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yannis7 | 1 year ago | on: 26-Year-Old EY Employee Succumbs to 'Work Stress' Four Months After Joining

I think the most tragic of all is that, based on my experiences in both startups and corporate cultures, most of that work people are killing themselves for is just "busywork" handed to them by managers who themselves don't know any better.

The amount of waste in human energy & effort in pointless jobs that optimise for "being busy" is, as far as 1st-world problems are concerned, a humanitarian tragedy.

yannis7 | 2 years ago | on: Good times create weak men (2019)

your last sentence I think puts the 2nd pillar into the problem, which is not only technological (i.e. the abstraction problem mentioned in the original article) but also cultural

yannis7 | 2 years ago | on: Vice, Decayed Digital Colossus, Files for Bankruptcy

VICE seemed to make sense at a given time + place + context: * Gonzo journalism: "On my way to North Korea I'm gonna stop by my auntie where over lunch she'd beg me not to go" * Peak hipster: pre-pandemic hyper-urbanised young white collar people who started making money * Excitement about Web 2.0 weirdness and the over-sharing culture

all of the above created a compelling package back then, but don't seem to scale to a "global media empire" Shane Smith wanted to make, one that would topple the incumbents.

yannis7 | 2 years ago | on: Vice, Decayed Digital Colossus, Files for Bankruptcy

interesting how certain industries were never "disrupted" by startups, no matter the amount of hype that was generated in the mid-2010s [1]; banking is a major example (no startup bank overthrew JPMC) but the same seems to apply to legacy media.

[1] Shane Smith (VICE founder) quote about Murdoch during an FT interview: "I have Gen Y, I have social [media], I have online video. You have none of that. I have the future, you have the past." https://www.ft.com/content/61c51d64-4a9c-11e2-968a-00144feab...

yannis7 | 3 years ago | on: Shazam turns 20

Shazam belongs to that class of iPhone apps that when they were released I was like "wow, the future is here" -- this alongside the first accelerometer and AR ones

yannis7 | 3 years ago | on: Reading Ourselves to Death

+1+1 spot on -- it's a very common issue nowadays that few people actually touch upon, or be able to verbalise

yannis7 | 5 years ago | on: Spartan School (2019)

nit: there are some fragments, say the speech of Spartan King Archidamus, which are recorded in sources like Thucydedes -- these you _may_ consider them as sources that reveal Spartans' self-understanding to some extent

yannis7 | 5 years ago | on: George W. Bush is smarter than you (2013)

A few anecdotes from my side: - I had one colleague and a former boss, both staunch Democrats, who knew GW Bush from Yale; they both independently mentioned to me how likeable he is in person vs. how bad he's in his policies. This comes in contracts to Obama (who my ex-boss had met in a fundraising dinner) who's super likeable/charismatic publicly but a bit distant/aloof in person. - As for the WMDs in Iraq, it's the classic intelligence fallacy; "send my people to find evidence for X", and guess what, your minions _do_ find plenty of data to support their boss's view! This happens to all organisations from govt. to companies - and will be only made worse with "Big Data" and "AI"

yannis7 | 6 years ago | on: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

as @gexla mentioned down below, I prefer looking for leadership/culture advice on historical / biographical books.

For example, "Making of the Atomic Bomb" was recommended to me, for examples of how on earth did the US manage to get a bunch of primadonna scientists to finish a megaproject on time (though this is not the main scope of the book) -- I haven't read it yet, but I would it put forward as a suggestion.

yannis7 | 6 years ago | on: The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann

von Neumann, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Einstein, Rutherford, Turing, Teller, Szilard, Wigner, Meitner... the list goes on... -- how did that time produce so many people of colossal intellect? War certainly can't be the primary factor, given that many of them were brilliant/productive even before WWI

yannis7 | 6 years ago | on: The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann

there's a lazy sensationalist style on that article that I find off-putting -- the relevant Wikipedia page is more sober and actually (or because of that) makes you more in awe of the man in question.
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