flâneur

Bo Lau

66 followers · 30 following · 5035 views

on the atlas — 266

highlights — 272

  • I've had conversations with people recently who are losing sleep because they're finding building yet another feature with "just one more prompt" irresistible.
    AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
  • "But doesn't everything always just work out? Like sure, it might suck in the moment, but everything's always fine. Somehow every moment in life always magically works out in the long run. I don't think I could name one time where everything went completely wrong, because if it did I wouldn't be here right now."
    Alexandria
  • Working multiple jobs for a period of time and using the earnings to have a period of unemployment (what I’m doing currently). This has enabled me to prevent myself from (1) being anesthetized by my job and becoming complacent, and (2) giving myself full latitude to work on projects in-depth, not as perpetual half-assed “side projects”.
    Career Advice That Doesn’t Suck
  • you can play the tables as long as you want, telling yourself another kind of story about how you’re the one in control, but the house always wins. Desire always wins. Isn’t that embarrassing?
    against narrative - by rayne fisher-quann
  • Our conflicting desires. Desire in general — his lack of it, my abundance. All the things I wanted and all the things he didn’t want.
    against narrative - by rayne fisher-quann
  • Clear communication (3-5 minutes): Begin with well-defined assumptions, articulate your game plan, and engage with the interviewer to establish a clear structure for the conversation. Product motivation (3-5 minutes): Establish why the product matters to users and the company, creating a mission statement that guides your decisions throughout the interview. Segmentation (8-10 minutes): Identify ecosystem players, create meaningfully different user segments, and prioritize one segment by evaluating reach and underserved dimensions. Problem identification (8-10 minutes): Map the user journey for…
    The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews
  • Generally there are three components to address for clear communication: Waypointing: Before each section, candidates should take a thinking pause to work for 1-2 minutes and come up with what they want to say. Once they’re ready to share, candidates should walk the interviewer through their response for that section and check in with the interviewer before proceeding to the following section. Assumption setting: Make 2-4 assumptions at the start of the interview that narrow the scope to a manageable exercise without prematurely limiting your solution space. Game plan articulation: Clearly out…
    The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews
  • A market that is perceived as crowded can actually be quite empty. No one is really providing a great product or service. These crappy competitors are getting some customer traction because the market needs a product similar to what they have.
    Who Cares If It's Been Tried Before? - by Elad Gil
  • The people who rise fastest in hyper-growth companies develop an independent view of how the business works - beyond what’s assigned to them. This is the attitude that leads to promotions - responsibility at higher levels requires independent judgment. When you’re early in your career especially, it’s easy to assume that leadership knows everything. But they simply can’t maintain that much context. You are ultimately closest to your work, and leaders want you to own it.
    Rippling Operating Lessons, #1: Learn the Business
  • Small, adaptable teams of generalists, equipped with modern AI, are well-suited to solve the often unglamorous, industry-specific problems that others miss.
    Why Teams of Generalists Win in the Age of AI - Ambrook
  • a desire to ask and answer questions, a commitment to evidence, an understanding of what already exists, an output, a certain degree of contemporary relevance, and a community
    research as leisure activity - by Celine Nguyen
  • The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and interest. It’s not about the formal credentials. It’s fundamentally about play. It seems to describe a life where it’s just fun to be reading, learning, writing, and collaborating on ideas.
    research as leisure activity - by Celine Nguyen
  • "In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites, instead of being dependent on a few big sites to host their online identity."
    J. R. Carpenter || A Handmade Web
  • I evoke the term 'handmade web' to refer to web pages coded by hand rather than by software; web pages made and maintained by individuals rather than by businesses or corporations; web pages which are provisional, temporary, or one-of-a-kind; web pages which challenge conventions of reading, writing, design, ownership, privacy, security, or identity.
    J. R. Carpenter || A Handmade Web
  • you have to loosen some constraints to give yourself a chance at solving the key problems: they are hard enough in themselves. If you impose as many constraints on yourself as the average person does, the likelihood that you will pull off what is most central to you approaches zero. So, seek clarity on which constraints are real and shape your life to fall within them.
