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JA Westenberg explaining what is effort heuristic:
There’s a concept in behavioral science called the “effort heuristic.” It’s the idea that we tend to value information more if we worked for it. The more effort something requires, the more meaning we assign to the result. When all knowledge is made effortless, it’s treated as disposable. There’s no awe, no investment, no delight in the unexpected—only consumption.
Kent Beck’s thought provoking post on, what he calls, ‘bridge model’ to make connections with others:
Here’s the mental model that finally helped me: a bridge.
I can unilaterally construct a bridge to another person. I can reach out. Make contact. Say something real. The further the distance—emotionally, culturally, socially—the harder the bridge is to build. But it’s possible with almost anyone of positive intent. (It’s also possible with people whose intent toward me is negative or merely transactional. That’s a different problem.)
With the bridge in place, I can walk halfway across.
Half. Way. I can make an investment. Do something a little uncomfortable. Reveal something true about myself. Share an observation that matters to me. Ask a question that shows I’m paying attention.
And then I have to stop.
I have to stand in the middle of the bridge and wait.
Jacob Schroeder sharing his 25 lessons on money and meaning. This lesson regarding raising kids stood out for me.
The cost of children is an admission to adventure, love, pain, joy, despair, loss, fulfillment – all that life can and should be. Then one day it’s over. The ride comes to a stop – hopefully, much later than sooner – and that emptiness is a bittersweet debt. It is a debt that can never be repaid. You are left desperately wishing to repay it only to take it out again so you can relive it all over, desperately wishing to take out a second mortgage on all the spills, the cuts and bruises, the breaks, the heartaches, the tears, the smiles, the hugs, the laughs, the I love yous and the goodbyes, enough to get you angry at the unfairness of it all.
I am still on this adventure.
This comment by nicbou who is sharing their thoughts on the layoffs among technical writers due to AI.
I write documentation for a living. Although my output is writing, my job is observing, listening and understanding. I can only write well because I have an intimate understanding of my readers’ problems, anxieties and confusion. This decides what I write about, and how to write about it. This sort of curation can only come from a thinking, feeling human being.
I revise my local public transit guide every time I experience a foreign public transit system. I improve my writing by walking in my readers’ shoes and experiencing their confusion. Empathy is the engine that powers my work.
Most of my information is carefully collected from a network of people I have a good relationship with, and from a large and trusting audience. It took me years to build the infrastructure to surface useful information. AI can only report what someone was bothered to write down, but I actually go out in the real world and ask questions.
I have built tools to collect people’s experience at the immigration office. I have had many conversations with lawyers and other experts. I have interviewed hundreds of my readers. I have put a lot of information on the internet for the first time. AI writing is only as good as the data it feeds on. I hunt for my own data.
People who think that AI can do this and the other things have an almost insulting understanding of the jobs they are trying to replace.
I would implore you to read the comments in the Hacker News thread. A lot of folks are having a feeling that there’s no going back and it reminds me of this—we are in a market of lemons.
Weimin Chu has documented the scale of renewable energy in China in series of photographs. Yale Environment 360 showcases these photographs along with the energy capabilities of these renewable energy sources.
Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.
The massive buildout is happening across the country, from crowded eastern cities increasingly topped by rooftop solar panels to remote western deserts where colossal wind farms sprawl across the landscape.
“From the ground, it’s hard to grasp the scale of these power plants,” said Chinese photographer Weimin Chu. “But when you rise into the air, you can see the geometry, the rhythm — and their relationship with the mountains, the desert, the sea.”
Matheus Lima sharing his thoughts on processing everything at 2x, just because you can.
Life happens at 1x. Every conversation you’ve ever had. Every walk, every meal, every meaningful experience. None of it comes with a speed dial. We’re biological creatures wired for real-time processing. When someone speaks to you in person, you don’t get to fast-forward through the parts you find boring.
There’s something strange about trying to shortcut how humans communicate. A podcast is just a conversation you’re eavesdropping on. The pauses, the rhythm, the way someone builds to a point. That’s all part of it. Speed it up and you get the words, sure. But you lose the texture.
Your brain needs empty space too. This is the part we’ve collectively forgotten. Boredom is a feature, not a bug. It’s where our best ideas — like starting this blog! — come from. It’s where you actually process what you’ve learned, make connections, have original thoughts. Constant consumption, even sped up, leaves no room for any of that. You need to be bored.
The irony is that consuming faster often means processing less. You’re optimizing for throughput when you should be optimizing for understanding. All those 2x podcasts blur together into background noise. What did you actually retain? What changed how you think? It’s empty calories. It’s fake productivity.
Morgan Housel shares his theory about nostalgia.
I have a theory about nostalgia: It happens because the best survival strategy in an uncertain world is to overworry. When you look back, you forget about all the things you worried about that never came true. So life appears better in the past because in hindsight there wasn’t as much to worry about as you were actually worrying about at the time.
