134 karma · joined October 5, 2012
That further helps simplify shopping and decision-making and resolves the paradox of choice. Instead of having to sort through a wide variety of unknown brands on Amazon, they just go with KS.
https://www.thestreet.com/retail/costco-reveals-why-kirkland...
https://testing.googleblog.com/2025/10/simplify-your-code-fu...
The key insight of FCIS is that complicated logic with large dependencies leads to a large test suite that runs slowly. The solution is to isolate the complicated logic in the functional core. Test that separately from the simpler, more sequential tests of the imperative shell.
That sounds like standard goal-oriented planning. Amazon starts with the product's press release. "The Amazon working backward method is a product development approach that starts with the team imagining the product is ready to ship. The product team’s first step is to draft a press release announcing the product’s availability. The audience for this press release is the product’s customer."
https://www.productplan.com/glossary/working-backward-amazon...
Which brings us to the second most famous statement in all of modern philosophy: Nietzsche's "God is dead." The year was 1882. (The book was Die Frohliche Wissenschaft [ The Gay Science ].) Nietzsche said this was not a declaration of atheism, although he was in fact an atheist, but simply the news of an event. He called the death of God a "tremendous event," the greatest event of modern history. The news was that educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years. But before you atheists run up your flags of triumph, he said, think of the implications. "The story I have to tell," wrote Nietzsche, "is the history of the next two centuries." He predicted (in Ecce Homo ) that the twentieth century would be a century of "wars such as have never happened on earth," wars catastrophic beyond all imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to, to absolve them of their guilt; but they would still be racked by guilt, since guilt is an impulse instilled in children when they are very young, before the age of reason. As a result, people would loathe not only one another but themselves. The blind and reassuring faith they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods: "If the doctrines...of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal, doctrines I consider true but deadly"--he says in an allusion to Darwinism in Untimely Meditations --"are hurled into the people for another generation...then nobody should be surprised when...brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers...will appear in the arena of the future...
Nietzsche said that mankind would limp on through the twentieth century "on the mere pittance" of the old decaying God-based moral codes. But then, in the twenty-first, would come a period more dreadful than the great wars, a time of "the total eclipse of all values" (in The Will to Power ). This would also be a frantic period of "revaluation," in which people would try to find new systems of values to replace the osteoporotic skeletons of the old. But you will fail, he warned, because you cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a god who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not."
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/tim-cook-teases-new-apple-se...
I've taught it to over 3000 Google employees as a 20% project over the past 7 years. I've also developed a team of volunteer facilitators who help people practice in weekly workshops. We're happy to talk about the program and answer questions on Clubhouse (currently Sunday afternoons at 1pm PT):
More broadly, Nozick's focus shifted away from logical proof as a form of argument, the hallmark of Anglo-American Analytic philosophy. It seems to shift to a more Continental (European) style, in which philosophers point to patterns, aiming to evoke insights (e.g. Foucault and more recently Žižek).
It sounds like the expansive freedom in Holocracy to work on the Accountabilities for your Role. You have that freedom up to the point that they interfere with someone else's Role.
Basically, once you have a lean MVP that works, all social and economic pressures are to add new features with decreasing marginal gains, support standards of interest to fewer and fewer users, handle increasingly obscure edge cases, etc.
https://hbr.org/product/an-everyone-culture-becoming-a-delib...
"Reinventing Organizations" by Frederic Laloux
"An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization" by Kegan and Lahey
The latter profiles Bridgewater, a hedge fund in which every meeting is recorded and available to anyone in the company via the intranet.
This blog post summarizes the paper "Machine Learning: The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt": https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/02/29/machine-learning-the-hig...
"Man is the measure of all things" – Protagoras
"We see things not as they are. We see things as we are." attributed to Anaïs Nin
A long term drought contributed to the civil war in Syria[1]. It may be the first of many around the world.
Both Ebola and Zika are exacerbated by global climate change[2][3].
According to the link, Egypt survived as a state for a century longer before it too fell. That was after transforming from a civil society to martial law. With the threat to pregnancy posed by Zika, I'm reminded of the propaganda in "Children of Men": "The World Has Collapsed: Only Britain Soldiers On"
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/science/earth/study-links-...
2. http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2014/09/04/how-climate-change-i...
3. http://www.vox.com/2016/1/20/10795562/zika-virus-cdc-mosquit...
"Unlike some other forms of camouflage, dazzle works, if at all, not by offering concealment but by making it difficult to estimate a target's range, speed, and heading. Norman Wilkinson explained in 1919 that dazzle was intended more to mislead the enemy as to the correct position to take up than actually to miss his shot when firing."
I'll put it another way: Graham says we can look at just the performance by group to detect bias in selection. But there could be bias in selection, and A) different treatment after selection, which would not be revealed through Graham's test. Or could also be bias in selection and B) continuous reminders of stereotypes triggering stereotype threat, and this would also not be revealed.
Now you could point to a tech company with few underrepresented minorities, let's say 1%. If there's no overt bias in the work environment then people should succeed and if they don't they're just worse performers. On the other hand, if you're in the 1%, just noticing the underrepresentation among your coworkers might be a constant reminder of stereotypes.
I don't claim to have a simple solution for this.
When a member of a group is primed with a stereotype that their group underperforms at a task, they are more likely to underperform. So there could be a selection process biased against a group, and a selected member could be an above-average performer otherwise but, because of work environment, be underperforming.
Some universities work to remedy this through support groups or other practices aimed at under-represented minorities, and they appear to help students be more successful academically. On the other hand, there's the Hawthorne effect... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
Sure the robots were awkward and performed poorly. The situation was much the same at DARPA's autonomous vehicle grand challenge in 2004 that he mentions. Then, none of the robots finished the 150 mile course. CMU's vehicle traveled the farthest, 7 miles. Now Google and others are pretty far along with self-driving cars.