I think “communication skills” should really be thought of as two separate sets of skills.

There are the “hard” communication skills, which are easily visible and which I’m going to call “expository communication skills”. These are things like being articulate, being able to write coherently, being good at public speaking, etc.

Then there are the “soft” communication skills, which I’m going to call “collaboration skills”, which are all about having the ability to understand and influence and compromise and work with other people. These are largely invisible.

While the terms “distributed systems” and “distributed computing” are often used interchangeably, for my purposes, I’ve found it useful to draw a distinction. Distributed systems research is often focused on how to get multiple components of a system to act together in a reliable way, whereas distributed computing research is focused on how to use multi-component systems to solve a problem by breaking it down into different parts. While distributed systems is more of an engineering discipline focused on systems architecture, distributed computing is more of a mathematical discipline focused on the design of algorithms.

These are the notes I took while watching How to Speak, which was MIT professor Patrick Henry Winston’s yearly lecture on how to give talks. (It’s an iconic lecture, and you should definitely watch it). These notes are the key points, and they’re mainly for me, but I thought I’d share them here in case someone else might benefit.

I recently saw a tweet that said something along the lines of “it ticks me off that high schools don’t prepare kids for schools like CalArts.” This idea kind of bugs me, because as someone who graduated from a magnet arts high school with a selective application process,

One thing that is really starting to bother me is how it feels like we’re supposed to default to asking AI for help these days instead of asking an actual human. Every once in a while, when I ask someone a question, instead of the person answering me themself, they tell me “I asked AI and got this” and forward me some AI-generated answer. I find this frustrating for two reasons, the first being that it feels like a condescending insult to my intelligence. I am perfectly capable of typing my own questions into a chatbot and reading the answers it produces. But the second reason is that if I ask someone a question, it’s because I want to hear directly from that person. I’ll often deliberately ask multiple people the same question so that I can get multiple sides of the same story.