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Attention span has been declining and it leads to consuming bite-sized contents. Too much content requires curation. Sometimes we learn from random things, but allegedly "attention-seeking & activating emotions" content leads to chaos.

What “activating emotions” undermine is a sense of context and proportion. If enough people are paying attention to something—if you, personally, are paying attention to it, and it feels to you as if others are—it’s nearly impossible to conclude that it’s unimportant, or even to fit its importance onto a scale of relative importance. Likewise, if a thing gains and then loses public attention, it seems to have correspondingly lost importance.

At first, these were just philosophical musings. However, Elbakyan was compelled by how neural interfaces could enable people to share information, even across language barriers, with unprecedented speed. “Later, I expanded the idea to include not only hard interfaces that would connect people directly neuron-by-neuron, but also soft interfaces, such as speech, that we use every day to communicate.” She cared less about the form than the function: she wanted a global brain. To her, paywalls began to seem like the plaques in an Alzheimer’s-riddled mind, clogging up the flow of information.

When you experience a glass of red wine, for example, you may enjoy its dominant cherry aroma—until someone comments on a strong vanilla note in the same glass of wine. Suddenly the cherry moves to the backseat of your conscious awareness, while the vanilla aroma pops into focus—even though you had not noticed it before. How do you turn such ephemeral and transient nature of odors into a measurable, stable, and comparable object of scientific study?

George Bernard Shaw said, and a character say in The Doctor’s Dilemma, “In the last analysis, every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.” But he didn’t have it quite right because it’s not so much conspiracy as it is a subconscious, psychological tendency.

As the astronomer Carl Sagan once put it, “Too much openness and you accept every notion, idea and hypothesis—which is tantamount to knowing nothing. Too much skepticism—especially rejection of new ideas before they are adequately tested—and you’re not only unpleasantly grumpy, but also closed to the advance of science.” In other words, as some wit once put it, don’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out.

I’ve been struck by how many of these people refer to their most creative ideas as “obvious.” Since these ideas are almost always the opposite of obvious to other people, creative luminaries can face doubt and resistance when advocating for them. As one artist told me, “The funny thing about [one’s own] talent is that you are blind to it. You just can’t see what it is when you have it … When you have talent and see things in a particular way, you are amazed that other people can’t see it.” Persisting in the face of doubt or rejection, for artists or for scientists, can be a lonely path—one that may also partially explain why some of these people experience mental illness.

Think carefully about who you surround yourself with. Your time on Earth is a valuable resource — it might merit optimizing.

In a culture of excess, this can be exploited by cigarettes, sugar, push notifications and anything else that provides an immediate reward.

Segment has a rigid philosophy for how customer data should be structured, and they apply that in Analytics.js. Any action that a customer gets classified as one of five different types, and you need to decide which you want to use for each event you fire. If you hear “identify calls” or “track calls” chances are someone is talking about Segment.

Excellent! Murphy's laws about Technology, Love, Military, and Philosophy.

Organisations should be designed to induce scientists from different disciplines to focus on a common project; to keep them talking to each other while maintaining ties with their home academic disciplines; and to get them to concentrate on commercially relevant projects while permitting enough freedom to ‘stare out the window’ and to think ‘blue sky’ thoughts. If you want profits, then – it was widely conceded – one price you pay is a significant amount of intellectual freedom, allowing the scientific workers to do just what they wanted to do, at least some of the time. The one-day-a-week-for-free-thought notion is not the recent invention of Google; it goes back practically forever in industrial research labs, and its justification was always hard-headed.

I’ve been wondering about this for a long time, and I try to notice when something I’m doing is bulls**t. I guess this fits the bill. It seems to be an issue of people spending time and money to create and satisfy procedures that degenerate into rituals, so that they can look all procedural and responsible in front of – courts? regulators? bosses? investors? I’m not sure. But I do wonder how much of the economy is made of things like this.

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it's hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3–4 hour days.

Life is a fight against entropy. Writing is as an act of creation, but in many ways I see it as an act of maintenance in the exact same way exercise is: if I don't write every day, nothing will ever get finished.

“The better an organization is, the less obvious it is,” he says. “In Visa, we tried to create an invisible organization and keep it that way. It’s the results, not the structure or management that should be apparent.” Today the Visa organization that Hock founded is not only performing brilliantly, it is also almost mythic, one of only two examples that experts regularly cite to illustrate how the dynamic principles of chaos theory can be applied to business.

