I have a very specific (and pretty easy) strategy for this when I join a new org. Technically you could do this at any time, but you generally have a "grace window" when you're new where people are happy to go out of their way to meet you and teach you.
First, meet 1 on 1 with every member of your immediate team. This of course serves as a "get to know you" meet, but your real goal is to get them to explain their work to you. Have them go into as much detail as time allows on whatever they're currently working on. Ask followup questions that start with "why" on everything. Have them show you their part(s) of the product, have them share as many docs as they're willing to (for you to read async later), etc.
Put aside whatever ego you may have, and just get into a beginner's/learning mindset. Ask all the stupid questions.
Then, at the end, ask them who else they're working with from other teams. Put those names on a list, and rinse and repeat with them. This way you'll start local to your role and work your way outward in the company. Eventually you'll find people that are doing nothing particularly relevant to you and you can decide to stop.
If it's a larger company, this is also where you establish your understanding of the org chart and who does what in it, and also makes you known to a ton of folks who may want or need to work with you in the future - which is invaluable in and of itself.
Does "CTO" mean you are the tech lead of a small (single team) engineering organization? Then everything written for staff engineers applies. E.g I've heard good things about "Staff engineer's path" by Tanya Reilly.
Does "CTO" mean you are leading an org that is too large to be hands-on with tech, and need to build an effective structure and culture? Then I second the recommendation for "an elegant puzzle" by Will Larson.
Or does "CTO" mean that you switched from being an engineer to managing a team of engineers? Then everything for new managers applies, for starters I'd recommend "Becoming an effective software engineering manager" by James Stanier, or "Engineering management for the rest of us" by Sarah Drasner.
For some good general material, I'd also recommend the resources that Gergely Orosz makes available for subscribers to his "pragmatic engineer" newsletter. Those are templates for the kind of documents and processes you will most likely need - if you're new to the role, you will not go too wrong by using them, and if you want to create your own they are excellent starting points.
Ali got really expensive over the years. Especially in the ultralight hiking community there are/were some really good gear choices for a bargain (Aegismax, IceFlame quilts and 3F UL equipment amongst others).
$100k financially makes little sense for any professional because it completely ignores the risk attached - I suspect you are between 1 and 2 orders out (although you are very unclear how much time you are looking at spending).
I suspect it is easier to think of it in time invested and returned: if you invest a year of time at a 10x risk, you need to get 10 years of early retirement to cover that risk. That is easier to back-calculate how much you need to bank to reward your risk - 10 years of after tax income is a huge figure for most people (far far more than your $100k).
VCs target 30-times return for each individual investment to cover their risk, and they spread their risks over multiple investments. You usually have only one concentrated investment, so a sensible target profit for yourself alone could easily be $10 million if you have high earnings, and the revenue target is probably much much higher than that (depending on profit margin, and dilution, etcetera).
There are a few mitigations that could lower the multiplier. I regarded starting a business as university-of-practicality, so I also valued learning. I had also said no to previous valuable opportunities in my past, so I knew the regret and opportunity cost of saying no. If you can do something on the side and slowly ramp up the proof-of-profitability, you can dramatically reduce risk and so far lower profitability is needed (but beware of the slow ugly death at one_second_per_second of time wasted on a failing business). Many people value autonomy highly (although beware that it is common to make clients your boss, and end up with a lack of autonomy in your own business).
Background: I founded a business over a decade ago that has let me semi-retire, however in hindsight I am still unsure it was worthwhile, because there are other serious costs and risks beyond my time investment.
Coming out and saying that you think the election stolen gets you labeled a conservative nutter. So wise commenters won't say that, instead they will do what you've noted. Imply that folks are saying the election was perfect, and then say that they think there might have been some "imperfections" going on.
That way the listener doesn't automatically correctly categorized their point of view as nuttery, but is drawn into listening longer out of decorum. And the speaker doesn't suffer a loss of reasonableness for "wanting the truth".
The good thing about 5x5 is that you start with minimal weights - like an empty bar - and spend your first couple of weeks training with "easy" weight. This time is really for you to learn the movements. There's a wealth of information out there on how to do these movements properly. Injury is always a possibility, but if you start light and progress steadily, the risk of it is substantially diminished.
A coach is a great resource, but a) most trainers in gyms are not strength coaches, and range from actively harmful to wonderful, and there's not really any way for the novice to know which they are, and b) legit strength coaches are expensive. I'd recommend self-study and starting lightly before a coach, personally, but if having a coach is the difference between you lifting and not lifting, get the coach.
