What's Up Wednesday #8 - Security, Why you need to learn to say no and the dark side of smart

Security in the digital age

🔒 Stumbling about this post describing how the author got hacked and figged trough several security checklists. Here are the main things I noted:

• SMS is the least save 2FA method (use some other method instead if possible)
• Don’t save your passwords in the browser but use platform-independent, open source password manager like bitwarden and use a different generated password for everything
• Do not login to your browser
• Never answer online security questions truthfully
• Disable browser autofill
• Use a privacy focused browser like Brave or Firefox with extensions to add extra security (extensions I use: CSS Exfil Protection, Privacy Essentials, uBlock, Skip redirect, Self destructing Cookies, Clear URLs
• Use a privacy-focused search engine like DuckDuckGo

Mac-specific: - Disable spotlight suggestions(else everything you time into spotlights gets send to apple and third parties) - On a newer Mac (with t2 security chip) set a firmware password - Deactivate captive portal

If you want to read the whole guides, go ahead and skim the Personal Security Checklist and have a look at the MacOS security guide if you have a Mac.

Great Meetings

👨‍👨‍👦“A great meeting has three key elements: the desired outcome of the meeting is clear ahead of time; the various options are clear, ideally ahead of time; and the roles of the participants are clear at the time. … I think that’s the single largest source of optimization for a company: the makeup of their meetings. To be clear, it’s not about fewer meetings because meetings serve a purpose. Rather, it’s key to improve the meetings, themselves. A lot of my efforts focus on teaching people this framework. Ironically, I find that most people are just challenged by that stuff.” — Spotify Founder and CEO Daniel Ek

Filtering is a superpower. Why you need to learn to say no.

🙅‍♂️The people you don’t hang around. The opportunities you don’t accept. The distractions you don’t allow. The relationships you don’t have. The news you don’t read. The content you don’t consume. The calls you don’t return. The emails you don’t answer. Saying no turns filtering into action.

The dark side of smart

“Human intelligence is incredibly useful but it doesn’t safeguard you against having false beliefs, because that’s not what intelligence is for. Intelligence is associated with coming up with more convincing bullshit and with being a better liar, but not associated with a better ability to recognize one’s own bias. Unfortunately, intelligence has very little influence on your ability to rationally evaluate your own beliefs, or undermine what’s called “myside bias.” The dark side of smart is that whenever we do good works and cooperate, we draw from our manipulative past. The even darker side of smart is that competition doesn’t just select an ability to manipulate but also an adaptive ability to be unpredictable. And one of the best ways to be unpredictable is to not know yourself. So we have evolution to thank for shielding us from complete self-knowledge. As a result, most of our own minds are shrouded in darkness. Perhaps that’s for the best. We might not like what we’d see.” — The Dark Side of Smart