Tag: Books

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, Book Review

~ Veselin ~ 13 Comments

Sarah Wynn-Williams wrote a memoir about her times as a very ambitious young executive, working on international policies at Facebook. She was close to but not close with Mark Zuckerberg, Joel Kaplan, Sheryl Sandberg, and Elliot Schrage.

First half of the book describes her work. It was what I hoped to read when I took that book. It describes hard-working people, self-absorbed, ambitious, awkward, making honest mistakes, stupid mistakes, moving on, forgiving. Lots of internal politics, relationships, some favoritism and harassment. I managed to extract a positive idea out of it and wrote a post- Think Wrong, Move Fast and Break Things. I wish the book stopped there and the shocking airplane bed was the last chapter.

The second half is like swimming in a pool full of excrements with an occasional crocodile. All of the mentioned names lose their souls in the pursuit of goals, which seems to be humanly random and randomly human but completely unacceptable. One wants to promote a book probably filled with lies. Another wants to sleep with everyone from the opposite gender using his authority as a leverage. A third wants to be the emperor of Rome but realizes he’s already surpassed that. And all of them show the empathy of a hungry crocodile. But that’s only the beginning of the dreaded second part.

Then Sarah Wynn-Williams goes into details about election meddling, promoting violence and confrontation as an engagement tool, helping the far-right politicians and dictators around the globe because that would allow a better growth for the company, and even accuses Facebook for treason with their activities in China. She describes individual poops from the poop pool.

I knew Facebook is used that way – every time I watch more than 10 Facebook shorts, one will be by a pro-Russian troll account and maybe 3-4 will use other people’s content. They don’t hesitate to block my posts when I link to this blog but have never positively responded to a hate speech report or removed a fraudulent advertisement that I reported to my memories. Their moderation for Bulgaria has always been oddly biased in favor of anti-democratic forces. But the events from the book describe that in a world-level scale, engineered to be that way for money and power.

I don’t know if the book is true. I found Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Senate hearing, trying to get an impression. I can’t quite relate to any of these people, the author, the interviewers but it matches my expectations. It’s a cautionary tale about why the free, independent, and decentralized web is important, why and how the walled gardens are harming our society, and why kids should not be allowed to use social media.

I’m on Facebook, my friends are there. What do I do?

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.

Cursed by Alex Kosh, Book Review

~ Veselin ~ 5 Comments

I was the first person to read, rate, and review this book on Goodreads. Goodreads, this has to be a major achievement, I demand a badge or a cookie!

The book was originally published in Russian and later translated into Bulgarian for the free online library Chitanka, with the author’s permission. Since its release in 2023, only one person has reviewed it on Goodreads.

The story follows Roman who resurrected into a world with ghosts, mediums, and magic. He was much older in his previous life but now finds himself in his teenage years. He forms relationships with dead people and animals. This 3rd part of the story will make him face Sadako Yamamura but without the videotape hack. Sadako is terrifying.

The story is good and I enjoyed it. The only thing I didn’t like was the description of various government authority figures as billionaires who live in incredible luxury and show complete disregard of human life.

Should I trust my intuition?

~ Veselin ~ 13 Comments

We make decisions many times per day. Most of them are quick, automatic, and unimportant. However, some choices can have a dramatic impact over our future. For example, a choice of one university over another can determine the career path. The choice of a partner. Buying one house over another, and particularly the financial aspect of that choice. Buying an old car with cash vs a new with credit. We are made in a way that follows the heart, which is essentially using intuition rather than judgement.

The problem with fast decisions

Our brains have an incredible capacity to produce quick, intuitive, and wrong answers to any problem. Once our action doesn’t solve the problem, we often have a bigger problem and a new chance to try solving it. Repeating the same approach can lead to a chain of bad choices. Feelings appear to be a force multiplier and can make any situation much worse than the original problem.

Is it true and why why is that? One theory that I liked comes from the work of Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, which I read in 2016. It’s been quoted before on this blog as it’s essential to how I see the world.

The theory is that we are adjusted to living in the bush where a lion can hide and eat us. The intuitive response to anything moving in the bush has to be quick in order to prevent us from being eaten. There’s absolutely no need to have a quick and intuitive response when the car dealership makes an offer to us. In the past, you only make one mistake and you get eaten. In the modern world, the movement in the bush is not a lion.

