Links from 2021

Conflict within a team is not always a bad thing. Happy teams are not necessarily the most productive. “If we're going to draw an arrow of causality, it's stronger to reword the statement as ‘a productive team is a happy team’,” says Leslie DeChurch, a psychologist at Northwestern University. “Nothing builds cohesion in a team like excellence.”

Avoiding conflict can discourage the creative friction that can generate new or better ideas. Conflict associated with tasks is different from that associated with personalities. Conflict over ideas can be helpful. But when conflicts get personal, things can get ugly.

Quadratic Voting is the mathematically optimal way to vote in a democratic community. Vote through collective decision-making, by allocating votes that express the degree of your preferences, not just direction.

In the conventional survey, people tended to gravitate to one end of the scale or the other. They expressed strong approval or disapproval, just as online reviewers tend to give five stars or none. In both cases, a strong statement costs nothing. In the quadratic poll, people faced a constraint. Expressing vehemence on one issue required them to weaken their stand on another. This constraint forced them to be more discerning about their passions.

More nuance to this than first realised.

The traditional populist view is that we should reform our social order through politics, things like mass education, elections, and civic engagement. That’s how Elizabeth Warren sees the world. She wants to strengthen the state so it can restore the social order, one that will tolerate less cheating and will involve the rule of law applied to the powerful.

The crypto response is different. The crypto response is to reject the social contract itself as irredeemably corrupt. Their goal is put pressure on the state itself by creating a money-like instrument outside of the public rule-setting capacity of the government. This is framed in the name of consumer choice, as in the state shouldn’t be able to boss you around and tell you what you can do with your money. After all, it’s yours. And anyone who doesn’t buy into this idea is inherently defending a set of collusive bailout-friendly institutions that we sometimes call liberal democracy.

Astro to me feels very much like a developer-facing tool. It helps me. It uses the Vite compiler and is super fast and pleasant to work with (Astro has rough edges, for sure, as it’s pre 1.0, but the DX is largely there). It scopes my styles. It lets me write SCSS. It lets me write components (in many different frameworks). But it also helps the user here. No more JavaScript bundle on the site at all.

...a new platform dedicated to fostering critical conversations around emerging digital technologies and their connections to contemporary art.

Supercharged CSS variables.

Yet all of these technical arguments circle around a deeper truth: a technology which is purpose built to circumvent and arbitrage the regulatory perimeter cannot be brought within the perimeter without destroying its core claim to value or irreparably crippling it.

The problem with coordination is that it adds complexity to our systems which make them harder to change and work with.

Our journalists discuss how to communicate with clarity, style and precision

A collection of code snippets to help you optimize your web projects.

What makes “The Metaverse” unique, then, is that it is the Internet best experienced in virtual reality. This, though, will take time; I expect that the first virtual reality experiences will be individual metaverses, tied together by the Internet as we experience it today.

Individual care schedule and reminders for your plants, recommendations, step by step guides, identification, light meter and more.

The City Centre West to East Link will be suitable for less confident cyclists and anyone who‘s concerned about cycling in busy traffic.

Dreampunk is a microgenre of electronic music characterized by its focus on cinematic ambience and field recordings, combined with various traits and techniques from electronic genres such as techno, jungle, electro, and dubstep.