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2024_reading.md

Things I might read in 2024.

  • Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Richard Howard (translator) - The Little Prince
  • (Translation by) Sam Hamill - Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems From the Chinese
  • Sayaka Murata, Ginny Tapley Takemori (translator) - Convenience Store Woman (via)
  • Jorge Luis Borges - Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (in Labyrinths)/ printed (via)
  • Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis (via)
  • William Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker/ audio, go to 12m35s to skip past the introduction spoilers
  • The Heart of Innovation: A Field Guide for Navigating to Authentic Demand/ audio (via)
  • Peter D. Kaufman - Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, Expanded Third Edition
  • Lia A. DiBello - Expertise in Business: Evolving with a Changing World (in The Oxford Handbook of Expertise) (via)
  • Joël Glenn Brenner - The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars
  • Elad Gil - High Growth Handbook/ audio
  • W. Edwards Demming - The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education/ audio
  • W. Edwards Demming - The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education/ the PDF or ebook
  • Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland/ including the posts I SingleFile'd
  • the relevant-looking posts on benkuhn.net/posts
  • Commoncog Case Library Beta
  • Keith J. Cunningham - The Road Less Stupid: Advice from the Chairman of the Board/ audio
  • Keith J. Cunningham - The 4-Day MBA/ video
  • Cedric Chin's summary of 7 Powers
  • Akio Morita, Edwin M. Reingold, Mitsuko Shimomura - Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony
  • Nomad Investment Partnership Letters or redacted (via)
  • How to Lose Money in Derivatives: Examples From Hedge Funds and Bank Trading Departments
  • Brian Hayes - Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape
  • Accelerated Expertise (via)/ printed, "read Chapters 9-13 and skim everything else"
  • David J. Gerber - The Inventor's Dilemma (via Oxide and Friends)
  • Alex Komoroske - The Compendium / after I convert the Firebase export in code/websites/compendium-cards-data/db.json to a single HTML page
  • Rich Cohen - The Fish That Ate The Whale (via)
  • Bob Caspe - Entrepreneurial Action/ printed, skim for anything I don't know

Interactive fiction

unplanned notable things read

unplanned and abandoned

  • Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga - The Courage to Be Disliked/ audio
  • Matt Dinniman - Dungeon Crawler Carl/ audio
  • Charles Eisenstein - The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible/ audio
  • Geoff Smart - Who: The A Method for Hiring/ audio
  • Genki Kawamura - If Cats Disappeared from the World/ audio
  • Paul Stamets - Fantastic Fungi: How Mushrooms Can Heal, Shift Consciousness, and Save the Planet/ audio
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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024 •
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What finally got this to stick for me was abandoning all notion of structure and organization (and formal concepts like “logging” and “journaling”) and optimizing fully for capture over retrieval, then relying on search tools and proximity for the latter.

[...]

It took me a couple years to realize this too. For the past five years I abandoned all structure. I use a literal log file. Chronological from top to bottom, with paragraph breaks for each workday. Higher than necessary verbosity, no points taken away for spelling or grammar mistakes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40950584

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024

I cannot work without taking notes. It is a process of thinking, sorting my ideas, documenting steps and outcomes, pausing, practicing meta-cognition, gaining clarity and confidence along the process. Plus I have the benefit to go back to my notes and have instant access to what I did days, months, years ago. So I can’t understand how people are working without taking notes, documenting (for themselves), and journaling.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952344

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024

we will approach all methods in terms of their intended effects—that is, what they were designed to do and what happens when you engage with them

https://vajrayananow.com/about-my-approach

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024 •
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We tried to give away the technology, and it didn’t work! So now we are selling it, with considerably more success.

https://stevana.github.io/the_sad_state_of_property-based_testing_libraries.html

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024 •
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The major omission in this article is fuzzing. Not only is it practical and in wide (and growing use), it’s also far more advanced than QuickCheck’s approach of generating random inputs, because fuzzing can be _coverage-driven_. Property-based testing came out of academia and fuzzing came out of security research, initially they were not connected. But with the advent of in-process fuzzing (through libFuzzer), which encourages writing small fuzz tests rather than testing entire programs; and structure-aware fuzzing, which enables testing more than just functions that take a bytestring as input, in my view the two techniques have converged. It’s just that the two separate communities haven’t fully realized this yet.