    An essay in which my friend feels stuck and I suggest relaxing some constraints
  • Information abundance is a modern miracle but it's also an impediment to agency. And it happens to be much more fun and freeing to be out in the world just doing stuff, stumping around and humming merrily, expanding my zone of competence, than sitting inside on a screen watching someone else do stuff. Knowledge is rarely the bottleneck. To start almost anything, you need to know nearly nothing.
    Do what you can't - Tommy Dixon
  • A lot of stress in my life came from being set on certain strategies when if I appreciated what need I was trying to meet, I could have been more flexible in switching strategies.
    35 - Erik Torenberg
  • Being wrong comes with its difficulties. After a while, it can become demoralizing. You may begin to doubt a lot. But I think if you can survive this trough of sorrow, then you would have built a new coat of armour to weather the storm of incorrectness so you can march forward.
    Dark horse
  • With failure in mind, you become awakened to a new realm of possibilities. Instead of innovation theatre, you begin to run experiments. Instead of an over-engineering process, you have a low-touch process with no micro-management and increased autonomy. Instead of fake work, you get in the trenches and do hard manual work that eventually can scale.
    Dark horse
  • Success can draw the wrong incentives: affirmation, compliance, fame, capital and a title to your name. It deeply centers on matters that present the appearance of correctness as the metric of success, rather than a metric that expresses intrinsic value.
    Dark horse
  • We think in clear verifiable hypotheses and continuously obtain data that validates or refutes them. We ask questions and challenge assumptions to get consistently to the truth.
    Active vs. Lazy Thinking - by Alexandr Wang
  • Force yourself to think in clear, verifiable hypotheses, and obtain data that validates or refutes those hypotheses. Ensure to ask questions, challenge assumptions, and identify where the real bottlenecks and constraints are. It is the only way you will be able to sort through the noise to identify the reasons you failed.
    Active vs. Lazy Thinking - by Alexandr Wang
  • I believe that if you start dating someone with the set intention of marriage you’re screwing yourself over from the start, do you do that with your friendships as well? The choice for another person to stay in my life is not entirely my own. I am not in full control. We can have tunnel vision in pursuit of a relationship, eyes set on the prize, and maintain it for years. While I do believe this is the correct way to build and grow relationships this does not minimize the challenges I will face nor does it provide a guaranteed outcome for a life partner.
    The Day I Said ‘I Love You’ Was the Day I Broke up With Him | by Ella Schlaghecke | Medium
  • Vulnerability in a leader is great, but there are times where people just need a calm voice no matter how you’re actually feeling. Complete disassociation is not a sign of a mature leader, but neither is showing your unfiltered emotions to everyone on your team.
    Why harnessing stress is the key to a high-growth career
  • To actually become a stress absorber, you need to build a toolkit to manage your own stress, so you have the capacity to manage stress for others.
    Why harnessing stress is the key to a high-growth career
  • This means that if you want to grow quickly in your career as a manager, you have be in very stressful situations without externalizing your stress
    Why harnessing stress is the key to a high-growth career
  • We inherently don’t trust ourselves so we put systems in place to take the thought out of it. While setting constraints is a good short-term solution in bridging our self-trust gap, the ultimate goal is to build a reserve of self-kept promises that help us restore faith in our intuition rather than further optimize a system that keeps us caged.
    You won't grind your way to aliveness - by Cissy Hu
  • East Asians hit the bamboo ceiling because their low assertiveness is incongruent with American norms concerning how leaders should communicate
    Why East Asians but not South Asians are underrepresented in leadership positions in the United States | PNAS
  • The outside world can shift rapidly as long as I maintain internal equanimity.
    hedging uncertainty - by Nix 🕊 - starting from nix ꩜
  • A shelf full of books would be like an iterable. You can see the long line of books in the shelf. You may not know how many, but you can see that it is a long collection of books. The librarian would be like the iterator. He can point to a specific book at any moment in time. He can insert/remove/modify/read the book at that location where he's pointing. He points, in sequence, to each book at a time every time you yell out "next!" to him. So, you normally would ask him: "has Next?", and he'll say "yes", to which you say "next!" and he'll point to the next book. He also knows when he's reached…
    java - What is the difference between iterator and iterable and how to use them? - Stack Overflow
  • at-home tests can still be sold on account of a regulatory loophole: The FDA does not typically review what it calls “low risk general wellness” products before they hit the market.
