Milan Cvitkovic writes essays on neurotechnology, longevity, conference etiquette, and personal habits, including a well-known list of things people are allowed to do.
Commenters single out 'Things You're Allowed to Do' as something that unlocked a lot for them, and also cite his Neuropixels case study on tool-building in science.
> Why is your individual preference relevant by the way?
Because it deserves to be heard, as do those of people who disagree with me. When people disagree about their preferences of getting things done, that means that there are perhaps 2 approaches that work and that might just be worthy of exploration. You don't need to be Einstein to get things done in either of the approaches, the rest is about figuring out which tradeoffs you'd prefer to make.
Otherwise we'd end up with a generation of people who don't even know what even can be done. That whole "Dropbox is just rsync" is a bit of a meme at this point, but at the same time it might actually introduce someone to rsync and they'd benefit from it. I know that i sure did once i first heard about it. I have actually been introduced to many nice technologies and approaches due to similar discussions online.
I'd like to link this article on a similar note: https://milan.cvitkovic.net/writing/things_youre_allowed_to_do/
If no one chimed in about self hosting, as people do about using Linux, FOSS and many other things, people out there wouldn't even consider those a possibility.
> You are just one of 100s of millions of people who use digital devices.
Maybe in a decade one or two of those millions will have converted to running their own services and a smaller part yet will contribute back to the community in some way: be it help with documentation, software development, testing, discussions etc.
Maybe not a life-changing thing but something that truly unlocked a lot of things: https://milan.cvitkovic.net/writing/things_youre_allowed_to_do/
HN discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25513713
For a semi-related case study of entrepreneurial tool-building in science, I also liked this: http://milan.cvitkovic.net/writing/neuropixels/