I’ve added a page about my public appearances throughout the years. I still have to figure out how to make it load faster with all those pesky videos coming from youtube!

Has Xi Jinping lost control of the markets?

What’s happening in China is really interesting. If we trust their official figures and estimates, the economy was driven by 3 things:

1. Real estate (who’s crashing hard)
2. Consumer spending (who’s in decline, as their population is not growing and aging)
3. Exports (who are threatened by India and South East Asia)

As 1. is crashing, consumers—who put most of their savings in, guess what, real estate—are more conscious about spending, hurting another good 30% of their economy.

So, 2/3 of their economy is hurting and will hurt more badly in 2024.

The Chinese’s and Hong Kong’s markets are also spooked, having shed USD 1.5 TRN in January alone.

It’s going to be an interesting 2024.

Today, I read Terence Eden’s article about the abundance of Microsoft’s safelinks systems. One example he gives is

https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcfa.nhs.uk%2Fabout-nhscfa%2Fcorporate-publications%2FSIA-23%2FSIA-2023-foreword&data=05%7C01%7CAnnualReport%40dhsc.gov.uk%7C26af6f102198492b3bcd08dbca6a3cc3%7C61278c3091a84c318c1fef4de8973a1c%7C1%7C0%7C638326329851162850%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=WK%2FuqOZJ0ixZpvJIyJiCWRt5hxTwBfcwbONaUxJViBw%3D&reserved=0

As my work email is hosted by Microsoft, I’m bugged to no end by this system, which doesn’t make it easy to extract the URL in a readable format (read the blog if you want to know more shortcomings of the system).

For a couple of years, I have a Typinator snippet that decodes the URL, so that by typing ;dec, the following script is triggered

{/JavaScript
let URI = "{clip}".split("=", 2)[1].replace("&data", "")
let encURI = decodeURIComponent(URI)

encURI
}

Converting the above link to

https://cfa.nhs.uk/about-nhscfa/corporate-publications/SIA-23/SIA-2023-foreword

The script is not perfect, but, since defining it, Typinator analytics tell me I’ve used it some hundred times and I can’t recall when it didn’t just work.

I often listen to Apple Music in the background and sometimes I casually listen to a song I want to add to my favorites.

Instead of jumping around, I created a small AppleScript script (that can be executed through Launchbar or Keyboard Maestro).

I report it here for posterity!

tell application "Music"
	set favorited of current track to true
end tell

American universities face a reckoning over academic freedom

Too often universities reflexively try to mollify students rather than have them grapple with ideas they find unsettling, says Edward Hall, a philosophy professor at Harvard. Administrators see an angry or upset student in their office and instantly try to make them feel better.

A failure of good parenting for those who grew up in the wave of the 60s and 70s?

Lately, I’ve been playing around with helix, a relatively new modal editor.

One of the things I was missing was an LSP for Grammarly (the only reason I can put the commas where they belong).

After struggling a bit with the configuration, I’ve finally found what works

[[language]]
name = "markdown"
auto-format = false
file-types = [ "markdown", "md", "mdown", "txt" ]
language-servers = [ "grammarly" ]

[language-server.grammarly]
command = "grammarly-languageserver"
args = ["--stdio"]
config = { clientId = "client_BaDkMgx4X19X9UxxYRCXZo"}

Note that:

• You need to install the Grammarly language server before.
• clientId is not a secret and is the same for all installations.

By contrast the illiberal left put their own power at the centre of things, because they are sure real progress is possible only after they have first seen to it that racial, sexual and other hierarchies are dismantled.

I’ve missed this article when it came out. What an astute analysis.

I’ve been bitten by this bug since getting a new Apple Watch.

Unfortunately, I had to revert to resetting all my location and privacy data on my iPhone, meaning I’m now continuously prompted by iOS if I give permission to all my apps for location, camera, bluetooth, and what not.

I wished I had waited, though. watchOS 10.1 fixes this bug.

While reading Scaling People, specifically this passage:

“The conversation then turned to how the person might mitigate these patterns in future meetings, which was the conversation we needed to have so they could thrive at work.”

I thought how—at least in the environment around me—people seem much more focused on improving at their job instead of improving at home—what kind of partner and parent they are.

Why is that? The most obvious answer, to me, is that improving at work has effects you can literally bank on: being promoted and getting a raise.

Improving at home has benefits as well, but they’re mostly long-term and could be seen as boring: you get stable and fulfilling relationship for the long run, things you will cherish the most when you’re old rather than cherish them now. Although they don’t hurt in the present, their absence can be mitigated by other things: it doesn’t go well with your partner, you can get another while you’re young. Your son doesn’t speak to you, you can speak to your colleagues, who share a silent offspring with you.

But when you’re old, you don’t get a new partner that easily. You’ll hardly get someone to speak to if your children park you in a hospice.

How can we put more emphasis into improving our long-term outlook of a fulfilling life?

Very happy to share that I’ve passed the Professional Communication: Business Writing and Storytelling course by The Economist, obtaining a final grade of 87%.

What are the 7 key takeaways that fit in a short post?

1. Think about the briefing: what’s the main message, who’s the audience, what’s the medium
2. Then think about the key points you want to make to get your message across
3. Order your key points on a map to form a journey. Is the path from one point to the next logical? Are there logical gaps?
4. Write the intro — a catchy sentence or two that invites the reader to take the journey — and the executive summary — ideally covering most key points
5. Then put some evidence or arguments beside each point
6. At this moment, you should have a solid enough structure and text that you can produce a first draft
7. Once the draft is ready, polish, polish, polish.
8. [Bonus] Grammarly is an excellent tool for non-native English speakers. For example, I use commas the Italian way — it just sounds right to me — and apparently, some actual rules dictate how to use them in English.

You can enroll on their site.