Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

How to Be a Wise Optimist About Science and Technology?
17 minutes read.

Michael Nielsen’s essay has landed just in time for me in terms of relevance. It goes deeper into analyzing moral questions and our obligations in this journey to build a better and safer world, even if destruction might become easier: "Humans uplifted by BCI (Brain-Computer Interface), genetic engineering, intelligence augmentation, and similar technologies will continue to face the Alignment Problem: Uplift may well change the nature of the problem – for instance, it might help us invent far more destructive technologies, making it harder to solve the Alignment Problem. Or perhaps it will make the Alignment Problem easier, by modulating uplifted human behaviour to be more pro-social. But there is no intrinsic reason uplift will provide an ongoing solution to the Alignment Problem. With that caveat, it's well worth investigating ways uplift may help change (and perhaps address) the Alignment Problem."

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The First Year Starting a Company
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face. Nerds are the best!

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The Non-Obvious Insights, Tactics and Workflows Shopify Used to Bring an Ambitious Memo to Life
16 minutes read.

Fascinating coverage of Shopify and how they use the latest GenAI tools to take their entire organization forward. From the GTM organization to the technical organization, you can see demos of the various tools they built and insights they gathered along the way. What would you start experimenting with next week?

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Optionality Bets With Generative AI (Video)
41 minutes read.

Insightful interview with Joseph Jude and Krishna Kumar. I think this is the right mindset all companies should adopt now when exploring GenAI: "AI needs urgency. War rooms create focus, urgency, and attention. It’s not a side project. If you treat GenAI as a side-project, it will be sidelined. Leaders must take ownership and pride. Good leaders take AI personally—they want to be relevant, they want their teams to succeed."

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Palmer Luckey Explains Why Founders Need to "Make Themselves Obsolete"
4 minutes read.

Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus and Anduril, explains one of the best reasons why you should master your craft (greatness can spot greatness), learn to sell and convince others to join your mission, and always be hiring (finding great talent takes time and luck).

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In Most Difficult Things in Life, the Solution Is Indirect
2 minutes read.

"If you want to be happy, you minimize yourself and you engage in high flow activities or engage in activities that take you out of your own self and you end up with happiness. [...] the things that are either competitive in nature or they seem elusive to us—part of the reason for that is that those are the remaining things that are best pursued indirectly." -- Naval Ravikant's take made me think a lot about redefining my role in the era of GenAI. Which areas should you pursue indirectly?

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Advanced Techniques for Workplace Communication and Productivity (Video)
43 minutes read.

What a great idea by Hiten Shah - uploading your boss's user manual to ChatGPT and then collaborating to pitch ideas or expand your influence area, etc. I've created [http://managerreadme.com](http://managerreadme.com "smartCard-inline") (give it a try, it's free), which captures some key dimensions of it. I wonder if I should expand it to cover some interesting nuggets that would be "chatgpt friendly" in that sense.

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You Might Have Heard People Say: "Amateurs Talk Strategy. Professionals Talk Logistics." People Conclude From This That, to Be a True Professional, They Should Fixate on Logistics/Operations. Such Conclusions Are Flawed & Can Even Be Harmful. The Curse of Brilliance: (Thread)
5 minutes read.

For those of you who have read my newsletter for long enough, you know that Shreyas Doshi is one of my favorite thinkers. There are so many nuggets in this thread: "The Curse of Brilliance: When dissecting what makes them successful & prolific, people unwittingly tend to overemphasize the things they found very difficult and underplay (or altogether ignore) the importance of things at which they were naturally brilliant. [...] I see this problem very often. People aspiring to be "one of the greats" seek out the _tactics_ of The Great One. They then try to replicate the tactics. The tactics usually don’t work the same way. So on to another Great One. And on and on."

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@thejustinwelsh: Stop trying to be extraordinary at everything. (1) Be ordinary at most things. (2) Be exceptional at one thing. (3) Be consistent in all things. This is how you actually thrive.

@mmay3r: The greatest sin I regularly commit against life is to wish away the present moment in favor of a future moment. This accomplishes nothing while undermining a large chunk of life.