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Ownership is one thing. If the company believes in a cause and everybody in the company is truly working towards that cause, it may be equally, if not more, fulfilling. Does your company work on a problem or cause that you believe in?


It is unavoidable for the kind of article the author is writing. He is trying to give the perspective of a person who has 'been there'. This I imagine is very interesting to read for people who want to 'be there' or going to. For them, an article that doesn't deal too deeply into philosophy may be more appealing. This is possible only if the author makes a lot of assumptions. And of course, if you don't agree with those assumptions, you'll just move on.


I didn't introduce the philosophical notions myself. The author makes plentiful use of them, but inaccurately.

That's worse than not using them.

It's like pasting

    rm -rf /
in an article about Fun Bash Commands. People who know enough won't be harmed, and either find it funny or moronic. But those who don't know enough can be injured.


I think the point was that for a lot of people the settings are more productive than if they were left to their own devices.


That largely depends on the value system. Set someone in a remote area and tell them they have to make it on their own with nobody coming to their aide, they'll work hard. Give them a salary that doesn't change based on work effort, then why would they try harder?

I get way more done for my self than when I'm working for an employer. I'm not dragged down by meetings and bureaucracy.


That sentence was followed by 'Life could be a struggle for survival with hard work and adversity at every corner. Marriages were arranged by parents and if, after 20 years, the couple hated each other, there was no option to divorce.'. So, if you don't struggle for survival, and don't have to work hard, and are not hit by adversity, and not forcely married to a person you don't like, then you may be happy. That seems a reasonable assumption considering the objective of the essay.


To some people, the pain of letting the money go is greater than the perceived benefit of the product/service they get in return for the money, most of the time. You can imagine such people accumulating money all their life. For them, FIRE would be a very attractive proposition.


> For a tool like that I need it to be a frictionless as possible

Friction can be at different levels. All text editors especially the ones we are used to are friction less when we want to quickly open a new file and jot down something. But then, many higher levels things you want to do with chunks of text are not straight forward. You'll have to use plugins or write your extensions which sort of do what's required, but then they become clunky.

Doing the following things in a text editor is very clunky 1. Drop files from a file browser 2. A wiki that you'll stick to and not want to switch every month. 3. Write reasonably large documents that you'd actually also read in a text editor. 4. Have the same experience on all devices 5. Tables that are pleasing to the eye. 6. Visuals cues that enhance understanding of the content. 7. Select a bunch of text and convert them into pages or todos or tickets.


Roam takes a while to startup. Once up, it's quite fast to switch between pages. A bit like an IDE. It's still browser based I think, and there are no native apps for Android and iOS. So I feel constrained when I'm not at the desktop.

Notion mobile apps are quite good, so I never have to tell myself I'll do something when I go to my desktop.


Exactly.. I was wondering the same. What notifications are these people talking about. First thing I do on my phone is to turn off all notifications.


I don't turn all off. But it's a pretty high bar and those I have notification on for are pretty low volume that I typically do want to respond to or be aware of in a timely manner.


I use Google Keep for saving anything I find interesting online. There's a chrome extension that you can use to do it from the browser. It allows you to write some text around the link/text you are saving. I write enough text so that I am able to find it by searching. I also give one standard label to these notes so these are not mixed up with other Keep notes for tasks, book notes etc.


Can you suggest some books


What do you want, fiction? Non fiction, self help. Entertaining or thought providing or challenging?

Your question is insanely broad. Also what is the longest single work you have read? Many of the best reads take forever to get going. Also they are insanly long and thus intimidating


Sometimes you can combine an answer to such a question by getting someone to read a relatively compact one like "The Physics of Star Trek". That won't work for people that don't like technology or science, but there are similar examples on other subjects. Works well for people who haven't started asking detailed questions yet, but may expect a fitting answer anyway.

If after starting or even finishing such a book and they like it, it gets a lot easier to recommend more specifically after that. If they don't like it, it either means the book needs to be less complex, or more single-topic and perhaps even non-fiction to remove more unknown elements.


The moon is a harsh mistress


Recursion by Blake Crouch! Biggest mindf* of the 2010's, hands down.


_12 Rules for Life_ by Jordan Peterson is quite eye opening, he has an insightful view on many things.



Interesting that The Second Sex is included in this list, given that its author believed that women are generally too stupid to choose what's best for them in life.

> No woman should be authorized to stay home to raise her children. Women should not have that choice, because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.

— Simone de Beauvoir


You left out the next sentence, so in context it reads “ ... because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.“

> “ ... women are generally too stupid to choose what’s best for them in life.”

Those are your words, not Simone de Beauvoirs.

I haven’t read “The Second Sex” yet but I have read “The Ethics of Ambiguity” by her.

I would bet a dollar though that Beauvoir considers stupidity an individual human trait generously distributed across all genders.

Here are some other quotes from The Second Sex.

"Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it."

"To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other. The reciprocity of their relations will not do away with the miracles – desire, possession, love, dream, adventure – worked by the division of human beings into two separate categories; and the words that move us – giving, conquering, uniting – will not lose their meaning. On the contrary, when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form."


I know those are my words, but this is the implicit message I interpret from hers. One must think rather lowly of others (and/or extremely highly of oneself and/or one’s ideology) to claim to know what’s best for those others.


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