Dominik Mayer · Products, Asia, Productivity

Events bring us into the same room, but not into each other’s lives.

Bill Maher visited Donald Trump at the White House, where he not only got Trump to sign sixty of the insults he’d hurled at Maher but also encountered a president who was surprisingly self-aware and willing to listen.

I really enjoyed listening to Tim Cook on Table Manners.

Herman Martinus wants his products to be like a garden: That’s what I want from my products.

The authors of The Pragmatic Programmer about users not knowing what they need: Dave Thomas: Tying in to what Andy said earlier about software having a Heisenberg effect, where delivering the software changes the user’s perception of the requirements, alm…

Cal Newport: Between this newsletter, my podcast, my books, and my New Yorker journalism, I offer a lot of advice and propose a lot of ideas about how the modern digital environment impacts our lives, both professionally and personally, and how we should…

Masks by Shel Silverstein: She had blue skin, And so did he.

Incorporated ERP integration service Nexova Dynamics.

The first time it happened, I was writing a paper.

After thirteen years I finally graduated from my for-fun studies.

Within a few days of prototyping a game mechanic, Valve’s designers start watching users play.

Morgan Eua does a great job introducing Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten method for personal knowledge management.

Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running inspired Cal Newport’s theory of deep work.

You might have heard of Parkinson’s Law.

Tyler Wetherall writes in the New York Times about how she helped her ex-boyfriend recover from memory loss: To break up with someone is to lose the imagined future you would create together, but you would always share the landscape of your collective pas…

YouTubers MrWhoseTheBoss and MKBHD explain the techniques tech companies use to get a more positive coverage of their products.

Christopher Balding retraces Xi Jinpings rise in the 1980s and the conclusions Xi must have drawn from the collapse of the USSR: Everything the USSR did in the 1980s and 1990 was wrong.

Swedish band ABBA announced a new album to be released in November 2021 and a virtual concert in its own arena.

The video shows the tallest building in the world between the completion of the Singer Building in 1901 and the planned opening of the Dubai Creek Tower in 2022.

Keith Zhai, Lingling Wei and Jing Yang write in the Wall Street Journal about Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma.

In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Dr.

Late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia refutes the notion that the United States are such a free country because of the Bill of Rights: But then I tell them, if you think that the Bill of Rights is what sets us apart, you are crazy.

In the New York Times Magazine, Samanth Subramanian describes how Singapore reclaims land from the ocean.

Matt Blodgett: There’s a whole class of bugs that comes down to the developer followed very specific instructions without understanding the goal.

Sir Jony Ive in the California College of the Arts’ virtual commencement for the graduating class of 2021: Being curious fuels our appetite to learn, and wanting to learn is far more important than being right.

Using a public park as an example user experience consultant Paul Boag explains how to iteratively build products.

Travel+Leisure portraits Anan’s Peter Cuong Franklin and Å By Tung’s Hoang Tung and mentions a couple of other fine dining restaurants.

Emirates Global Aluminium explains how Bauxite is mined and refined.

Paul Simon explains how he wrote Bridge Over Troubled Water and Mrs.

Over at A List Apart Matt E.

China expert Michael Schuman describing his disappointment with where China is headed: Xi’s vision for “a community with a shared future,” as he calls it, is like a neighborhood where a man beats his wife every night, but anyone who tries to help her is “…

Paul Horowitz describes on OSXDaily how to add currency exchange rates to the iOS stock app: All you need to do is search for a ticker symbol containing the two currencies, USDEUR=X, for example.

Director Clint Eastwood’s soundtrack to Changeling.

Every Chinese New Year, Apple commissions a short film.

DER SPIEGEL correspondent Bernhard Zand: Deep in Siberia, at the same latitude as Hamburg, China begins.

Bert Hubert dives into the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 vaccine: The code of the vaccine starts with the following two nucleotides: GA This can be compared very much to every DOS and Windows executable starting with MZ, or UNIX scripts s…

For VnExpress Phan Anh retraced how Vietnam successfully contained the Coronavirus in the first and second wave.

“What’s the danger with Vietnam’s motorcycle helmets?”

Nicholson Baker writing for the New York Magazine: What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe.

Former Evernote CEO Phil Libin shares his simple but elegant model of tracking (and converting) different user types.

When a promoter booked the rock band Van Halen they needed to provide a bowl of M&Ms, having all brown ones sorted out.

John Pasden at Sinosplice shares this cute conversation between a bilingual kid in the US and a Chinese adult: Adult: 你最喜欢跟家人做什么？

James Clear in his 3-2-1 newsletter: If a decision is reversible, the biggest risk is moving too slow.

Donald Trump bragging about his cognitive exam: "Person, woman, man, camera, TV" - Trump 2020 pic.twitter.com/MqmcwPWNv1 — Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) July 23, 2020 In a cartoon version: pic.twitter.com/3kh81WYNTu — The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLinco…

James Currier, Managing Partner at NFX, lists 23 success factors of B2B marketplaces.

Ben Thompson suggests blocking TikTok in the US: This is, without question, a prescription I don’t come to lightly.

Denis Shiryaev upscaled and colorized footage “from the dawn of film taken in Tokyo, Japan from 1913-1915”.

Ars Technica: Today Ars Technica brings you inside the pilot’s seat of an F-15C Eagle fighter jet to break down every button in the cockpit.

Joshua Drummer on Twitter: Wife trying livestreaming on Douyin.