    Think Twice Before Testing Your Hormones at Home - The Atlantic
  • hormones such as estradiol, testosterone, and progesterone—which are commonly targeted by this new wave of start-ups’ tests—regularly circulate throughout the body during various stages of a woman’s life, and are far trickier to measure using the low-volume samples involved in dried urine, dried blood, and saliva tests.
    Think Twice Before Testing Your Hormones at Home - The Atlantic
  • Many independent restaurants use a JIT inventory system where they order less food but more often, rather than ordering large quantities of food and storing it in freezers for weeks at a time. This reduces the cost of food storage and cuts down on waste.
    What Is Just In Time Inventory? A Guide to JIT Inventory - 2024 - MasterClass
  • What is the opportunity cost? If I do this, if I go on this vacation, if I get this car, what am I turning down? By asking yourself this, and then consistently aiming to pick the thing that optimizes for what you most deeply value—it adds up. It makes life rich.
    Don’t sacrifice the wrong thing - by Henrik Karlsson
  • Based on short-term nitrogen balance studies, the Recommended Dietary Allowance of protein for a healthy adult with minimal physical activity is currently 0.8 g protein per kg body weight (BW) per day.
    Dietary protein intake and human health - PubMed
  • We agreed that some long term relationships grow distant when both parties aren’t quite sure what to talk about anymore. When the plane of understanding has shrunk. I find that profoundly sad. You lose shared context, and realize there’s nothing substantial left. The love is always there, like an invisible weight, but we can’t always get it back.
    old friends - by Nix 🕊 - starting from nix
  • not all friction is bad
    The evolution of user onboarding at Databox
  • Snap, Retool, Replit, Uber, Square, Open AI, and The Browser Company are a few examples of companies that have Design Engineers on their software teams.
    Design Engineering - by David Hoang - Proof of Concept
  • To say Design Engineering is combining product design and front-end development dilutes what the value the practice brings. Like a minestrone, the Arnold Palmer, or Cronut, Design Engineering is a true blend of two conventional roles. Design Engineers have deep knowledge in technological systems while scaling interface quality. They naturally fit in design crit or reviewing code with engineering.
    Design Engineering - by David Hoang - Proof of Concept
  • Self-unfoldment involves seeing the fullness of you in all your multi-layered beingness and allowing all of your parts to exist together. It means listening with earnestness to what arises from your wholeness.
    Self-help is dead; long live self-help - With Love, Mel
  • The value you get out of learning is determined by the rigor you put into it. Rigorous thinking and questioning makes synthesis more accurate and efficient, sharpening your information input to be more concrete, direct, and unbiased.
    First Principles Thinking • Calix Huang
  • You may be told that if you put in a couple of years at Firm X, you can write your own ticket anywhere. However, the skills you learn doing substantive, innovative work generally have far more carry-over to other fields than formulaic and anonymous work for a big-name firm
    Do Important Things - Shyam Sankar
  • - The best way to learn is still by doing things. For this reason alone, you should go someplace where you can have an immediate and tangible impact. If you can find a workplace where your actions matter, I guarantee that you will learn a ton about your world, your profession, and yourself.
    Do Important Things - Shyam Sankar
  • Don’t be constrained by what you know now; do optimize on your chances for success in the real world.
    Do Important Things - Shyam Sankar
  • Similarly, “annotating the web” is another interesting idea along this vein — imagine stumbling across a niche site and seeing a record of which friends may have been there before you.
    Making the Internet Alive Again
  • The Internet used to be the creative medium. Now, it’s just the mode of delivery.
    Making the Internet Alive Again
  • Audience capture can disconnect you from the intuitive/emotional foundations of creative work. But, equally, social incentives can serve to coax the muse, and provide motivation to get over the anxiety of public exposure.
    There's nothing wrong with doing things because you want to look good
  • I was lucky, yes, but by expressing my interest, I also invited the opportunity for her to put my name in.
    Make Your Own Luck - by Deb Liu - Perspectives
  • an admiration for their achievements on one hand, and on the other, a readiness to undermine these accomplishments through the prism of inherited privilege versus earned success.
    the girlboss & the nepo baby: our obsession with women failing
  • The girlboss, a figure once celebrated for breaking glass ceilings and challenging patriarchal norms, now faces scrutiny not just for her actions but for merely existing in spaces traditionally dominated by men.
    the girlboss & the nepo baby: our obsession with women failing