Kate DiCamillo: “I just wrote at the top of a draft of a story that I’m working on, “Details, details, everything is in the details.” And everything is. I tell kids who want to write: Pay attention to everything. I think that paying attention is a way to love the world.”
Arnold Kling: “I want to claim that intelligence is not a thing at all. It is an ongoing process. It is like science. You should not think of science as a body of absolute truth. Instead, think of the scientific method as a way of pursuing truth. One should resist the temptation to think of intelligence as a huge lump of knowledge that an entity possesses. Memorizing the encyclopedia does not constitute intelligence. Human intelligence is collective. Pretty much everything I know I learned from other people, either directly or indirectly.”
Priya Parker: “All organizations basically have vibes and cultures. And a huge part of remote and hybrid work is that we’ve killed the vibes, and so our perceptions of each other, our understanding of what our work is, our understanding of what the workplace is, is now primarily through mediocre meetings. On Zoom, when everything is muted, the signals that you get as to whether or not a group is with you are deleted. It becomes a sterile environment. You can’t hear people’s sighs, groans or laughs. It destroys one of the core elements of group conversation, which is a feedback loop: call and response. There are legitimate concerns from senior leaders that much of what allows for new people to succeed in an organization is based on apprenticeship and informal interactions—which in-person work provided. The mode of conversation that happens when you’re not being watched by 20 people [on a video meeting] is fundamentally different. You can absolutely design meaningful connection through remote work, but it’s a skill.”
Economist: “As sales of EVs slow in some markets, carmakers are hoping to rev up sales with both cheaper and more-powerful batteries. Cheaper materials, however, can provide a reduced level of performance, so these are likely to be used in shorter-range city cars. The more costly high-performance versions are aimed at luxury and sports cars. And somewhere in the middle are versions of both. What all this means is that EVs will be using many different types of battery, and each version will need a different concoction of cathode active material (CAM).”
WSJ: “It’s known as “technical debt.” Underneath the shiny and the new, lurking in IT systems where it creates security vulnerabilities and barriers to innovation, is an accumulation of quick fixes and outdated systems never intended for their current use, all of which are badly in need of updating…This technical debt would require $1.52 trillion to fix, and costs the U.S. $2.41 trillion a year in cybersecurity and operational failures, failed development projects, and maintenance of outdated systems, according to a 2022 report by a software industry-funded nonprofit. That’s more than 2.5 times what the U.S. government pays in annual interest on the national debt. The author of that report, retired University of Texas at Austin software engineering professor Herb Krasner, says he believes that debt has now climbed to nearly $2 trillion.”
