Category: Food for thought

This quote from Frank Herbert’s book Dune.

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

Rohan Rajiv talking about the upsides and downsides of defaulting to trust or distrust in a relationship.

The benefit of defaulting to trust is that trust begets trust. People have a wonderful way of repaying the trust you place in them. 

The downside, of course, is that once in a while, you’ll find somebody who will misuse that trust. And hurt you. Some in small ways, some in much larger ways.

Defaulting to distrust means you place a very high bar before you trust somebody. That obviously insulates you from those failures in trust.

But it also means you get to enjoy very little of the upside. Because trust is the foundation of great relationships.

This post on Finshots explaining what agglomeration is.

When companies cluster together geographically, they tend to become more productive — not just individually, but collectively. Suppliers specialise. Workers circulate. Knowledge spreads informally over coffee breaks and factory floors. The location itself becomes more efficient than the sum of its firms.

In the 1990s, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman formalised this idea, calling it agglomeration or the tendency of industries to cluster and generate increasing returns.

And nowhere in the modern world is agglomeration more visible than in one city ― Shenzhen.

[…]

At the heart of Shenzhen is Huaqiangbei, often described as the world’s largest electronics market. This isn’t a mall or shopping complex. It’s a vertical system.

One building may house hundreds of component traders. One specialises in microcontrollers. Another in lithium batteries. Another in display drivers. Need a niche chip discontinued five years ago? Someone likely has old inventory. Need 5,000 units by Friday? A call is made.

In most countries, supply chains stretch across continents.

But in Shenzhen, they stretch across blocks.

This density compresses time.

A design flaw discovered in the morning can be corrected by night. A supplier underperforming can be replaced within hours. Engineers move between firms, carrying tacit know-how that never appears in formal manuals. This is what agglomeration looks like in practice.

As of 2025, the Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou cluster is ranked first among the most innovative regions in the world by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). In simple terms, it had the most number of patents filed in 2025 than any other region in the world.

David Attenborough explaining what culture means, in his book A Life on Our Planet, from the perspective an evolutionary biologist.

To an evolutionary biologist, the term ‘culture’ describes the information that can be passed from one individual to another by teaching or imitation. Copying the ideas or actions of others seems to us to be easy – but that is because we excel at it. Only a handful of other species show any signs of having a culture. Chimpanzees and bottle-nosed dolphins are two of them. But no other species has anything approaching the capacity for culture that we have.

Culture transformed the way we evolved. It was a new way by which our species became adapted for life on Earth. Whereas other species depended on physical changes over generations, we could produce an idea that brought significant change within a genera-tion. Tricks such as finding the plants that yield water even during a drought, crafting a stone tool for skinning a kill, lighting a fire or cooking a meal, could be passed from one human to another during a single lifetime. It was a new form of inheritance that didn’t rely on the genes which an individual received from its parents.

So now the pace of our change increased. Our ancestors’ brains expanded at extraordinary speed, enabling us to learn, store and spread ideas. But, ultimately, the physical changes in their bodies slowed almost to a halt. By some 200,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens – people like you and me – had appeared. We have changed physically very little since then. What has changed spectacularly is our culture.

This Hacker News comment by user Stratoscope on how being a force multiplier for your team is very difficult to showcase in front of leadership.

Many years ago, I worked at a company with a product that ran on Mac and Windows. The Mac version was pretty solid, but the Windows version had some problems.

They had a talented team of developers who were mostly Mac experts and just starting to get a grip on Windows.

I was known at the time as a “Windows expert”, so they hired me to help the team get the Windows version into shape.

My typical day started with “house calls”. People would ping me with their Windows questions and I’d go door to door to help solve them – and to make sure they understood how to do things on Windows.

In the afternoon, I would work on my own code, but I told everyone they could always call on me for help with a Windows problem, any time of day.

One colleague asked me: “Mike, how can you afford to be so generous with your time?”

Then in a performance review, I got this feedback:

“Mike, we’re worried. Your productivity has been OK lately, but not great. And it’s surprising, because the productivity of the rest of the team has improved a lot during this time.”

I bit my tongue, but in retrospect I should have said:

“Isn’t that what you hired me for?”

Ha!

This comment on Hacker News by user internet2000.

This Douglas Adams quote is still undefeated:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

This reminded me of the shifting baseline syndrome explained by David Attenborough in his book A Life on Our Planet.

There are fewer fish in the sea today. We don’t realise that this is so because of a phenomenon called the shifting baseline syndrome. Each generation defines the normal by what it experiences. We judge what the sea can provide by the fish populations we know today, not knowing what those populations once were. We expect less and less from the ocean because we have never known for ourselves what riches it once provided and what it could again.

Jim Nielsen arguing that values should drive decision making, not data:

Data tells you what people consume, not what you should make. Values, ethics, vision, those can help you with the “should”.

“What is happening?” and “What should happen?” are two completely different questions and should be dealt with as such.

The more powerful our ability to understand demand, the more important our responsibility to decide whether to respond to it. We can choose not to build something, even though the data suggests we should. We can say no to the data. 

Data can tell you what people clicked on, even help you predict what people will click on, but you get to decide what you will profit from.

There’s a GitHub project called posturr that blurs your screen when you slouch. This comment on Hacker News by avalys explains the inverse relationship between a developer’s posture and their productivity.

You can measure my productivity by how slouched I am.

Sitting up straight at my desk, chair locked, perfect posture? I’m doing nothing, maybe looking through System Preferences to change the system highlight color.

Sliding down in my chair like jelly, with my shoulders where my butt should be and my head resting on the lumbar support? I’m building the next iPhone and it’ll be done by 2 AM.

Ha!

Mark Carney’s speech from Davos 2026:

[…]we aim to be both principled and pragmatic – principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights, and pragmatic and recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values. 

So, we’re engaging broadly, strategically with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.

We are calibrating our relationships, so their depth reflects our values, and we’re prioritizing broad engagement to maximize our influence, given and given the fluidity of the world at the moment, the risks that this poses and the stakes for what comes next.

And we are no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength.

We are building that strength at home.

Nicholas Carr talking about how instant communication, enabled by telegraph, was one of the catalyst the First World War.

The unprecedented ability of far-flung leaders and diplomats to talk directly with each other without delay spurred great hopes. It seemed obvious that the resulting exchanges would ease friction and encourage goodwill among nations. Nikola Tesla, in an 1898 interview about his work on wireless telegraph systems, said that he would be “remembered as the inventor who succeeded in abolishing war.” His rival, Guglielmo Marconi, declared in 1912 that wireless telegraphy would “make war impossible.”

What actually happened was altogether different. In the lead-up to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, telegraphic communications inflamed tensions rather than dampening them. Writes the French historian Pierre Granet: “The constant transmission of dispatches between governments and their agents, the rapid dissemination of controversial information among an already agitated public, hastened, if it did not actually provoke, the outbreak of hostilities.” 

The start of the First World War in 1914, two years after Marconi announced the end of war, was similarly hastened by the new communication mediums. After the June 28 assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, hundreds of urgent diplomatic messages raced between European capitals through newly strung telegraph and telephone wires. As the historian Stephen Kern describes in The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918, the rapid-fire dispatches quickly devolved into ultimatums and threats. “Communication technology imparted a breakneck speed to the usually slow pace of traditional diplomacy and seemed to obviate personal diplomacy,” Kern writes. “Diplomats could not cope with the volume and speed of electronic communication.”

Same as ever.