the page, save it to disk, write code to load the page, parse the table, and dump the data into a database.
But why should we need to do any of those things? Why can't we just query it directly?
There's a wall around each app preventing this sort of thing. A program is in the way, blocking our path to expressiveness and computing freedom. Much like great nations, great software should build bridges, not walls.
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More to Check Out:
- JBS Haldane: the man who knew almost everything
- The Joys of Being a Stoic
- Problem Solving Techniques
- $0 To $2m ARR With B2B Sales
- Submarine cable map
My Update:
Living in Santa Monica now. Working, running, writing. What should I know about LA?