Category: Thinking

Why aren’t intelligent people happier

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

I found this nice article today that digs into the subject. Check it out.

The article suggests that we’ve been measuring intelligence the wrong way, which leads to poor correlation with life success metrics. Most of our intelligence metrics (like IQ) focus on how well someone can solve clearly defined problems. Real life rarely works that way. Living well, building relationships, raising children, and so on, depend more on the ability to navigate poorly defined problems. As a result, you can have a chess champion who is also a miserable human.

The article goes further and states that AIs can’t become AGIs because they’re only operating with human definitions (training data), and well-defined problems coming from prompts. AGIs would have to master poorly defined problems first.

How Do I Handle the Daily News?

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments
Daily writing prompt
Which topics would you like to be more informed about?
View all responses

Most of my effort goes into making sure I know what I need for work, and what’s happening in school or with the kids. That’s the stuff that really matters. Honestly, if there’s an area where I feel I should probably know more, it’s school/kids.

I’ve discovered that most news articles, TV, and so on are farming by exploiting our productive emotions, primarily fear and anger. I stopped watching TV years ago, and no longer pay for a cable. My news consumption is likely under 2-3 minutes per day, mostly checking if we should hide in a bunker already or not. So far, the news meet the long established pattern:

  • You should be afraid, very, very afraid because…
  • Here are two, three, or five things that are unfair, corrupt, or awful…
  • Somebody just died in a car crash…
  • Here’s an extreme, factually questionable opinion…

My unfortunate conclusion on this cycle is:

Little Things

~ Veselin ~ 5 Comments

Yesterday, I saw the Jetpack app on my phone and it felt like I’ve not turned that on in awhile. It made me think about how easily we let things slip. We do something regularly, then skip it once, then a few more times… and eventually, we just stop. Even if we made a clear commitment to keep it up.

Other examples:

  • Use that frontendmasters subscription, because I made a commitment to learn SVG animations but never did
  • A 10-year-old dashboard, from a past role, visiting which used to be second nature for me
  • Vacuuming the car
  • Checking up on an old friend who’s always happy to chat but never calls
  • Watering the plant in the other room
  • Reading a few pages of that book that’s boring but useful and I want to finish

I was greatly embarrassed and checked all 10-year-old dashboards, the trash in the car (uh, forgot one thing that just stays in the trunk), messaged a few friends, and watered the plant.

The frontendmasters sub is gone, I have to admit I’m not learning SVG animations any time soon.

Scott Berkun on Values

~ Veselin ~ 11 Comments

Talking about values and virtue signaling is easy. But sacrifice is hard and often unobserved. We don’t get as much credit from others for living up to our values, as we do for merely proclaiming them on social media or t-shirts.

— Scott Berkun on his Substack blog

Scott Berkun is an inspirational writer. He worked on the Internet Explorer team between versions 1 and 5. He also lead a team at Automattic, an experience he documented in the book The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work.

I keep writing about kindness and using every opportunity to treat people well. His post resonated a lot with me because it challenges a thing I value highly. Kindness usually costs little, requires no sacrifice, and can be visible. Scott Berkun says this is not a real value. Even worse, promoting kindness as a public statement could be like wearing a patriotic t-shirt.

This is not a new idea but a new point of view that hasn’t crossed my mind before. The Bible has lots of quotes that give a definition of good, and the lack of publicity is a common requirement.

But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret.

— Matthew 6:3

For example, is it a good thing when you hand free iPhones to strangers for views on YouTube? It costs something so it checks the first requirement but is done in public so it doesn’t check the second. Same with pretty much any act of kindness that’s done for views or shared on social media.

I need to think more about this.

Think Wrong, Move Fast and Break Things

~ Veselin ~ 6 Comments

I’m currently reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. I’m less than halfway through, but it already feels like this book deserves more than one post. So far, it doesn’t paint Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg as supervillains, and I’m getting a glimpse into Facebook’s early culture.

One of the big ideas from Facebook’s early years was Move Fast and Break Things. This mantra has been both confirmed working and disproved many times – often by engineers like me, who’ve lived through its successes and catastrophic failures. .

Moving Fast and Breaking Things Works

It works because the software industry can be like a gator-infested pool. When a new idea drops like a piece of meat in the pool, everyone jumps on it. The biggest reward goes to the fastest gator that ships first and markets well. There’s often no time to make things well.

Facebook won the social network race in large parts of the world. Twitter and a few others got the leftovers. But this principle applies beyond tech giants – down to much smaller scales. It’s a form of the Pareto principle: 80% of the outcomes stem from 20% of the causes. If you can roughly identify the 20% and validate an idea quickly, you’ve already won even if it doesn’t work. You saved the effort for something that may work.

On an individual level, it also feels like it works. You get a task, you ship something quickly – it shows up in your weekly update, your team’s update, maybe even the leadership sees it. You’re productive, visible, and valuable.

But It Also Doesn’t Work

Once an idea is validated, it gains users, traction, and revenue. A bug that shows up once in 1000 runs might never happen with 10 users/day. Once you have a million users, it happens 1000 times a day. Also, one broken user profile may be easily fixable but a million? Not so much.

Zuckerberg himself cited this kind of thinking when Facebook moved away from the motto around 2014. You can’t keep patching the same issues over and over at scale. Stability becomes a requirement.

From an individual contributor point of view, it looks that profitable ideas attract many layers of heavily invested people – technical, marketing, finance, data, legal, executive, investors. And when something breaks, you’re not just dealing with bugs. You’re affecting dashboards, KPIs, morale, and your own job security. Blame becomes easier to assign. 10 of these people will know how things work and won’t blame you but the eleventh may have a bad day and push the button.

How to make a difference?

In early-stage product development or during moments of intense change, moving fast and breaking things can be the right move. But in mature projects, where uptime matters and stakeholders are many, the priority shifts. It’s more about stability, reliability, and trust.

Ultimately, Mark Zuckerberg hung that motto on Facebook’s wall – and eventually took it down. He may put it back up if he recognizes a need for it. Recognizing the moment is a key part of leadership.