grepLeigh

Supply chain attack? Does anyone have more info?

It still is! I think getting your foot in the door is much more difficult now compared to 5-6 years ago, similar to difficulty finding entry level work in 2008-2009 financial crisis.

Market conditions aside, the points the OP blog post makes about asymmetrical value are evergreen.

I adored this post right up until:

> I have an internal KPI: if in the last three days I haven’t spent at least 30 minutes playing with my kid, there’s something seriously wrong

I think I'm interpreting this ungenerously, because my knee-jerk reaction was to wonder about who is handling the other 12+ waking hours a day.

Eh, if you hadn't found Stumbleupon then you would have experienced the same effect from one of the zillion other competitors in the attention economy.

You're right that this kind of novelty-seeking content has a profound impact on the brain. It's really interesting to see finally see longitudinal research, plus research on screens/novelty on child development (search for $thing + "psychosocial development").

One of the most encouraging thing I've taken away is that neutral pathways are still quite plastic well into adulthood.

For example, here's an experiment to try if you wake up and scroll in bed. After you do your morning routine, jot down a mood score (-1 feeling crummy, 0 meh neutral, +1 feeling good). You can do this for a week or two if you want to collect control data. Then, force yourself to get out of bed without looking at your phone (buy an alarm if you have too). You should see changes in your mood log within a week. Sleep regulates/replenishes dopamine levels, and scrolling through a dopamine wonderland first thing in the AM can result in dopamine dysregulation for the rest of the day. Try it!

I found this years ago, during the "Stumbleupon" era of the Internet (does anyone remember this time sink?). I'm so glad it's still alive!

I do this a lot; it's just nice to have some quiet companionship while working on something.

The difference between body doubling and "working in an office setting" is mutual agreement to avoid distracting each other. I usually combine body doubling with a pomodoro timer, so 25-30 minutes and then a break. This isn't conducive to deep flow work, but it's great for getting your taxes done, booking a trip, researching a dreaded thing, reviewing a PR, etc.

That was after the IBM acquisition.

Hah, this is exactly what I was hoping to find. Thank you!

As an outsider looking at Microsoft, I've always been impressed by the attention to maintaining legacy APIs and backward compatibility in the Windows ecosystem. In my mind, Microsoft is at the opposite end of the killedbygoogle.com spectrum. However, none of this is grounded in real evidence (just perception). Red Hat is another company I'd put forth as an example of a long-term support culture, although I don't know if that's still true under IBM.

I'd love to know if my superficial impression of Microsoft's culture is wrong. I'm sure there's wild variance between organizational units, of course. I'm excluding the Xbox/games orgs from my mental picture.

If money weren't an object, which labs or lines of research would be the most interesting to you? Do you have strong personal preferences between university/academic research, national labs, and private/startup research roles?

Back to the reality where money is a real factor, what was the difference in compensation like? Was it like a 10x difference or closer to 2x?

I'm asking because I'm a software engineer/founder, but I stepped back from my career due to burnout. I went back to college to study physics and geek out on quantum computing, but I know it'll take grad school (likely a PhD plus postdoc) to grok the full stack. Trying to get a sense of what might be ahead of me.