![\"Things_Vol1_Cover.png\"](\"https://buttondown-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/images/ff80f30e-f264-4339-8b67-b628b1154e0d.png\")
It's Friday, March 11 2022 in Portland, Oregon. The sun is out, it's not raining, and because this is the second anniversary of the COVID pandemic, I also have not been outside because I've been trained as a shut-in.
\nI had a pretty good week and then things went a bit sideways. A piece of work I'd been picking at ended up taking longer than I wanted and I got stuck, so I ended up letting my client know it was taking longer than I wanted and could we turn the here's-the-deliverable meeting into a let's-check-direction feedback meeting. Which it did, and it was great, and I got some fantastic direction.
\nIn other words, it wasn't the disaster I was worried it might be in my head, and I am doing Good, Valuable Work.
\nIt's 2:53pm. Let's do this in 15 minutes or less.
\nSo. I have in my hands (i.e. an iCloud folder), an early (call it an alpha) build of an ebook I'm calling Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1. It includes the best bits (so far -- this is a first pass!) of the first 50 episodes of this newsletter. And if you want to know what they are, that's January to March, 2014. But I swear, there's useful, relevant stuff there!
\nHere's what the cover looks like:
\n
It is pretty much done in the "good enough for me to not feel terrible about people having it" in that I need to update some references to 2021 to 2022, and technically I should do things like wrote a proper foreword and stuff like that. And it's not like I can't keep editing/iterating it.
\nBut instead, I'm just going to go with it. All my paid subscribers and supporters will get a free copy NEXT WEEK, plus I'll make it available to buy online SOMETIME AFTERWARDS depending on how I figure out getting stuff into Apple and Amazon.
\nSo! If you're not already a subscriber/supporter and you're interested, then... you can subscribe! The recommended rate is USD $7/month.
\nVia Michael Tsai, here's a list of Apple applying or in effect promoting dark patterns, like featuring a game that has a $120/year subscription, and a modal dialog that only allows you to agree.
\nSomehow, an article on the Columbia shuttle disaster ("Death by PowerPoint")and the underlying Tufte commentary ("PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports) hit my feeds this week from multiple directions. I mean, yes. The PowerPoint slide was bad. But as is pointed out on Tuft's discussion, we don't know the context in which the information was presented (but that doesn't absolve it), and in my mind it highlights a larger issue with the thought that goes into clarity of communication in general. PowerPoint was the tool that might have made bad/ineffective/unclear communication easier, but it wasn't the smoking gun. There's a good point in the Tufte commentary as well that, well, the NASA officials who were the audience for the presentation from Boeing's engineers also had a duty to ask questions. Which again, is something that comes up, repeatedly in my work: in most meetings, and some in particular, I'm paying particular attention to listening to the questions people ask and how they're answered, with the default assumption that people won't speak up if they don't understand and won't ask for clarification. Because, well, we're people.
\nWhich is why I like to ask dumb questions and be the proxy. I'm perfectly happy to ask or say: I'm sorry, I don't understand. Could you explain that to me again? Part of my job, I feel, is to make it safer/easier for people to ask those questions so they can do their jobs better.
\nFaine Greenwood (who you should follow!) has a 2019 piece on Medium on the provenance of drones. My interpretation about why it's valuable is that she's zeroed in on concern about the provenance of drones (e.g. are they all derivative of military research and development, in which case tainted in certain contexts, or are they a sort of convergent evolution where "drones" as they are now had multiple ancestors). I mean, I'm firmly on the multiple ancestors side and Greenwood always gets bonus points for mentioning/bringing up a sort of Drone-y Cambrian explosion. In case it's not clear, this provenance of drones is relevant again because of what's happening in Ukraine (some suggestions that for example Western allies of Ukraine should deploy giant humanitarian drones for evacuation, barring the fact that they don't exist), and the super interesting use of civilian drone hardware like off-the-shelf DJIs. Anyway, go read it.
\nThere's a tweet from Brandon Chu that's stuck in my head about "Swinging the Pendulum" which in his example for a product team is -- kind of -- the ability to acknowledge that there are potentially diametrically opposed "good" things to be doing, and that instead of the team thinking they're getting unclear direction and whiplash, that actually success depends on doing a whole bunch of different things and that's okay and to plan for it. Which makes sense to me! There is a lot more context here and hopefully I'll come back to it.
\nWhich leads to...
\nThis one might not make sense, but I wanted to record it: it's a deep link, mid-conversation with Dorian Taylor, about the pendulum thing, where he successfully nerd-snipes me into wondering "what if the rocket equation, but for strategy". Here's your link about the rocket equation.
\nJohn Wiswell has a thread about how his Nebula-nominated, Hugo-eligible short story For Lack of a Bed went through seventeen rejections. It's a story about chronic pain, a monster, friendship and has "a weird sense of humor" so you can see why I'm attracted.
\nThis is just cool: "What if the Sony's PlayStation 1 CPU had a real data cache?" is something a regular person can find out now that FPGAs are readily available.
\nLastly, Rick Klau pointed out that "it will never not be funny to me that Slack calls this 👊🏻 :facepunch:", to which my thought was: "ok, now I’m seriously thinking about intentionally set culture change canaries to guard against/signal the onset of hostile acquisitions".