One pitfall with non-coverage-driven randomized testing like QuickCheck, is that how good your tests are depends a lot on the generator. It may be very rarely generating interesting inputs because you biased the generator in the wrong way, and depending on how you do the generation, you need to be careful to ensure the generator halts. With coverage-driven fuzzing all of these problems go away; you don’t have to be smart to choose distributions so that interesting cases are more common, coverage instrumentation will automatically discover new paths in your program and drill down on them.

But isn’t fuzzing about feeding a large program or function random bytestrings as inputs, whereas property-based testing is about testing properties about data structures? It is true that fuzzers operate on bytestrings, but there is no rule that says we can’t use that bytestring to generate a data structure (in a sense, replacing the role of the random seed). And indeed this is what the Arbitrary crate [1] in Rust does, it gives tools and even derive macros to automatically generate values of your data types in the same way that QuickCheck can. The fuzzing community calls this Structure-Aware Fuzzing and there is a chapter about it in the Rust fuzzing book [2]. There are also tools like libprotobuf-mutator [3] that substitute fuzzers’ naive mutation strategies, but even with naive strategies fuzzers can usually get to 100% coverage with appropriate measures (e.g. recomputing checksums after mutation, if the data structure contains checksums).

I am using this extensively in my own projects. For example, RCL (a configuration language that is a superset of json) contains multiple fuzzers that test various properties [4], such as idempotency of the formatter. In the beginning it used the raw source files as inputs but I also added a more advanced generator that wastes less cycles on inputs that get rejected by the parser. The fuzzer has caught serveral bugs, and most of them would have had no hope of being found with naive randomized testing, because they required a cascade of unlikely events.

Structure-aware fuzzing is not limited to generating data structures either, you can use it to generate reified commands to test a stateful API, as you describe in the _Stateful property-based testing_ section. The Rust fuzzing book has an example of this [5], and I use this approach to fuzz a tree implementation in Noblit [6].

[1]: https://docs.rs/arbitrary/latest/arbitrary/
[2]: https://rust-fuzz.github.io/book/cargo-fuzz/structure-aware-fuzzing.html
[3]: https://github.com/google/libprotobuf-mutator
[4]: https://docs.ruuda.nl/rcl/testing/#fuzz-tests
[5]: https://rust-fuzz.github.io/book/cargo-fuzz/structure-aware-fuzzing.html#example-2-fuzzing-allocator-api-calls
[6]: https://github.com/ruuda/noblit/blob/a0fd1342c4aa6e05f2b1c4e2929804c82e348ae2/fuzz/fuzz_targets/htree_insert.rs

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40877028

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024

The following instructions do not require any plugins or addons, which is a bonus.

  1. Find your profile folder.
  2. Navigate to the subfolder 'chrome'. If it doesn't exist, create it.
  3. Now inside that folder, create an empty file called 'userContent.css'.
  4. Open that file in a text editor, and add this text (all on one line): @font-face { font-family: 'Helvetica'; src: local('Arial'); }
  5. Save that file and restart firefox.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1210975/how-do-i-block-or-substitute-a-certain-font-in-firefox

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024

Hydration works differently

Svelte 5 makes use of comments during server side rendering which are used for more robust and efficient hydration on the client. As such, you shouldn't remove comments from your HTML output if you intend to hydrate it, and if you manually authored HTML to be hydrated by a Svelte component, you need to adjust that HTML to include said comments at the correct positions.

sveltejs/svelte@528d346

This just cost us about two days of three people debugging.

==> Removing whitespace and comments will brake Vue’s hydration strategy when using server side rendering.

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/omit-formatted-comments-from-minification/18572/28?page=2

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024

Wikipedia trench warfare is an elaborate game, opaque and bizarre for outsiders to even contemplate, in which motivated figures fight to exhaustion over often trivial-seeming changes with deep significance to participants. Given that, I’ll expend my last remaining bit of sanity to bring legibility to a few of Gerard’s skirmishes. When Gerard fixates on something within an article, he touches it up via a series of gradual, mild tweaks: often individually defensible, usually citing one policy or another, all pointing one direction. He removes neutral information tangential to his fixation, gradually expands and adds citations to the sections he fixates on, and aggressively reverts any change that goes against his vision. When challenged, he raises policy names, invites editors to escalate, requests hard proof for straightforward claims he knows are true, accuses opponents of being fringe conspiracists, and if all else fails, simply goes silent and waits for people to shift their focus before returning to what he wanted to do in the first place.

