ছোট ছোট স্টারটআপ গুলোয় যারা মুভ করছেন – তাঁদের জন্য কোম্পানি কালচার প্রেডিক্ট করা অনেক টাফ। এনাফ ইনফরমেশন থাকেনা। এক দুইজন পরিচিত থাকলেও তেমন ভোকাল থাকেনা জেহুতু ছোট সার্কেল।

এই কেইসগুলায় সবচাইতে সিম্পল এবং ইজি ট্রিক হচ্ছে এর ফাউন্ডার/ওউনার একটা খাসড়া পাবলিক কিনা সেইটা ডিটারমাইন করা। তাঁকে যদি সবাই স্যার স্যার করে – তাহলে এইটা একটা সমস্যা। টিম মেম্বাররা যদি স্যারের ব্যাপারে লিঙ্কডইন এ তেলবাজি করে – সেইটাও একটা সমস্যা। ফেইসবুকে “স্যার” যদি টিম মেম্বারদের ব্যাপারে গুটিবাজি করে – সেইটাও একটা সমস্যা। আর সবথেকে বড় সমস্যা – যদি দেখেন যে স্যার তাঁর কোম্পানির সব এচিভমেন্ট কে নিজের এচিভমেন্ট হিসেবে চালিয়ে সারাদিন বুক ফুলাচ্ছে – তাহলে ওইদিনই ভাগেন লাইফ নিয়ে।

কালচার জিনিষটা অনেক ইম্পরট্যান্ট। তবে ওউনার/ফাউন্ডার এর ম্যাচিউরিটি এর থেকেও বেশী ইম্পরট্যান্ট।

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For those who are moving to small startups, it is very difficult to predict the company culture. There is never enough information. Even if you find a few acquaintances who work there, they are not very vocal because it is too small a small circle to remain anonymous.

In these cases, the simplest and easiest trick is to determine whether the founder/owner is a jerk in public. If everyone calls him “Sir,” it is a problem. If team members flatter the “Sir” on LinkedIn, that is also a problem. If the “Sir” flatters team members on Facebook, that is also a problem. And the biggest problem is if you see that the “Sir” is blowing his chest all day long, touting all the achievements of his company as his own achievements.

Culture is very important. However, the maturity of the owner/founder is more important than that.

There is a beautiful blog from Benchling Engineering where they used a suffix tree and depth-first search to solve a problem related to finding the longest common sub-string. What makes it very interesting is that the problem is something that originates from a first-year biology and computer science course’s context. On the other hand, it’s downright sad because this kind of frontier innovation scope is quite limited in Bangladesh because we are somehow stuck around the idea that we have to be the cheapest solution to any problem.

I don’t understand the complaints about the 15 Pro not having really good heat dissipators. How many people do you know who game for long hours on their iPhone?

If it doesn’t heat up while I am on a Teams call for long ours – I am happy to buy it.

Apparently, Microsoft is looking at next-generation nuclear reactors to power its data centers and AI, according to a job listing for someone to lead the way.

Starting to wish that private nuclear power plants were a thing!

I think every robot that tries to cook eggs is set up to fail in some way or the other. I know human chefs cooking for years who can’t get eggs right :3

But LLM’s teaching actuators how to whisk an egg is such a dream project 😭

Read a report that Phenylephrine is basically as good as a placebo when it comes to being a decongestant.

Now – I am not a pharmacist. I am neither a doctor. So it should not matter to me. But it does. Because I have had medicines that had this as an element in it. This means I was being fed basically bullshit – and I was taking it because I felt that “FDA Approved” means its properly vetted and trustable.

But as it appears – it isn’t! Who do we trust?

I had a rather strange curiosity today. How do fuel pumps on rockets work? I imagine that the use of pressured gas would be a good way to enable that (same as how F1 cars are fueled). It appears that turbo pumps also have to struggle with temperature and pressure differences in the extremities of space. And I can’t even imagine how a solid fuel engine works.

I wish there existed some better video content on how something like that works though!

I will never understand why climate activists glue themselves to the roads. I have tried. Trust me. But it just makes no logical sense.

An op-ed in the New York Times argues that “sex work is an inappropriate phrase because it is neither sex nor work.” In the piece titled “What It Means to Call Prostitution Sex Work“, Paul argues against the use of the phrase, citing a source who argues that “it is neither sex nor work.”

