beasthacker

This is a great episode.

I worry that increasingly sophisticated dynamic pricing could one day make it nearly impossible for anyone to get ahead.

Many people fail to appreciate the thermos. I think it is one of mankind's greatest achievements.

I wonder whether government testing actually makes a material difference in food/beverage safety.

For example, when I worked for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, I was surprised to discover that the percentage of imported food/beverage actually tested for safety is very low. Like comically, microscopically, unbelievably low.

In the United States, I suspect concerns over reputation and civil litigation do more to keep our food safe than government testing.

Anki, but a pseudo-terminal that drills you on a programming language's syntax. Utilizes spaced repetition.

Aims to cement fundamentals needed before leet code.

Loved this piece. Especially that it is written in a Gonzo journalism style, including the author as part of the narrative, like a Hunter S. Thompson essay.

I sanity-checked it with two headshots of the same third party and it swung ~2.5 points, so it seems to capture state (lighting/angle/expression) more than trait. Then I uploaded my own photo and got an unexpectedly high score, which conclusively validates the model and my rigorous n=2 study.

This framing has been helpful for me:

Your workday isn’t a monolith; it is a series of tiny tasks. Try deconstructing your job to identify intrinsic motivation.

Which micro-tasks do you look forward to? Which raise questions you think about and work on in your free time?

Which tasks do you avoid, put off, or find immediately draining?

If you can’t identify interesting tasks, you are likely looking at too high a level of abstraction. Break “working with clients” down until you find the specific unit of work (e.g., “debugging edge cases” vs. “proofreading emails”) that sparks interest.

After sorting tasks into intrinsically motivating or not, look for a role that involves about 20% more time on the interesting micro-tasks and 20% less on the boring ones. If you do this every few years, you drift toward a career you enjoy without needing a radical “reset.”

This approach led me down an unexpected path: law firm attorney -> government attorney -> regulatory consultant -> small-business operator. Now, I am looking at moving to a role that involves at least 20% more time on software development (intrinsically interesting to me) and 20% less time chasing unreliable people (particularly draining to me). I never set out to change my “identity,” but focusing on the micro-tasks I actually enjoy has allowed me to engineer a career I enjoy on a day-to-day basis.

What is your blog? Which do you recommend?

What is your blog?