growing up, the perspective transferred to me implicitly by prev generations including parents and teachers is that there are a minority of 'troubled people' among the majority of 'normal people' among whom they included themselves.

30 years on, after seeing them live out their lives, after a career that accidentally exposed me to years of what HR folks deal with, I can tell you - I have seen no normies. If I find one, I will try to convince them to become my guru. but that's not the point I want to make...

the actions of self-identified 'normies' of older generations observed over decades proved that by and large way they were conflating their low self-awareness with 'normalcy'. I'm slowly formulating a silver-lining theory to social media as a consequence.

I'm starting to suspect that we have not fully integrated the scale and power of the "what will they say?"/"लोग क्या सोचेंगे" drive and it's evolution pre/post internet+social media. This drive is very deeply rooted in our biology, and with the limited social metadata generated by pre-internet society, acted as a massive brake on self-awareness.

"What will they think of me?" completely overrode "What do I think of me?"

For every like on this tweet I will reply with something that most folks in tech and tech-adjacent industries don't want to hear.

Hit me. We're extremely bad at estimation, and routinely overcommit and undeliver.

This cannot be fixed, only worked around.

🧵 of obvious startup truths that I have to repeat in every other early stage founder conversation because they're obvious but also... not: If you build a sustainable business, your competitors will beat you by raising capital and building an unsustainable business that undercuts you long enough to defeat you.

I'm a dog person that's been living with a cat for 17 years.

Luckily I've also been living with rb for the same period, and everybody knows rb loves you back.

https://twitter.com/sidv_22/status/1499375981219303428

This is why I run away from js on the server. I need _something_ in my stack that loves me back.

Hiring Product Managers sidu.in/essays/hiring-… via @ponnappa I'm still getting a ton of feedback from reviewers and still have reviewers lined up that I haven't even asked yet... but leaving this unpublished for weeks makes me twitchy so gonna push and continue to fix.

Iterate in production, right?

The biggest perk of being my own boss is reading fiction guilt free I mean I used to read fiction most of the time otherwise also but oh the guilt of not investing enough in 'self improvement'

I'm here in this line of work because I love to build.

I've spent more than a decade actively and intentionally working, and saving so I have enough put away to build freely. I've accidentally gotten enormously lucky along the way a few times, which really helped. Now I wake up everyday and have to remind myself that everything else is accidental complexity to the essential complexity of the joy of building, because otherwise it's so easy to get sucked into random fomo.

I asked this of a student of mine a few years ago who was arguably one of the most talented & hard working people I ever taught: You spend all your time honing yourself into the perfect weapon, with the perfect edge.

But if you end up wielded by someone else, what was the point?

https://twitter.com/adadithya/status/1464851198633123840

You're a fucking human being experiencing life, not a target for a mindless optimization process.

"I'm taking a break, how do I use my break productively?"

Fuck, breaks my heart.

already loving crystal lang, the type inference is so non-invasive (but caution, I'm writing trivial code) and so much learning from decades of Ruby baked in from the get go

Every time I see one of these articles I lol because nobody really knows what a superapp is and we popularized the term as a hiring hack to explain Gojek to Indian candidates
theverge.com/22738395/socia… "It's a closed ecosystem of lots of apps"

As though this is some formula to guarantee that those apps will have adoption. Most, if not all, of those apps will have little to no serious traction unless driven by lock in to existing services.

If one has leadership responsibilities, there is a simple way to judge ones delegation skills: increasing amounts of idle time while the metrics one is responsible for continue to improve. One of the key metrics along this axis for me is "# of pleasant surprises per cycle time" from any given team.

If it was a surprise, then by definition I'm not micromanaging.

If it was pleasant, then it's something I would have wanted had I been micromanaging.

Genuinely interesting people on Twitter almost never have large follower counts

> 1K followers generally == vanilla pap Also they are almost always anon

Non-anon + large following means it's a brand not a person

Apple M1 Max performance 🤯🤯🤯

tl;dr time to sell INTC for sure

anandtech.com/show/17024/app… google.com/search?q=INTC&…

Hmm INTC already at lowest in a year, sharp correction downward already

Increasingly conviced Roam Research's daily log + its C2wiki/mediawiki style fwd links + its backreferences is a model that could the core of product for a founder to manage their startup operationally. graph (eg. roam) + wiki (eg. notion) + workflow (eg. airtable) is the CEO's dev stack.

We need an IDE and runtime. (Roam is 10% an IDE already - syntax, macros already in place)

The best engineers *I've* worked with don't have formal CS backgrounds and are self taught.

The best PMs *I've* worked with don't have formal management backgrounds and are self taught.

https://twitter.com/TheProductfolks/status/1414960165435101187

MBAs (by and large) are designed for managers working in large (1000s of employees) companies growing very slowly (relative to startups).

If you are a PM in such a company then yes, I feel it helps.

But there's nothing in an MBA to prep one for 10% WoW or MoM businesses.

Scepticism is now a survival trait. If you aren't a sceptic and are on the internet, it's a matter of time before you're scammed into bankruptcy.

It's a matter of time before scepticism is taught as a basic social skill to kids. Gen Z will be the last generation of the defenseless - those who grew up without being actively coached to be sceptical of all information, to build firewalls against ideas and ideologies.

The paradox of personal growth is that the mental models and personal biases that serve well at an early level hold you back at the next. Re-inventing one's personality repeatedly over time seems non-negotiable.

Become who you need to be to do what you want to do. Repeat. The test for progress:

1. Does present you more consistently make what you want to happen, happen, than past you could?

2. Would past you (say ~5 yrs ago) violently disagree with present you on philosophical issues?

3. Are those differences the basis of your improved results?

The human need to be perceived as a "good person" is as much of a compulsion as a dog's need to be perceived as a "good dog".

I've always felt that dogs being bred into this need was, you know, unfair, a control mechanism. Took me a long time to see we bred them in our image. This need to be perceived as "good people" operates at the group level as well, with interesting side effects.

https://twitter.com/iwelsh/status/1188971105022889984

Not always. We launched with three products and had doubled that in a year. Depends on the market and the products being launched.

https://twitter.com/suvirsujan/status/1187567785326592001

Let's dig in with more IMOs.

Superapp strategies work in blue ocean, growth stage markets.

You're in one of these markets when your problem is scaling the business to meet demand, not scaling demand to grow the business.

Of late I've wondered how of this has to do with humans having evolved to spend 99% of their time in
1. fear of going hungry
2. being coerced to do something they don't want to

and then abruptly having %age of both drop exponentially over the last century...

https://twitter.com/AJA_Cortes/status/1084283173645631489

I suspect humans are simply not (biologically) adapted to deal with autonomy and material wealth, and that our biological response to sharp increases in both in last 20K yrs is behind the adverse psychological effects we see. And I think the Buddha was the first to call this out.

Fast growing organizations produce lots of bad news as teams & systems adapt. Decision makers find this emotionally overwhelming, and react instinctively by shooting the messenger. I personally find it very hard, and struggle to remind myself:"This is why you're here. To listen." Reacting badly to increasing amounts of bad news will result in your colleagues hiding things from you. It doesn't matter if you screwed up, and its all your fault - forcing your colleagues to disconnect you from reality because you're hard to deal with simply makes it worse.