The rich holed up in vacation properties; the middle class marooned at home with restless children; the working class on the front lines of the economy. ๐
Edition #002
The rich holed up in vacation properties; the middle class marooned at home with restless children; the working class on the front lines of the economy.
While World's scientists unite to focus on one goal; to develop a coronavirus vaccine with global scientific collaboration, in cities around the world residents are applauding healthcare workers, first responders, and others keeping us safe when hospitals change shifts, the battle for remote work has also been ongoing. And with the pandemic, things get rough on every front.
Study after study after study demonstrates that remote workers are more productive, satisfied, and engaged than their office-bound colleagues. Recent surveys of 8,000 workers by McKinseyโs Global Institute and 3,500 remote workers by Buffer find that those workers, freed from the constraints of office life, report higher levels of satisfaction and greater productivity.
But there is no work without health, both physically and mentally. So eat mind foods and don't forget your daily 7 min. scientific workout that fulfills the latest mandates for high-intensity effort - all of it based on science. Take a break from the work, go on a virtual tour in the world's top museum and art gallery exhibits that The Guardian gathered for you.
In this weekโs edition:
๐ Remote jobs, work is where home is now.
๐ Tools, making our lives easy.
๐ง Articles, for mind-food.
๐ TED Talks, brilliant people educate and inspire.
๐ค Words, resonated across.
๐ถ Music, playing on the loop.
๐ฐ What else, news all around our planet.
Remote jobs
Automattic is looking for Senior Product Designer
GitLab is looking for Director of UX Research or Senior Manager
Mobalytics is looking for Video Editor
Zapier is looking for Customer Support
Clubhouse is looking for Product Manager
Signal is looking for Product Designer
Toggl is looking for Editorial and Social Media Marketer
InVision is looking for Principal Product Manager
Memberstack is looking for Frontend Engineer
Scopic is looking for UX/UI Graphic Designer
๐ก Notion Tip: Stay on top of job applications with this template. (Also great for tracking internship apps!) If you donโt have an account, sign up here and get $10 in credits to get started.
Tools
The first 5 tools listed made by fellow makers from Indie Hackers. โค๏ธ
๐ฌ Storycreator
Create engaging videos quickly.
Storycreator makes it easy for you to get your message across. Quickly create short form commercials that make your brand stand out. More attention means more revenue. Save time by having high quality content available at all times. Choose premium HD videos and photos from Unsplash and Pexels.
๐ Charts Factory
Create simple charts super fast and for free.
Quickly create charts and add them to your presentation as a picture. Select the theme you want and highlight the data in your presentation.
โ๏ธ Divjoy
The react codebase generator.
Developers who want to move fast. Divjoy sets you up with an entire React codebase and UI in minutes. You save weeks of development time and can get right to work on the features that make your web app unique. You get a landing page, contact form, pricing, faq, authentication, forgot password flow, routing, and more. Divjoy saves you weeks of development time.
๐ค Lakebed.io
Data lakes made easy.
The Lakebed app combines your datafrom many sources into a central hub (data lake). Use it for dashboards, business intelligence, data-driven apps, and more.
๐ Open Startup List
Get some insights on incredible startups.
Open Startup List promotions help you grow your audience by reaching thousands of entrepreneurs around the world.
๐น Whereby
Freedom to work from anywhere.
Enjoy the freedom to live and work where you thrive with easy video meetings from Whereby. Formerly appear.in, with its new brand Whereby is a flexible tool providing you with video meetings in the browser โ no downloads & no logins for guests. And of course, better privacy.
๐ฑ Make yourself great again
Your life is just a combination of the choices you make. Stop making excuses and make yourself great again. As you live life, there will always be distractions and opportunities. By focusing on the latter, you develop good habits and progress. Use this tool to visualize progress.
๐ฉโ๐ซ Lessonly
Better remote work.
Lessonly is business training software that enables teams to move fast, stay aligned, and Do Better Workโin or out of the office. In times of change and uncertainty, people need clarity, training, and enablement more than ever. Lessonly makes it easy to create lessons and practice scenarios in minutes. Teams spin up entire training programs in just a couple days, not weeks or months.
๐ Focusmate
Distraction-free productivity. Stop procrastinating, start producing!
Focusmate virtual coworking helps you get things done. Stop relying on will power, Focusmate helps you reach a "flow" state on-demand, so you can enjoy long stretches of productivity any time you want. Win the fight against addictive social media and focus-killing technologies. Declaring your intentions to an accountability partner helps you rise above life's daily messes and focus on long-term goals. According to internal user surveys, 93% of users say virtual coworking with a Focusmate accountability partner significantly improves their productivity.
๐ฅ React-Ultimate-Resume
Share your experiences with an open-source resume built with React and JSON Resume. A modern and open-source resume for developers to share their know-how and keep your personal data in control.
