My intuition is that all of the benefit you get being outside and walking is probably lost by strapping a laptop to yourself and being on calls the whole time. Call me old fashioned but I'm outside to look at the sea, hear the birds and be very definitely away from my tech.
For the last year or so I have scheduled my two status meetings back to back in the mornings. That means I have 90 minutes of walking in the forrest in the morning (30min before the meetings and then 30min each for the two meetings).
I have two teams reporting to me, and each have a 30minute morning meeting where we decide what needs the team attention during the day. There is also room for small talk to keep it a bit social.
Those meetings do not need screensharing very often. When they do, we can manage to look briefly at a phone screen.
It has been wonderful and it is something I would miss if I ever had another job. I encourage the others in the team to do the same thing.
Walking in the forrest have two benefits; less risk of getting hit by a car, and, it’s more quiet of a background for when I unmute.
What about for other users of the forest? Hopefully you're able to stay well away from them so as not to disturb the peace and quiet of the forest for work.
> Walking in the forrest have two benefits; it’s less chance to get hit by a car, and it’s more quiet of a background for when I unmute.
More than that, it's very cathartic and peaceful. I used to live next to a big park on the Puget Sound and I would do a similar routine, in addition to occasionally taking a stroll through the park (effectively a forest) at lunch.
> I have two teams reporting to me, and each have a 30minute morning meeting where we decide what needs the team attention during the day.
Why you have to talk with your team on a daily basis? That’s too frequent and into weeds. The earliest should be weekly. Delegate and plan for long term.
> Walking in the forrest have two benefits; less risk of getting hit by a car
There’s a risk with everything. You just switch one with another.
Regardless of opinions, the sheer volume of his output is a tad overwhelming. I do wish he had taken Mathematica down a different path (just imagine if it was truly broadly available at non-insane pricing as a local native app, almost as a stupefyingly flexible Jupyter), and I find the Wolfram Language too unwieldy for some things, but if you can see past the self-branding and unusual viewpoints, Mathematica is prety awesome.
I once had a bit of fun with it on a 20-core Raspberry Pi cluster, and sometimes I think it would have been amazing to run some ML workloads on this kind of environment: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2016/08/10/0830
I'd say it is more flexible than jupyter. I really think many folks are hidden from a lot of magical computation you can do with computers, by not having exposure to some of tools like mathematica.
That was a great read. It got me smiling!. It's not often that you find fellow control freaks in the wild.
Stephen Wolfram's personal infrastructure sounds overall great, but it crumbles in the sound department.
If you're going to be on calls for hours every day, for everything that is holy please get a hands-free set up. The most ergonomic object is no object at all.
I use a Scarlett 212 mic and sound card paired with a decent pair of speakers and my working room works like a charm. Everything is set up so if I start a call any device I can walk though the office and have a conversation with someone like they're in the room. 10/10 would recommend.
I use a condenser mic so the audio going out is top notch. The mic is the one offered with the Scarlett 212 bundle but you could use any decent mic.
HQ mics are great because you can fine tune the volume. It's high enough for my voice to come across strongly, but low enough to avoid background noises, people hearing themselves through my speakers, etc.
The idea behind my set up is to have a hands-free and always-on working room. I just walk in and know that everything is ready to start a call. Just click a button to make a call or accept it. No need to fiddle with headphones, adjust volumes, check if sound is working well, etc.
The only exception to this set up is when I have a confidential call, in which case I use my phone or headphones.
Everything is wired, as wireless sound devices are just not there in terms of quality and avoiding annoyances (see the HN thread called 'The first minute of every phone call is a torture now)
I love this essay so much. It was the inspiration for my Dogsheep project - https://dogsheep.github.io/ - because I wanted to build a much less impressive version of a subset of what Wolfram had built, and a Dogsheep is clearly a less intimidating version of a Wolfram!
(Also it meant I could call my search engine Dogsheep Beta, as opposed to Wolfram Alpha - and I enjoyed that pun so much I spent quite a significant of time writing the software to support it: https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/14/personal-data-warehous... )
Everything he does I see his keyboard or monitor in the background. I don’t know why he is so much into ‘productivity’ that even for walks he has to be in front of his machine and working? Why can’t he just enjoy walking to relax a bit outdoors. I think walking is as much for mental well being as for improving physical health and decoupling from work and digital life is how I’d like to relax.