Alan Thrall has 3 really good beginner videos on the S/B/D movements:
There's also https://www.reddit.com/r/formcheck (and r/fitness and r/stronglifts5x5) which can be valuable resources for getting help fixing particular problems.
The number one issue I have with a lot of finance newsletters is the lack of historical context so I think it's extremely valuable you featured historical data right next to the daily data to give context on how small daily moves actually are (minus this latest bout of volatility). I think that has a lot of overlooked behavioral value, why not also feature 20 & 30y data, considering this is the time series many young investors will need to consider for retirement?
I find myself often googling to check S&P futures so this email would remove that step for me. Might also be cool if the email had other features like Tax Loss Harvest notifications when an ETF you're watching drops more than X%.
I did some research on the finance newsletter space myself a while back, here's some of my favorites I ran across:
Tried Robinhood Snacks but can't get over the feeling it's written by low paid interns and doesn't offer any actual insight, just condensed mainstream narratives.
This is absolutely true in my experience. Going to my therapist I realized that I spent all my time focusing on negative outcomes for a given life problem of mine. So much so that the failure to imagine a more optimistic outcome left me paralyzed to act. This paralysis left me feeling hopeless and depressed. As I talked things over I realized that:
1) We have a perverse tendency to reinforce our existing views in new experiences. For example, if one believes he/she is not a very charming and likable persom, every opportunity to make a new friend may thrown away because the person doesn't have confidence to present themselves in an interesting way or the person may misinterpret another's neutral body language as a negative signal during a conversation.
2) Experience is the best teacher. Experience etches things into our subconscious. If negativity is etched in our brains then it takes a strong conscious effort to over turn it. This can potentially scary because the effort to experience a positive outcome may result is us being beat down further. But we have to see it for what it is, one experience, the next may end differently. Overcoming depression requires concious effort, hope and resiliencey. This is not something that happens overnight.
William Langewiesche is a pilot himself, and has written many other articles over the last 2 decades detailing accident investigations (among other things). As much as the technical details, he often explains the organizational and political circumstances that are just as interesting. Some that stick with me: the late-90s ValuJet and EgyptAir crashes, and the Space Shuttle Columbia.
I’m at the point where dishonest discussions about “free speech” online are a non-starter (Having had an illuminating exchange on this very site two days ago). It’s not as though these anonymous chats matter in the slightest, they’re had in bad faith and most of all are intellectually stultifying. The only winning move is not to play. You won’t convince anyone of your position who has made the conscious choice to adopt a dynamic series of positions to support their unstated agenda. It’s like arguing with creationists, the best you can hope for is changing their declared position of the day. Meanwhile they win just by having an audience and the semblance of legitimacy, not to mention dominating and railroading ever comment section they can to quash reasonable debate.
This is setting aside issues with bots, trolls, and brigades. In real life with people you know and can talk to there can be value in these discussions, but never anonymously and never online. It’s pseudointellectual wank dressed up as reasonable talk. There is nothing wrong with simply saying, “I’m not interested in having this conversation with you, sorry.” and moving on.
Hmm... that aligns somewhat with my own thoughts on the actual cause of depression. I've spent a lot of time thinking about since I spent a significant portion of my life depressed, and I find the current approach to it in health care unsettling.
Allow me, if you will, to engage in some inexpert speculation. If you read the following, please keep in mind that I am just some idiot on the internet and not in any way qualified to give advice.
It seems to me that depression is not a disorder, disease, or abnormality, but a necessary and purposeful reaction of the mind and brain to certain stimuli. Of course this is not always the case, and the same symptoms can be triggered by other factors that affect our neurochemistry or mental function, but in a normally functioning mind and brain I think this is true. When examined in this context, what do we find?
Depression makes us apathetic, reluctant to act, and unconfident. A while back there was an article on HN spitballing that depression and mania were related to our mind's assessment of its own ability to predict outcomes. Overconfidence in its own predictive ability manifests as mania, and low confidence manifests as depression. This makes some sense. If you are confident in your predictions you are more likely to act on them, and if you are not you are less likely to. Given this, I submit that it's possible that what depression really is, much of the time, is a philosophical problem.
Philosophy is our model of reality, and we use that model to make predictions and decide how to act in the world to affect change. When that model is known to be broken, we lower our confidence in it and act less. Over time, as more and more of our model is revealed as flawed and our confidence in it continues to plummet, we enter a state of learned helplessness. Finding ourselves unable to predict the results of our actions, we are unable to determine how to effect the changes we desire in our lives, leading to interesting contradictions like being bored and at the same time unmotivated to do things we used to enjoy. We don't want to be in this state, but we lack the ability to see a path out of it, so we become frustrated, angry, and/or sad. It can eventually reach a point where the only path out of the suffering that we're confident in, is death.
