What I’ve been reading this week ending 19 October 2025

What To Do When Empowerment Doesn’t Work — Leadership Unlocked: 10 Years of Team of Teams

Authority: JSOC leadership did more than merely give decision-making power to lower-level teams. At every level, they also clearly defined which decisions could be made and who could make them, and supported those decisions with constant reinforcement in public forums.

Capacity: Leaders made sure teams had what they needed to execute decisions through skill development and resource allocation.

Context: Leaders required teams to understand how their work connected to JSOC’s broader goals, so decisions could be informed and aligned with the overall strategy. This learning was a daily activity that was driven from the top. Everyone was informed of what was happening and where they were going.

Desire: Leaders also addressed the psychological aspects of empowerment by creating motivation and establishing safe environments for individuals to take more ownership.

The Hidden Rulebook 📔 of Corporate Politics (and How to Use It to Your Advantage)

Rule 2: Ignoring politics is how you lose by default.

Rule 4: Good work is necessary, but not sufficient.

Rule 8: Proximity to power shapes your trajectory.

Rule 22: You don’t have to like politics. You just have to understand it.

More on US Pedestrian Deaths — by Brian Potter

My (unsatisfying) current theory is that the increase in pedestrian deaths is due to a multitude of small factors (an uptick in homelessness, an increase in drug use, a reduction in traffic law enforcement, etc.) and/or some sort of complicated multi-factor interaction (such as reduced driver forward visibility exacerbating American’s tendency to use their phones while driving). But I’m not particularly confident of this.

At least five interesting things: No, You’re Wrong edition (#70)

Thanks to the amazing progress in renewable technology, and China’s gung-ho willingness to scale that technology rapidly, the world will probably be spared the worst. And the idea that climate change is going to be solved — or even meaningfully altered — by pious Europeans eschewing modern consumer lifestyles is just numerically illiterate. Technology is solving the problem while German intellectuals wring their hands.

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I think many American progressives take it as almost an article of faith that if we exaggerate the severity of our problems, it’ll galvanize society to greater action. But op-eds like this one demonstrate that such pessimistic exaggeration simply paralyzes people into hand-wringing helplessness.

The Hidden Science Behind LLM Token Limits (And How Million-Token Models Actually Work)

Token limits are physics, not business — quadratic complexity is fundamental

Longer isn’t always better — quality degradation is real and measurable

Different architectures optimize for different goals

Most applications work better with RAG or hierarchical processing

Understanding limits enables better system design