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This pandemic will eventually be over, and the Delta surge—in which most of those not yet vaccinated against the coronavirus could become infected—may well be America’s last destructive wave. But just because we’re eager to move past the …

Huge favor to ask. Have you learned a new analytics product in the last year or so? If so, and you have 5 minutes to spare, It would be a big help for my team.

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A food tech startup is partnering with an avant-garde San Francisco chef to serve the company’s cultivated, cell-grown chicken at her restaurant.

Alex Murdaugh, the descendant of a prominent family of lawyers in rural South Carolina, was shot on Saturday, nearly three months after his wife and son were killed at their home.

Guest Essay

The heat has come.

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As Congress argues over the size of the infrastructure bill and how to pay for it, very little attention is being devoted to one of the most perplexing problems: Why does it cost so much more to build transportation networks in the US than …

Photo enhancing in movies and TV shows is often ridiculed for being unbelievable, but research in real photo enhancing is actually creeping more and more into the realm of science fiction. Just take a look at Google’s latest AI photo …

Again and again, I run into situations in which change agents in organizations that I work with run into organizational boundaries that stop them from moving forward in a way that makes perfect sense from a business and innovation …

Dave Bailey Follow

Just because your work doesn’t always look like work, doesn’t mean you don’t get to take a real vacation.

TL;DR: When different parts of an organization need to coordinate, it seems like a good idea to help them coordinate smoothly and frequently. Don’t. Help them coordinate less — more explicitly, less often.

Dave Bailey

Tim Denning Jun 23 · 5 min read

BY ALEX KONRAD

Normally the question I focus on in my work and in my writing is “How can we leverage the best practices of the very best companies in order to give ourselves the very best chance for continuous innovation?”

The Maersk Triple-E Class container ship is 1,300 feet long, carries over 18,000 containers across 11,000 miles between Europe and Asia, and… Its entire crew can fit inside a passenger van.

To most software organizations,Covid-19 represents a fundamental surprise- a dramatic surprise that challenges basic assumptions and forces a revising of one’s beliefs (Lanir, 1986).

In 1994 — before most Americans had an email address or Internet access or even a personal computer — Philip Agre foresaw that computers would one day facilitate the mass collection of data on everything in society.

Satya Nadella, for the record, was first: on May 25, 2021, during the keynote for Microsoft’s Build developer conference, he characterized a collection of Azure offerings as a metaverse:

Meetings are important — and they suck.

I originally wrote this piece internally at Eventbrite and thought it might be valuable to folks who do not work at Eventbrite as well. Slightly edited to remove Eventbrite jargon.

Leaders of software development organisations are under great pressure to

Why prioritization frameworks have little value for empowered product teams

Mathilde Collin

As June came to an end, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his employees about an ambitious new initiative. The future of the company would go far beyond its current project of building a set of connected social apps and some hardware to …

A big shift is apparently underway in Silicon Valley.

Camille Fournier

I’ve been delving deeper into the vast and strange world of knowledge organizing tools (notes apps, contact organizers, personal search engines). During this rather abstract expedition, one of my goals has been to emerge with some …

A remarkable new study by a director at one of the largest accounting firms in the world has found that a famous, decades-old warning from MIT about the risk of industrial civilization collapsing appears to be accurate based on new …

Jason Yip Jul 4 · 3 min read

Welcome to the Convivial Society*, a newsletter about technology and society, broadly speaking. If you find the writing helpful, you can sign up if you haven’t already, share it with others, or subscribe.*

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In his six years at HashiCorp, **Kevin Fishner **has strung together a unique set of startup experiences. He joined the cloud infrastructure automation company in 2014 as the first business hire, going on to spin up the sales, solutions …

© GettyImages coldsnowstorm

After years of starting the day with a tall morning coffee, followed by several glasses of green tea at intervals, and the occasional cappuccino after lunch, I quit caffeine, cold turkey. It was not something that I particularly wanted to …

Fifteen months after shutting down “out of an abundance of caution,” Quartz’s office in New York City reopened to employees on June 1 under new guidelines befitting our changed world, increasingly far-flung workforce, and rapidly evolving …

Camille Fournier

At Superhuman, we use Reid Hoffman’s “Single Decisive Reason” (SDR) principle

Knowledge work is unique among skilled professions in that we lack a culture of systematic improvement.

June 2021

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The 4 Ds of time management, sometimes referred to as the 4 Ds of productivity, is a popular strategy for discerning whether or not a task or project is worth your time. It involves making a quick decision about what to act on now either by …

Ben Zotto

Sixty years ago the futurist Arthur C. Clarke observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The internet—how we both communicate with one another and together preserve the intellectual products of human …

June 2021

What does it mean to be productive? At the beginning of the pandemic, when many workers went remote, some managers were tempted to start counting things — whether hours, objects, or other things. But they’re about 100 years and two …

At Raycast, we do not require code reviews. Engineers push to the main branch and request reviews when they think it’s necessary. In this blog post, I outline how we built an engineering culture that is based on trust and allows us to move …

I was promoted to director less than a year after becoming a manager. In the movie version of my life, getting promoted was a recognition of years of hard work and undeniable, innate leadership ability. The truth is probably closer to me …