Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. In my life, I’ve personally witnessed three elite salespeople at work. The first was in the Johnson County, Iowa, jail, where I spent July 4 and 5 some years ago for reasons…

Nisan1y624 Progress towards a robotic piano tuner: Entropy piano tuner attempts to accommodate "variations in string thickness, stretching, corrosion, dents, the harp flexing", etc. by minimizing the entropy of the power spectrum. Using it should be better than mindlessly tuning to a digital guitar…

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021. If you can’t move the preferences window because it’s fake, you might be running an Electron app like 1Password 8. I’ve used AgileBits’s 1Password for more than a decade. I’ve recommended it to friends and family alike. Over time, password management…

The Ocean Sciences Building at the University of Washington in Seattle is a brightly modern, four-story structure, with large glass windows reflecting the bay across the street. On the afternoon of July 7, 2016, it was being slowly locked down. Red lights began flashing at the entrances as students…

It seems like we’re replacing the parts that make us human with AI, which feels antithetical to the idea of computers. It’s bothering me a lot. 📝 What Do We Want Computers to Do? lmnt.me/blog/what-do-we-want-c…

I know what makes people grow more reliably than anything else. It is: taking on a difficult project with some amount of public accountability. This can be large or small: a lecture series, a business, a blog, a house, a child, etc. It’s strange, but I know that it’s common to resist positive…

Windows 10 Desktop July 2015 –– An icon is defined, among other things, by its longevity. Icons don’t withstand change - they endure it, by evolving with the times. An icon adapts to each new era, maintaining its identity while simultaneously remaining contemporary and fresh. At their best, icons…

“Something’s a little bit off here.” That’s what I predict your first thought to be upon seeing my cubicle for the first time. There’s no screen or mouse in sight. Instead there’s a guy hammering away on a keyboard, staring at seemingly nothing. It’s only me, and my colleagues can assure you that…

How to prompt friends and influence people The fine art of human prompt engineering: How to talk to a person like ChatGPT People are more like AI language models than you might think. Here are some prompting tips. Benj Edwards – Apr 3, 2024 7:30 am | 243 With these tips, you too can prompt people…

Updated at 2:44 p.m. ET on April 6, 2024. This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Day 1 MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and…

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. “Was the internet really this bad?” I wondered to myself as I read the September 1995 issue of The Atlantic. I was reading the issue in digital form, displayed on Netscape Navigator 3 on a mid-’90s Macintosh.…

"Tis sure the hardest science to forget" Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the philosophy of self, identity, and memory The critically acclaimed film remains deeply relevant as it marks its 20th anniversary. Jennifer Ouellette – Mar 25, 2024 10:14 am | 64 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless…

(former Head of Oculus at Meta) Friends and colleagues have been asking me to share my perspective on the Apple Vision Pro as a product. Inspired by my dear friend Matt Mullenweg’s 40th post, I decided to put pen to paper. This started as a blog post and became an essay before too long, so I’ve…

"Don’t even bother," the upholsterer told me. I was on the phone, asking for a theoretical quote to reupholster a five-year-old or so midrange sofa, which cost more than $1,000 when new. That task, the upholsterer told me, would run me several times more than the couch was originally worth, and,…

From my first desk job working at my college newspaper. My first job was working at a small deli and grocery store in Lake Tahoe when I was 15. It was a job that came full circle some twenty years later when my wife and I bought a place called ​Tracy’s Drive-In Grocery​ in 2021, a little place…

But Jobs’ outsize influence as Apple’s leader leaves a lasting impression on managers and employees alike. One of his most unwavering beliefs might surprise leaders who aspire to success as great as the Apple cofounder. When Jobs and Apple’s other cofounders, including Steve Wozniak, first realized…

Photo illustration by Bráulio Amado Sociopaths are modern-day boogeymen, and the word “sociopath” is casually tossed around to describe the worst, most amoral among us. But they are not boogeymen; they are real people and, according to Patric Gagne, widely misunderstood. Gagne wrote “Sociopath,” her…