In fact, this model-breaking occurs many times in our minds' development. As we grow up we form several different models of reality, all of which are inevitably revealed to be flawed. This is the reason you find children who believe they are hidden just because they can't see you (their model of reality doesn't include the concept of different perspectives), and why the terrible twos are so terrible (the young mind is dealing with its model of reality failing), for instance. With children, however, there are plenty of people around them operating with better models of reality to help them work out a new one. Societies can also be modeled this way, and if we look at the past we find that human cultures also go through a similar pattern of forming a stable model of reality, eventually finding it flawed, suffering through process of dealing with that, and ultimately resolving the crisis. I say resolving because, in actuality, there are two solutions to the problem of realizing your model is broken: forming a new, more accurate, one; or ignoring the information that contradicts it.
This is the important point, I think: When an individual's model of reality is broken, and society cannot guide them towards a more accurate one because society itself is still operating on the model that individual has determined to be flawed, then chronic depression is a likely result. Our current societal philosophy, the one our health care system is also based on, see's this individual's suffering not as a transition period in which they form a new model, but a severe disorder. To them, the rejection of the model is a form of insanity, and unclear thinking. This is why you sometimes see people tell a depressed person an obvious platitude in an attempt to cheer them up, only for it to further frustrate the depressed individual: they are aware that the platitude is part of a flawed model.
Further, the health care system is, like most of current western society, firmly implanted in empiricism. Science and measurement are the hammer, and everything else is a nail. Society as a whole forms its model of depression on measurements and manipulation of the neurochemical and behavioral aspects of depression, the social side effects, etc, but without regard for its greater reason for being. They are witchdoctors, sacrificing chickens to drive out the demons and bloodletting to balance the humors. Sometimes it works, because even a broken clock is right twice a day, but a lot of times it doesn't.
If one were to assume that this assessment is accurate, then reason we get depressed is so that our mind is motivated to take a step back and build a more accurate model of reality. The thing to do, then, is to help the sufferer realize why they are suffering. There's nothing wrong with them, they don't have a chemical imbalance of the humors, they aren't bad people for feeling the way they do or for not having faith in what society tells them is true. They have in fact taken a step toward growth, and nearly all growth comes at the cost of suffering. They need to look hard at where reality has shone the light on their flawed conception of it, reason through the problems, and build a more accurate replacement, and we may not be equipped to help them.
3) Finally, each of these popular "Getting Started in Security" guides has a slightly different, but useful, opinion on the specifics of the path to take:
With the wide adoption of WebGL, it's a good time to get involved in graphics. Furthermore, GPUs are taking over esp. with the advent of machine learning (nvidia stock grew ~3x, amd ~5x last year). The stuff nvidia has been recently doing is kinda crazy. I wouldn't be surprised if in 15 years, instead of AWS, we are using geforce cloud or smth, just because nvidia will have an easier time building a cloud offering than amazon will have building a gpu.
These are some good resources to get started with graphics/games
# WebGL Programming Guide: Interactive 3D Graphics Programming with WebGL
Historically, C++ has definitely been THE language for doing graphics but if you are starting these these, you would have to have really compelling reasons to start with C++ and not JavaScript and WebGL. And that's coming from someone who actually likes C++ and used to write it professionally.
This is more of college textbook if you'd prefer that but the WebGL one is more accessible and less dry.
# Physically Based Rendering & Real-Time Rendering
These discuss some state of the art techniques in computer graphics. I'm not going to claim to have really read them but from what I've seen they are very solid.
First, meet 1 on 1 with every member of your immediate team. This of course serves as a "get to know you" meet, but your real goal is to get them to explain their work to you. Have them go into as much detail as time allows on whatever they're currently working on. Ask followup questions that start with "why" on everything. Have them show you their part(s) of the product, have them share as many docs as they're willing to (for you to read async later), etc.
Put aside whatever ego you may have, and just get into a beginner's/learning mindset. Ask all the stupid questions.
Then, at the end, ask them who else they're working with from other teams. Put those names on a list, and rinse and repeat with them. This way you'll start local to your role and work your way outward in the company. Eventually you'll find people that are doing nothing particularly relevant to you and you can decide to stop.
If it's a larger company, this is also where you establish your understanding of the org chart and who does what in it, and also makes you known to a ton of folks who may want or need to work with you in the future - which is invaluable in and of itself.