Amidst the pandemic, I embraced communism... the communism that the late anthropologist David Graeber proposes is the basis for human social life in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

He calls it “baseline communism,” defining it as:

“[The] understanding that, unless people consider themselves enemies, if the need is considered great enough, or the cost considered reasonable enough, the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’ will be assumed to apply.”

If I had to explain why, I’d start by pointing out that if you’re a parent visiting your kid in college, you probably feel immense pride at seeing your kid thriving in an unfamiliar environment. There are many reasons for this, but suffice it to say that the pride you feel doubles as validation; as knowledge that your 50+ years on this earth have produced a human being who is capable not only of providing for themselves, but of providing value to others.

Evidence for Lukianoff’s reverse CBT hypothesis

In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression.

Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT.

How a Phone-Based Childhood Breeds Passivity

Liberal teen girls are by far the most likely to report that they spend five or more hours a day on social media. Being an ultra-heavy user means that you have less time available for everything else, including time “in real life” with your friends.

It’s the secret to high-performing teams — and strong marriages.

The average ratio for the highest-performing teams was 5.6 (that is, nearly six positive comments for every negative one). The medium-performance teams averaged 1.9 (almost twice as many positive comments than negative ones.) But the average for the low-performing teams, at 0.36 to 1, was almost three negative comments for every positive one.

Only positive feedback can motivate people to continue doing what they’re doing well, and do it with more vigor, determination, and creativity.

Give criticism without hurting people's feelings while opening the relationship for constructive collaboration.

He was taught criticism had to tick two simple boxes. It had to be constructive, and it had to be criticism of an action or thing instead of a person.

But no one ever bothered to teach us how to criticize constructively— without making humans miserable. At least nobody ever taught me the secret.

What I didn’t get at the time was that my advice was not nearly as valuable to the receivers as I estimated in my mind.

My advice was totally unsolicited.

Radical Candor by Kim Scott — a book every “boss” should read.

After reading The Coaching Habit, I realized that the best criticism is criticism that doesn’t have to come out of your mouth, but ideally from the receiver of the criticism’s mouth.

• “What” questions drive exploration.
• “How” questions drive action.
• “Why” questions drive justification.
• “When” questions drive accountability.

Step 1: Set the stage, tone, and rules

While we dive deeper into ____, I may also say some stupid things that might make you feel like this bizarre person doesn’t know what the heck they’re talking about. I’d like to openly invite you to poke holes in my ideas whenever you can.
I’d love for this to be a space where we can collaboratively challenge each other’s thinking so that we can both leave this conversation with sharper thoughts.

Step 2: Ask curious “what” questions

Step 3: Ask “what else” questions

Step 4: Ask “how” questions

That’s excellent! How would you go about improving ____?

Step 5: Ask the first step question

That’s excellent! What would be the first tiny step to improve on ____?

6. Ask the “when”

Doctors currently have no way of predicting which gender dysphoric children will persist in their gender dysphoria, and yet they are pushing the minimum age for irreversible hormone therapy and surgery as low as possible.

In his letter to shareholders back in 2016, Jeff Bezos gave the best advice I’ve ever heard on how to stop procrastinating:

“Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.”

What Bezos is saying is that you should think like a C student. When you’re about 70% sure, you take a guess and see what happens.

A bunch of Google employees participating in the company’s Area 120 internal incubator have launched Grasshopper, a free mobile app for Android and iOS that teaches you the basics of programming. It’s beautifully designed and is suitable for just about anyone who can be trusted to use a phone on their own.

Glitch is the friendly community where you'll build the app of your dreams

Amazing 19-minute talk, where Robinson explores the way education in this country values one kind of intelligence: mind over body. One way he explores this is by talking about dancing. I particularly liked this bit about college professors:

When you teach people to type faster, they get their ideas out. "Transcription influency" - 24wpm is minimum

Typing is great for producing knowledge for other people, say, writing an article. The faster you type, the better your ideas will be. There’s a thing called transcription fluency, which boils down to: “when your fingers can’t move as fast as your thoughts, your ideas suffer.” If you help people increase their typing speed, their thoughts improve. (Learn to type faster.)

This updated 2018 list features 10 websites that offer the best coding challenges and resources to help new and intermediate developers improve their skills, prepare for interviews, and progress in their careers. The ordering of the list is based on level of difficulty (beginner to advanced).

Nagging is the dispiriting, unpleasant, counter-productive but wholly understandable and poignant version of a hugely noble ambition: the desire to change other people.

Today, we’re happy to introduce Dorota, an artist who created a fun little project last year that was inspired by Twitter’s new logo based on 13 circles. Below you’ll find the lessons Dorota has learned along the process, so maybe you’d like to embark on a similar journey as well?

The book, and its successors like Machine Code for Beginners and Practical Things to Do With a Microcomputer were major hits–but they were largely forgotten until recently when Usborne published them online as free PDFs, as Cory Doctorow first pointed out this week.

Alda’s ambition is to be a powerful and flexible music programming language that can be used to create music in a variety of genres by typing some code into a text editor and running a program that compiles the code and turns it into sound. I’ve put a lot of thought into making the syntax as intuitive and beginner-friendly as possible. In fact, one of the goals of Alda is to be simple for someone with little-to-no programming experience to pick up and start using. Alda’s tagline, a music programming language for musicians, conveys its goal of being useful to non-programmers.

Drum machine

Roland TR-808 drum machine emulator

Instructions
Your mission is simple: achieve pleasant and readable text by distributing the space between letters. Typographers call this activity kerning. Your solution will be compared to a typographer's solution, and you will be given a score depending on how close you nailed it. Good luck!

Zines about computer science! Each zine focuses on one concept & is filled with comics, diagrams, stories, examples, and exercises.