Articles
Class and COVID: How the less affluent face double risks
Brookings Institution
The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a harsh light on inequality. People living paycheck to paycheck in service sector jobs are in a very different position to those working in salaried jobs they can do from home. Stark gaps in wealth, health and work have gone from being chronic problems to acute ones. Other inequalities have become even more consequential in a time of social distancing โ such as access to a fast internet connection.
How to practice social distancing
The New Yorker
The idea is to โflatten the curve,โ or slow the spread of the virus, decreasing the number of people who get sick at one time and the risk of overwhelming our medical system. In practice, social distancing mostly means avoiding close contact with people who do not live with you, and also public spaces, where surfaces may be contaminated. But, no matter how often we have been given such advice, it can be hard to totally change our habits, and the specific advice about how to behave can be confusing and overwhelming.
How to be great? Just be good, repeatably
Steph | Smith
Over the years, weโve all encountered our fair share of successes and failures. As Iโve acquired more of both under my name, Iโve started to contemplate which experiences were truly โgreatโ and why.
Interestingly enough, I realized that it was not the sporadic highs that were exceptional, but instead the long hauls; the sequences of events that seemed minimal at each juncture but compounded into major gains. This led me to think further about whatย greatnessย truly means. Iโve come to learn that itโs not about overnight successes or flashes of excellence, but periods of repeatable habits.
We have an epidemic of bad posture
levels.io
What happens if you Google โcoworking spaceโ? You see people working hard.
I see lots of necks, backs, arms, wrist, and hands that will need physical therapy in the next decade. So how do we fix this?
Signaling as a Service
Julian Digital
Most of our everyday actions can be traced back to some form of signaling or status seeking. Our brains deliberately hide this fact from us and others (self deception)
So we think and say that we do something for a specific reason, but in reality, thereโs a hidden, selfish motive: to show off and increase our social status.
You may have heard about a similar concept before calledย conspicuous consumption. Conspicuous consumption describes the practice of purchasing luxury goods (or services) for the sake of signaling the buyerโs wealth in order to attain or maintain a certain social status.
A classic example of this would be a luxury watch: A Rolex isnโt better at telling the time than a cheap Casio โ but a Rolex signals something about its ownerโs economic power and thus their social standing.
This is not a new theory, but Simler and Hanson argue that a lot more human behavior can be explained by signaling.
Coronavirus and rent: Landlords and tenants play chicken before April 1
Slate
In a pandemic, the rent eats last.
That seems to be the desperate consensus as a growing number of residential tenants, small businesses, and national chains, in a game of chicken with nervous landlords, prepares to withhold rent for the month of April.
More than 3 million Americansย filed for unemployment benefits last week, five times as many claims as the previous weekly record set in October 1982. Even so, that statistic understates how much money people arenโt making, because it doesnโt count undocumented workers, gig economy or freelance workers, or people who have been laid off but havenโt filed. Finally, all those numbers are from last weekโbefore shelter-in-place orders had been issued in New York, California, and Illinois.
Becoming a magician
Autotranslucence
The way to extraordinary growth and changes often involves a fundamental ontological or โlensโ shift in how you see the world. Magicians are wearing not just better, but fundamentally differently shaped lenses to the rest of us. And regardless of your skills and experience, it is likely that you are a magician to someone else. As someone who has a well-defined felt sense of how various foods affects their body, and can cook simple, healthy food well, I can seem like a magician to someone lacking a similar mental framework whoย ricochets between spartan self-denial and uncontrollable junk binges.
Meeting magicians is the first step to becoming one โ when you are attempting to learn implicit knowledge that by definitionย you donโt understand, it is important to have a bunch of examples in front of you to feed your brainโs pattern-recognition systems. This will start to change your worldview without the controlling โyouโ explicitly approving or denying every new belief or framework.
Work was the world for many. Now itโs a very small place
National Geographic
A global pandemic is teaching us that the intersection between geography and culture weโre most accustomed to is our office.
โMarch also ushered in a new crisis, one in which our world became small beyond reckoning. How small? Small enough to pace its perimeters. Its horizon had become a wall; its sky, a ceiling; its oceans, a kitchen sink and a shower stall. The Sherman brothersโ lyricsโโThereโs so much that we share/that itโs time weโre aware/itโs a small world after allโโnow took on somber overtones as we solemnly closed our doors and disappeared into an indefinite period of self-sequestration.
Self-education: how to leverage the end of credentialism
Ness Labs
The average lifespan of a technical skill is roughly 18 months. The world is moving fast. Anything you learn today may become obsolete tomorrow. It may feel discouragingโwhy bother acquiring a new skill if it will soon be useless?โbut it shouldnโt be. The fact is it has never been easier to teach yourself anything. In a world where knowledge is power, self-education can, in fact, become your superpower. How can you channel the incredible breadth of information available to you to teach yourself anything?
What is your โAverage Speedโ in your life, your health, and your work?
James Clear
So often we waste our time and energy thinking that we need a monumental effort to achieve anything significant. We tell ourselves that we need to get amped up on motivation and desire. We think that we need to work harder than everyone else.
