codexjourneys

By this logic, we wouldn't have some of the breakthroughs made throughout history. Outsiders have made some pretty interesting leaps (later honed by experts). Expertise is great, but it can exist outside of formal education, and it isn't the only metric.

Totally agree, it can be a bit of an echo chamber. I had an infection post-dental-work. Bing Chat insisted I had swollen lymph nodes from a cold that would resolve on their own, then decided I had a salivary gland infection. After a follow-up with a real-world ENT, it was (probably accurately) diagnosed as a soft-tissue infection that had completely resolved on two rounds of antibiotics. The AI never raised that possibility, whereas the ENT and dentist examined me and reached that conclusion immediately.

I do think AI is great for discussing some health things (like "how should I interpret this report or test result?"), but it's too echo chamber-y and suggestion-prone for accurate diagnosis right now.

Why wouldn't it work with 2 or 3 unified days onsite and 2 or 3 days wfh, with a no-meetings, minimal-interruptions directive on wfh days? I think this structure, if well managed, would work even better than the old 5-days-in-office.

This will be counterbalanced by the fact that WFH is better for many employees from a work-life balance perspective, so higher-performing employees who have more choices will tend to gravitate toward companies that allow WFH.

I expect many companies will arrive at an equilibrium with at least 2 days WFH for focused work and 3 days in-office for collaboration. This seems to already be happening since the % of companies offering hybrid is up this year. The question is how many great employees laggard companies will lose before accepting that.

(Caveat: this does not apply to companies doing mostly ground-breaking work that have more mission-focused, highly qualified applicants than they can handle. Some companies may be surprised to find they are no longer in this bucket.)

I just thought the topic sounded interesting. It's back up now.

I read this as more of a "both, and" situation. Lots of other industries have ISACs (Information Sharing and Analysis Centers), mostly focused on information security, and they can work quite well. The FS-ISAC, for example, is quite active in the financial services sector and (IMHO) reasonably effective.

It's always been a little baffling not to see FAANGs on this list (the IT ISAC is broader than just the tech industry): https://www.nationalisacs.org/member-isacs-3

So, I think this is a good step for the AI industry. Of course regulation is still a necessary component, but an industry consortium focused on sharing lessons learned and good practices is a good step, in my view.

Absolutely, the closest state to NY with a "right to try" law is Connecticut. Pennsylvania also has one. https://righttotry.org/in-your-state/

Edit: Also, the federal law applies regardless of location: https://righttotry.org/rtt-faq/

"I do not live in a state with a Right to Try law. Can I still use Right to Try?

"Yes. S.204 makes Right to Try the law of the land. So long as a patient and treatment meet the qualifications of the federal law, Right to Try applies, regardless of whether the patient’s state adopted Right to Try."

Essay author here. Success-to-the-successful is a real feature of our current economic landscape, more than in the semi-recent past (yes, ancient feudal societies were way worse). Here’s Harvard Business Review:

“… we find that large corporations are more and more likely to maintain their dominant positions, while small corporations are less and less likely to become big and profitable.” Link: https://hbr.org/2019/08/the-gap-between-large-and-small-comp...

Here’s economist Austan Goolsbee in The New York Times highlighting growing corporate concentration even pre-pandemic: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/business/big-companies-ar...

These are success-to-the-successful trends.

Disruptive shocks (like when Google created a truly better search technology and dethroned AltaVista in the late ‘90s, or when the US gov broke up AT&T in 1984) can change those dynamics. That’s how Kodak, despite having lots of resources, lost dominance and eventually failed: they didn’t have the right non-monetary resources (innovative culture and support for change) at a critical time, so disruptive shock toppled them.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

Some banks offer sweep accounts that automatically move funds over the 250k limit into accounts at other banks (again, up to the 250k limit) or into money-market funds (which have their own risks).

