a more or less weekly digest of juicy stuff

• navigating stuckness, in life, you will become known for doing what you do. that sounds obvious, but it's profound. if you want to be known as someone who does a particular thing, then you must start doing that thing immediately. don't wait. there is no other way. it probably won't make you money at first, but do it anyway. work nights. work weekends. sleep less. whatever you have to do. if you do it well, and for long enough, the world will find ways to repay you. highly recommended
• the last re-org you'll ever do, here's the problem. the design of an organization is an insurmountable intellectual puzzle. whatever your mental model of the organization might be, it's too simplistic. no human, and no current machine, can handle the complexity. it's literally impossible. highly recommended
• unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments, those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it (pdf)
• how dogecoin changed my perspective on cryptocurrency, there's no inherent reason that a piece of paper has a certain amount of value. there is a subjective reason, though: namely, that a large enough number of people agree that usd is a worthwhile commodity. they believe that for a number of reasons, including that our army will go off and fucking kill anybody who threatens to break the spell that makes everyone agree that usd are worth your time to accept
• debian bug #727708: on diversity, open source does not turn the developers who (often in their spare time) work on the software into slaves of their users. the exact opposite is true, and the developers who do the work have the freedom to force whatever they want on the users of their software. among the freedoms open source gives to all users the relevant one is actually the right to fork: if you don't like a policy decision of an open source project, you can always create a fork that works exactly the way you envision it.
• vertical align anything with just 3 lines of css
• how to increase your luck surface area, when you pour energy into a passion, you develop an expertise and an expertise of any kind is valuable. but quite often that value can actually be magnified by the number people who are made aware of it. the reason is that when people become aware of your expertise, some percentage of them will take action to capture that value, but quite often it will be in a way you would never have predicted
• speaking.io, thoughts on public speaking
• the 7 habits of highly overrated people, if you're thinking of doing these things, don't. if you're currently doing them, stop
• how t-shirts are designed in 2011, hilarious
• orson welles on cold reading
• camera, a post-punk art-rock from chicago