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024

If China wanted to make the yuan a true global reserve currency, they would need to embrace massive financial deregulation and abolish their currently strict capital controls, in order to allow massive inflows of foreign held currency and yuan into China. But China needs to maintain its strict financial regulation for domestic economic success, and political stability. China is unlikely to ever decide to abandon the statist model it has followed for decades just to make itself a better hub for the international financial system.

https://keithwoods.pub/p/the-shadow-money-system-that-rules

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024

[Cloudflare is] now processing an average of 57 million HTTP requests/second (+23.9% YoY) and 77 million at peak (+22.2% YoY). From a DNS perspective, we are handling 35 million DNS queries per second (+40% YoY).

https://blog.cloudflare.com/application-security-report-2024-update

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024

The good thing about open source software is that it’s reusable intellectual property. Consultants can work for one company using it, then move on, and use it to do consulting for someone else. Open source software is great because talented engineers can work where people can see them, on something they can show, and something they can keep.

https://news.alvaroduran.com/p/we-love-writing-software-so-much

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ivan commented Jul 26, 2024 •
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I think the ever-evolving nature of conspiracies is actually pretty important to psychologically grasping their appeal. I have a friend who is a big believer in 9/11 Trutherism. He once compelled me to watch the documentary “The New Pearl Harbor,” an exhausting 5-hour film promoting 9/11 conspiracies. If one actually watches, one quickly discovers that a lot of 9/11 conspiracy theories are mutually exclusive, or at least don’t mesh well together: One conspiracy argues that fighter jets were intentionally diverted the wrong direction to keep them from shooting down the hijacked jets approaching New York, while another conspiracy suggests that United 93 was shot down, and it was all covered up. In some versions, the planes didn’t hit the Twin Towers at all. Sometimes Bush did it, and sometimes Israel did it, and so on. 

Similarly, in my career I’ve worked adjacent to people who, like RRN, were very hostile to Covid-19 shots. That hostility made them sequentially endorse wildly different assertions about how the vaccines worked. Sometimes, the vaccines contain heavy metals. Sometimes, they contain hydra DNA to turn recipients into partially non-human chimeras. Sometimes, the vaccines are a depopulation agent. Sometimes, they’re a mind-control agent, or a killswitch that can be activated by self-assembling nanomachinery. One viral documentary in 2022 claimed that Covid was caused by snake venom in the water supply, and that Covid vaccines were an additional dose of snake venom to keep people sick (all this, of course, because the snake is Satan’s animal).

What stands out isn’t the silliness of these particular theories, but that I saw them sequentially endorsed by the same people.

Some of these people are smart enough to notice inconsistencies, at least when they’re pointed out, so why don’t they bother them? To some extent, I think it’s for the same reason people don’t care that every Batman story doesn’t perfectly line up. Consistency isn’t the point! What actually matters is enjoying individual stories and the wider genre they fit into. Covid vaccine haters don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, they’re driven by a core impulse of “distrust the new vaccine that people I distrust are promoting,” and every conceivably story or tale that feeds that genre of thought is, for them, worthwhile.

Similarly, Real Raw News fans don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, I think their core impulse is, ironically, profound disappointment in how the Trump administration failed to deliver. Trump shook up the American political landscape more than anyone in living memory, and promised sweeping changes to every level of American government, yet his actual administration proved rather disorderly, changed far less than was promised, and then lost power after one term. For many, this simply prompted a revision in how they saw Trump. But for others, the preferred response is to embrace a fantasy reality where Trump is a superhero.

[...]

Imagine you are an ordinary, mildly engaged American citizen. You live far from the halls of power, you work an ordinary job, and whatever your feelings on political issues, you rarely see elections translate in a clear way to your own daily life. You might be interested in Washington, but Washington really isn’t that interested in you. 

Online, the world throws a million potential narratives at you. In some of them, the world is a confusing mess of moral gray areas. In others, the people you care about are winning. But in some narratives, you’re the hero, the people you like do good things, and the bad guys get what they deserve. The superficial evidence for all of these narratives is about equally convincing, at a glance. Look outside, and it’s hard to see the impact of any of the stories. Your entire understanding of reality is mediated through what sites you choose to read and what videos you choose to watch. As a politically marginal person, it won’t matter what you as an individual choose to believe. 

