DeSiena

Blogging on Life, Tech, and Urbanism

  • John Mulaney’s bit on Bone Thugs N Harmony is perfect Sunday night watch.

  • Duke basketball’s March Madness weapon isn’t Cooper Flagg; it’s vulnerability (NYT)

    Rausch eventually found his way into the sports world after connecting with Dan Quinn, then the Seattle Seahawks’ defensive coordinator, in 2014. One of Rausch’s teachings that Quinn immediately took to was the importance of specificity: providing players with exact instructions and information, instead of speaking in generalities.

    Rather than telling athletes to “play tough,” for example, how could they play tough? Rausch learned from studying UCLA legend John Wooden, who still holds the NCAA record with 10 national championships. Psychologists who studied Wooden found that offering specific instructions, even ones as simple as grabbing rebounds with both hands, led to performance increases.

    There’s a larger lesson here that we need to dust off in personal and professional relationships in 2025.

  • A post from 2024 I keep coming back to.

    In 2025 the biggest superpower will be the ability to be hopeful and optimistic. Not as a way of avoiding the hard stuff, but in the sense of knowing that change is possible, that nationalism and tribalism can be defeated, and that dystopia is not a preordained fate.

    — Ben Werdmuller (@werd.io) 2024-12-26T20:00:32.265Z

  • Fantastic breakdown of what makes a graph useful

    Trying something new:A 🧵 on a topic I find many students struggle with: "why do their 📊 look more professional than my 📊?" It's *lots* of tiny decisions that aren't the defaults in many libraries, so let's break down 1 simple graph by @jburnmurdoch.bsky.social 🔗 www.ft.com/content/73a1…

    — Evan Peck (@peck.phd) 2024-11-20T17:02:49.174Z

    via Evan Peck

  • CNN: Apple’s failures on AI have more to do with AI than Apple

    This is a good piece from CNN (I can’t believe it either) on my largest critique about AI: Both the developers and the users don’t know how to use it. Because that’s the case, we’re blaming the people rolling it out vs. the actual use cases not being known.