Andrei Stoica

Yes, there can be taste in technology. But the problem is that the majority of practitioners are not consciously trying to extend nor synthesize towards improving quality of life.

Instead we are stuck in the darkest loop of identity confirmation derivatives, in order to extract and accumulate professional status for ourselves.

Taste in technology... See more

Noticing this makes me realize another reason I’ve been out of it. I have fallen for the cardinal sin when looking for interestingness: I’ve wanted what I find interesting to be interesting to others, too. Even at the first larval stage. I’ve wanted, in an unarticulated way, to be able to point at ideas that fascinate me and have people say, “Wow,... See more

As I note in that post, the successful examples of “socialism” that people cite — the Scandinavian societies of today — are actually social democracies. They achieved their mixed economies through a slow evolutionary process that was absolutely nothing like the revolutionary upheavals predicted and advocated by Marx.

“The culture” as a phrase, has been unfortunately hijacked by the artistic class to mean the byproducts of their creativity. But this is an incomplete picture of our culture. Culture is the difference between car-centricity and walkable neighborhoods. Culture is the values we place on our food system. Culture is the quality of our public goods and... See more

Been thinking about architecturally interesting tennis courts recently https://t.co/69Y61DyMO2

In Sarah Schulman’s book The Gentrification of the Mind , she laments, “Will everything (books, music, pornography, education, movies, friendship, camaraderie, love, and television) all be free if they’re consumed online and prohibitively expensive to experience in person?” She wrote this in 2012 and may not have anticipated how much further that... See more

Case Study: The Aquarium of PMs

One extreme example is the “Aquarium of PMs” model. Imagine a division where all the engineers sit on one side together, and all the PMs/designers sit on the other side.

This is also reflected in the weekly cadence of meetings—product meets more with product (as a group) than it does with engineers.

When initiatives

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