As an interesting coincidence, after finishing a privacy training I watched this movie.
“I give the fight up: let there be an end, a privacy, an obscure nook for me. I want to be forgotten even by God.” – Robert Browning
May 6, 2018
August 17, 2016
Dreamers
“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.” – Lawrence of Arabia
“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” – Edgar Allan Poe
So how about those who act on their dreams from the night with open eyes in the day?
🙂
July 16, 2016
The art of war
In the standard of Chinese classics, the art of war is crisp, even with repeating the core ideas.
During my first reading as a kid, I focused mainly on the languages.
After my second reading, the core ideas become very clear, even with my now rusty Chinese.
I can probably summarize the book in just a few sentences. But it is still better to read the original Chinese; no translation can do justice to the beautiful writing, and the repetition helps hammer the messages home.
I examined several English versions, all contain very obvious mistakes.
The best version I have seen so far is 孫子兵法論正, 朔雪寒.
February 23, 2015
Don’t join them if you can beat them
I guess this is the opposite of “if you can’t beat them, join them”.
🙂
July 19, 2014
Revelation for this day
“A man is measured by the size of things that anger him.” – Geof Greenleaf
一個人的格局是由他在乎事情的大小來衡量
Thank you!
July 4, 2014
Flash boys
The finance and tech industries have been the whipping boys for American inequality. Lie in their junction are the algorithm traders.
A specific form of algorithm trading, with high frequency as depicted in this book, is to arbitrage the time differentials between signals traveling through different electronic routes.
For example, say you want to buy or sell a block of stocks too large for any single exchange to fulfill. Your order is then broken down into smaller blocks, each routed to a different exchange. A high frequency trader, by placing small orders for all stocks in all exchanges all the time, like a fisherman placing baits, can detect your order arriving in the first exchange, and quickly insert itself as the counter party of all your other orders arriving later in other exchanges. This allows the trader to make a small amount profit multiplied by a very large number of trades.
In order to pull this off, a high frequency trader has to be on the frontier of high performance computing.
This is a highly entertaining read like many of Michael Lewis’ previous books. But the distinction is not all that clear between the narrated protagonists and antagonists, who are all wealthy financiers.
Instead, the most intriguing character I found in the book is Sergey Aleynikov, a former Goldman coder whose prosecution triggered the start of the book, in which he was quoted:
If the incarceration experience doesn’t break your spirit, it changes you in a way that you lose many fears.
You begin to realize that your life is not ruled by your ego and ambition and that it can end any day at any time. So why worry?
January 9, 2014
Tolerate only A players
Quote from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs:
You have to be ruthless if you want to build a team of A players. “It’s too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players,” he recalled. “The Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can’t indulge B players.”
October 23, 2012
Iron curtain
This book should be a required reading for dictators all over the world.
Quote from the Economist review:
Human beings, as Ms Applebaum rousingly concludes, do not acquire “totalitarian personalities” with ease. Even when they seem bewitched by the cult of the leader or of the party, appearances can deceive, she writes. When it seems as if they buy into the most absurd propaganda—marching in parades, chanting slogans, singing that the party is always right—the spell can suddenly, unexpectedly, dramatically be broken.
August 13, 2012
Rules
“Rules are mostly made to be broken and are too often for the lazy to hide behind” – Douglas MacArthur
Add-on #1: just don’t get caught. 🙂
Add-on #2: if you do, pretend you don’t know the rules. 🙂
It takes courage to break rules, intelligence to know which rules to break and how, and imagination to get away with it.
This is why I consider breaking rules as both a good training and testing.