\nOK, that's it. Fifteen minutes on the nose!
\nHow are you doing? I'm mildly terrified I've set a public deadline for getting the ebook out, which is also a way for me to hopefully not awkwardly say: hey, if you become a paid subscriber/supporter, you'll get a copy of the ebook.
\nHave a good weekend,
\nBest,
\nDan
\n","body_text":"0.0 Context setting\n\nIt's Friday, March 11 2022 in Portland, Oregon. The sun is out, it's not raining, and because this is the second anniversary of the COVID pandemic, I also have not been outside because I've been trained as a shut-in.\n\nI had a pretty good week and then things went a bit sideways. A piece of work I'd been picking at ended up taking longer than I wanted and I got stuck, so I ended up letting my client know it was taking longer than I wanted and could we turn the here's-the-deliverable meeting into a let's-check-direction feedback meeting. Which it did, and it was great, and I got some fantastic direction.\n\nIn other words, it wasn't the disaster I was worried it might be in my head, and I am doing Good, Valuable Work.\n\nIt's 2:53pm. Let's do this in 15 minutes or less.\n\nA preview for paid subscribers/supporters\n\nSo. I have in my hands (i.e. an iCloud folder), an early (call it an alpha) build of an ebook I'm calling Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1. It includes the best bits (so far -- this is a first pass!) of the first 50 episodes of this newsletter. And if you want to know what\nthey\nare, that's January to March, 2014. But I swear, there's useful, relevant stuff there!\n\nHere's what the cover looks like:\n\nIt is\npretty much done\nin the \"good enough for me to not feel terrible about people having it\" in that I need to update some references to 2021 to 2022, and\ntechnically\nI should do things like wrote a proper foreword and stuff like that. And it's not like I can't keep editing/iterating it.\n\nBut instead, I'm just going to go with it. All my paid subscribers and supporters will get a free copy NEXT WEEK, plus I'll make it available to buy online SOMETIME AFTERWARDS depending on how I figure out getting stuff into Apple and Amazon.\n\nSo! If you're not already a subscriber/supporter and you're interested, then... you can\nsubscribe\n! The recommended rate is USD $7/month.\n\n1.0 Some things that caught my attention\n\nDark Patterns by Apple\n\nVia Michael Tsai, here's a list of\nApple applying or in effect promoting dark patterns\n, like featuring a game that has a $120/year subscription, and a modal dialog that only allows you to agree.\n\nPowerPoint, Again\n\nSomehow, an article on the Columbia shuttle disaster (\"\nDeath by PowerPoint\n\")and the underlying Tufte commentary (\"\nPowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports\n) hit my feeds this week from multiple directions. I mean, yes. The PowerPoint slide was bad. But as is pointed out on Tuft's discussion, we don't know the context in which the information was presented (but that doesn't absolve it),\nand\nin my mind it highlights a larger issue with the thought that goes into clarity of communication in general. PowerPoint was the tool that might have made bad/ineffective/unclear communication easier, but it wasn't the smoking gun. There's a good point in the Tufte commentary as well that, well, the NASA officials who were the audience for the presentation from Boeing's engineers also had a duty to ask questions. Which again, is something that comes up, repeatedly in my work: in most meetings, and some in particular, I'm paying particular attention to listening to the questions people ask and how they're answered, with the default assumption that people won't speak up if they don't understand and won't ask for clarification. Because, well, we're people.\n\nWhich is why I like to ask dumb questions and be the proxy. I'm perfectly happy to ask or say: I'm sorry, I don't understand. Could you explain that to me again? Part of my job, I feel, is to make it safer/easier for people to ask those questions so they can do their jobs better.\n\nWhere Do Drones Come From?\n\nFaine Greenwood (who you should follow!) has a 2019 piece on Medium on the\nprovenance of drones\n. My interpretation about why it's valuable is that she's zeroed in on concern about the provenance of drones (e.g. are they all derivative of military research and development, in which case tainted in certain contexts, or are they a sort of convergent evolution where \"drones\" as they are now had multiple ancestors). I mean, I'm firmly on the multiple ancestors side and Greenwood always gets bonus points for mentioning/bringing up a sort of Drone-y Cambrian explosion. In case it's not clear, this provenance of drones is relevant again because of what's happening in Ukraine (some suggestions that for example Western allies of Ukraine should deploy giant humanitarian drones for evacuation, barring the fact that they don't exist), and the\nsuper interesting\nuse of civilian drone hardware like off-the-shelf DJIs. Anyway, go read it.\n\nSwinging the Pendulum\n\nThere's a tweet from Brandon Chu that's stuck in my head about \"\nSwinging the Pendulum\n\" which in his example for a product team is -- kind of -- the ability to acknowledge that there are potentially diametrically opposed \"good\" things to be doing, and that instead of the team thinking they're getting unclear direction and whiplash, that\nactually\nsuccess depends on doing a whole bunch of different things\nand that's okay\nand to plan for it. Which makes sense to me! There is a lot more context here and hopefully I'll come back to it.\n\nWhich leads to...\n\n... a rocket equation for strategy?