If you are doing software engineering, Dave Snowden's Cynefin Framework is worth a look. Considers complexity as one quadrant to deal with when making decisions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_Framework
I personally never liked the whole Nord ecosystem. I tried NordPass and encountered bug after bug and had to stop using it. The software seems kind of thrown together / shoddily made just to make a quick buck. They don't nearly put in as much passion and effort as better offerings like ProtonVPN and Mullvad (no affiliation, just really love their services).
Can confirm. I used to use ProtonVPN and it was worth every penny. I switched to NordVPN to save a few bucks and it was one of the worst decisions I have ever made. NordVPN couldn’t hold a candle to what ProtonVPN offered in terms of reliability, ease of use, transparency and support. ProtonVPN was costlier, but I think it justified its cost.
And with Mullvad you can just make a one-time payment of EUR 5.00 if you need to use it for 30 days. No auto-renew crap / commitment to long subscriptions to deal with.
> I remember seeing photos of some university - I can't remember where - that actually ripped up the old paths and paved over the desire paths, to great success.
And when people do this: it makes the path a bit jarring since you intuitively know it's been designed that way for maximum efficiency and you are being 'played' in this subtle way.
Well we assume any important Internet choke-point is used for surveillance. If I just started surveilling anything sent en clair my first stop would be Internet backbone connections.
And what percentage of these users regularly encounter censorship, Internet infra shutdowns, or even surveillance? Every other day there are news articles pointing out the woes of the Great Firewall[0]
> Communicating the mapping of the code and the real world, as Naur describes, would have required us to document all these processes in meticulous detail. If we had tried to, I believe the result would’ve been multiple hundred pages describing the business processes
Or in other words: building in business logic is paramount and the only thing you should be doing if running a startup, otherwise these engineers are just dossing around with code that doesn't yield a profit.
There's been political winds blowing there over enacting certain prohibitions on crypto activity (again), Balaji makes reference to it early in the essay.
> Our world is defined by it, and yet we struggle to ever define it
> German psychologist Gustav Fechner provided evidence that people prefer rectangles with sides in proportion to the golden ratio (if you’re curious, that ratio is about 1.6:1)
Glad it mentioned the Golden Ratio and beauty seemingly being in the 'eye of the beholder' as mentioned here:
> Despite his experiments with the golden ratio, Fechner continued to believe that beauty was, to a large degree, in the brain of the beholder.
IMHO Beauty can be subjective, but there are entire industries built on the fact that some beauty is unquestionable, like in the modeling/fashion industry.
In modeling, acting, or even dating, beauty have always been a mix of objective features (like things signifying good health) and subjective features (features conferring to status, like being white).
There are even examples of objective feature colliding with subjective feature, resulting in different standard of being fit in different regions.
> …entire industries built on the fact that some beauty is unquestionable, like in the modelling [sic] industry
There are unquestionably beautiful models. But the modeling industry is as transactional as any other. The industry confers the status of beautiful on many people and things that are in no way beautiful.
