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PacifyFish

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I made the switch over to “customer facing tech savvy person.” Think Sales Engineer, Solutions Architect, Technical Account Manager.

Pays slightly less (until you get 5+ years experience, then tends to catch up if you’re good) but my lord it’s so much less taxing on your brain.

You’ll realize that most customer facing folks may be charismatic, but they aren’t very organized or willing to learn on the job. It’s easy to be top 1% while coming in at 9 and leaving at 5, with plenty of time and mental energy leftover for whatever hobbies you want to pursue. Including programming.

Worth checking out if you feel comfortable communicating verbally for a living.

If you want to chat, feel free to reach out at evan dot hellmuth at gmail dot com

Berlin Gold Hat 6 years ago

The Wikipedia article states that it’s a cover for a hat, not meant to be worn.

Psychological safety is 10% job security and 90% how comfortable you feel with the people you work with. Simple to understand, hard to make happen - you need to hire well.

Keep in mind the lockdown is meant to slow spread so the healthcare system doesn't get overloaded, not to stop it.

It is successful in this respect, and IMO a healthy balance of economic slowdown and death toll. We'll probably start reopening (hopefully in stages, so we can monitor impact) in the next ~3 weeks.

Maybe I've missed the boat, but what's the big deal about collecting telemetry?

You already trust Gitlab with everything you store in Gitlab, like source code, which is presumably much more sensitive than the number of times you loaded a page or clicked on a button or whatever.

Is it because the data would be stored with a third party, and you don't trust that third party? If Gitlab trusts the third party, and they're giving you the option to NOT trust the third party and only trust Gitlab, what's the issue?

What kinds of things do you need to check for that aren’t automated? Maybe I’m spoiled by our CI pipeline.

I’d love to take a look at your list

I’ll offer some speculation with no data to back it up: quality of life is good enough that after a certain threshold of wealth people aren’t willing to work extra hours any more. See: Europe & bigco tech jobs.

Sure thing.

I’ll typically make a few cards at first trying to test different aspects of the MM (general concept, example applications, given definition identify the MM, quiz any internal associations I have with it like if I learned it in a specific context, etc.) then I can delete ones that aren’t useful and/or add others later.

Let’s use the mental model of inversion as an example. I found this one in a Farnam Street blog post about Charlie Munger. Here are some cards I might create:

Front - what is the principle of inversion?

Back - when you want to try to maximize something, instead try minimizing its converse. Or vice-versa.

Front - what mental model might help if you’ve unsuccessfully tried implementing programs to increase innovation in your company?

Back - inversion. Rather than thinking of ways to increase innovation, can you instead think of things that are decreasing innovation and eliminate those?

Front - what’s another way to think about reducing time spent on work tasks?

Back - invert the problem. Try to increase time saved on nonessentials (e.g. laundry service, meal prep, outsourcing)

Front - what’s it called when you work backwards through a problem you’ve already tried to work through forwards?

Back - inversion

Front - what would Charlie Munger ask you if you came to him with a tough optimization problem?

Back - “have you tried inverting it?”

This is a bit contrived, but I hope this gives you a sense of how I think about creating cards for mental models.

I love Michael Nielsen. He's so earnest and thoughtful.

His recent forays into spaced repetition have been an interesting glimpse into his thought process. I am a bit of a spaced rep fanatic, but use it to internalize more general "Mental Models" (a la Farnam Street), useful tidbits e.g. how to horizontally align using flexbox, or surface-level concepts like product management frameworks.

I love the effort Michael puts into grappling with ideas to strengthen his intuition. This is something I'd like to do more of, but feel that few of the ideas in my day-to-day are sufficiently complex (I don't have any use for linear algebra proofs, for example).

Anyways, that's my word salad on Michael Nielsen and spaced repetition.

Curious how you implemented this. I bought a Phillips “sunrise alarm clock” about a year ago, but the light was weak and I didn’t feel a difference at all. Did you hack together something yourself?

Could not agree more with this, especially for creative ideas or knowledge that is most useful when instantly accessible (ie mental models and facts/concepts that help with making decisions when you can’t do a bunch of research beforehand).

To help with this internalization I made a chrome extension that lets you review your ideas using spaced repetition in new browser tabs. Check it out if you’re interested https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/forgetmenot/nncbpj...

Because that's what people with money want to invest in, because there is a potential market for space travel/tourism/mining, and because money isn't always allocated such that the benefit to humanity is maximized.

Note that I personally am fine with billions going into space exploration, and I think it can be worked on in tandem with climate issues. Just trying to address what seems to be the crux of the issue - you're saying "shouldn't we..." whereas the world is saying "this is how things are."