Fortnightly Issue #2
Tech and humanities, business meetings, and more
Hello, friends!
I hope you are enjoying the holidays!
Today’s list of topics is no less broad than in the first issue, so let’s jump straight at it.
No “tech vs. humanities” dichotomy
I firmly believe that almost all people are predisposed to all kinds of mental work. Of course, some of us are more agile at certain tasks than others but in general, we all share the ability to write texts, do math problems, play and compose music, meditate deeply, program computers, and so on.
Still, many cling to the contrary belief. That is, they think that some humans excel at physics but suck at art, or do miracles on a canvas but lack math sense at all. My take is that the division takes place in people's minds and then, they restrain themselves from following many paths at the same time. To just hint at it, many great figures in our history indulged in a variety of fields and skills. Carroll, Einstein, Feynman, to name a few. Ancient Greeks were almost all interdisciplinary thinkers.
If we take any activity that is widely regarded as belonging to a humanities — or a technical — discipline we may find notions of the "opposite" field in it:
writing poems is quite a bit of finding a proper approximation for the probability distribution of words in a language;
mathematics is at least partly an attempt to paint the beauty of the world but to do it strictly, in the most formal and concise way.
I’d even say that not only the dichotomy is false but that there’s no dichotomy at all as our mental activities reside on a spectrum, large parts of which are occupied by what’s commonly named tech disciplines and humanities. Meditation, for one, is something different at all.
So heed my words, don’t ever limit yourself. Explore and enjoy!
Three types of business meetings
Surely, we can distinguish more but, for the sake of the story, I’ll keep to these:
status updates (bottom-up information flow);
announcements (top-down information flow);
decision making.
The trick is, the first two may be done in a completely asynchronous way. No need to make meetings out of them! And even for brainstorming and decision making, they may (and should) include a considerable amount of preparatory work, both to reduce the time consumed, and to avoid groupthink.
Miscellaneous
Home automation
Not my field of expertise but I have a short list of dos and don’ts to share:
always have a kill switch for the whole system;
always have common, pre-smart era switches and controls to fall back to;
do not have your smart home provided by any cloud services;
do not allow admin-level access via the Internet, or even WiFi, only Ethernet;
do not make essential API accessible via the Internet.
This doesn’t concern turning kettles, or coffee machines on and off though, but make sure you don’t expose the kettle’s own API, always set up a wraparound.
If you’re serious about building such a system in your house yourself, consider using (at least as a reference) a framework. The most popular are Project Haystack, Home Assistant, and openHAB.
If you’re not that nerdy, it’s always a good idea to find a team that will set up a locally hosted smart home for you. Avoid using cloud solutions like Google or Amazon for the sake of your security and sanity. Also, local setups don’t suffer from outages of remote data centers (some people were much annoyed when they couldn’t switch on the light bulbs during Google breakdown a couple of weeks ago).
Zero to One is not the only step
Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One is basically about building a startup. With zero meaning idea and one meaning reality, there are at least two more steps:
… to 0 for gathering insights and getting an idea;
1 to N for scaling the startup from simply being to being a mass reality.
Don’t be a bad one
If one's attitude towards other people is "everybody is an asshole" then, most probably, that one instead is an asshole. But it may vary. For example, if a partner says that all their exes were bad, it may be as well because of a bias instilled in the childhood, or an emotional trauma kind of thing. In that case, you're either your partner's savior and redemption, or — truly — it is you that is the bad guy.
Interslavic language
The existence of Interslavic hints that languages, in general, are not as discrete as we may think. Some are standing afar from the others, but they all exist in one space, and we may gradually move our perception spot through that space — and thus move from one language to another as if continuously. That process is generally possible only in theory but for some groups of languages (at least for Slavic ones, these being one of the most closely knit language groups) it has been implemented in practice.
If you’re a speaker of one of the Slavic languages and have not heard of Interslavic, give it a try, it’s awesome and you can understand it without any preparation!
Phew, it was a tightly packed hour writing this issue! I look forward to you reading it and — hopefully — enjoying and finding something new. With this, till the next time!