So, what happens if you choose to believe the story you find most enjoyable? And what if millions of others choose the same?

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-real-raw-news

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ivan commented Jul 26, 2024

There is no technical improvement good enough to compensate for poor usability. If the App takes 0.5ms to do something but I have to go to 3 different screens, and another takes 2ms but one button is enough, in everyday use it will be faster, even if it is less efficient.

We have a Ferrari under the hood, but without electric steering, with manual windows and old brake pads.

https://old.reddit.com/r/OvercastFm/comments/1ecra74/the_official_better_than_ever_thread_list_all_the/

#ux

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ivan commented Jul 28, 2024

salon-style spaces for people to talk about important issues and difficult ideas while resisting their reflexive reduction to existing ideological oppositions

https://partiful.com/e/pmrQzkZEienFcvzwJJ9q

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ivan commented Jul 29, 2024

Ask HN: Strategies to Reduce AI Hallucinations?

Feed it grounding text that's about as long as the output text you expect it to produce.

They are called transformers for a reason.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41055736

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ivan commented Jul 30, 2024

As an Essentialist, distilling, organizing and simplifying is your call. It doesn't matter where you go, whether at work or home or on vacation (or a restaurant, store, experience, etc), you see chaos, mess, complexity and it triggers a near-primal urge to create order and simplicity.

It could be complex information, ideas, spreadsheets or data-sets, toys in a room, items in a display, clothes on a rack, books on a shelf, physical or digital, it doesn't really matter. Your brain immediately goes into distill and simplify mode. You think in systems and processes designed to create space, order and efficiency. It's what breathes you.

This is one of the Sparketypes that often expresses itself very early in life. Unlike others where you need to "go out into the world" to experience activities and moments that give you the raw data to really get a sense for what lights you up, nearly every moment of every day provides opportunities for Essentialists to embrace and employ their Sparketype. Because, it turns out, the world is a largely chaotic, complex and massively disorganized place.

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ivan commented Jul 30, 2024

Attachment as a driver of work will almost always produce good results. Unfortunately it may not produce useful results, or results that society wants. The Artist that aligns with society is rare.

https://www.eristicstest.com/the_artist/

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ivan commented Jul 31, 2024

  • If people have a good “user experience” when they interact with you, then they will want to interact with you more in the future.

https://dynomight.substack.com/p/advice

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ivan commented Aug 2, 2024

Ask HN: What is the best software to visualize a graph with a billion nodes?

Visualizing large graphs is a natural desire for people with lots of connected data. But after a fairly small size, there's almost no utility in visualizing graphs. It's much more useful to compute various measures on the graph, and then query the graph using some combination of node/edge values and these computed values. You might subset out the nodes and edges of particular interest if you really want to see them -- or don't visualize at all and just inspect the graph nodes and edges very locally with some kind of tabular data viewer.

It used to be thought that visualizing super large graphs would reveal some kind of macro-scale structural insight, but it turns out that the visual structure ends up becoming dominated by the graph layout algorithm and the need to squash often inherently high-dimensional structures into 2 or 3 dimensions. You end up basically seeing patterns in the artifacts of the algorithm instead of any real structure.

There's a similar, but unrelated desire to overlay sequenced transaction data (like transportation logs) on a geographical map as a kind of visualization, which also almost never reveals any interesting insights. The better technique is almost always a different abstraction like a sequence diagram with the lanes being aggregated locations.

There's a bunch of these kinds of pitfalls in visualization that people who work in the space inevitably end up grinding against for a while before realizing it's pointless or there's a better abstraction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41132095

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ivan commented Aug 4, 2024

Intellectual property is absolutely a moat, but it's not the "Intellectual Property" as defined in law. It's the implicit, tacit knowledge & what exists in the collective mind of the team. But it's still property of a sort, the shareholders have a beneficial claim to it.

https://x.com/J_L_Colvin/status/1820119713654984913

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ivan commented Aug 4, 2024

Reinventing the wheel is a terrible metaphor in a lot of cases. I understand why it exists, but it seems to discourage trying something by yourself the first time. There is a lot of value in rediscovering something because you understand it a lot more, and in many contexts, that personal discovery is key.

https://x.com/inkolore_/status/1818739846774768064

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ivan commented Aug 4, 2024

I love thinking.

https://x.com/inkolore_/status/1816133765359652883

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ivan commented Aug 5, 2024

Wow not a single mention of Whisper this entire comment first page! I think Whisper is really cool: the large model can pull speech out of even heavily distorted (wind noise, clipping, etc) audio. I have a story to illustrate why running Whisper on your own locally is not so easy! Much easier to sign up to the OpenAI API.

In my research I found that actually pre-processing the audio to reduce noise (using the IMO best-in-class FB research "denoiser") actually increases WER. This was surprising! From a human perspective, I assumed bringing up the "signal" would increase accuracy. But it seems that, from a machine perspective, there's actually "information" to be gleaned from the heavily distorted noise part of the signal. To me, this is amazing because it reveals a difference in how machines vs humans process. The implication is that there is actually speech signal that is inside the noise, as if voice has bounced off and interacted with the noise source (wind, fan, etc), and altered those sounds, left its impression, and that this information is then able to be utilized and contributes to the inference. Incredible!

With whisper: I started with the standard python models. They're kind of slow. I tried compiling python into a single binary using various tools. That didn't work. Then I found whisper.cpp--fantastic! A port of whisper to C++ that is so; much; faster. Mind blowing speed! Plus easily compilation. My use case was including transcription in a private, offline "transcribe anything" MacOS app. Whisper.cpp was the way to go.

Then I encountered another problem. What the "Whisperists" (experts in this nascent field, I guess) call it "hallucination". The model will "hallucinate". I found this hilarious! Another cross-over of human-machine conceptual models, our forever anthropomorphizing everything effortlessly. :)

Basically hallucination includes: feed Whisper a long period of silence, and the model is so desperate to find speech, it will infer (overfit? hallucinate?) speech out of the random background signal of silence / analog silence / background noise. Normally this presents as a loop of repeats of previous accurate transcribed phrase. Or, with smaller models, some "end-of-youtube video" common phrases like "Thank You!" or even "Thanks for Watching". I even got (from one particularly heavily distorted section, completely inaccurate) "Don't forget to like and subscribe!" Haha. But the larger models produce less hallucinations, and less generic "oh-so-that's-what-your-dataset-was!" hallucinations. But they do still hallucinate. Especially during silent sections.

At first, I tried using ffmpeg to chop the audio into small segments, ideally partitioned on silences. Unfortunately ffmpeg can only chop it into regular size segments, but it can output silence intervals, and you can chop around that (but not "online" / real time) as I was trying to achieve. Removing the silent segments (even the imperfect metric of "some %" of average output signal magnitude (sorry for my terminology, I'm not expert in DSP/audio)) drastically improved Whisper performance. Suddenly it went from hallucinating during silent segments, to perfect transcripts.

The other problem with silent segments is the model gets stuck. It gets "locked up" (spinning beach ball, blue screen of death style--I don't think it actually dies, but it spends a long, disproportionately long, time on segments with no speech. Like I said before, it's so cute that it's so desperate to find speech everywhere, it tries really hard, and works its little legs of during silence, but to no avail.

Anyway, moving on to the next problem: the imperfect metric of silence. This caused many issues. We were chopping out quieter speech. We were including loud background noise. Both these things caused issues: the first obvious, the second, the same as we faced before: Whisper (or Whisper.cpp) would hallucinate text into these noise segments.

At last, I discovered something truly great! VAD. Voice Activity Detection is another (normally) AI technique that allows segmenting audio around voice segments. I tried a couple Python implementations in standard speech toolkits, but none were that good. Then I found Silero VAD: an MIT licensed (for some model versions), AI VAD model. Wonderful!

Next problem was it was also in Python. And I needed it to be in C++. Luckily there was a C++ example, using ONNX runtime. (I had no idea any of these projects or tools existed mere weeks ago, and suddenly I'm knee deep!). There were a few errors, but I got rid of the bugs, and had a little command line tool from a minimal C++ build of ONNXruntime / Protobuf-Lite and the model. Last step was the ONNX model needed to be converted to ORT format. Luckily there's a handy Python script to do this inside the Python release of ONNXruntime. And, now, the VAD was super fast.

