Weekend Reading: Remote Work, Autonomous Behaviors, and AirPods 2

March 23, 2019 • #

👨🏽‍💻 Why Naval Ravikant Thinks Remote Work is the Future

Anyone that works in a successful company with a large distributed staff can attest to remote-first being the future for knowledge work organizations. The more we expand our remote team at our company, the better we all get at realizing all of its benefits. It seems like an inevitability to me that there’ll be a tipping point where all new tech companies begin as remote-centric groups. Naval, the founder of AngelList (which is a key player in recruiting and hiring infrastructure for startups):

“We’re going to see an era of everyone employing remote tech workers, and it’s not too far away. In fact, now’s the time to prepare for it. But I think in the meantime, the companies that are going to do the best job at it are the ones that are remote companies or that have divisions internally that are remote. It’s going to be done through lengthy trials. It’s going to be done through new forms of evaluating whether someone can work remotely effectively.”

đźš™ Twelve Concepts in Autonomous Mobility

Jan Chipchase from Studio D posted these fun, creative, realistic, and sometimes scary speculations on what sorts of behavioral side effects could play out with the proliferation of autonomous vehicles. See also the follow on 15 more concepts.

The practice of what we currently call parking will obviously change when your vehicle is able to park and drive itself. Think of your vehicle autonomously cruising the neighbourhood to be washed, pick-up groceries and recharge its batteries whilst you’re off having lunch. What is the optimal elasticity of your autonomous vehicle to you? What are the kinds of neighbhourhoods it likes to drive around in when you’re not using it? This is an especially pertinent question, when a vehicle is considered a sensing platform — the technology to autonomously negotiate the city can collect rich data for other uses.

🎧 Apple Releasing New AirPods

While the batch of feature enhancements isn’t mind-blowing, I’m glad to see Apple continuing to evolve these. AirPods are the best product they’ve released since the iPhone. I use mine for hours every single day — far more than I ever used any previous headphones. I recently got one of these Qi wireless chargers for my office, so I’ll be glad to have the inductive charging for the AirPods, too. Of course the extra battery life will be a huge plus.