I believe there is no way to eliminate credit, default, and/or liquidity risk entirely in banking (when cracks in the system appear and start spreading, you may have exposure no matter what you did), but it's possible to mitigate it in ways that don't seem to have happened here.

Here's a decent explainer on sweep programs (it talks about broker-dealers using them, but banks can also offer them): https://www.sec.gov/oiea/investor-alerts-bulletins/ib_banksw...

There's a good article from September on how Australia's similar bill worked pretty well: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/should-we-save-newspapers...

Local news is in trouble, and it might be worth saving.

Agree that great managers are sometimes individual contributors who take on the job because they believe doing so is the only way to ensure effectiveness. But it's important to filter for ego-as-motivation, which can make for a terrible manager....

There's another type of great manager, too, whose best quality is their ability to defend the team from b.s. and politics originating elsewhere in the organization. This is especially valuable in large, established companies.

It would be interesting to see long-term results of off-sites in which a company's executives and an equal number of long-tenured average-performing and high-performing employees gather to share and learn from each other, with follow-up on-site meetings to experiment and execute afterward.

I have never encountered an off-site like this, but if you have, how did it go?

Bringing my comments over from the other submission:

Not just wolves. Toxoplasma infection also "may make people look more attractive to the opposite sex": https://www.earth.com/news/parasite-makes-infected-people-lo...

Is this because it increases risk-taking behavior? Who knows, but it's interesting that something with potentially significant health drawbacks may have enough benefits that it's evolved to coexist with us (up to 50% of people carry it).

Overall, it looks increasingly like microbes shape our behavior and emotional health: https://www.science.org/content/article/evidence-mounts-gut-...

I think we may be able to say that someday, the science is new and evolving but it looks like microbes shape our behavior (edit: and emotional health): https://www.science.org/content/article/evidence-mounts-gut-...

This is really cool and echoes earlier human studies that found Toxoplasma infection "may make people look more attractive to the opposite sex": https://www.earth.com/news/parasite-makes-infected-people-lo...

Is this because it increases risk-taking behavior? Who knows, but it's interesting that something with potentially significant health drawbacks may have enough benefits that it's evolved to coexist with us (up to 50% of people carry it).

Completely agree with this; it should not be experienced as a videogame, it should be experienced as a real responsibility as in, "This is what I'm 100% focused on because it's the most important thing I'm doing right now."

Yeah, I didn't know about halteres but just looked up the image! Here's something on changes during T. rex growth: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192160/

Funny enough VCRs had this decades ago, the double-fast-forward skipped forward a few minutes. Why e-readers can't do this with a similar symbol to skip forward 25 pages is a mystery to me.

Two things:

Once, when facing a great personal crisis, I found some wisdom that helped me reframe my worries and fears: "Why do you spend all your time worrying about the blizzard on top of the mountain? Go around the mountain."

Secondly, in grad school I was upset that other students appeared to be cheating during exams, to the point that I could hear messages pinging in the classroom. A friend told me, paraphrased: "You can't control what other people do. You'll just have to do well enough that it doesn't matter." I didn't want to hear it, but once it sunk in, he was right and accepting his advice was the best path forward.

It might be for balance despite the small size. On the human side, our pinky toes are important for balance despite appearing a little bit vestigial.

No, the Northeast. A general rundown that mentions the post-2008 building shortfall: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/29/1089174630/housing-shortage-n...

This one's older (from 2020) but digs into details by area of the country: https://eyeonhousing.org/2020/01/a-decade-of-home-building-t...

Steve didn't like our data center rack mounts being silver, we had to pull them all out and spray paint them black, because silver just wasn't acceptable, in a datacenter.

This strikes me as funny because of all the canonically silver iMacs and Macbooks that came afterward. Is black even an option?

I am just not sure about this. There are more Millennials than Gen X, and Millennials are in their prime family-building and house-buying years. At the same time, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, not much new housing was built. The intersection of those two trends might mean demand exceeds supply purely mathematically. Especially if people who locked in mortgages at lower rates are reluctant to sell as a result, furthering lowering supply.

