Friday, April 14, 2023

Mitch is on nostr


Public Key:  6d02616805101764c9347c1ad08c46bca7d4f2b88b2705c3a4bd2dba4513c8a3


Sunday, April 9, 2023

Interface by Neal Stephenson (1994)


Surprised I missed this one.  I really enjoyed it, 5/5 Stars.  The book is still very relevant today.

Saturday, April 8, 2023

Breaking History by Jared Kushner


Tight, well-written political history from an outsider brought into the inner-circle of the whitehouse during the dark times of the "Trump" years.  Fun details of the drama, power struggles, and "leaks" that politicians use to attack each other. The author appears to be a bright person who read a lot of political books to take on his role. This insider's account of the creation of the Abrahamic Accords is worthwhile. 4/5 Stars.

Racing the Light by Robert Crais


Another "impulse borrow" from the library.  Fun read with unexpected plot twists and great characters. 5/5 Stars.

Friday, March 31, 2023

The Boys from Biloxi by John Grisham


Fascinating look at the rise and fall of the Dixie Mafia with thrilling legal drama and great storytelling. 5/5 Stars.

Power, Faith, & Fantasy, America in the Middle East 1776 - 2011 by Michael Oren


"I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you have made me one."  --Jimmy Carter to Yasir Arafat, July, 2000.

This well-researched and insightful history book fills in some important gaps that other historical fiction and history books I have read on this topic leave out. The book is long but still manages to omit an enormous amount of context and concurrent events to those described.  I wish professor Oren had added more references and made the book longer (it is very long, but still fantastic).  The main theme of misset expectations, culture clash, and lack of empathy among the leaders is well-presented.  If you are at all interested in America in the Middle East, I highly recommend the book, 5/5 Stars.

Armageddon by Craig Alanson

This chapter in the never-ending story is better than some of the others, and continues to develop all the characters.  It drops direct hints of a bigger, awe-and-wonder, galactic-scale mystery and kills off some of the characters who were with the reader for 8 books.  The creative, bizarre, desperate schemes always eventually work out in the end, so this cliff hanger "formula" is getting tiresome.  I am hoping we can get more and better political stories among the space aliens.  4/5 Stars.

Thursday, March 30, 2023

Detecting Deception


In Malcolm Gladwell's Talking to Strangers, Gladwell has some fun anecdotes explaining how experts and trained professionals were deceived by liars.  Gladwell champions some relatively weak theories explaining how and why we are so terrible at detecting deception.  Recently, researchers at (you can't make this up!) the "Lie Lab" have published a fantastic comic, a youtube video, and research paper explaining that going deep into details is the most reliable method of probing for deception.

Comics are underrated as the most approachable and effective communications medium.

Friday, March 17, 2023

Meetings according to devth


My buddy (who unwisely works in fintech) posted this twitter thread about meetings that I have enhanced and summarized.

All two of you who follow my blog likely have wisdom, links, and strong opinions about tech business meetings so I welcome your comments in my G-Doc here: 



Proposed Meeting Hygiene Workflow

Quotas

  • max 10 hours per week for individual contributors (ICs), 

  • 20 hours per week for managers. 


New meetings that exceed this quota forces an existing meeting to be deleted before a new meeting can be accepted.

Automated meeting follow-up workflow

  • All participants anonymously rate how effective the meeting was [1-5] for their individual purpose.

  • All participants answer "This could have been a Slack thread." [Y/N].

Automated Meeting Scheduler workflow

  • Includes a mandatory checkbox: "we tried to resolve this issue on Slack" before booking.

  • Forbids creating a meeting without an agenda and associated Notes doc.

  • Verifies that the meeting notes include at least one task is created

  • Warns if number of tasks and assignees is disproportional to number of participants

  • Forbids creating a meeting with more than X participants; requires manager approval

  • Calculates and displays meeting cost in the description and notes doc

  • Requires mandatory inclusion for the reason each participant is invited

  • Adds meetings coach approver or manager approval to restrict meeting creation for organizers who score low on meeting effectiveness.


A Zoom meeting will always be much less effective and much less enjoyable than meeting in real life. Let's stop pretending otherwise.


Sunday, March 12, 2023

Babel by R. F. Kuang


The Nebula Award nominees for 2022 were recently announced; Babel  looked intriguing; my ranking algorithm pushed it high up on my queue.  The magic system is interesting, but the system is arbitrary and clashes too much with physics so I would categorize the book as fantasy, not sci-fi. The linguistic roots & translation subtleties are fun but also clash with linguistic research (Adger, Chomsky, Pinker), so they were also disappointing.  However the story and characters are fun and the writing is immersive. So I did enjoy the book. 4/5 Stars.