innovation culture

In Part III, they continue to work through the ideas of philosophers Martin Heidegger and René Girard, exploring the metaphysics of both technology and desire. “For both thinkers, salvation doesn’t come from technology itself but from a transcendent outside,” they posit. They then cite Nick Land, the father of accelerationism, whose ideas have sinc... See more

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 i... See more

04. The Illusion of Progress : Action Bias leads us to believe that doing something – anything – is better than doing nothing , even when the action doesn’t actually move us forward. We equate busyness with productivity, mistaking motion for progress, and perceive novelty as innately valuable.

When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it accessible. This is a left over from mass media. Words addressed to a large and diverse set of people need to be simple and clear and free of jargon. It is valuable to write clearly of course, to a degree. Clear writing is clear thinking. But to make the content accessible? To

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FDEs tend to write code that gets the job done fast, which usually means – politely – technical debt and hacky workarounds. PD engineers write software that scales cleanly, works for multiple use cases, and doesn’t break. One of the key ‘secrets’ of the company is that generating deep, sustaining enterprise value requires both. BD engineers tend to... See more

But the choice of a main programming language is the most important signaling behavior that a technology company can engage in. Tell me that you program in Java, and I believe you to be either serious or boring. In Ruby, and you are interested in building things quickly. In Clojure, and I think you are smart but wonder if you ship. In Python, and I... See more

To be curious about that which confuses. Not too rapidly seeking the safety of knowing or the safety of a legible question, but waiting for a more powerful and subtle question to arise from loose and open attention. This patience with confusion makes them good at surfacing new questions. It is this capacity to surface questions that set Grothendiec... See more

This silicon union of intellect and action creates a culture fond of big ideas. The expectation that anyone sufficiently intelligent can grasp, and perhaps master, any conceivable subject incentivizes technologists to become conversant in as many subjects as possible. The technologist is thus attracted to general, sweeping ideas with application ac... See more