TikTok Isn't a Life Coach Helping You Make Decisions

“I saw it on TikTok,” she told me.

I was making small talk with a young girl at a hospital. She wanted to join the military. I asked her why, in a curious way. “It keeps appearing on my TikTok.”

A couple of days ago, she watched one short of another young girl leading a female squad running around a military base. She kept seeing the same videos since then. “Of course, the more videos you watch…they will keep popping up,” I said.

If you stop your endless scrolling to watch a short, the algorithm will flood you with more. “Hey, she just watched the whole short, we’d be better off showing her similar content. She seems to like that type of content.” That’s what TikTok would think. Its job is to exploit our attention and keep us in the same echo chamber.

Don’t make a decision just because TikTok keeps showing you the same videos. That’s not a sign from the Universe. That’s not guidance either. It’s manipulation.

Friday Links: Scams, scaling, and code reviewing

Hey there.

Here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week:

#1. Typing isn’t the bottleneck (2min). With AI in the mix, it seems we’re optimizing the wrong variable.

#2. Here’s someone who played the game of a scam job interview (20min) and lived to tell about it.

#3. Not all side projects have to scale (3min) or become the next rising Silicon Valley startup. And that’s fine.

#4. If you’re looking for alternatives to code reviews on GitHub, here’s how code reviews can be better (6min).

And in case you missed it, I wrote on my blog about why now is the best time to learn coding (2min) and how to navigate to the root folder of a git repo (1min).

(Bzzz…Radio voice) This email was brought to you by… Check my C# Fundamentals Bundle, two easy-to-follow video courses and a practical ebook—now at a 20% discount. With the essential tools every new coder needs to start writing clean and professional-grade C# code.

See you next time,

Cesar

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Six Takeaways from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

#1. A book can be built from posts and scattered ideas. I’ve learned that while listening to Yuval Noah Harari discuss the book in a podcast interview. If he can do it, so can we.

#2. “In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.” I loved that opening line.

#3. Homo Sapiens thrived as a species because we learned to collaborate. And to collaborate, we created stories. For example, 1,000 years ago, a soccer World Cup would have been impossible. Not because we didn’t have planes, but because we lived in isolated, rival empires and tribes with little in common.

#4. The next device to hack is the brain. Corporations already hack our minds using the data they collect about us. Now imagine the impact of biometric data: Instagram knowing when your pupils dilate and your heart rate changes when dumb scrolling. Most likely, algorithms will make the most important decisions for us.

#5. We need to be more connected to our senses and emotions. We no longer taste the seeds or fruits we once gathered to check for poisons. The old saying “Know Thyself” will be as relevant as it was 2,000 years ago.

#6. The most important skill to learn is meta-learning. The ability to learn how to learn. We’ll have to reinvent ourselves multiple times to adapt. We can’t simply expect to be factory workers for life.

TIL: How to Navigate to the Root Folder of a Git Repo

Recently I found myself cding to find the folder with a .sln file. You know to run dotnet commands.

Being a lazy coder, I thought of a better solution with a Bash script. But it turned out to be way easier with a Git command,

$ cd `git rev-parse --show-toplevel`

That would take you to the root folder of a git repo. And since my solution file is at the root, bingo! Kudos to this SO answer.

And the next lazy step was to create an alias,

alias groot='cd "$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)"'

Et voilà!

Why I Work from Home (It's Not the Pajamas)

Today life threw me a curve ball and forced me out of my home office.

It was rush hour and I was still across town. Errands took me so long that I didn’t make it home before 5:00PM.

I waited for 15 minutes next to ~100 people at a bus stop. After watching the time, I asked the lady in front of me, “Is it like this every day or just today?” “Yes! Every day! It’s rush hour,” she said.

I got so desperate that I walked for 10 minutes to the closest bus terminal. Every stop had at least a dozen people waiting for the same bus. At the bus terminal, I waited for ~5 minutes for the right bus.

Forty minutes later, I reached the closest station to home. It felt like a trip to the next city. Then another 5 minutes in line charging my card for tomorrow. And finally, another 10 minutes walking home.

At home, I’d have been getting ready to work out or simply reading a book. And I still don’t get why people ask me if I like to work from home.