Kahneman says that our brains have two modes. System 1, Intuition, produces quick and wrong decisions. System 2, slow thinking, can sometimes produce not wrong solutions.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

Another famous book, called Crucial Conversations, explores the area of arguments. The recurring theme is that you won’t drive if you’re drunk. Don’t drive under the influence [of alcohol]. Just like driving, the choice of words during an important conversation can be of lasting consequences. Don’t make important choices under the influence [of emotion]. Our boss wrongs us. Intuitive response? Something with the F word. A quote from the book:

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

To make the matter worse, not only is the emotional response bad for us, but it’s also predictable on a group level. It gets exploited by politicians, marketers, grifters, and more ordinary humans who’ve learned how to do it. It’s an appeal to emotion, which makes you susceptible to mistakes. Enter that car, hold the wheel, feel the smell. You’ll love it. It can be yours.

Productive emotions have been used by mass media to increase the sales since at least the discovery of the tabloids (Ryan Holiday, Trust me, I’m lying). A fear-mongering title sells the newspaper. Anger, Fear, Greed, Guilt, Lust can make us respond in a certain way as a group. These switch us into System-1 mode and we make decision not in our favor based on intuition. We can be fooled and negatively impact our or our group’s future.

The problem with slow decisions

It not possible to switch our reptile system-1 brain off and it’s also unsafe. Gavin de Becker explores the fear and anger in his book The Gift of Fear. He lists pre-incident indicators in a long list of possible violent outcomes. For example, a group of young men hang out by an pedestrian underpass. One of them peaks at me and my heart drops. It’s the lion in the bush of our modern world. There’s no time, just turn around and run for help.

The book also covers the area of domestic violence and the tendency of people to ignore clear signs of coming attacks. A possible conclusion from that book is that when people show you who they really are, trust them.

Dr. Albert Ellis classifies the underreaction to incidents as Rationalization, one of the three groups of thinking errors from his book How To Keep People From Pushing Your Buttons. The modern day understanding of Rationalization classifies under it a group of behaviors that justify violence and wrongdoing by making up reasons for the violent behaviors where rational reasons do not exist.

So, all in all, ignoring the intuitive response is not good either.

How do I make the difference

Perhaps most decision making in the area of physical safety should use the intuitive brain first. Take ourselves out of danger and turn on the System-2. Anything in the area of purchases, investments, money, work, business, programming, health should use the slow brain. Any classification like that is prone to exceptions but the bare awareness of it can help, particularly when a manipulation tactic is being used on us. A countdown timer. A limited time offer. It’s just one, now or never, “I have five other offers for this apartment”. Yeah, sure you do.

None of the quoted books speaks about guaranteed good decisions. They all speak about probabilities. You can meet someone, say yourself “Oh, I’ll spend my life with them” 15 seconds later, and proceed to actually do it, and have a happy life. It’s not likely but it happens.

Ending with a reminder about an old post. Never miss an opportunity to be kind. The world is harsh and we can’t change it. We can only change our responses to events. Love and kindness make everything more tolerable.

March in Books

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment

I completed 8 books in March.

Best

  • The Book of Koli by M.R. Carey – a teenager leaves the safety of his village to explore a hostile post-apocalyptic world where trees move and eat humans. The trees won’t eat Koli but have managed to do eradicate our society. 5/5
  • Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells – The Murderbot, who is a little bit human and a lot more a bot, moves around to find the truth about something. We don’t remember what exactly but it’s cool and the pages turn themselves quickly.
  • Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding – an airship and its strange crew run around to get through the day. The crew gets involved in battles and death. 4/5
  • The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey – a zombie apocalypse, followed by more zombie apocalypse, from the point of view of a teenage zombie. She isn’t really threatened by zombies. 4/5

Worst

  • The Cipher by Isabella Maldonado – A tiny FBI agent will face off against a giant serial killer with incredible reflexes, intellect, and combat skills, who has made it his goal to finish her off. The killer is so smart that he constantly streams and provides clues but everything goes through so many servers that it becomes untraceable 🙄. 3/5, barely read it.
  • The Alchemyst – two kids have the same very special gift. We’d expect something like playing a piano, speaking languages, or being good at math? No. They have strong auras. The idea isn’t bad but the book was hard to read. 3/5
  • The Boy on the Bridge by M.R. Carey – DNF. Suffered through about 100 pages with nothing happening. After all, what can happen so much given that the world is over, and then over again in The Girl with All the Gifts. End again? It’s just pointless and whatever the idea is, it doesn’t reveal itself within the first 100 pages. 1/5 DNF. My first DNF for 2025.

Reading Challenge Update

I read 27 books this quarter, a bit less than last year. I still try to read every evening after 10pm but seems to fail on some days. I haven’t been able to find a good new series to make achieving the goal easier. Chris Wooding’s Ketty Jay and Sten were both 4s, and nothing else had enough books to matter.