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According to Brook’s law, the number of communication paths grows at a faster rate than the number of people you add to the group. As a result, what worked for a small team of 10 won’t work for a team of 40. Actively designing and tending to the tools & process is essential.

Sherlock Holmes, in BBC’s rendition, builds a fabled mind palace, an imaginary castle in which to stash his clues and concepts for later recall. Mere mortals with our average powers of recollection turn instead to notes and bookmarking apps, with their promises to be our “second brain” and help us “remember everything.”

While many politicians earnestly believed their Covid policies necessary and good, it is impossible not to notice these policies also afforded our political leaders sweeping new power over the lives of ostensibly free people. Beyond the world of elected power, on questions related to the nature of the pandemic from which these new political powers draw legitimacy, media companies policed our information landscape for dissent, and social media companies erased that dissent from the internet. All of this was managed unofficially in tandem, and with ruthless efficiency. Tensions flared. Flaring tensions were further repressed. Backlash was inevitable, and in Ontario that backlash manifested on the road.

Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought.

This metagame ends up giving players the habit of looking at every situation by asking: what's the best way to automate this, and what dependencies of other automations are threatened if I do? This is, for developers and for the many, many people whose jobs will involve more software development over time, a very good habit indeed. I tried to crank through some emails right after playing Factorio one time, and realized—I urgently need to write some email snippets. This just can't be allowed to exist in an un-automated state! But if I'm going to use a lot of email snippets, I need a consistent way to manage them lest I end up with five different iterations on "Yes, let's talk about that; here's my Calendly."

If those dreams become realized, you’ll probably end up buying crap and yelling at people through a head-mounted display, instead of through your smartphone. Sure, calling that a metaverse probably sounds better. Just like “the cloud” sounds better than, you know, a server farm where people and companies rent disk space.

High school taught me big words. College rewarded me for using big words. Then I graduated and realized that intelligent readers outside the classroom don’t want big words. They want complex ideas made simple.

Facebook Marketplace is the world’s second-largest marketplace, in terms of monthly active users, behind only Amazon.

Delicious represents choices that have been made. Delicious is a learning machine, and it has done learnt a shitload about what is not shit on the internet.

But the point of these phrases is to fill space. No matter where I’ve worked, it has always been obvious that if everyone agreed to use language in the way that it is normally used, which is to communicate, the workday would be two hours shorter.