Issue 3: Rounding the corner

being a renaissance man, how to feel good, rules for creating good UI

Wei Chun

and

Benedict Neo

Jan 28, 2024

Most People Won't

Most people want to be fit, most people aren’t.
Most people want to build a successful business, most people won’t.
Most people want to be the best version of themselves, most people aren’t.
Most people have dreams they want to fulfill, most people won’t.
Everyone wants to quit something, build something, be something, do something. Most people won’t.
How many things have we wanted? How many opportunities have we craved? How many broken things have we wanted to fix?
And how many of those have we shrunk from. Hid from. Or, excused away.
We’re not alone.
Most people won’t.
But every once in a while someone puts themselves out there. Makes the leap. Faces rejection or failure or worse. And comes out the other side. Better. Changed. Bolder.
Most people won’t. Which means those that do change everything.

On Caring

Courage isn't about being fearless, it's about being able to do the right thing even if you're afraid.
And similarly, addressing the major problems of our time isn't about feeling a strong compulsion to do so. It's about doing it anyway, even when internal compulsion utterly fails to capture the scope of the problems we face.

7 Rules for Creating Gorgeous UI

Take buttons. Even with this relatively “flat” button, there are still a handful of light-related details:
The unpushed button (top) has a dark bottom edge. Sun don’t shine there, son.
The unpushed button is slightly brighter at the top than at the bottom. This is because it imitates a slightly curved surface. Just as how you’d need to tilt a mirror held in front of you up to see the sun in it, surfaces that are tilted up reflect a biiiiit more of the sun’s light towards you.
The unpushed button casts a subtle shadow – perhaps easier to see in the magnified section.
The pushed button, while still darker at the bottom than at the top, is overall darker – this is because it’s at the plane of the screen and the sun can’t hit it as easily. One could argue that all the pushed buttons we see in real life are darker too, because our hands are blocking the light.
That was just a button, and yet there are these 4 little light effects present. That’s the lesson here. Now we just apply it to everything.

How to feel good | Evan Conrad

The first step towards building this skill is realizing that your negative thoughts are almost always untrue and untrustworthy. After all, negative thoughts and negative emotions, such as fear, anger, and sadness are your body's emergency management tools. From evolution's perspective, they don't need to be 100% accurate in order to accomplish their goal of keeping you alive, keeping predators away, or keeping you aligned with the tribe. False positives still get your genes across. But the experience of being a modern human is to have all of these emergency tools fire without reason even when there are no lions and tigers in sight.

Exa (previously Metaphor)

Why we need Taiwan

What impressed me most about their system was how much effort went into protecting the privacy of individuals. An entire team at City Hall was devoted to anonymising the data from these streams, even going so far as to do their best to ensure identity couldn’t be reverse-engineered. Protecting the integrity of these processes was the primary reason why unfortunately so little of what they were doing was able to be formally shared. I was impressed by the fact that where the CCP devotes considerable resources to the creation of its panopticon, Taiwan instead devotes those resources to preventing it.
These technologies are not only being used by local governments but are being increasingly applied in Taiwan by the medical sector as well. Traditional monitoring sensors are being supplemented with cameras and ML models trained to detect signs of deterioration, assist with diagnosis, and assess patient risks. Patient mortality has subsequently dropped by a staggering 25% in less than a year, while antibiotic costs have fallen by 30%. Emergency patient wait times have halved. Taiwan is also experimenting with ‘smart’ operating theatres and telemedicine, allowing remote and mobile centres, as well as emergency vehicles, live access to central AI models and specialist services.

Awesome Behavioural Interviews

How to Be Alone: An Antidote to One of the Central Anxieties and Greatest Paradoxes of Our Time

mastering the art of solitude doesn’t make us more antisocial but, to the contrary, better able to connect. By being intimate with our own inner life — that frightening and often foreign landscape that philosopher Martha Nussbaum so eloquently urged us to explore despite our fear — frees us to reach greater, more dimensional intimacy with others