15 chunks · 15 episodes
...single loop. We should be angry about that. The Dynabook vision has stayed as a north star for the industry… but accidental architectural decisions made it impossible to reach. We locked ourselves in silos, and so now we can't reach the sta...
... stable enough to build from and grow from. With an iterative path towards your north star. Don't aim for perfection, aim for good enough.
... be a thing. But they also built a monster of a DVD business on the way to that north star. Had they focused on streaming prematurely it wouldn't have work, they would have died.
...a new even faster pace layer on top. Gradient descent without a goal, without a north star of meaning, optimizes for something hollow. Meaning reduces down to just "MOAR."
...long term. Then, pick the gradient that is steepest that brings you towards the north star.
...momentum. Before there's momentum, trying to get momentum around your strategic north star is nearly impossible in the bottom-up chaos. Instead, get momentum on the short-term in things that you know align with a compelling long-term strate...
... makes the world better by default, by drafting off what we want ourselves as a north star to help orient. Everyone has a different north star, but they all point in roughly the same direction, so the average direction of travel is consiste...
...world is hard. Doesn't work: 1) Found a consortium 2) come up with a compelling north star The consortium will all be pulling in random directions, giving you a mush outcome or more likely simply no outcome. Does work: 1) Come up with a com...
...tion you want to go? Do that, then repeat. If you have a plausible and valuable North Star you're sighting off, this can work very well. No need to overthink it! Surf the possibility space; as long as you have a consistent bias, it will def...
... that makes games built in this internal swarming approach coherent is a shared north star vision that everyone working on it is compelled to share. If they didn't share the north star they'd have never been hired, or would be fired. Unity,...
...resting eddies of gradient to surf to achieve a distinct, interesting, valuable North Star vision. An auteur choosing which interesting details to absorb is way better than a group decision made by consensus. There has to be someone applyin...
...y layers of middle management will create chaos. With a comprehensive strategic north star, everyone can break ties easily. Even though each middle-manager wants to put their stamp on the outcome, their stamps tend to nest mostly cleanly. B...
...ality changes you can hill climb easier, which gives you a better self-steering north star. Of course, the quality can change so much that it's effectively an interface change ("this workflow that used to work now fundamentally doesn't") bu...
.... Parallels to the Assembly Theory academic paper I linked last week. Imagine a north star representing your vision or long-term goal. Imagine each adjacent (edge + node) combo has a few components: An orientation (angle towards or away fro...
...elerating rate. Things that make something more automatically cohering A shared north star Independent components with clear boundaries, where it's OK for that boundary to be visible externally (Conway's law) Ecosystem (relying on third par...