So i put all these pieces together: ffmpeg, VAD, whisper.cpp and made a MacOS app (with the correct signing and entitlements of course!) to transcribe English text from any input format: audio or video. Pretty cool, right?

Anyway, running Whisper on your own locally is not so easy! Much easier to sign up to the OpenAI API.

MacOS APP using Whisper (C++) and VAD0--conveniently called: WisprNote heh :) https://apps.apple.com/app/wisprnote/id1671480366

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34992012

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ivan commented Aug 5, 2024

Apple Intelligence in 15.1 just flagged a phishing email as “Priority” and moved it to the top of my Inbox.

https://social.panic.com/@cabel/112905175504595751

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ivan commented Aug 5, 2024

“What are my options?”

Do you perhaps have a button to push… in case of an unexpected situation.

https://x.com/patio11/status/1817955327154831784

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ivan commented Aug 6, 2024

  • TOB-BREW-12, wherein a formula could opportunistically perform a privilege escalation through a user’s previously activated sudo token.

https://blog.trailofbits.com/2024/07/30/our-audit-of-homebrew/

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ivan commented Aug 6, 2024

In United States labor law, at-will employment is an employer's ability to dismiss an employee for any reason (that is, without having to establish "just cause" for termination), and without warning,[1] as long as the reason is not illegal (e.g. firing because of the employee's gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or disability status). When an employee is acknowledged as being hired "at will", courts deny the employee any claim for loss resulting from the dismissal. The rule is justified by its proponents on the basis that an employee may be similarly entitled to leave their job without reason or warning.[2] The practice is seen as unjust by those who view the employment relationship as characterized by inequality of bargaining power.[3]

At-will employment gradually became the default rule under the common law of the employment contract in most U.S. states during the late 19th century, and was endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court during the Lochner era, when members of the U.S. judiciary consciously sought to prevent government regulation of labor markets.[4] Over the 20th century, many states modified the rule by adding an increasing number of exceptions, or by changing the default expectations in the employment contract altogether. In workplaces with a trade union recognized for purposes of collective bargaining, and in many public sector jobs, the normal standard for dismissal is that the employer must have a "just cause". Otherwise, subject to statutory rights (particularly the discrimination prohibitions under the Civil Rights Act), most states adhere to the general principle that employer and employee may contract for the dismissal protection they choose.[5] At-will employment remains controversial, and remains a central topic of debate in the study of law and economics, especially with regard to the macroeconomic efficiency of allowing employers to summarily and arbitrarily terminate employees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

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ivan commented Aug 6, 2024

97% of Americans' daily trips are done via automobile. Walking, biking, and bus riding tend to be associated with low socioeconomic status. There is heavy policing of low SES populations. In Kaplan, Louisiana it is explicitly illegal to walk at night. https://www.klfy.com/local/vermilion-parish/kaplan-starts-pe...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41105944

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ivan commented Aug 6, 2024

On July 1, 2021, Amazon did something it hadn’t done in many years: It added two new leadership principles to its list. “Strive to be Earth’s best employer” was one new principle. “Success and scale bring broad responsibility” was the other. 

When these were introduced, Amazon was facing intense media coverage over the swell of unionization efforts in its warehouse network, as well as antitrust and environmental scrutiny. And with Bezos scheduled to hand over the CEO reins a few days later, the introduction of the two new principles served as a convenient opportunity to demonstrate a company committed to progress under his successor.

Inside the company, though, the reaction among many employees was swift and brutal: “They are clearly a marketing ploy and they devalue the rest of the Leadership Principles,” one former senior manager of more than 10 years who left the company recently told Fortune. “Total bullshit,” opined a former longtime communications employee at Amazon who was still at the company at the time, and who summed up the new principles as “playing the reputational game versus guiding how you think.”

The problem, explained a former Amazon vice president, is that the pair of new leadership principles are so radically different from the other 14 that it makes it tougher for employees to grasp the essence of the overall principles and to act on them. “I’ve got to think that that’s somewhat challenging for the rank and file. The fact that there are so many LPs, and the fact that these last two are so abstract,” the former VP said.

https://fortune.com/2024/07/31/amazon-leadership-principles-questions-future-jeff-bezos-departure-andy-jassy/

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ivan commented Aug 7, 2024 •
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Just do your best.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzXJDP9Hoic&t=27m30s

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