Adam Engst

Better than the cheap alternative

Frozen pizza changed the game for many pizzerias. If you couldn’t offer something better than what I had in my freezer, what do I need you for?

If the wedding photographer can’t deliver more magic than the phone in my guest’s pocket, no thanks.

Does working with your non-profit make me feel better than putting a... See more

There are a lot of persuasive papers and books kicking around about social cognition, and the ones I’ve read so far land in essentially the same place. We mostly don’t know things, even though we believe we do, and this is mostly okay because we can either learn things as needed, as when we flip to YouTube to search why knenmore clothe dyrer make... See more

Productive meetings

This 1-minute video by John Cleese is all you need to know about how to have productive (vs unproductive) meetings. One minute! Applies to zoom meetings, too. — KK

Productivity, AI and pushback

Typesetters did not like the laser printer. Wedding photographers still hate the iphone. And some musicians are outraged that AI is now making mediocre pop music.

One group of esteemed authors is demanding that book publishers refuse to use AI in designing book covers, recording audiobooks or a range of other tasks.

As... See more

Resilience is a practice

It’s easy to imagine that we should do our work and then, when it doesn’t work as we hope, improvise to fix it.

But perhaps our work is to show up ready and willing to deal with a future we didn’t expect.

I keep writing about it because we all need to keep thinking about it. Especially me.

My friend Ava curated this list:

... See more

[Claude Code] has the potential to transform all of tech. I also think we’re going to see a real split in the tech industry (and everywhere code is written) between people who are outcome-driven and are excited to get to the part where they can test their work with users faster, and people who are process-driven and get their meaning from the

... See more

Jamie McCarthy via Irregulars irregulars@lists.tbtf.com via easysrs.org

Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 3:00 PM

to IRRegulars

I would expand on this by pointing to Wilhoit's Law, from 2018. I think this portion of it is exactly correct:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind,

... See more

You have a drawer full of USB cables. Half are junk that barely charge your phone. The other half transfer data at full speed. But which is which?

Android Studio solved this. Recent versions warn you when you connect a slow cable to your phone:

developers.android.com

I wanted this for the command line. So I “built”1 usbi, a script to check your USB... See more