\n\nThis one might not make sense, but I wanted to record it: it's a deep link, mid-conversation with Dorian Taylor, about the pendulum thing, where he successfully nerd-snipes me into wondering \"\nwhat if the rocket equation, but for strategy\n\". Here's your link about the\nrocket equation\n.\n\nThings take a long time and involve rejection\n\nJohn Wiswell has a\nthread\nabout how his Nebula-nominated, Hugo-eligible short story\nFor Lack of a Bed\nwent through\nseventeen\nrejections. It's a story about chronic pain, a monster, friendship and has \"a weird sense of humor\" so you can see why I'm attracted.\n\nA million dollars isn't cool, FPGAs are cool\n\nThis is just cool: \"\nWhat if the Sony's PlayStation 1 CPU had a real data cache\n?\" is something a regular person can find out now that FPGAs are readily available.\n\nA culture-change canary\n\nLastly, Rick Klau pointed out that \"\nit will never not be funny to me\nthat Slack calls this 👊🏻 :facepunch:\", to which my thought was: \"ok, now I’m seriously thinking about intentionally set\nculture change canaries\nto guard against/signal the onset of hostile acquisitions\".\n\nOK, that's it. Fifteen minutes on the nose!\n\nHow are you doing? I'm mildly terrified I've set a public deadline for getting the ebook out, which is also a way for me to hopefully not awkwardly say: hey, if you become a\npaid subscriber/supporter\n, you'll get a copy of the ebook.\n\nHave a good weekend,\n\nBest,\n\nDan","raw_format":"markdown","source":"app","summary":"This issue collects eight brief observations spanning from Apple's deceptive design practices to the Columbia shuttle disaster's lessons about communication clarity, from the murky origins of drone technology to strategic decision-making as a pendulum rather than a straight line. The connecting thread is a fascination with how systems—whether technological, communicative, or organizational—work when we actually examine them closely, and how understanding the real mechanics underneath (whether it's why a presentation failed or where consumer drones actually came from) matters more than surface-level blame or assumptions. Throughout, there's an underlying belief that asking good questions, seeking clarity, and accepting productive tension are how we do better work and make better decisions.","reading_minutes":6,"links":[{"url":"https://newsletter.danhon.com","normalized_url":"https://newsletter.danhon.com/","domain":"danhon.com","anchor_text":"subscribe","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"self"},{"url":"https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/03/11/featured-dark-patterns/","normalized_url":"https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/03/11/featured-dark-patterns","domain":"mjtsai.com","anchor_text":"Apple applying or in effect promoting dark patterns","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd7w2t2mtvfg81uhx","normalized_url":"https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd7w2t2mtvfg81uhx","domain":"mcdreeamiemusings.com","anchor_text":"Death by PowerPoint","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB","normalized_url":"https://edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB","domain":"edwardtufte.com","anchor_text":"PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://faineg.medium.com/the-ascent-of-drones-6e4329c19288","normalized_url":"https://faineg.medium.com/the-ascent-of-drones-6e4329c19288","domain":"medium.com","anchor_text":"provenance of drones","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://twitter.com/BrandonMChu/status/1502312471461249030","normalized_url":"https://twitter.com/BrandonMChu/status/1502312471461249030","domain":"twitter.com","anchor_text":"Swinging the Pendulum","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://twitter.com/doriantaylor/status/1502337186032668682","normalized_url":"https://twitter.com/doriantaylor/status/1502337186032668682","domain":"twitter.com","anchor_text":"what if the rocket equation, but for strategy","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation","normalized_url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation","domain":"wikipedia.org","anchor_text":"rocket equation","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://twitter.com/Wiswell/status/1502326452603301898?s=20&t=wDaVkQULY96aA9fOX9KxoQ","normalized_url":"https://twitter.com/Wiswell/status/1502326452603301898?t=wDaVkQULY96aA9fOX9KxoQ","domain":"twitter.com","anchor_text":"thread","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://www.diabolicalplots.com/dp-fiction-74b-for-lack-of-a-bed-by-john-wiswell/","normalized_url":"https://diabolicalplots.com/dp-fiction-74b-for-lack-of-a-bed-by-john-wiswell","domain":"diabolicalplots.com","anchor_text":"For Lack of a Bed","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://twitter.com/AzumFpg/status/1502345713291771908","normalized_url":"https://twitter.com/AzumFpg/status/1502345713291771908","domain":"twitter.com","anchor_text":"What if the Sony's PlayStation 1 CPU had a real data cache","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://twitter.com/rklau/status/1502096853000540160","normalized_url":"https://twitter.com/rklau/status/1502096853000540160","domain":"twitter.com","anchor_text":"it will never not be funny to me","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://twitter.com/hondanhon/status/1502104505684422658","normalized_url":"https://twitter.com/hondanhon/status/1502104505684422658","domain":"twitter.com","anchor_text":"culture change canaries","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://newsletter.danhon.com","normalized_url":"https://newsletter.danhon.com/","domain":"danhon.com","anchor_text":"paid subscriber/supporter","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"self"}],"sections":[{"id":2030,"ord":0,"number":"0.0","heading":"Context 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