He has his fingers in anything that involves people making subjective decisions. In business and investing his guiding principle was summed up by author Maggie Mahar who wrote, “men resist randomness; markets resist prophecy.” He has little tolerance for outliers and no tolerance for fragility.

An innocent denial of your own flaws, caused by the ability to justify your mistakes in your own head in a way you can’t do for others. When other people’s flaws are easier to spot than your own it’s easy to assume you have no/few flaws, which makes the ones you have more likely to cause problems.

• EC2 to deploy our web app in a few Docker containers
• Lambda to process form submissions on the marketing site
• EBS for block storage connected to our EC2 instance(s)
• S3 to store backups and files for the app and marketing site
• Route53 to connect our domain name to our AWS servers
• RDS (Postgres) as our managed database for our web app
• Cloudfront as our CDN for serving assets quickly
• VPC to isolate our resources into a private, secure network
• Backup to back up our data across services
• Redshift to store analytics data as our data warehouse

I have uninstalled all the social media and news apps from the phone, consume "slow news" only on weekends via newsletter.

What’s interesting is how the internet numbs you. You spend some time on it and it numbs you, you stop thinking in a certain way. You take in information, yes, but there’s a certain process loop that takes priority- and what happens is that you forget about what you want to do, you forget about what you want to create. It’s quite scary, actually.

You can’t do your research in the heat of keyboard-battle or the latest news cycle. If you care about making real contributions, I think you owe it to yourself to step away from social media from time to time.

Is this The Path to Enlightenment?! ;) :D :P

“Master, until now I have lived an unexamined life. Going to temple every day, meditating, taking the drugs, doing the dances. But I longed for something more. In an old library, I found a book which claimed the ancients knew of a state known as samsara, and of a mystery called the Self. That those who master these mysteries gain strange powers. Using the technique of Greed, they can attain such perfect willpower that they can work eighty hour weeks for abusive bosses without quitting. Using the technique of Lust, they can reach such perfect focus that all their thoughts for months revolve around the same person.

Like everything we do on the Internet, streaming and downloading music requires a steady surge of energy. Devine writes, “The environmental cost of music is now greater than at any time during recorded music’s previous eras.” He supports that claim with a chart of his own devising, using data culled from various sources, which suggests that, in 2016, streaming and downloading music generated around a hundred and ninety-four million kilograms of greenhouse-gas emissions—some forty million more than the emissions associated with all music formats in 2000. Given the unprecedented reliance on streaming media during the coronavirus pandemic, the figure for 2020 will probably be even greater.

After watching an eye-opening documentary called The Social Dilemma (2020), I am convinced that Netflix is damn addictive. Although most of the concerns expressed by those good samaritans from Silicon Valley are pretty much common knowledge, it’s worth reiterating because public memory is a lot like public opinion: inconsequential. For every strand of positivity that we have in the world today, there has to be an equal number of pain points. The balanced law of shittiness. And the internet is no different. If we can do awesome stuff online, we can also destroy ourselves brilliantly there. Completely depends on how equipped an individual is, emotionally or otherwise. In my know there are some people who have quit smoking and drinking in the last 10 years but I am yet to meet somebody who went offline for good. Not one. That said, it’s necessary to talk about the dangers of addiction even if we don’t really know how to tackle the problem in the first place.

First, paywalled newspapers sometimes use a clickbait model, where they start by making you curious what’s in the article, then charge you to find out.

But as long as bloggers, Facebookers, tweeters, etc aren’t following good Internet hygiene, the very existence of paywalled sources will continue to be a net negative for the average Internet user.

A few years ago, the kharai didn’t exist—in the official sense. The maldharis of Kachchh (or Kutch), a vast sun-bleached district of Gujarat in the farthest westerly reaches of India, always recognized that the kharai was distinct from the region’s other camel, the Kachchhi (or Kutchi), but administratively, the camels were all Kachchhi. Sahjeevan, a local NGO focused on conserving biodiversity and supporting the livelihoods of pastoralist communities, was working on a camel conservation program around 2011 when staff learned about the kharai from herders.

The reading isn't merely a book, of course. The reading is what we call it when you do the difficult work of learning to think with the best, to stay caught up, to understand.