It has been broadly observed that Amazon is powered by a writing culture. Meetings at Amazon typically begin with at least twenty minutes of silent, communal reading. PowerPoints are rare, reserved for presentations to large audiences. However, I haven’t seen a lot of discussion of how Amazonians approach writing documents. This document attempts to address…
A quick follow-up to my post last week, “Why to Beat Wordle, or, How Information Theorists are No Fun At Parties,” which treats Wordle as an information theory problem. However, the analysis was incomplete, because I was unaware that Wordle has a Hard Mode. So, without a lot of preamble, because I wrote a Very…
The term “technical debt” is a useful one. Unfortunately, as with anything useful, it is overused and used sloppily. It’s also sometimes misused to disparage a historical decision somebody disagrees with. But more than that, I think it is broadly misinterpreted. The term is intended to help justify work that has no immediate customer benefit,…
Are you having the right conversation? I want to talk about the racial through-line that has existed in American politics from the very beginning, from the 3/5th compromise in the constitution, to the Civil War, to “Birth of a Nation,” to Jim Crow, to segregation, to Nixon’s “Tough on Crime”, to Reagan’s “War on Drugs,”…
Don’t make decisions by oil drum! …story time: Once upon a time, there was a group of scientists studying a troop of lowland gorillas. There was nothing particularly notable about the study, the scientists, or even the gorillas. I don’t even know what they were studying. Lowland gorillas are have a wider range than their…
I’ve been spending time recently trying to understand is how it’s possible for people to overlook the harm their political stance is causing. These people aren’t sociopaths, but they can ignore the injustice of “let’s talk about the looting, not the murders” and the real harm (including deaths!) being caused by “open early” and “I…
