innovation culture

What’s going on here is, fairly obviously, some combination of simple old-guy aesthetic NIMBYism (“those massive solar fields”) and right-wing culture wars. The latter has been caused by decades of Americans seeing energy technology as being fundamentally about climate , rather than about energy itself . In a post back in December, I wrote the... See more

The combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense competitiveness was a perfect fit for me. It’s still hard to find today, in fact - many people have copied the ‘hardcore’ working culture and the ‘this is the Marines’ vibe, but few have the intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich set of ideas . This is hard to LARP - your... See more

The reason I've spent so long establishing this rather obvious point [that writing helps you refine your thinking] is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone

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Kinda want to launch an unironic, on-the-nose pro-bureaucracy discourse. Not even an apologia or defense, just straight up “bureaucracy is actually good and you morons trying to tear it down have no idea what you’re talking about or doing”

My longer-term agenda is to re-imagine and refactor bureaucratic functions and patterns into decentralized... See more

“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

At work the junior engineer sends you some code to review. The code was clearly written in a first draft, and then just iteratively patched until the tests passed, then immediately sent to you to review without any further improvement. They do not care.

The guy on the hiking trail is playing his shitty EDM on his bluetooth speaker, ruining nature... See more

Engineering organizations today have ballooned to huge numbers of people, but these huge engineering organizations don’t exactly have a reputation for high velocity output. Some of this is the result of what happens with products at scale: it is just fundamentally faster and easier to iterate, improve, or change a product with 100 users than it is... See more