Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (October 12, 2022)

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa

Questions include: How much time do you spend on building Wolfram Language vs. doing research on the Physics Project? And what are the pros and cons of doing both things? - When working on something new, how do you know if you're making progress? Have you had stretches of time when you were exploring something, but it turned out that you weren't making much progress? - How do you choose whether to throw a project in the trash or not? Sometimes you invest so much of yourself in something that it feels just impossible to do so. - What tools, practices and/or policies can be implemented to mitigate the effects of reduced attention span and memory from social media use (and short-form content in general)? - When you code, do you apply a test-driven design approach, or do you enjoy a more exploratory approach? - What's "a day in the life of Stephen Wolfram" look like these days? - With so much email, how do you bucket your email? Have you been running it through a rules engine of your own design? - Why do so many companies prove such easy targets for hackers? Is robust security really so hard? - Any future interviews of any public physicists, mathematicians, etc. coming soon? - Do you take notes of things you learn? What's the system that you use for managing new information (when researching or learning new things)? - What is your opinion on solo work vs. group work and how it impacts the legacy of a product that has tangible and intangible business products? - How do you identify great developers? Do you test developers, be that with code or psychometrics, as part of the hiring process, or do you prefer to rely on conversation? - Any philosophy book or article you recommend reading?