Communication

Deeply Personal Current: Co-op Games Can Save Your Relationship Analysis Paralysis All Posts Next Co-op Games Can Save Your Relationship (Or Ruin It) My wife and I play video games together. ...

It’s 9 AM. You walk into a conference room at Amazon for a major product decision. No one is talking. Everyone is reading. For 20 minutes, the room is completely silent. Executives, directors, engineers—all reading the same six-page document. No PowerPoint deck. No bullet points. No presenter standing at the front of the room. Just reading. Then, after everyone finishes, the discussion begins. Welcome to Amazon’s most powerful cultural practice: the 6-pager. ...

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy stood before the American people and did something remarkable for a politician: he admitted total failure. The Bay of Pigs invasion—a CIA-backed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro—had been an utter disaster. Over 1,400 Cuban exiles were captured or killed. It was a humiliating defeat, just three months into Kennedy’s presidency. Kennedy didn’t deflect. He didn’t blame his predecessor. He didn’t hide behind classified briefings. ...

It’s a hot summer afternoon in Coleman, Texas. A family is relaxing on the porch, playing dominoes and enjoying the fan. The father-in-law says, “Let’s drive to Abilene for dinner.” Nobody really wants to go. It’s 53 miles away in 104°F heat, in a car without air conditioning. But nobody speaks up. The wife says, “Sounds good to me.” The husband, not wanting to disappoint, says, “Sure, I’m in.” The mother-in-law agrees. ...

Two headlines compete for your attention: A: “Multifaceted approaches to ameliorating socioeconomic disparities” B: “Why poor people stay poor” Both convey similar ideas. But you clicked on B, didn’t you? Or at least your brain wanted to. This isn’t about intelligence or laziness. It’s about cognitive fluency—one of the most powerful forces determining which stories spread and which die in obscurity. What Is Cognitive Fluency? Cognitive fluency is the subjective ease with which our brains process information. ...

“We should talk.” Three words. Grammatically simple. Literally: a suggestion to have a conversation. But everyone who hears them knows: Something bad is about to happen. A breakup. A confrontation. A revelation that will hurt. How do we know? Because of subtext—the meaning beneath the words, the real message hiding under the literal one. And it’s arguably the most important skill in dialogue writing. What Is Subtext? Text: What is literally said Subtext: What is actually meant ...

A software engineer tries to explain their work at a dinner party: “So basically we’re implementing a microservices architecture using containerized deployments with an event-driven messaging pattern…” The eyes around the table glaze over. A doctor explains a diagnosis: “You have acute pharyngitis secondary to a streptococcal infection, so we’ll prescribe a beta-lactam antibiotic…” The patient nods, understanding nothing. An experienced teacher wonders why students don’t grasp concepts that seem obvious. ...

Go Concurrency Patterns Series: ← Goroutine Basics | Series Overview | Select Statement → What are Channels? Channels are Go’s primary mechanism for communication between goroutines. They embody Go’s concurrency philosophy: “Don’t communicate by sharing memory; share memory by communicating.” Think of channels as typed pipes that allow goroutines to safely pass data back and forth. Channels provide both communication and synchronization, making them incredibly powerful for building concurrent applications. They’re type-safe, can be buffered or unbuffered, and support directional constraints for better API design. ...