Category: Food for thought

A wonderful article by Shane Parrish on why slack is so important. It’s so important there is a book about it–Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency.

…imagine one of those puzzle games consisting of eight numbered tiles in a box, with one empty space so you can slide them around one at a time. The objective is to shuffle the tiles into numerical order. That empty space is the equivalent of slack. If you remove it, the game is technically more efficient, but “something else is lost. Without the open space, there is no further possibility of moving tiles at all. The layout is optimal as it is, but if time proves otherwise, there is no way to change it.”

Having a little bit of wiggle room allows us to respond to changing circumstances, to experiment, and to do things that might not work.

Slack consists of excess resources. It might be time, money, people on a job, or even expectations. Slack is vital because it prevents us from getting locked into our current state, unable to respond or adapt because we just don’t have the capacity.

Efficiency is the Enemy

And at the end.

Amos Tversky said the secret to doing good research is to always be a little underemployed; you waste years by not being able to waste hours. Those wasted hours are necessary to figure out if you’re headed in the right direction.

Efficiency is the Enemy

Wow!

It’s often said that the stock market’s main oxygen comes from sentiments and the share price has hit the roof for a company that has the word ‘Oxygen’ in its name despite its business having nothing to do with the life-saving gas — something in high demand due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The share price of Bombay Oxygen Investments Ltd hit its upper circuit limit ₹ 24,574.85 apiece at the BSE on Monday, with the maximum permissible gain of 5 per cent due to the stock being under surveillance. The same is the case with some other little-known stocks with ‘gas’ or ‘oxygen’ in their new or old names and all of them are being probed for any possible foul play.

What’s in a name? A lot for stock market, if it’s ‘Oxygen’ in Covid-era!

I mean… I can’t even… Kaun hain ye log? Kahan se aate gain ye log?

An article worthy of putting on a refrigerator magnet so that I can read it every day.

I often have people newer to the tech industry ask me for secrets to success. There aren’t many, really, but this secret — being willing to do something so terrifically tedious that it appears to be magic — works in tech too.

We’re an industry obsessed with automation, with streamlining, with efficiency. One of the foundational texts of our engineering culture, Larry Wall’s virtues of the programmer, includes laziness:

Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it.

I don’t disagree: being able to offload repetitive tasks to a program is one of the best things about knowing how to code. However, sometimes problems can’t be solved by automation. If you’re willing to embrace the grind you’ll look like a magician.

Embrace the Grind

Read on for some amazing examples.

A simple loophole discovered by Alex Birsan and Justin Gardner

Last year, security researcher Alex Birsan came across an idea when working with another researcher Justin Gardner.

Gardner had shared with Birsan a manifest file, package.json, from an npm package used internally by PayPal.

Birsan noticed some of the manifest file packages were not present on the public npm repository but were instead PayPal’s privately created npm packages, used and stored internally by the company.

On seeing this, the researcher wondered, should a package by the same name exist in the public npm repository, in addition to a private NodeJS repository, which one would get priority?

To test this hypothesis, Birsan began hunting for names of private internal packages that he could find in manifest files on GitHub repositories or in CDNs of prominent companies but did not exist in a public open-source repository.

The researcher then started creating counterfeit projects using the same names on open-source repositories such as npm, PyPI, and RubyGems.

Every package published by Birsan was done so under his real account and clearly had a disclaimer in place, stating “This package is meant for security research purposes and does not contain any useful code.”

Researcher hacks over 35 tech firms in novel supply chain attack

Now here’s the kicker

Birsan soon realized, should a dependency package used by an application exist in both a public open-source repository and your private build, the public package would get priority and be pulled instead — without needing any action from the developer.

Researcher hacks over 35 tech firms in novel supply chain attack

Yikes!

The english version of “Shaadi ka laddoo jo na khaaye woh pachtaye, jo khaaye woh bhi pachtaaye“

If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret it; if you laugh at the world’s follies or if you weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or you weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a girl, you will regret it; if you do not believe her, you will also regret it; if you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both; whether you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both. If you hang yourself, you will regret it; if you do not hang yourself, you will regret it; if you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both; whether you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the sum of all practical wisdom.

Either/Or: Kierkegaard on Transcending the Tyranny of Binary Choice and Double Regret

I recently watched the episode ‘Diamonds Aren’t Forever’ of Bad Billionaires: India on Netflix. This statement from James Crabtree stood out for me.