It was an interesting read because I disagree with the whole of it. And it seems Huffington Post’s Kaytlin Bailey does too.

But that’s not interesting. Because it’s just yet another debate.

What felt interesting though – was that after a long time – I was reading two different perspectives on the same problem – and both writers were making sense. Somewhat. And it was getting very difficult for me to call one of them wrong.

What a time to live in!

Read on a PWC publication that leaders at a UK-based housing-management company thought that collecting rents via its app was the key to its business continuity. But C-suite discussions around the question What if? revealed that paying its suppliers promptly mattered more. If the app crashed, rental payments would be late, but the company could withstand that longer than it could live with customer anger caused by disrupted third-party services like heating and repairs.

The outcome? Don’t try to anticipate all risks. Look to where plausible risks could materialize and hurt customers—and you—the most. This is a true pan–C-suite exercise that requires candor, trust, transparency, and the courage to challenge assumptions.

Read a really interesting article recently around how time is a very perceptive matter. The idea is that while clocks measure objective time, people perceive and value time subjectively. When time feels like it’s dragging due to monotony or boredom, people become disengaged – even though in real life it might just have been a few minutes.

I mean – its common sense if you really think of it. But its nice to read about how a study of 200 workers, published in Current Psychology in 2019, found that even when controlled for personality traits, a person’s time perspective played a significant role in work-related outcomes. To quote: “Individuals who were more future-positive tended to enjoy higher job satisfaction and work engagement, and demonstrate fewer counterproductive work behaviors. Among those who were more present-fatalistic, meaning they took a dim view of their ability to affect their present, and future-negative, the opposite pattern of associations was observed.”

I don’t understand the UX behind Test Results from Bangladeshi Hospitals.

Look, it’s not that tough to mark out the good ones and the bad ones.

Just tell me it’s fine. Wtf is up with making me read 1.23 < n > 2.31 and then making me compare it against my result of 17.82? Just write “you ded bro” on the results

If there was a policy-level journalistic maturity, Bangladeshi news portals would refrain from sensationalizing the lives of Parimoni’s son or Shakib Khan’s son. These children will grow up. They will go to school. They will lead public lives. The amount of social stigma or bullying they will have to face due to these clickbait news items is quite unfair, and they have done nothing to deserve it.

I will never understand why top-notch Dhaka hospitals don’t provide a bed for the attendant. Its not like their service is so good that you don’t need an attendant. When you are already charging so much money, why arrange for a useless half-sofa, half-divan type of reclining chair? What’s the problem with providing a normal bed?

How much are your NFT’s worth now? Heh.

This year was odd. My feed was completely devoid of any gore on Eid – and I am not sure whether it was my own bubble or whether people just stopped posting. But probably, it was the advent of cheaper algorithms that can now run on every image at a low cost – thus making automated filters more feasible. Ten years ago, it was a dream that one day everything online would be filtered down. Now they are scary.

I meme I read today said: next time you are afraid to share ideas in a meeting – remember that someone once said in a meeting “let’s make a film with a tornado full of sharks” and got that approved.

An interesting grouping I read today was around the 12 Jungian Archetypes. Now – don’t get me wrong – I understand that it’s usually quite useless to try and group human behavior into any type (sorry ABCD folks). The trait around any of these personality types is that they usually have to be universal, meaning that they are present in all cultures and societies – or else they will be useless. But the 12 Jungian Archetypes also claim to be unconscious, meaning that we are not aware of them on a conscious level.

For example – if we have a strong unconscious identification with the Hero archetype, we may be more likely to take risks and try to achieve great things. Or, if we have a strong unconscious identification with the Caregiver archetype, we may be more likely to be nurturing and supportive of others.

Somehow, I still cannot come to terms with how I could be unconsciously doing something of a single trait, and not be conscious of that trait in me. I mean, how often would you have a hero who doesn’t know he gets a chill from doing heroic things?

So confusing.

I have recently started following somedeafguy. What a wholesome person!

Fariha made me buy an Anton Chekhov collection the other day. It’s covered in gold foils that sizzle and snap in the dark. Even the pages have a colored edge that gives me goosebumps. On the back, there is one sentence that goes “and only when his head was grey, he had fallen properly, really in love – for the first time in his life”. And I could not have said anything better about a book that I haven’t even read yet.