196. New Monitor

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The cover photo shows my new Dell U2723QE monitor in my study. A simple setup with a great result—happiness levels have definitely increased.

Record the down-to-earth trending technologies seen every week, and publish them here after screening. If you find it good, you can follow this weekly to get update notifications.

Trending Tools

About the monitor in the cover photo

I was previously developing on just my laptop, but I added a monitor and a screen bar last weekend. It’s fantastic! Having everything over a single USB-C cable for both charging and display is very convenient. A good monitor can truly boost a programmer’s happiness.

For monitor selection: since I mostly only use it at home during weekends or early mornings, I didn’t go for an Apple Studio Display (though I highly recommend it if you work from home). I chose the Dell U2723QE for its 4K 27-inch display, slim bezels, and cost-effectiveness. The experience is excellent—clean and sharp. LG’s monitors are also worth a look.

For accessories: I initially wanted a monitor arm and considered the AOC AM400P in Space Gray, but my desk has a sloped edge and couldn’t accommodate it, so I had to return it. I ended up using a 3cm thick book as a base, which worked perfectly for the height.

Second accessory: A Xiaomi A6 USB-C USB4 braided cable. Supporting 40Gbps and 8K 60Hz video, it’s more refined and easier to hide than the original Dell cable.

Third accessory (a game-changer): A screen bar. It’s one of those things you don’t think you need until you have it. I got the Xiaomi 1S, which comes with a sleek wireless dial. It eliminates screen reflection and lights up the keyboard—perfect for immersive coding. If you have the budget, BenQ’s is 5x more expensive but even better.

Frame0: A minimalist free product sketching tool
https://frame0.app/
I highly recommend engineers learn product sketching to quickly visualize ideas. I used to use Excalidraw, but Frame0 is more specialized and free. Give it a try.

APPLORE: Discover and explore app icons
https://app.uiboy.com/
A fellow designer, Viggo, used Cursor to build APPLORE. It’s great for searching for app icon images or exploring new apps by release date. Check it out.

Keyviz: Open-source real-time key/mouse input visualizer
https://mularahul.github.io/keyviz/
If you need to show your keystrokes during a demo, try Keyviz. It’s open-source and cross-platform. Mac users can also try KeyCastr.

Technical Learning

State of AI Report - 2024
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1GmZmoWOa2O92BPrncRcTKa15xvQGhq7g4I4hJSNlC0M/edit#slide=id.g309a25a756d_0_85
The latest State of AI Report (October) is a must-read. Bookmark it for later.

Just Looking Around

“Don’t Trust Your Gut” - Reading Notes

I recently finished “Don’t Trust Your Gut”. It is simple and easy to read, you can basically finish it in an afternoon. It uses data to talk through things you may run into in life, dating and marriage, parenting, wealth, starting a business, luck, appearance, happiness and misery, and I want to share a lot of the interesting points in it with you.

Dating & Relationships

1. If someone is very happy while single, they will also be very happy once they are in a relationship.
2. In the dating market, the people everyone competes for do not necessarily make for a happy relationship. Predicting whether a relationship will be happy is extremely hard.
3. The most important traits to look for in a partner are their personality: life satisfaction, secure attachment, conscientiousness and a growth mindset.
4. Appearance affects how attractive someone is, and the effect is very significant. Height plays an important role in men attracting women, and racial discrimination in dating is very obvious.
5. Income affects how someone does in the dating market, and the effect is largest for men.
6. A cool profession attracts women more than one that pays more but is dull.
7. The suggestion for people dating is to focus their search more on those who are not highly competitive on the market, and on those with strong mental resilience.

Parenting

1. Parents have a surprisingly small effect on a child’s overall development (as long as they do no harm and raise them normally). In raising children, you may want to pay more attention to the people your child is around, which is the key factor in their future.
2. The share of applicants who get college scholarships varies hugely between sports, so you can choose a sport with fewer applicants where the competition is less fierce.
3. Some athletic abilities depend heavily on genes, basketball for example, but genes matter less than half as much in baseball and football as in basketball, and horse riding and diving are barely affected by genes.

