Wisereads Vol. 155 — Big Time Off by DJ DiDonna, Patrick Collison on aesthetics, and more
Last week, we shared a preview of Richard Louv's latest release: Noticing: Intimate Encounters With the Natural World. This week's preview comes from DJ DiDonna's debut, Big Time Off, on the case for extended time away from work.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
The Shape of Things to Come
Steve Yegge turned dozens of agents loose on his 30-year-old online game, and thinks the system that grew up around them is where every engineering team is headed. "That's the shape of things to come. It ain't gonna be a framework you download, or a harness from someone who's not building an actual thing. You're going to be building a whole civilization, plank by plank, with colleagues who happen to run on datacenter silicon."
Don't be a meat proxy
"Meat proxy" is Niklas Gruhn's term for the colleague who answers a Slack question by pasting in whatever Claude said. "By all means, prompt AI. But don't just relay the output. Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words (a decent certificate that you've done the prior steps). Making that effort is value you can add."
LLMs reward expertise
LLMs made everyone a generalist, but GitHub engineer Sean Goedecke argues the people who already know a domain get far more out of the same model. "For many tasks, the human is the bottleneck, not the model, because the difficult part is in communicating to the model exactly what kind of solution the human wants. The information is 'in the model' already, but it takes a very smart human to pull it out."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
How to Make Your Job Optional - The Freedom Profile Matrix
Financial independence usually gets framed as an exit. Ali Abdaal, who left medicine to work for himself, uses his Freedom Profile Matrix to argue for something less dramatic. "The ideal situation that a lot of us are aspiring to is where work is optional. That doesn't mean we're going to quit our jobs. That doesn't mean we're going to stop running our business. That doesn't mean we're going to just stop working because work is a thing that generates fun, flexibility, fulfillment, and some amount of finances."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
Someone asked me recently why I’ve become interested in aesthetics...
Patrick Collison, who has been funding New Aesthetics grants with Tyler Cowen, traces his interest in beauty back to Stripe. "We've always tried to do things well at Stripe. I've come to see that attempting to do them beautifully is often a helpful way to break out of standard practices and to do something with greater novelty and in a way that might have other benefits besides."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
Shape Up: Stop Running In Circles And Ship Work That Matters
Shape Up is from 2019, before planning was the bottleneck. Ryan Singer's fixed-time, variable-scope method is now finding a second audience among teams whose agents write code faster than anyone can plan it. "Scope creep isn't the fault of bad clients, bad managers, or bad programmers. Projects are opaque at the macro scale. Rather than trying to stop scope from growing, give teams the tools, authority, and responsibility to constantly cut it down."
Hand-picked book of the week
Big Time Off
On his sabbatical, DJ DiDonna walked 900 miles on a pilgrimage across Shikoku, Japan. His experience eventually led him to found the Sabbatical Project, where he studies what happens when people step away from work for an extended period. Big Time Off is the result.
In his debut, the Harvard Business School senior lecturer argues that a sabbatical is more than a long vacation, and that people too often wait until something goes wrong before taking one.
"The strongest case for sabbaticals lies in one of the most common phrases in my research: feeling human again. Not like a machine whose habits and schedule revolve around work but a living, loving, sensitive individual seeking meaning, fulfillment, and joy in the day-to-day."
If you enjoy the preview of Big Time Off, you can pick up a full copy wherever you buy your books.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Trying Again
Trying Again is a weekly newsletter about starting over, from Steve Kamb, who built Nerd Fitness and then demoted himself twice to write How to Try Again. From The Beautiful Art of Starting Ugly: "We can't write a masterpiece without first writing a draft that's described as 'gobbledygook.' We can't play the violin beautifully without first making it sound like an asthmatic cat. We can't become a gourmet chef if we first don't burn a meal or two or ten."