Category: personal AnGoL

If you’re anything like the nearly 100 million people worldwide who have a Costco membership, you probably love Costco’s Kirkland Signature. You can get two dozen cage-free eggs for $6.50, or a 1.75-liter bottle of French vodka for $19.99.
But despite these products’ exceptional prices, their quality doesn’t suffer at all. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Many of their products pass purity tests with flying colors.
Kirkland also has a passionate and loyal fan base — not something you typically find with a private label brand. One guy even got a Kirkland Signature tattoo on his left arm and held his 27th birthday party at the Costco food court.
Kirkland’s success defies our intuition and experience. Shouldn’t lower prices lead to lower quality products? How can they offer rock-bottom prices but still have some of the best products around?
The answer is this: they get the best manufacturers in the world — who already have products on Costco shelves — to make Kirkland products. Yeah, you read that right. While customers might not know it, Kirkland products are often made by the same manufacturers who make the branded products that sit next to them on the shelves.

Source: How Costco Convinces Brands to Cannibalize Themselves – Napkin Math

When you experience someone else’s genius work, a little part of you feels, “That’s what I could have, would have, and should have done!”
Someone else did it. You didn’t.
They fought the resistance. You gave in to distractions.
They made it top priority. You said you’d get to it some day.
They took the time. You meant to.
When this happens, you can take it two ways:
You could let that part of you give up. “Oh well. Now I don’t need to make that anymore.”
Or you could do something about that jealous pain. Shut off your phone, kill the distractions, make it top priority, and spend the time.
It takes many hours to make what you want to make. The hours don’t suddenly appear. You have to steal them from comfort. Whatever you were doing before was comfortable. This is not. This will be really uncomfortable.
The few times in my life I’ve made a real change like this, it felt awful on the surface. I wasn’t shallow-happy about it. I wasn’t smiling. I was annoyed and fighting it inside, but on the outside I did the work. And in the end, got the deeper satisfaction of finishing.

Source: Where to find the hours to make it happen | Derek Sivers

I agree with all of this. The agile scrum methodology is not all bad. The issue is the mechanical way it is applied.

The Problems

My current team has recently adopted Scrum and started with two-week sprints. Issues have already developed and it reminds me of why I hate Scrum.
For this particular rant, I’ll define Scrum as the methodology developed by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland and documented in “The Scrum Guide.”
In my humble opinion, Scrum is not agile and, in practice, not very flexible. It is not agile because of its emphasis on time blocks for planning, typically two weeks. More on that later. It is not flexible in practice because there are strong adherents to the cause (aka zealots) who insist on following whatever they believe to be Scrum to the letter. The disciples have taken over!
Now let’s take a look at what Scrum is. “Scrum is lightweight, simple to understand, difficult to master.” Oh right, that is just the kind of process I want to adopt: one that is difficult to master. Major strike one against Scrum in my book.
Let’s take a look at the basic terminology: a “daily scrum” and “sprints.”
Apparently, a group of dirty men pushing against each other in a big pile is the metaphor for doing your daily routine of making sure the there are no blockers on the project. I prefer something a bet less sporty and a lot less aggressive: a daily standup. Same basic drill of what you did, what you are going to do and no blockers. But without the aggressive overtones.
Now on to sprints. In an industry where burn out from working extra hours is a problem, that is just what we want: a metaphor so management can tell everyone they just need to sprint faster. And then let’s put that in a two-week time box to regularly amp up the pressure to produce more. Looks to me like a great management technique to maximize free overtime from the staff. It’s amazing we don’t have a programmer’s union to clean this stuff up. I myself believe in 40-hour weeks and anything over that should be a rare emergency.

Source: Why I Hate Scrum – DZone Agile

Anuradha Mittal was about to step out of her home in Oakland, Calif., on the last Friday of May, but first she had one last email to send. She was on her way to one of the demonstrations that had broken out around the world five days after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Like hundreds of other protesters, she’d be praying and dancing late into the night, in streets blurred by billowing tear gas and teeming with riot police.

