October 12th, 2020
Michael Kaminsky recently emailed me an interesting post he wrote about bounties in open source, and I took the opportunity to write up some thoughts that had been swirling in my head for a while. You can find the (lightly edited) response I sent to him below.
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Bounties are great for well-scoped, low-context work. For example, bounties work can quite well for things like penetration testing, because it's fairly clear what the objective is (sp...
September 9th, 2019
Recently, Ayaz Matin sent me an email asking the following question:When I was looking at your website I came across these words:
Individual liberty is the single most important value that society should uphold.I’m more utilitarian and communitarian now.I still believe we should be extremely skeptical of sacrificing individual liberties for the sake of a greater good (in practice if not in theory), but I no longer hold liberty as sacrosanct.Th...
August 11th, 2019
You're not allowed inside the Duomo with your shoulders uncovered. We learned this the hard way. I was wearing a spaghetti strap dress (it's 92℉/33℃ and humid here in Milan), so they stopped my little group at the entrance, after we'd already purchased 3 tickets.
Luckily, we only had about 15 seconds of frustration. I said "Ah that's a shame", Sebastián responded "Oh I'm sure there's a shop around here somewhere", Tyler said "Markets in eve...
May 12th, 2019
For ages, I've wondered why Google Docs still clings to the sheet-of-paper metaphor when lots of its users never print out most of their documents.
Of course it does make sense for "Print layout" to be an option. Many people do print docs, and students make up a huge portion of the users. What I find strange is that Google Docs imposes this UI—you cannot escape the sheet of paper with its edges and isomorphic physicality even if you're just c...
September 3rd, 2018
This was originally published in Oct 2015.
It's a controversial question whether streetcar (also known as trams, trolleys) or bus rapid transit systems (BRT) are a better investment to solve cities' challenge of offering short-distance transit options. The two offer similar stop spacing, and both share the road with cars. However, they differ greatly in their cost structure, flexibility, and public image. Some notes on the subject...
The arg...
September 1st, 2018
Given how much time I spend producing text, I've spent shockingly little of it considering the tradeoffs of various modes to input it.
I had a vague sense that typing is faster than handwriting and that, despite this fact, I still prefer writing drafts by hand in my notebook. Recording audio notes while walking and using Otter's automatic voice-to-text transcription is fantastic for getting thoughts down in a steady flow, but the result is ne...
August 5th, 2018
Sergey Zavadski emailed me today asking for advice on how to start writing, and I figured I'd share my response here and open an invitation for suggestions from others!
The biggest advice I'll give is to find ways to hold back from self-censoring. There are three key tools I use to do this myself, though there are probably other clever ways I haven't considered.
One is called The Most Dangerous Writing App, which deletes your writing if you ...
July 24th, 2018
A common argument against spaced repetition goes something like this:
If an idea or fact is useful enough to memorize, your brain will retain it anyway. If it's important, it'll just stick, because you'll use it enough times.There's some validity to this. If you find it is really difficult to remember something, you may want to examine whether it's really worth expending that memorization effort. Maybe you just don't need to know it that badly...
May 31st, 2018
Today I learned of the existence of Copenhagen Suborbitals, the "world's only manned, amateur space program". From their website:
Since 2011, we’ve built and flown 5 homebuilt rockets and space capsules from a ship in the Baltic Sea, and some day one of us will fly into space. It’s all crowdfunded and nonprofit, and has only come this far because people all over the world donate money that pay the materials, tools and rent. Our goal is simple:...
February 2nd, 2018
Most people seem to think of themselves as "at the edge" of several communities rather than defined by a single identity. It’s easy to think of yourself as special and that other people are more singularly defined, but that’s a bias stemming from the fact that you’re mostly seeing people in the context of just one of the communities they’re a part of. It can be hard to remember: you just don’t have visibility into their other thoughts and othe...