When you've been gifted with a brain like his, I imagine the most interesting and intoxicating thing in life is to engage with your mind as much as you can.
I want to be as productive as possible while working. What I don't want is to be as productive as possible while living. So tools that integrate work into non-work aspects of my life end up turning my whole life into endless work; for some people that might be fine -- and it used to be fine for me 2 decades ago, but it's not fine anymore.
I run my own personal infrastructure. Most of what it takes is to research secure setups from the beginning. You don't have other users so upgrades aren't painful. Frankly what I find most difficult is dealing with aging hardware, but this dude probably had the money to buy everything new.
Not really. I keep even more than that. And at a finer grained resolution. And have done so for almost two decades. It's all put on to a write-only-by-the-capturing-device/read-only-by-other-device secured storage system.
I give up filesystem taxonomies to end up in org-mode/org-roam managed time-organized notes, with files attached and retrievable in a classic search&narrow UI (org-roam-node-find) with eventual quick search (via counsel-rg on org-roam-directory, where in that case notes are like files metadata) or queries (org-ql on drawes properties and tags who are ensured a bit consistent via templates (org-capture, yasnippet etc).
This extra layer was a game-changer for me, I hesitate for long, but finally switched few years ago and so far prove to be flawlessly. I still miss fancy UI/ML tools, but anything is at my fingertips locally, I can make quick slides if needed directly in org-mode, I can click code-executing links (elisp:), running code blocks (org-babel) and anything is integrated to a level NO ONE modern software can reach due to modern systems archaic, limited and limiting designs.
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I have two teams reporting to me, and each have a 30minute morning meeting where we decide what needs the team attention during the day. There is also room for small talk to keep it a bit social.
Those meetings do not need screensharing very often. When they do, we can manage to look briefly at a phone screen.
It has been wonderful and it is something I would miss if I ever had another job. I encourage the others in the team to do the same thing.
Walking in the forrest have two benefits; less risk of getting hit by a car, and, it’s more quiet of a background for when I unmute.
Highly recommended!
Not as egregious as the mountain bikers who blast music from speakers on the trails as they ride, but still.
More than that, it's very cathartic and peaceful. I used to live next to a big park on the Puget Sound and I would do a similar routine, in addition to occasionally taking a stroll through the park (effectively a forest) at lunch.
It had a very calming effect, def miss that!
Why you have to talk with your team on a daily basis? That’s too frequent and into weeds. The earliest should be weekly. Delegate and plan for long term.
> Walking in the forrest have two benefits; less risk of getting hit by a car
There’s a risk with everything. You just switch one with another.
I once had a bit of fun with it on a 20-core Raspberry Pi cluster, and sometimes I think it would have been amazing to run some ML workloads on this kind of environment: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2016/08/10/0830
I use a Scarlett 212 mic and sound card paired with a decent pair of speakers and my working room works like a charm. Everything is set up so if I start a call any device I can walk though the office and have a conversation with someone like they're in the room. 10/10 would recommend.
I imagine you can hear your partners quite well, but I want to be heard well also.
HQ mics are great because you can fine tune the volume. It's high enough for my voice to come across strongly, but low enough to avoid background noises, people hearing themselves through my speakers, etc.
The idea behind my set up is to have a hands-free and always-on working room. I just walk in and know that everything is ready to start a call. Just click a button to make a call or accept it. No need to fiddle with headphones, adjust volumes, check if sound is working well, etc.
The only exception to this set up is when I have a confidential call, in which case I use my phone or headphones.
Everything is wired, as wireless sound devices are just not there in terms of quality and avoiding annoyances (see the HN thread called 'The first minute of every phone call is a torture now)
(Also it meant I could call my search engine Dogsheep Beta, as opposed to Wolfram Alpha - and I enjoyed that pun so much I spent quite a significant of time writing the software to support it: https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/14/personal-data-warehous... )
I can't relate, it is not my cup of tea, but I can understand it and refrain for judging.
Yikes? He's smart, so I'm sure he's protected it adequately, but auditing the surface area of this much software seems insane.
This extra layer was a game-changer for me, I hesitate for long, but finally switched few years ago and so far prove to be flawlessly. I still miss fancy UI/ML tools, but anything is at my fingertips locally, I can make quick slides if needed directly in org-mode, I can click code-executing links (elisp:), running code blocks (org-babel) and anything is integrated to a level NO ONE modern software can reach due to modern systems archaic, limited and limiting designs.