Great foods for Thought

Last Updated: 11/21/25

You know when you come across a piece of information that you just want to share with the world? Well I do, so I am going to post this (right now small) list to the Internet so that you Random Stranger reading this at 3 am on whatever random weekday can hopefully find something here that you find will scratch your itch of curiosity.

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• "Robotics is a systems engineering problem with the end goal being a machine, or multiple machines, that can produce one or more human unit of work at equal or lower cost than that of a human." America Is Missing The New Labor Economy - Robotics Part 1
• "The best engineers I know are instead motivated to create as much value for users as possible. Sometimes this can mean doing something extremely valuable for one user, or something reasonably valuable for many users. But in all cases, the goal is to deliver impact." How did Stripe build a strong engineering team despite not having a "sexy" product?
• https://www.snider.com/jeff/hemingway.html
• "I forgot to make sure everyone understood that we were still a business. Even when I said things like, “Money in a business is like gas in the car. You have to fill the tank, but a road trip is not a tour of gas stations,” people heard the “road trip is not a tour of gas stations” way louder than they heard “you have to fill the tank.” " How I failed by Tim O'Reilly
• "Time burns without leaving ashes" by Elsa Triolet

Voice

Podcasts

Audio books

Video

YouTube

• talks
  • Monktoberfest 2016: Bryan Cantrill - Oral Tradition in Software Engineering
    • All of the Talks This guy does are worth listening to, and I really look up to the things he is doing with 0xide as well.
  • DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting | Lex Fridman Podcast #474
  • pretty much anything that Bryan Cantrill has said on record. This man has way too many cool ideas and not too many viewers
  • Implicit Surfaces & Independent Research
    • This talk has fundamentally shaped how I want to progress in my career going forward. perhaps Matt has figured out that you don't have to compromise in your Ikigai. you can just tinker with your own original research on your free time on top of working at a company that is completely orthogonal to the research.

Other places: