In psychology, self-efficacy is an individual's belief in their capacity to act in the ways necessary to reach specific goals.[1] The concept was originally proposed by the psychologist Albert Bandura in 1977. Self-efficacy affects every area of human endeavor. By determining the beliefs a person holds regarding their power to affect situations, self-efficacy strongly influences both the power a person actually has to face challenges competently and the choices a person is most likely to make. These effects are particularly apparent, and compelling, with regard to investment behaviors such as in health,[2] education,[3] and agriculture.[4] A strong sense of self-efficacy promotes human accomplishment and personal well-being. A person with high self-efficacy views challenges as things that are supposed to be mastered rather than threats to avoid. These people are able to recover from failure faster and are more likely to attribute failure to a lack of effort. They approach threatening situations with the belief that they can control them. These things have been linked to lower levels of stress and a lower vulnerability to depression.[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-efficacy

Old (Jan'1999) Malcolm Gladwell article about SmallWorld. Recently, a computer scientist at the University of Virginia by the name of Brett Tjaden actually sat down and figured out what the average degree of connectedness is for the quarter million or so actors and actresses listed in the Internet Movie Database: he came up with 2.8312 steps. That sounds impressive, except that Tjaden then went back and performed an even more heroic calculation, figuring out what the average degree of connectedness was for everyone in the database. Kevin Bacon, it turns out, ranks only six hundred and sixty-eighth. Martin Sheen, by contrast, can be connected, on average, to every other actor, in 2.63681 steps, which puts him almost six hundred and fifty places higher than Bacon. Elliott Gould can be connected even more quickly, in 2.63601. Among the top fifteen are people like Robert Mitchum, Gene Hackman, Donald Sutherland, Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters, and Burgess Meredith. Aside from Bacon's low ranking, what surprises me is how low the difference is between the top and the average. (more)

process of rapidly/iteratively building prototypes via Vibe-Coding, immediately validating each through Solution Interview (more)

experimental step of Product Development (specifically Customer Development) (more)

Rahul Vohra Shares Superhuman's Product-Market Fit Framework. We had set up shop and started coding Superhuman in 2015. A year later, our team had grown to seven and we were still furiously coding. By the summer of 2017, we had reached 14 people — and we were still coding. I felt intense pressure to launch, from the team and also from within myself. (more)

co-founder of coda (more)

CollaborationWare: A doc for makers. https://coda.io/ Coda is a document editor that uses features from spreadsheets, presentation documents, word processor files, and apps.[4][5][6] Possible uses for Coda documents include using them as a wiki, database, or project management tool.[5] Coda has built a formula system, much like spreadsheets commonly have, but in Coda documents, formulas can be used anywhere within the document, and can link to things that aren't just cells, including other documents, calendars or graphs.[4][5][7] Coda also has the ability to integrate with custom third-party services,[1][3][4][8][9] and has automations.[4] It has offered $1 million in grants for developers that create such integrations... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coda_(document_editor) (more)

Grammarly acquires AI email client Superhuman. Grammarly announced Tuesday the acquisition of email client Superhuman in a push to build out its AI for its productivity suite. Neither companies provided details about the financial terms of the deal. (more)

Context: joining a start-up that has launched its MVP but not yet reached Product-Market Fit. (more)

Joshua Porter: The Next Feature Fallacy (or, the case for simple, working systems). Tell me if this sounds familiar: You released the first version (MVP) of your product some months ago and it was an exhilarating experience. You went through the highs and lows of launch and had moments of excitement and pride when people started using your product for the first time. But...as the weeks wore on it started to become clear there just wasn’t enough usage. (more)

This is our jam: How Postlight kickstarts every idea with a real Product Plan. (more)

Jul'2019 Free ebook/site by BaseCamp folks describing their process. (more)

Scrum Iteration; also Mobile TelCo

a multi-layer-iterative Product Management process of Thinking in Bets (more)

Renaissance Man (fictional) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Buckaroo_Banzai_Across_the_8th_Dimension: brain surgeon, Scientist, adventurer, sword-fighter (Warrior), guitar player (Syncopated Music) (more)

Andrej Karpathy tooted, relating to his new nanoChat repo to someone wanting a chatbot built on his own writing, I think this is not a good repo for that. You should think of micro models maybe more as very young children (kindergarten etc.), they just don't have the raw intelligence of their larger cousins. If you finetune/train it on your own data you'll probably get some amusing parroting that feels like your writing in style, but it will be slop. (more)

anarchist, scientist

In the philosophy of science, the science wars were a series of scholarly and public discussions in the 1990s over the social place of science in making authoritative claims about the world. Encyclopedia.com, citing the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, describes the science wars as the "complex of discussions about the way the sciences are related to or incarnated in culture, history, and practice. [...] [which] came to be called a 'war' in the mid 1990s because of a strong polarization over questions of legitimacy and authority. One side [...] is concerned with defending the authority of science as rooted in objective evidence and rational procedures. The other side argues that it is legitimate and fruitful to study the sciences as institutions and social-technical networks whose development is influenced by linguistics, economics, politics, and other factors surrounding formally rational procedures and isolated established facts." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars (more)

Ron Jeffries: How to Impose Agile: ...with survival at stake, going “Agile” would be necessary (more)

see Flow State and similar/different Principles Of Product Development Flow