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Sep 4 2019

"An all-out blitz on the heart of Silicon Valley.”

#97:
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As Burning Man week comes to a close on social media, it's a somewhat opportune time for me to talk about psychedelics in this otherwise tech-centred newsletter.

This fascinating paper presents a plausible unified theory of how psychedelics work:

The basic idea: the main thing psychedelics are doing is relaxing the weight of the brain’s top-down prediction-making, while increasing the weight of the bottom-up sense information. This allows beliefs to be more readily changed by the new sensory information.

Back to regular programming…
ज्ञान
Why Slack is an Else Statement
Slack is ubiquitous at most companies in tech but it doesn’t feel like it is becoming the central nervous system undergirding all the apps and workflows of its customers.

The arc of collaboration is long and it bends in the direction of functional workflows.
For centuries, Indian parents have been tasked with finding partners for their children and organizing marriages. Now the roles are being reversed.
Citing theories of distributed systems, the author argues that meetings may be better.
No word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
Mark Twain
Amidst this, there's a great story of how the CIA in the 1960s built a 34 milef tubing system within their office walls to deliver internal mail.
Slightly dated but still a fun read:

The day unfolded like a scene from a James Bond movie: Segars landed at a small airstrip near the village of Marmaris, Turkey, where two security men picked him up and whisked him to an empty restaurant overlooking the marina. “It was surreal"

Are you ready to live in a Masa world?

Today's subject line is from this article.
On July 19, 1989, one of the most dramatic events in aviation unfolded in the skies over Iowa as heroic pilots battled to land a crippled DC-10.
Make your career great again
Here are a few open roles at well-known, vetted, and promising tech companies:
  • Product marketing @ a seed-funded, SaaS, marketing platform
  • Category lead @ a Series-A funded, video-based, e-commerce startup
Slide into my DMs if you could be interested.
Other tidbits
Quotable
"No word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause."

– Mark Twain

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