This was supposed to be a post on radical transparency. But an article bashing radical transparency just left me feeling so outraged with its lies and misleading statements that I just spent the last four hours of my life writing this warning to all of us media-consumers out there: Don't trust all you see, even if it... Continue Reading →
Doing what’s right – pasta and the lizard brain
I cooked pasta for lunch today. Though it turned out pretty good, the pasta was a little soft, far from the al dente I was aiming for. This despite me checking every couple of minutes or so to see how it was doing, and taking it off the stove the moment I found it to be... Continue Reading →
Do not give me a gift of which I desire
A little note about happiness, from the book Homo Deus, by Yuval Noah Harari: If I identify happiness with fleeting pleasant sensations, and crave to experience more and more of them, I have no choice but to pursue them constantly. When I finally get them, they quickly disappear, and because the mere memory of past pleasures... Continue Reading →
Supposedly Irrelevant Factors
I'm halfway through reading one of the best books I've read in a long while: Misbehaving, by Richard H. Thaler. One of the things that most stuck with me was that of "supposedly irrelevant factors", which refers to something that, in theory, should not affect or influence the thinking of a rational person but does. Thaler... Continue Reading →
Anticipation, proactivity, and the Invisibles
Just read an article via Slashdot on this thing called "Tab Warming" that the Mozilla team is testing for the Firefox Web Browser. I won't go into the details, but in essence what Tab Warming does is that it anticipates whether or not you'll click on a link, and if it does it "paints" the page... Continue Reading →
The Run
We act very much as if we were on a voyage. What can I do? I can choose out the helmsman, the sailors, the day, the moment. Then a storm arises. What do I care? I have fulfilled my task: another has now to act, the helmsman. If the weather is bad for sailing, we... Continue Reading →
The difficulties of doing “deep work”
These past two weeks I've been on leave, staying at home and being a dad to my 2-year-old son. He's got quite a standard schedule: the wife and I bring him out in the morning to let him "see the world", have breakfast, and/or visit the grandparents etc.; he comes back around noon, takes a... Continue Reading →
Feeling good about one’s work
I was just "thinking about things" when this thought came into my head: To feel good about one's work, there are two sides of validation: the internal and the external. External validation: somebody tells you, "you've done well. This is excellent!" Internal validation: you tell yourself, "you've done well; you'd set out to do something... Continue Reading →
Winning first place without ever being first
Or: what I learned from playing too much DiRT Rally (one of my favourite rally racing games.) So here's the context: I'm playing "career mode", in which I buy a car, hire a couple of engineers, and go out to race. In order to win the championship, I have to have the best time across... Continue Reading →
Perspective: Million vs. Billion
"How long is a million seconds? How many days do you think that is?" I asked."I don't know," she said, then started counting, realised it was pretty hard to do in your head, then stopped.I gave her the answer: "approximately 11 days"."Now," I continued, "how about a billion? How many days is a billion seconds?"This... Continue Reading →
Donn, fragments 