A simple cheat code for life is to just be easy to work with. Respond quickly. Do what you said you'd do. Be pleasant. An alarming number of people suck at all of this.

Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke explains Goodhart’s law and why he doesn’t like KPIs or OKRs “Goodhart’s law is real. The moment a metric becomes a goal, it’s no longer a useful metric… No metric by itself is a complete heuristic for a complex business. There’s a million different tensions in a company, and you can’t keep all of them in harmony by optimizing for one thing.” For this reason, Shopify doesn’t use KPIs or OKRs. But as Tobi explains, this doesn’t mean they don’t value data and metrics. “We are extremely data informed. We have invested enormous amounts of money and time into systems that give us basically everything at our fingertips… But what Shopify attempts to do is just not over-fit for what’s quantifiable.” People love optimizing for highly-quantifiable things because there’s immediate gratification that comes from seeing a number go up. But Tobi thinks that the most important aspects of a product are rarely quantifiable: “The overlap of the most valuable things you can do with a product and the things that happen to be fully quantifiable are like maybe 20%. Which leaves 80% of a value space unaddressable by the people who only look at quantifiable things.” He continues: “Shopify is comfortable with unquantifiable things like taste, quality, passion, love, hate… The sort of deep satisfaction that a craftsperson feels when they’ve done a job well is actually a better proxy if you allow it to be.” They then have robust analytics systems that tell the company if something’s wrong or a new rollout breaks something. “We think about it as a cockpit for a pilot. The decisions are still made by pilots, and we think this leads to better results… I think there needs to be more acceptance in business of unquantifiable things… And then metrics take a support function.” Source: @lennysan (Feb 2025)

Unix as literature theody.net/elements.html

Computer scientists only use red and black ball ornaments in their Christmas trees.

Todos queremos ser buenas personas. Decimos que valoramos la honestidad, la justicia y la generosidad… pero luego llega el momento de la verdad y, con mucha frecuencia, nos callamos, miramos para otro lado o hacemos exactamente lo contrario de lo que predicamos. ¿Por qué no aplicamos la moral que llevamos dentro? Según este artículo ser moral no depende solo de tus valores; depende mucho más de con quién estás y de lo que el entorno te permite hacer sin pagar un precio demasiado alto: “Este marco cuestiona la suposición de que el comportamiento moral de una persona es un reflejo de sus valores, ya que no siempre es así. Más bien, el comportamiento moral es una combinación de lo que creemos, los costes y beneficios sociales, si disponemos de los recursos para actuar y si creemos que nuestras acciones serán importantes. Por lo tanto, aunque las personas puedan parecer hipócritas morales, en realidad pueden estar haciendo lo que consideran «correcto» en ese momento. Si queremos crear entornos en los que las personas actúen de forma ética, debemos destacar las normas adecuadas, facilitar que se actúe de acuerdo con estos valores e incentivar las acciones éticas. Si no lo hacemos, no debería sorprendernos que las personas actúen como hipócritas morales.” powerofusnewsletter.com/p/wh…

Accounts payable is completely baffled by the concept of a "supplier" (SaaS product) only taking credit cards through a stripe portal and why they won't respond to our emails to fill out the supplier on boarding form for our gigantic 300/mo subscription.

“I’ll catch up on some work over the weekend?” The weekend: