innovation culture
An ethic of pure progress will accelerate equally toward shitcoins, space, and solar energy. For the diversified investor class, this may be just as well, but the rest of us must live in the world that VC built. AI friends, sports gambling, protein synthesis, killer drones—are all these inventions equally good?
Jasmine Sun • 🌻 tech right (disambiguation)
Conway’s Law is so commonly referenced in Silicon Valley at this point it’s almost a meme. But I still don’t think we take it seriously enough. Because your product will be a mirror of your teams. You will ship your org chart.
Make an Org Chart You Want to Ship — Advice from Linear on Designing Your Team
I think there is a similar fallacy for how we consider engineering organizations. Many of today’s “best practices” have been drawn from long-established internet companies like Google. However, the problem with copying their current practices on the basis of their success is that most of those companies found near-invincible business models that... See more
Moxie Marlinspike • The Magic of Software; Or, What Makes a Good Engineer Also Makes a Good Engineering Organization
“A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”
―
William F. Buckley
―
William F. Buckley
A quote by William F. Buckley Jr.
Together, Hobart and Huber argue that bubbles are coordination mechanisms for progress: by linking collective risk to potential financial rewards, bubbles enable megaprojects beyond the capability of any single person or industry—megaprojects which, although risky, mark inflection points in technology, economics, and culture when they are... See more
Bubbling Up | ARENA
the emerging technologies of today should be analogized to events like Genghis Khan’s rise in the 12th and 13th centuries or the proliferation of personal ranged weapons like longbows and muskets. While the technologies themselves are interesting enough, it’s their obvious capacity for triggering entirely new evolutionary arcs for humanity that are... See more
Venkatesh Rao • The Modernity Machine
For instance, sometimes we create abstraction layers that allow people to create things on top of them explicitly without having to understand anything beneath them. We call those “platforms.” The expectation is that when we create abstraction layers like that, we should see an explosion of creativity, since now people can focus only on the... See more
Moxie Marlinspike • The Magic of Software; Or, What Makes a Good Engineer Also Makes a Good Engineering Organization
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.
Noah Smith • Should economists read Marx?
A modern darling of edutainment that is a big public success would be Duolingo. Their focus on gamification is deeply studied and widely appreciated. In an interview the founder was asked about the conflict between gamification/engagement and education. To which Luis (founder and ceo of Duolingo) responded they always pick gamification/engagement... See more