MoviesMoviesIf you look deep enough, much of traditional fantasy and science fiction boils down to the theory. Including ‘Dune.’ Until it doesn’t. Ringer illustration Feb. 28, 2024, 2:21 pm UTC • 10 min I am truly sorry for the words I am about to make you read, but before we get to Dune, let’s talk…

I used to tell this story, about my theory of fucks. The theory goes like so: you are born with so many fucks to give. However many you’ve got is all there is; they are like eggs, that way. Some of us are born with quite a lot, some with less, but none of us knows how many we have. When we’re young,…

1650 LESSWRONG LW 1649 There is way too much serendipity — LessWrongThere is way too much serendipity 19th Jan 2024 8 min read 382 382 New Comment 57 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: metachirality2y418 I think artificial sweeteners are so often discovered serendipitously…

It’s Tuesday morning. The year is 2009. You’re just waking up after a long and boozy New Year’s Eve with friends. Your head rings, and your mouth is the type of dry that makes you question your adulthood. You feel something scratch against your arm. Did you take a lover last night? Sort of. It’s a…

Illustration by Alexander Naughton I often hear agency talked about as if it’s an inherent trait: Either someone has it or they don’t -- in which case, too bad, they’re doomed to a life in the minor leagues. This hasn’t been my experience. Over the years, as I’ve gradually grown dumber relative to…

I had the feeling I was a placeholder girlfriend. That once the winter was over she wouldn’t need me anymore. I had this feeling because it hadn’t started like my other relationships. I’d kept seeing her at parties with all the Toronto grad students that autumn and thought she was so different from…

A mental model for service businesses. July 1, 2022 • 2 min read A few years back, my team decided to get a custom meeting room table. In our search for something great, we were referred to a small studio that does great work: East Vancouver’s Union Wood Co. The team there met with us, showed us…

We're told repeatedly that it's just the price of one coffee a month. But the combined cost of every single tool, service, app and game demanding a cup of coffee a month becomes the equivalent of paying for enough caffeine to poison even the strongest constitution. theindex.media/p/the-subscript…

October 4, 2023 5 min read Cats Are Perfect. An Evolutionary Biologist Explains Why Cats have attained evolutionary perfection Shideh Ghandeharizadeh Anjali Goswami thinks cats are perfect—not in the same way as the average cat person, out of admiration for their beauty, athleticism and independence…

Frustrated? Procrastinating? Stuck? You've scrolled through all the timelines, checked your email 10 times, and now what? You don't feel like working... This is a common state of mind nowadays. Fortunately, there are ways to escape feeling stuck, and one of them is a brief moment of reflection. All…

The path, more of a faint depression in the field I had just crossed, disappeared into a wood: yes, I could see an opening in the vegetation. The day before, I had left the official walking route of the Via Francigena, an ancient pilgrimate route from Canterbury to Rome, to stay at a B&B that was…

Energy makes time 04 Aug 2023 by Mandy Brown BECAUSE I WORK WITH a lot of high performers, the kind of people who are frequently responsive to both the unending needs of their workplace and the unending needs of their kin, I often find myself listening as someone talks about being out of time. Even…

It happened towards the end of secondary school. Sunlight was cutting through the classroom, and it must have been close to lunchtime because the air was caramel-thick with boredom. This was in the queasy final weeks before the Leaving Cert, the state exams every Irish teenager has to sit if they…

One of the major milestones of our early childhoods comes when we learn, for the first time, how to successfully tie our own shoes. As most of us learned, there are three key steps to making that happen: Do all three steps correctly, and you’ll wind up with a successfully tied shoe. Or will you? As…

Dopamine is part of an ancient neural pathway that ensures human survival. It is also part of the reason it is so hard to stop playing a video game or pass up a cupcake. Meredith Miotke/for NPR Screens and sweets are, in and of themselves, alluring and potentially intoxicating. Dr. Anna Lembke Back…

While agonizing over what to write last week, I tried to reverse engineer my writing wins. In the process, I discovered that the decision which separated my good writing from my bad writing expanded to my whole life, and was the dividing line between my triumphs and my regrets. “Do the weirdest…