Crony Beliefs and and an addendum on this topc. A great set of essays - “Earlier I argued that other people are the cause of all our epistemic problems. Now I find myself arguing that they’re also our best solution.” From the author of The Elephant in the Brain

An app can be a home-cooked meal - Robin Sloan’s essays are always a treat to read. “When you liberate programming from the requirement to be general and professional and scalable, it becomes a different activity altogether.”

103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known. Kevin Kelly on his 70th birthday. Every single one of them is worth thinking over.

Edsger W. Dijkstra: a Commemoration, “a multiauthored portait of Edsger Wybe Dijkstra that consists of testimonials written by several friends, colleagues, and students of his” (PDF).

chez baldwin, “Some of the sounds that filled the abode of James Baldwin in St. Paulde-Vence,. These songs document the vinyl records left behind in Chez Baldwin after his death in 1987”. A Spotify playlist.

Here we go again, a personal post by one of Kaspersky’s Threat Intelligence (GReAT) team members on working for a Russian cyber security comapny in the current charged world.

The Fierce Triumph of Loneliness. “A paired life is not an aspirational state, but a compromised one. Loneliness is not the terror we escape; it is instead the reward we give up when we believe something else to be worth the sacrifice.”

Essential Life-Learnings from 14 Years of Brain Pickings. “Choose joy” and what an impactful choice it will be.

How a man who washed his own underwear built investment colossus GIC. “It was also Goh who nursed the then radical idea that the nation’s reserves could – and should – be invested to yield returns, a notion that eventually led to the formation of GIC.”

Of Course We’re Living in a Simulation. Interesting mental exercise topic as always. What the author shys away from, which is a pity, is the angle of questioning as to what it means that “slow-moving and petty and cavemannish as we” can even start to think of these simulations.

Race Is a Spectrum. Sex Is Pretty Damn Binary. Provocative, interesting discourse.

I gave myself three months to change my personality. “The late psychologist Carl Rogers once wrote, “When I accept myself just as I am, then I can change,” and this is roughly where I’ve landed.

Our Universe is SO big, it’s mindblowing! 21st-century remake of Charles and Ray Eames’ short documentary film Powers of Ten from 1977. Mind blown.

The last one of this year!

The ESG Mirage. “MSCI, the largest ESG rating company, doesn’t even try to measure the impact of a corporation on the world. It’s all about whether the world might mess with the bottom line.”

The Top 22 Security Predictions for 2022. Comprehensive and some unique ones in there.

Testing Firefox more efficiently with machine learning. “If we simply ran every test on every configuration on every push, we’d run approximately 2.3 billion test files per day!” Now, that is a problem.

Amy Jordan in conversation with Naomi Klein on “Branding, privacy, and identity: growing up in surveillance capitalism.” Too short a discussion, but so many interesting tangents of thoughts to follow up on.

Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3, by Tim O’Reilly. Some thoughts to ponder on (not all bubbles are bad, building useful infrastructure is key) though not a lot of new ones.

Robin Sloan’s Notes on Web3 “I do not think Web3 is a desirable or even tolerable path forward for this web right here, but I take its lesson well. “Code wins arguments”, and so do clubs, and cults; time remains to build all three.” The Non-Innovation of Cryptocurrency, straight talk - “There are indeed a lot of fools in this world, but to presume an infinite chain of them as the core of an investment thesis is beyond absurd.”

topher fixed it - “parody alternate endings to beloved but problematic children’s literature”, featuring the fixed ending of The Giving Tree

Tim Ferriss with Noah Feldman. Interesting discussion on building constitutions, Supreme court of Facebook, ‘crypto’ organisations (DAOs) and others.

Some thoughts on writing Why I write and why I won’t and Write 5x more but write 5x less

“The Human Crisis”, Albert Camus’s talk at Columbia University in 1946. “The years we have gone through have killed something in us.”

Atlassian Boosted Its Female Technical Hires By 80% — Here’s How. Informative and practical.

The Drunken Boat, by Shihan Ma. Contemplative short documentary about a man who sits on the South Bank in London as a “poet for hire”. (via The Browser)

Byrne Hobart On Finance And Culture. Interesting observations. Hobart is the author of The Diff, a well-regarded newsletter ‘covering inflection points in finance and technology.’

Creating The Time Of Your Life, a meditative look at the ‘stuff of everyday life.’

The Wires of War, a book by Jacob Helberg. “Frustrating” would be a one-word summary. Flashes of really good viewpoints, opinions and suggestions marred by hyperbole, one-sided arguments and underdeveloped and incomplete reasoning. Skip chapters 1-3, pay attention to chapters 4-6 and maybe 7 if you have the stomach for it.

A Political Scientist’s View on Site Reliability, talk at SREcon21 by Dr. Michael Krax. A political scientist’s insights into team building and system design and debugging extensively relying on Niklas Luhmann’s work.

Bugs in our Pockets: The Risks of Client-Side Scanning. An impressive list of authors including Anderson, Blaze, Callas, Diffie, Landau, Rivest, Schneier. “did not set out to praise Apple’s proposal, but we ended up concluding that it was probably about the best that could be done. … it did not come close to providing a system that a rational person might consider trustworthy”

The Day I *Almost* Rage-Quit Amazon, hmmm. Interesting lessons in more ways than one.

Hey, Facebook, I Made a Metaverse 27 Years Ago. Ethan Zuckerman details some pertinent issues in the second half of the article. However, the biggest issue is left unexplored - who is building it and how it will be built.