What I’ve been reading (and watching) this week ending 26 October 2025
What Matters: What Matters: OKR Google playbook: Examples & templates
Trap #1: Failing to differentiate between committed and aspirational OKRs
Trap #2: Business-as-usual OKRs
Trap #3: Timid aspirational OKRs
Trap #4: Sandbagging
Trap #5: Low value Objectives (aka the “Who cares?” OKR)
Trap #6: Insufficient KRs for committed Os
See also my thoughts on OKRs.
Knowledge creates technical debt — lukeplant.me.uk
The “pile of technical debt” is essentially a pile of knowledge — everything we now think is bad about the code represents what we’ve learned about how to do software better. The gap between what it is and what it should be is the gap between what we used to know and what we now know.
Ten things we know to be true — Google — About Google
Early expressions of values / beliefs have a tendency to sound more authentic and elegant. Also, an example of the superiority of catch phrases over single words.
- Focus of the user and all else will follow.
- It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
- Fast is better than slow.
- Democracy on the web works.
- You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
- You can make money without doing evil.
- There’s always more information out there.
- The need for information crosses all borders.
- You can be serious without a suit.
- Great just isn’t good enough.
AI Is Flight Level 0: Welcome to the Cave of Efficiency Illusion | Flight Levels Academy
Flight Level 1: Teams working faster (the keystrokes).
Flight Level 2: Coordination across areas (hitting the right keys at the right time).
Flight Level 3: Strategic alignment (deciding what text we even want to write).
And looking at today’s AI hype: we’re not even at Flight Level 1 — we’ve slid down to Flight Level 0, optimizing individual tasks.
As an engineer, you have more power than you think | Candost’s Blog
When you see that reducing debt in a specific part of the codebase makes the next engineer’s job faster and the results are visible quickly, you have the power to reduce tech debt. You don’t need any permission.
I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right.
The companies that will thrive aren’t the ones with the best AI tools. They’re the ones whose people use AI to become better, not to become lazier. They’re the ones where humans own the decisions, own the code, own the strategy, and use AI as an amplifier, not an autopilot.
Climate advocacy should focus more on the hard problems
A lot of conventional approaches seem to make the mistake of starting with current levels of energy use and then reasoning backward to figure out how much clean energy we “need.” But in the future, it would be desirable to use a lot more energy — in part so that poor people around the world can enjoy better living standards, in part so that we in the United States can enjoy better living standards, and in part so that we can deploy abundant electricity to solve some of these other problems by doing “wasteful” things like manufacturing synthetic hydrocarbons.
[2509.25721] The AI Productivity Index (APEX)
We introduce the first version of the AI Productivity Index (APEX), a benchmark for assessing whether frontier AI models can perform knowledge work with high economic value.
What Is Hitozukuri? — AllAboutLean.com
Hitozukuri is not just about technical skills. It also emphasizes building a person’s character, including qualities like integrity, responsibility, teamwork, and a strong work ethic.
Share Repurchases and Investment Policies — Brockman — Financial Review — Wiley Online Library
Our results provide no support for the claim that repurchases lead to lower real investments. Consistent with these findings, we also show that financial analysts do not revise downward their capital expenditure forecasts following repurchases.
Who maintains the scaffolding of freedom?
Today’s business leaders face a different challenge. If they can recognize that the most important bet is not their next product but the principles that allow all products to exist, then the future is not bleak but bright. It will mean accepting that some of the most valuable work is not measurable, that the best returns may come decades later, and that the surest foundation for freedom and prosperity is principled, long-term investment in the public good.
Two kinds of luck | Seth’s Blog
It’s easy to imagine that earned luck is well deserved, because it is. But quite often, earned luck, while earned, doesn’t arrive.
In this cohort study of 3322 grade 3 children and 2084 grade 6 children recruited from primary care settings in Ontario, Canada, between 2008 and 2023, higher parent-reported total screen time and TV and digital media time were associated with lower reading and math achievement on standardized tests in elementary school.
Steve Blank No Science, No Startups: The Innovation Engine We’re Switching Off
Countries that neglect science become dependent on those that don’t. U.S. post-WWII dominance came from basic science investments (OSRD, NSF, NIH, DOE labs). After WWII ended, the UK slashed science investment which allowed the U.S. to commercialize the British inventions made during the war.
Democracy and Capitalism are Mutually Reinforcing — Marginal REVOLUTION
What accounts for the correlation in economic freedom and democracy? The paper discusses a number of mechanisms of which I will only mention two here. Consider two ways to get rich, redistribution and growth. Redistribution can make a minority rich at the expense of a majority. A dictator can live in luxury amid national misery. But no redistribution scheme can enrich the majority — only growth can. Broad prosperity comes not from dividing wealth, but from creating it through pro-growth, capitalist policies. As a result, in a democracy, the rulers, the demos, can only get rich through growth and this provides some incentive to think about capitalism and economic freedom. The incentive is not a guarantee, of course, democratic voters can vote for bad policies but if they want to get rich they have to think about growth and that means capitalism.
