@luinalaska:
If you feel unsettled just know that there is a fog of manipulation around you. At all times right now. Just be present and don’t react. I keep saying this. This season will change soon. The wind direction is changing. The only thing that’s real is you in this present moment.
“No” to internet distractions today. Freedom via freedom.to.
I returned to Twitter on the theory that future marketing depended on it. I mute and block people and words to cultivate the world of ideas and thoughts I wish to see.
Net-net it’s just a treadmill for my mind to burn off excess energy.
Blocked for 23 hours today. I am free.
I’m putting this thought here for myself, as an employer.
Any complex business system built on a bet that cheap labor exists is a broken business.
Complex businesses require skilled labor.
Fewer people means fewer skilled people.
Fewer skilled people means wage demands must be met. The choice between lower margins and closing the doors is unpleasant but obvious.
The solutions are therefore:
But yeah. Expect wage pressure in all areas of life that require skill, training, experience, and judgment.
Maybe it has always been thus. But I doubt it. When the baby boom came after the war there was a surplus of labor. Many kids becoming accountants, lawyers, etc.
Not so much now.
OK Grasshopper. Which way do you hop?
Greetings from 247 W. 36th Street: Culture Espresso.
Related:
[Musk developed] the “idiot index” which calculates how much more costly a finished product was than the cost of its basic materials. If a product had a high idiot index, its cost could be reduced significantly by devising more efficient manufacturing techniques.
Rockets had an extremely high idiot index. Musk began calculating the cost of carbon fiber, metal, fuel, and other materials that went into them. The finished product, using the current manufacturing methods, cost at least 50x more than that.
[…]
The [“idiot index”] was the ratio of the total cost of a component to the cost of its raw materials. Something with a high idiot index-say, a component that cost $1.000 when the aluminum that composed it cost only $100-was likely to have a design that was too complex or a manufacturing process that was too inefficient.
Source: “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson (2023)
From a Sasha Chapin tweet, how to accomplish a lot:
“I ask, what is likely to make the thing I want happen,” and “when people tell me things, I ask, is this true”
Do what matters most and get good at noticing when you’re avoiding doing what matters most.
Couple this with the Pareto Principle.
Right now 20% of my activities give me 80% of the results. Look for what that 20% consists of. That’s what matters most.
Implication: 80% of my time is wasted on things that don’t matter most.
Yesterday, a man about my age woke up early and got dressed for a fun day on the river. Later that day, he was dead.
He made a cascading series of poor decisions. He chose a hardcore river, class 5 rapids beyond his skills. His companions were not skilled, either. Poor equipment—including a crappy life jacket that, when the time came, did not do its job. Drunk.
My daughter pulled him out of the river. He was already blue, rigid—dead. One and a half hours of CPR in the wilderness before help arrived, to no avail.
Know thyself. Know your limitations.
On a good day, the dice roll in your favor. Yesterday, he rolled snake eyes.
Even those who make good decisions roll snake eyes sometimes. This is the second death on the river this summer that my daughter witnessed—the first was the polar opposite of yesterday’s. Young, fit, equipped with top-notch gear, expert and experienced. Yet the river took him, too.
One day, I too will wake up and get dressed, full of expectations. It will be my last day.
I guess the moral of the story is . . . I don’t know what the moral of this story is.
Live. Life is ephemeral.
First. Do not expect your brain or body to function properly for three days. Jet lag for +9 time zones is a thing.
Second. Drink more water.
Third. Get outside, even when jet lagged. See above.
Fourth. Turn off the phone at night. Don’t rely on the silence switch. Lesson learned.
Fifth. There came a brief moment when I wanted the iPad. It passed. I’m glad I am not lugging it around. Does anyone want an iPad Pro 12.9”?
Sixth. I can put in five hours of work a day on the road. Do this more.
Seventh. Buy a new shell for the laptop—a bright color this time.
Richard Hamming’s “You and Your Research” speech: his introduction grabs your attention, doesn’t it? It grabbed mine.
I went searching for the little story I remembered about “what is the most important problem and why aren’t you working on it?” and eventually found this speech. For some reason I had misremembered this as a Shockley anecdote but soon enough Hamming’s name popped up and I found the anecdote.
This grabbed me though—his introduction. Emphasis added by me.
It’s a pleasure to be here. The title of my talk is, “You and Your Research.” It is not about managing research, it is about how you individually do your research. I could give a talk on the other subject – but it’s not, it’s about you. I’m not talking about ordinary run-of-the-mill research; I’m talking about great research. And for the sake of describing great research I’ll occasionally say Nobel-Prize type of work. It doesn’t have to gain the Nobel Prize, but I mean those kinds of things which we perceive are significant things. Relativity, if you want, Shannon’s information theory, any number of outstanding theories – that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.
Now, how did I come to do this study? At Los Alamos I was brought in to run the computing machines which other people had got going, so those scientists and physicists could get back to business. I saw I was a stooge. I saw that although physically I was the same, they were different. And to put the thing bluntly, I was envious. I wanted to know why they were so different from me. I saw Feynman up close. I saw Fermi and Teller. I saw Oppenheimer. I saw Hans Bethe: he was my boss. I saw quite a few very capable people. I became very interested in the difference between those who do and those who might have done.
When I came to Bell Labs, I came into a very productive department. Bode was the department head at the time; Shannon was there, and there were other people. I continued examining the questions, “Why?” and “What is the difference?” I continued subsequently by reading biographies, autobiographies, asking people questions such as: “How did you come to do this?” I tried to find out what are the differences. And that’s what this talk is about.
You can find the speech transcript everywhere. I used this source.
Read the Q and A at the end about the genesis of UNIX. Fascinating.
The new, focusing insight for me is also in the Q and A about the relative importance of papers, talks, and books. This has direct impact on my life and work. I will say no more since this is an anonymous blog.
Edit, a few days later. If I have a thought I should write it down. I have no idea what secret thoughts, ever so precious, I was thinking when I stopped myself in that last paragraph.
Ephemeral. That is my name. Such is my existence. So too are my thoughts. So too is my own memory, and others’ memories of me.
I spent 5 1/2 hours yesterday building an elaborate and intricate financial model in Excel. Buggy. Incomplete. But elegantly conceived and I was proud of myself and my brilliance.
I probably have another full day needed to make it workable and presentable.
Today on paper I came up with a simpler way to solve the same problem. Two orders of magnitude easier to understand, and two orders of magnitude easier for Management to implement.
(Complex system of dividing up a lot of money amongst a lot of heirs. “Fairly.”)
The point of this note is to show that first I had to get rid of my overly-complicated ideas to see the simple solution.
And the simple solution is better. It is better for the person whose trust will contain these allocation and distribution rules—he will understand and fine-tune his choices because the trade-offs are visible, not hidden in complexity. The trustee will know what to do When The Time Comes because the marching orders are simple and easily executed.
Those 5.5 hours spent in building a model that I have thrown away were not in vain.
Simple solutions are expensive to discover. You have to live through the suck to get them.