CDOQ

Driving down Hwy 101 in Silicon Valley yesterday, I spotted this billboard (See image). It reminded me that while the Bay Area overflows with technical brilliance, tech companies often stumble when it comes to marketing and communication. The ad boldly declares: “DEPLOY BRAVELY.” Deploy Bravely? In software, deployment is the last place you want bravery. A good deployment should be boring—built on testing, quality assurance, monitoring, and the ability to roll back instantly if things go sideways. Sonos once deployed bravely and left some of its speakers effectively unusable.  The bravery resulted in the company’s market cap declining by half. I have no idea what Prisma Airs is—and the ad doesn’t make me interested in finding out more. Can you tell what it’s about?

I met a software engineer yesterday at a conference — let’s call him Ted (not his real name). He has worked at well-known Silicon Valley companies like Square, Google, and Yelp. Ted told me that culture varies widely across companies. I asked, “But how does that affect your job? You’re a software engineer — you just have to code to the requirements.” He smiled and said, “Culture defines how good the requirements are, how good my code is, and how happy the customer will be with the application.” Then Ted shared a practical test for culture: measure how much time you spend convincing others. If most of your energy goes into persuasion instead of building, the culture is working against you. In a healthy culture, things just flow — and you spend your day building, not convincing. In other words, in good cultures, it takes less energy to get things done.

In investment banking, exploiting regulatory loopholes is often called innovation. 

Whenever you think that some situation or some person is ruining your life, it is actually everyone and everything except you, ruining your life. Feeling like a victim is a perfectly accountability-free way to go through life. If you just take this attitude that however bad it is in any way, it is always someone else's fault and you just complain to everyone as best as you can - the so called silver prescription. It never works.  Inspired by Charlie Munger's iron pill . 

Many startups are in the business of raising money instead of making money. 

At the last Figma conference , two Google employees presented their updated design principles.  One of classic design principles that most designers follow, including those at Google, is "form follows function." Google has now updated this to "form follows feelings." The change can be observed in the latest Google product releases. The relevant employees feel good about releasing the products that do not function well. 😀 

Google spends a lot of time and money developing the Transformer , the technology behind ChatGPT, but does not commercialize it. Microsoft invests billions of dollars in OpenAI , the company behind ChatGPT, to commercialize the technology. Apple makes a deal with OpenAI to incorporate ChatGPT into the latest iPhones without paying much for it. Apple will make billions of dollars by selling new hardware with minimal AI investment. :)

Money might not be able to buy love but it will definitely help you lease it. 

France is complaining about government subsidies contained in the Inflation Reduction Act. 

TikTok is banned on all US government devices and the US government often talks about banning TikTok entirely in the US. However, US President Biden now has an official accoun t on TikTok :) 

My breadth is my depth. 

Necessity is the father of acceptance and acceptance is the mother of peace. Hence, necessity is the granddaddy of peace. 

Everybody is a leader on LinkedIn.  Everybody is an advisor on Twitter.  Everybody is good-looking on Instagram.  Everybody is an entertainer on Tiktok.  Everybody not keeping with the times is on Facebook.  Influencers are the most influenced.  All are seeking attention and corporations are monetizing that attention. 

Blockchain is a technology used by the new middlemen to displace the old middlemen while claiming that the technology eliminates the middlemen. 

Food is a medium to eat spices. 

Romance is expensive. 

"An articulate incompetent, 'a person who speaks clearly and cogently and persuasively about something, without actually understanding anything about the reality that their words are intending to describe.' 'Such a person is dangerous to an organization because they can sound very persuasive, despite the fact that they have absolutely no clue what they are talking about.'" - John Cleese 

If you don't like your fortune, have another fortune cookie. 

Management by TLDR (Too Long; Didn't Read) results in TLDR (Too Late; Didn't Reason). 

I spent years finding myself and when I did, there was nothing there.