There’s a very clear double standard in the way that we view corruption in the world. People look at countries like India and say, “these countries are corrupt”, but, actually, much of the worst corruption would not be possible without seemingly respectable international finance. Somebody like Nirav Modi needed international banks in order to funnel his money abroad. He needed international lawyers. He needed tax havens in order to host his shell companies. And so, the corruption, the grand corruption you see in countries like India works hand in glove with a different and much more anonymous form of corruption, which is entirely created in rich countries like Britain or Switzerland and America.

It’s also a history lesson. The first four years of your life. Do you remember them? What’s your earliest memory? It is fascinating watching your child claw their way up the developmental ladder from baby to toddler to child. All this stuff we take for granted, but your baby will painstakingly work their way through trial and error: eating, moving, walking, talking. Arms and legs, how the hell do they work? Turns out, we human beings are kind of amazing animals. There’s no better way to understand just how amazing humans are than the front row seat a child gives you to observe it all unfold from scratch each and every day, from literal square zero. Children give the first four years of your life back to you.

On Parenthood

A wonderful article for all the new parents and the ones who are on the fence about becoming a parent.

As we sit here over six months after the initial lockdown provoked by COVID-19, the United States has moved out of a brief period of national unity into distressingly predictable and bitter partisan division. The return to this state of affairs has been fuelled by a cognitive trait that divides us and that our culture serves to magnify. Certainly many commentators have ascribed some part of the divide to what they term our “post-truth” society, but this is not an apt description of the particular defect that has played a central role in our divided society. The cause of our division is not that people deny the existence of truth. It is that people are selective in displaying their post-truth tendencies.

What our society is really suffering from is myside bias: People evaluate evidence, generate evidence, and test hypotheses in a manner biased toward their own prior beliefs, opinions, and attitudes. That we are facing a myside bias problem and not a calamitous societal abandonment of the concept of truth is perhaps good news in one sense, because the phenomenon of myside bias has been extensively studied in cognitive science. The bad news, however, is that what we know is not necessarily encouraging.

The Bias that Divides Us

A fascinating article by Keith E. Stanovich on what myside bias is. Highly relevant in these divided times and may help in understanding other person’s perspective. A bit more succinct explanation later in the article.

…people evaluate the same virtuous act more favourably if committed by a member of their own group and evaluate a negative act less unfavourably if committed by a member of their own group; they evaluate an identical experiment more favourably if the results support their prior beliefs than if the results contradict their prior beliefs; and when searching for information, people select information sources that are likely to support their own position. Even the interpretation of a purely numerical display of outcome data is tipped in the direction of the subject’s prior belief. Likewise, judgments of logical validity are skewed by people’s prior beliefs.

The Bias that Divides Us

That’s it. That’s what I learned today.

Parachute is an iconic brand. And it’s safe to say most people have heard about Parachute coconut oil. But the interesting bit is that the product oil isn’t sold or marketed as hair oil. Instead, Marico classifies them as edible oil. The reason is quite simple. Edible oil carries a low tax rate. Cosmetic hair oil is taxed at a higher rate.

When Sachin wasn’t a cricketer (Don’t get misled by heading of the article)

I did a double take when I read this and had to rush to see my Parachute hair oil bottle to confirm this.

Consider two very large prehuman populations, the Geniuses and the Butterflies. Suppose the Geniuses will devise an invention once in 10 lifetimes. The Butterflies are much dumber, only devising the same invention once in 1000 lifetimes. So, this means that the Geniuses are 100 times smarter than the Butterflies. However, the Geniuses are not very social and have only 1 friend they can learn from. The Butterflies have 10 friends, making them 10 times more social.

Now, everyone in both populations tries to obtain an invention, both by figuring it out for themselves and by learning from friends. Suppose learning from friends is difficult: if a friend has it, a learner only learns it half the time. After everyone has done their own individual learning and tried to learn from their friends, do you think the innovation will be more common among the Geniuses or the Butterflies?

Well, among the Geniuses a bit fewer than 1 out of 5 individuals (18%) will end up with the invention. Half of those Geniuses will have figured it out all by themselves. Meanwhile, 99.9% of Butterflies will have the innovation, but only 0.1% will have figured it out by themselves.

Being Smart is Not Enough (The quote is from the book The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter)

The author goes on to illustrate why you need both Geniuses and Butterflies in your team.