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The book is an excellent collection of rules which the author discovered while finishing his Ph.D. and transitioning into a full-time faculty position.

At some point, the incumbent’s product’s performance exceeds the demand of most customers. Then the “edge” that these performance metrics provided is lost, and the customers’ value proposition changes. They start valuing some other metrics, along which a disruptor’s product has better performance. The disruptor has an early mover’s advantage as well as leading to the demise of the incumbent.

Here is a summary of things that have happened since I wrote the previous Bitcoin blog post.

The book emphasizes heavily life education, glorifies college dropouts, and questions college education except for specialized fields like law and medicine.

Bureaucrats take the actions which are justifiable (by book or by order of their superiors), they care less about consequences (in case there are multiple possible actions, they let the politician decide the appropriate action). Technocrats take the actions which (according to their analysis) have best (long term/short term) consequences, they care less about how harsh the action could be on certain individuals and their logical thinking usually fails to take into account the law of unintended consequences like Cobra Effect. ...

The book is an insightful journey into the contemporary understanding of the human brain and how scientists are trying to replicate it. Major takeaways from the book are listed below.

In 2013, we saw how internet activists’ snap judgments about the interpretation (or misinterpretation?) of jokes at pycon destroyed the professional career of two individuals (Source: A Dongle Joke That Spiraled Way Out Of Control). The internet activism first sympathized with Adria Richards and then decided to side with the developer, eventually, both of them (and SendGrid customers temporarily) took a major hit which could probably have been resolved offline and would have never become a part of permanent history. As if this was not enough, this year the same story has been repeated with Gurubaksh Chahal and his girlfriend Juliet Kakish. The claim goes that he allegedly hit his girlfriend 117 times and she allegedly suffered bruises and injuries, there is an alleged video of that proving the same (I haven’t been able to find one yet that does not imply it does not exist though) (Source: A Letter To The Board Members Of RadiumOne).

Enough articles have been written about engineering crunch in the valley while some solutions like increasing equity grants to engineers have been suggested, the bigger issue of the broken recruiting pipeline has not gained the attention it deserves. Its a job of recruiters to source potential candidates and most recruiters are compensated in form of a percentage (usually 20-30%) of the annual base salary of the hired individual.

The book is a humorous compilation of pragmatic lessons which Scott Adams learned while navigating his professional career.

The Art of War is considered one of the classic books on military strategy. Due to the recent resurgence of China as an economic superpower, the book has garnered interest from non-Chinese who are curious to know more about its strategy.