Ha!
Bryan Cantrill reflecting back on his days when he decided to become a software engineer.
When I entered university in 1992, it didn’t feel like the right time: the economy for new grads was very grim — and I knew plenty of folks who were struggling to find work (and accepting part time jobs that didn’t need a college degree at all while they searched for something better). I never doubted going to school, but I also have never taken a job for granted.
When I fell in love with computer science as an undergraduate and realized that I wanted to become a software engineer, it didn’t feel like the right time: Ed Yourdon had just written “The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer”, which boldly told any young computer science student that they were wasting their time — that all programming jobs would be done by cheap labor abroad. This argument felt wrong, but I was too in love with computer science to be talked out of it anyway.
When I decided that I was specifically interested in operating systems kernel development, it definitely didn’t feel like the right time: the conventional wisdom in the mid-1990s was that operating systems were done — that Unix was in decline and that the future clearly belonged to Microsoft. I ardently disagreed with this, and my conviction in 1996 brought me to the one company that unequivocally shared it: Sun Microsystems.
This is so relevant in today’s uncertain times. And this reminds me of the book Same as ever by Morgan Housel.
Jason Fried explaining why obvious things need to be kept obvious even when the hard things become possible.
Much of the tension in product development and interface design comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the possible. Figuring out which things go in which bucket is critical to fully understanding how to make something useful.
Shouldn’t everything be obvious? Unless you’re making a product that just does one thing – like a paperclip, for example – everything won’t be obvious. You have to make tough calls about what needs to be obvious, what should be easy, and what should be possible. The more things something (a product, a feature, a screen, etc) does, the more calls you have to make.
This isn’t the same as prioritizing things. High, medium, low priority doesn’t tell you enough about the problem. “What needs to be obvious?” is a better question to ask than “What’s high priority?” Further, priority doesn’t tell you anything about cost. And the first thing to internalize is that everything has a cost.
I will be thinking about this every time I will be driving my car. I own Skoda Kylaq and my variant has automatic climate control. It seems that when automatic climate control became possible in cars, car makers thought users will not use the A/C controls anymore and put in fancy-looking-but-will-get-activated-or-deactivated-on-slightest-of-accidental-touch based controls.
Having touch based controls already makes it difficult to use while driving, but here the layout of the touch panel is so bad at times I take 1-3 seconds to figure out if the action worked or not.
Here’s how my touch based A/C controls look like (Figure 1). At first glance it everything seems to be present. But the moment you start using it, you realise how badly it is designed.
Let me annotate and show how to use the touch based panel (Figure 2).
There’s a small display screen (#1) in the top-center which displays key information.
The buttons of recirculate internal/external air (#2), on/off A/C (#3) and automatic climate control (#4) are all toggle touch buttons. But touching them, doesn’t light them up. Instead that information shows up on the display screen.
Similarly, the touch bar for temperature up/down (#5) and fan speed (#6) doesn’t use the line to give out information. That also goes in the display screen.
But the touch button to set the direction of the air outlet (#7) is a multi option button with 4 options. Each touch enables the next option but I haven’t memorised all the options and their order. So cycle through them twice to find my option but the first time I am just getting the order. In the analog days a knob was used here and I understand its usability—and importance—now.
But the toggle touch button to switch rear window heater on/off (#8) has a small LED light to indicate its on/off status. Something that should have been implemented for all the other buttons.
All this has led me to set the temperature, confirm if automatic A/C is enabled and then start my drive. If this is what Skoda wanted from its users, then the obvious option here should have been to have a physical on/off button for automatic A/C control and a physical knob for setting temperature.
Shubhabrata ‘Shumi’ Marmar reflecting on the dramatic design of Mahindra BE6.
What you should know about dramatic designs is there is always been a long-standing debate about whether they’re good for a company to do or not.
Dramatic designs can draw attention; they can create aspiration, but they can also age very quickly, which is why a lot of companies are a little leery of doing super out-there designs for production cars.
You do that for concepts because the concept is about attention and not production.
Therefore, if you look at, for example, the Polo—the Polo didn’t age a lot, but the Polo didn’t also look super fresh when it arrived. It looked like a nice, clean, fresh design, and it looked like that for a long time because it wasn’t a super dramatic design.
Whereas every time Lamborghini, for example, to go right to the other end of this, when they have to build a new supercar, they have to really push a dramatic design out because it is a supercar.
It’s not going to get produced in large numbers, but it’s that drama that is part of that brand’s design story.
But when you take it to production, which will sell a large number of cars, the risk is if it’s too dramatic, then in two years it’ll look like the last trend rather than today’s fresh car.
That’s why dramatic designs—it’s a trick; it’s a good trick, but it may not always work.
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