Certainly prices may come down in some locations as interest rates go up if there aren't enough cash buyers, but will it be enough to counteract the imbalance of demand and supply? I think it's an open question.

This - I wish they had categories for "host lives here too" and "this is a boarding house." You can usually figure it out by scrutinizing the reviews, but I'd like to see it overtly stated.

Reviews of the hosts are already informally available in the reviews of the rooms and apartments. It's the number-one thing I look for when booking: the reviews should be raving about not only the place, but also the host. If this is not happening, or the reviews are mainly short and neutral, I don't book.

I did get tripped up despite this rule once, when I booked a private room in an apartment and arrived to find the host going on vacation. After he left, a massive mouse infestation stirred up by basement construction the prior week surfaced, and I escaped down several flights of stairs in the dark surrounded by a cacophony of squeaking in the walls. I think a mouse ran over my foot. I have mostly stayed in hotels since.

But I've had many wonderful Airbnb experiences in the past, and I do believe my one terrible experience was an outlier (albeit traumatic). I would have started using it again, but high-quality Airbnb listings exceeded hotels in price in my country, so I stick with hotels, especially since I earned status with some programs.

This is a good point. If doctors start writing sanitized notes or leaving things out, it would be net negative. US patients can get their full medical records by requesting them from the office, and the notes are in there, but most patients do that only if leaving the practice or if the doctor retires.

I requested and received my medical file from a doctor who passed away. I enjoyed reading through it but was glad I didn't see those notes in real-time. I wouldn't have wanted to go to my next appointment wondering, "I think I'm doing okay, but is he going to write that I'm less compliant than the last time?"

I keep an old phone on airplane mode with a backup of my 2FA codes in my Auth app in case my current phone dies. Peace of mind. Totally agree with the other commenter about using multi-factor authentication in most cases.

I do not leave myself signed in to Mail on my phone. I don't even have my accounts set up there. If I lost my phone and someone gained access to my signed-in Mail account, that would suck. I also stay signed out of Facebook, Twitter, etc. if I'm traveling anywhere.

I prefer LTE over WiFi in most cases, unless I'm on a trusted WiFi.

I'm reading The Once and Future World by J.B. MacKinnon, and I'm reading extra slowly because I'm enjoying it so much.

It's about nature, how we're wired to think the wild landscapes we grew up with were pristine, how it's truly evolved through history in response to humans' presence and it's hard to really pinpoint a baseline, and how much wildlife and plant life has vanished so far in the last two hundred years (from whatever fuzzy baseline we can arrive at).

Earlier this year, I read Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows and on almost every page I was taking notes! A huge eye-opener and felt like a missing link across sciences and social sciences. Also extremely readable and engaging.

+100 to visiting all the schools after you apply. I believe it signaled serious intent to the departments where I applied and gave me a chance to explain my non-traditional background in person.

Ended up attending a school in a location that I wouldn't have ranked first on paper but ended up loving. And vice versa for a school in a location that didn't bother me on paper, but when I visited, I realized I couldn't spend years there.

Agree on the educational impact likely turning out as an utter disaster in the long term. I wish it were more measurable, but the article rightly points out it's hard to quantify effects (lower future income, etc.) that haven't fully materialized yet.

Most salient conclusion for me from the article is that "go early, go hard" like New Zealand is probably the best way to avoid what most countries ended up with: lots of half-effective measures for extended periods of time with bad second-order effects like learning loss, small-business closures, and mental-health declines. After a tough, short lockdown that actually worked, NZ had 18 months of "pandemic essentially doesn't exist" life while the rest of the world was struggling.

But letting those measures go on too long becomes counterproductive; China's zero-Covid rigidity is the most obvious example, but lots of measures dragged on past the point of utility or never made sense (like curfews - as if Covid wears a watch).