Wealth

1. Cases of reaching financial freedom on a salary are very rare. The rich generally own their own businesses.
2. How easy it is to get rich varies hugely between industries, and the rich generally own profitable businesses.
3. Keeping a business profitable matters, so avoid price competition. By the zero-profit theorem, price competition goes on until profit reaches zero. Some industries in which it is nearly impossible to get rich: building equipment contractors, residential construction, auto repair and maintenance, real estate sales and leasing services, construction engineering and related services, interior design contractors, personal care services and gas stations.
4. The fields really suited to starting a business are usually ones where big companies allow many regional monopolies to exist. The six industries that make people rich are real estate, investing, car dealerships, independent creative work, market research and other wholesale distribution.
5. If you want to get rich, you can use what the data shows to work through the three questions every career has to ask: 1. Do I own my own business? 2. Can my business avoid ruthless price competition? 3. Can my business’s industry avoid being monopolized by global giants?

Entrepreneurship

1. Starting a business is not an advantage of the young. The average age of founders of American companies is 41.9, and a 60-year-old founder is about three times as likely to build a profitable company as a 30-year-old founder.
2. Outsiders do not have the advantage in starting businesses. In business, deep domain knowledge is not a curse and does not stop entrepreneurs from innovating. On the contrary, being a good insider is a bigger advantage for starting a business.
3. Founders are most likely to succeed when their income before starting the company was in the top 0.1% of their industry.
4. Be patient on the road to success. Spend years learning all the knowledge and details of an industry, prove your worth by becoming one of its best-paid employees, then start a business and eventually build real wealth. You can spend years consolidating expertise and building a network while succeeding in one industry, then start your own business in middle age.

Luck

1. Sam Altman: startup success = idea x product x execution x team x luck, where luck is a random number between 0 and 10,000.
2. Collins and Hansen: successful companies are not luckier than others, they are just better at making use of the luck they get, the kind of luck any company can run into.
3. In fields where it is hard to judge how well someone performs, two effects stand out. The Mona Lisa effect: unpredictable events have a big impact on success (it had hung there for 114 years, no different from the other paintings, until in 1911 it was stolen by a rather foolish thief and the coverage everywhere brought it huge attention). The da Vinci effect: one success brings an artist more successes, and people are willing to pay more for work by artists who are already famous.
4. The Springsteen rule: travel around and go looking for your luck. The book gives the example of painters showing their work in galleries all over the world and not missing a single chance.
5. The Picasso rule: prolific artists have a better chance of getting lucky. You can apply this rule in dating and job hunting too, by trying many times.

Happiness

1. There is a strong link between someone’s appearance and other people’s impressions of them. Small differences in lighting and smile, and bigger changes such as a beard, hairstyle or glasses, have a big effect on how attractive people find you. You can use AI to generate yourself in several styles and quickly do market research and statistical analysis to assess your look.
2. The peak-end rule: when judging whether a past experience was good or bad, we go not by the process but by the peak (how good the good parts were, how bad the bad parts were) and by how it felt at the end (good or bad).
3. One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to avoid reflexively refusing to do things that look like they take a lot of energy.
4. Everything is fine, but nobody is happy, money has very little effect on happiness. A key way our minds limit our pursuit of happiness: we cannot focus on the present, and people often sink into low moods they cannot pull themselves out of.
5. Ways to ease the pain of work: listen to music, work from home, work with friends.
6. People are happiest when they are with the people they chose, such as partners and friends. Also, being alone is always happier than interacting with weak ties.
7. Social media may make us unhappy. Interacting on social media is one of the leisure activities that produces the least happiness.
8. Losses bring fans far more pain than wins bring joy, so the suggestion is to watch more games of teams you are not a die-hard fan of.
9. If you want to be happy, go out into nature and look for the beautiful scenery around you. Bright sunshine and perfect weather really can change our mood, but do not overstate the importance of weather. Weather alone cannot make you happy, you still need to do the things that make you happy with the people who make you happy.
10. Activities ranked by happiness: sex, theater, dance and concerts, exhibitions, museums and libraries, sports and exercise, gardening, singing and performing, chatting and socializing, bird-watching and nature, walking and hiking, hunting and fishing, drinking alcohol, hobbies, arts and crafts, meditation and religious activities, matches and sporting events, looking after or playing with children, looking after or playing with pets, listening to music, playing games, shopping and errands, gambling, watching TV, playing computer games, eating and snacking, cooking and preparing food, drinking tea or coffee, reading, listening to talks and podcasts.
11. Activities ranked least happy: being sick in bed, working or studying, caring for and helping adults, waiting or queuing, admin, finance and management, meetings and classes, traveling and commuting, doing housework.

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