The note Mittal, the board chair of Ben & Jerry’s, was sending was to the chief executive officer, Matthew McCarthy, requesting that a statement be prepared by Monday. She wanted the ice cream brand to express support for the Black Lives Matter movement and decry the violence against Floyd, who’d died while being restrained by a White law enforcement officer less than 15 minutes after his arrest for allegedly using a counterfeit bill to buy cigarettes. McCarthy replied immediately to assure her his team was already on it.

Source: How Ben & Jerry’s Applied Its Corporate Activism Recipe to BLM – Bloomberg

When deciding your product’s future, you have to collect data and opinions, analyze, and estimate issues and ideas. Unless, of course, you want your prioritization to be a gut feeling show in a zoo with HiPPOs, RHiNOs, and ZEbRAs.
A good prioritization framework will help you structure the data and be consistent. Deriving your own requires months of careful prioritization when you finally begin to understand how to detect small rare problems. And you have to define your priorities right from the start—a vicious circle.
Thanks to the community, that circle is easy to break. There are dozens of frameworks proven by hundreds of great teams. In this article, we want to discuss one of the most popular—RICE Score—why most use it incorrectly, when it really works and when it becomes useless.

Source: Is Using RICE Score Actually Increasing Productivity? – DZone Agile

Had a bad dream. Medyo traumatic. Huhu. I don’t want to go to sleep na .

The fact is starting or running a business is messy. That is especially hard for people whose views are more traditional. Unfortunately for me, that is my family. Well not exactly coming from a family of doctors we have our own version of traditional. The weird thing is since the risk-reward of small businesses/startups are not as sure as the risk-reward of having your own medical practice it translates to pretty much the same thing but with different intensity.
 
I can feel that they are trying to understand me, but it really is very hard for people to go beyond the way they see their lives.
 
I love my wife. I love my family. I hope I find success soon. I don’t want to go find a regular job or worse a government job.
 
 

Big Fucking Deal!

OpenAI API We’re releasing an API for accessing new AI models developed by OpenAI. Unlike most AI systems which are designed for one use-case, the API today provides a general-purpose “text in, text out” interface, allowing users to try it on virtually any English language task. You can now request access in order to integrate the API into your product, develop an entirely new application, or help us explore the strengths and limits of this technology.

Source: OpenAI API

I first encountered Bruno Maçães when he was interviewed by Tyler Cowen (Bruno Maçães on the Spirit of Adventure, Episode 50. Conversations with Tyler [September 2018]). With Maçães having recently completed a six-month overland journey across the Eurasian supercontinent while researching for his book, The Dawn of Eurasia (London: Penguin Random House UK, 2018), Cowen asked him to design a dream tour for someone with two or three weeks to spend in Eurasia. Maçães responded “the best would be fly to Kashgar in China…then cross the border into Pakistan, and perhaps go down all the way to Lahore and then Delhi,” in the process making “one of the classical trips, to go from China to India by land.” Hearing this, I was struck with the sense that Maçães was a thinker with a uniquely credible perspective worth paying attention to, having spent significant time on the ground in locations across Eurasia where China has a growing presence. Having undertaken the first part of the route described by Maçães myself during the summer of 2014, traveling south from Kashgar down the Karakoram Highway to the Khunjerab Pass (the border of China and Pakistan), my curiosity was piqued to begin a more systematic investigation of the role of China in the developing world. This serves as the entry point to my interest in Maçães’ Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order, the subject of this book review.

Source: Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order: The Independent Review: The Independent Institute

Saez: Yes. Kansas is an interesting case study, and I think it illustrates beautifully from a research perspective even though it’s a disaster in terms of public policy. This issue with tax avoidance, the second aspect that I discussed, is what Kansas experienced when it lowered or even effectively eliminated taxes on the profits of pass-through businesses under individual income taxes. The state provided huge incentives for high-income earners to reclassify, say, their compensation from wages toward pass-through businesses.

Source: In Conversation with Emmanuel Saez – Equitable Growth