But when you look at people who are really making progress, you see something different. Nathan wrote 1,000 words per day, every day. And nine months later? Three books are finished. At no point did he necessarily workย harderย than everyone else. There's nothing sexy or shocking about writing 2 or 3 pages per day. Nathan was simply more consistent than everyone else and, as a result, his average speed for those 253 days was much higher than most people.
Of course, the natural question that follows from all of this is,ย โHow do I increase my average speed?โ Letโs talk about that now.
TED talks
How bumble bees inspired a network of tiny museums | Amanda Schochet
How volumetric video brings a new dimension to filmmaking | Diego Prilusky
This country isn't just carbon neutral โ it's carbon negative | Tshering Tobgay
Cosmic creativity โ how art evolves consciousness | Alex Grey
Why good leaders make you feel safe | Simon Sinek
Words
And once the storm is over
You wonโt remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive.
You wonโt even be sure, in fact, that the storm is over.
But one thing is certain.
When you come out of the storm, You wonโt be the same person who walked in.
Thatโs what this storm is all about.
โ from Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.
Music
Sky Girl is a mysteriously unshakeable companion, a deeply melancholic and sentimental journey through folk-pop, new wave and art music micro presses that span 1961-1991. A seemingly disparate suite of selections of forgotten fables by more or less neverknowns, Sky Girl forms a beautifully coherent and utterly sublime whole deftly compiled by French collectors DJ Sundae and Julien Dechery.
From Scott Seskind's adolescent musical road movie to Karen Marks' icy Oz-wave, the charming DIY storytelling of Italian-American go-getter Joe Tossini and the ethereal slow dance themes of Parisian artists Nini Raviolette and Hugo Weris, Sky Girl resonates on a wide spectrum historically, geographically and stylistically. It unites in a singular, longing, almost intangible ambiance.
If the names sound wholly unfamiliar that doesn't matter, the nature of the compositions swiftly nurtures an intimacy with these lonely, poignant, openhearted wanderers. Most were available in a very limited capacity at the time of their release, some were never really released at all - Gary Davenport declined to release Sarra after he split with the girl for whom the track is named - years later a friend convinced Davenport to allow him to put 100 copies online to sell and DJ Sundae was quick enough to snare one. Beyond their scarcity, these tracks are bound together by a certain raw beauty that's achievable when music is made and no one is listening.
Sky Girl comprises of fifteen officially licensed songs, a two year international scavenger hunt through long-folded home label operations, the depths of internet forums and traceless acetates. Both compilers are well trained record sleuths - DJ Sundae's labels Hollie and Idle Press have reissued Arthur Russell affiliate Nirosta Steel and DIY relic Pitch, while Julien Dechery previously compiled 'Fire Star', a retrospective on Tamil film composer Ilaiyaraaja, for Bombay Connection.
Released by Noise In My Head offshoot Efficient Space, Sky Girl is enriched with artwork from Perks and Mini mutant Misha Hollenbach and appropriately elegant sleeve notes courtesy of Ivan Smagghe.
Release date: 8 July 2016
What else
Dutch museum says van Gogh painting stolen in an overnight raid.
Zoomย CEO Eric Yuan announced the company would freeze feature development and focus on trust, safety, and privacy features for the next 90 days. Zoom has been having trust, safety, and privacy issues.ย
Googleย launched a set of mobility reports that show peopleโs movements during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tesla offers ventilators free of cost to hospitals, Musk says.
Samsung reported the first coronavirus infection at its chip factory.
WeWork sells of social network Meetup to AlleyCorp and other investors.
NASA reveals what the final X-57 all-electric X-plane will look like.
FDA approved a coronavirus test made by Abbott Labs. It takes as little as five minutes to deliver positive results and could be coming to urgent care centers this week.
Walmart said itโs seen a boom in sales for tops but not for bottoms as our new collective work dress code is strictly waist-up.
The CoVent-19 Challenge calls on companies to help create "rapidly deployable, minimum viable" mechanical ventilators.
Microsoft bought Affirmed Networks, a virtualized cloud networking company, for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition will help Microsoft boost its 5G offerings.
Coinbaseโs Commerce platform has processed $200 million in cryptocurrency payments.
D-Wave gives anyone working on responses to the COVID-19 free cloud access to its quantum computers. The Vancouver-area company said it's a response to the Canadian government's call on the private sector to help during the coronavirus pandemic.
Huawei open-sourced MindSpore, an AI app development framework rival to Google's TensorFlow and Facebook's PyTorch. The Chinese tech giant is also preparing for a bigger push into self-driving.
Fitbit a unit of Google, unveiled a $150 fitness tracker with GPS, support for contactless payments, and Spotify compatibility.
So what happens now?
In this crazy time, there are still amazing tales of purpose and dedication, exploration that leads to discovery and understanding, and a natural world that often astounds us. Be patient for the storm to pass, stay home and sane.
Cover illustration byย Ray Dak Lam
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