Category: personal AnGoL

Anthony Bourdain had started smoking again, was the first thing I noticed as he sat down with me last February. He was a bit hung over from a recent working trip to south Louisiana for Cajun Mardi Gras; “Harder partying than I’m used to, I gotta say,” he said, laughing. Despite his great height his leonine head seemed just huge, and a little fleshier than I’d imagined; there was this slight dissipation to him.

But no—who could be troubled about the wellbeing of Anthony Bourdain? Just look at him, so debonair, so completely at ease. A veritable prince of savoir vivre. Sixty-one, and still very elegant in his looks; the word sexy came to mind. Almost an old-fashioned word now. The sort of person who seems to think with his hips, his hands. He was in love, he would later admit; he and his new girlfriend, Asia Argento, had started smoking again together. He was a little rueful about the smoking, had the air of someone who meant to quit soon.

Source: The Anthony Bourdain Interview

“No man is an island,” the English poet John Donne once wrote. Nearly 400 years later, if you’re into creative, ambitious work, that sentiment is truer than ever—collaboration is often essential. It also might not feel like your strong suit. Maybe you feel weird without your headphones in and would much rather work alone. But even then, chances are your efforts are part of a greater whole that hinges on your abilities as a collaborator to succeed—so you might as well speak up. It’s an area where we can al

Source: How to Collaborate Effectively at Work | Grammarly

A jumbo aircraft literally requires millions of parts, and innovations in any component can have important implications for the plane’s overall design and efficiency. For example, 3-D printing may radically lower the number of parts required by turbine engines and thus significantly reduce their weight (and thus their fuel consumption). To exploit these possibilities, innovating companies need to be able to connect to manufacturers elsewhere in a secure manner.5

This is exactly the opposite of what a sunset clause in the North American Free Trade Agreement would accomplish. And it is why Airbus recently warned that Brexit will have severe negative consequences for the United Kingdom’s aerospace industry. Modularization requires the ability to tap talent anywhere in the world. In Silicon Valley, over half the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) workers are foreign-born, and fewer than a fifth were born in California, a state that, with 40 million residents, would rank 36th among the world’s countries. With US President Donald Trump’s clampdown on immigration, the neighbor to the north put billboards in Silicon Valley that read “H1B Visa Problems? Think Canada.”

But implementing many technologies also requires ingredients that can be provided only through non-market mechanisms, and here governments play a critical role. Consider high-speed rail. Without government authorization and cooperation, no private company can build a rail line. Western Europe has more than 14,000 kilometers (8,700 miles) of high-speed rail, and China has over 25,000. The United States claims to have 56 kilometers, in a short stretch that covers less than 8% of the distance between Boston and Washington, DC. The reason is obvious: this is a technology that, like the electric car, requires a social decision and a government that enables that choice.

In short, technology requires a society that connects to the world, both through trade and openness to talent, in order to exploit the gains from modularization. It also requires a society that is able to develop a shared sense of purpose, one that is deep and powerful enough to direct the government to provide the public goods that new technologies require. The first requirement is facilitated by a society having a broader and more inclusive sense of who is a member. The second is facilitated by a deeper and more meaningful sense of membership.

Developing these attitudes is not easy. It requires a civic rather than an ethnic sense of nationhood. This is why the stakes in today’s policy debates in the West are not just about values. In a competitive world, societies pay dearly for being unable – or unwilling – to deliver what technology wants.

Source: Does the West Want What Technology Wants? by Ricardo Hausmann – Project Syndicate

Avoid the “tyranny of the articulate”

In many engineer-driven startups, world-class debaters end up making many of the decisions. Ben talked about why this is problematic:

There’s this tyranny of the articulate that happens at companies…But there’s only a loose correlation between how good people are at communicating and how good they are at actually building stuff.

I personally think debating is a horrible way to get to any solutions. There’s this idea that vigorous debate yields results, but in my experience, vigorous debate yields people who vigorously defend what they think. As a result, they’re unwilling to compromise at some point because it’s a debate and the objective is to win.

When it is necessary to have a debate, Ben offered this important reminder:

Most debates never get anywhere because there’s no clearly agreed upon goal. So scope what the actual problem is; articulate the goal.

Source: Pinterest Founder Ben Silbermann’s Lessons on Decision Making, Values, and Taking Time for Yourself

The same advice I give aspiring writers is relevant to anyone, in anyone industry, who wants to become successful.
You have to share your work. Regularly.
You have to practice in public.
You have to let people be part of the process, because it’s through sharing that you learn and grow the most.

Source: Most People Who Want To Become Successful Don’t Practice This 1 Simple Skill

Continuing the series of posts on how to connect DataGrip (or any other IntelliJ-based IDE) to various data sources, in this post we’ll show you how to connect to Google’s BigQuery. BigQuery is a low-cost enterprise data warehouse designed to handle data analytics at a massive scale. Currently, DataGrip does not come with a built-in connector for BigQuery, so let’s connect the IDE to it.

Source: Using BigQuery from IntelliJ-based IDE | DataGrip Blog

Library Rules means keeping to yourself, keeping your voice down in hushed tones, not distracting one another. If you do need to talk to someone at normal volumes, grab a room. A key to making open floor plans work is also having private rooms scattered throughout the space. A place where a few people who need to discuss something in real time can jump in, talk it up and work it out without bothering anyone on the outside.

Source: Library Rules: How to make an open office plan work

Daniel Kahneman advocates for recording your decisions in a dedicated decision journal. A good decision is known before the outcome. It involves a mental representation of the facts known at the time as well as applied judgment. Good decisions are valuable but they are more valuable if they are part of a good decision process because a good process allows for feedback about where you can improve. This feedback, in turn, allows you to constantly get better at making decisions.

Source: Why Bad Things Happen to Good Decisions

3. Write down decisions you make — and your rationale at the time — into a “decision journal.”

Next time you hire someone, cut a partnership deal, decide on a key product spec — or make any hard decision — write down your reasoning in a journal. Later, you can see how the decision played out relative to your reasoning at the time you made the decision. You can learn whether you should have trusted your gut at the time or not.

Source: Pinterest Founder Ben Silbermann’s Lessons on Decision Making, Values, and Taking Time for Yourself

In the end, the nothing-to-hide argument has nothing to say. When the nothing-to-hide argument is unpacked, and its underlying assumptions examined and challenged, we can see how it shifts the debate to its terms, then draws power from its unfair advantage. The nothing-to-hide argument speaks to some problems but not to others. It represents a singular and narrow way of conceiving of privacy, and it wins by excluding consideration of the other problems often raised with government security measures. When e

Source: Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’