2024-12-05
Worth your time
Literally worth your time:
Telling the time by sundial and history not only was custom, but also was understood as following God’s time. The idea of overriding traditional timekeeping because of the needs of the modern world seemed positively sacrilegious. “People…must eat, sleep and work…by railroad time,” wrote a contributor to the Indianapolis Daily Sentinel. “People will have to marry by railroad time…. Ministers will be required to preach by railroad time…. Banks will open and close by railroad time; notes will be paid or protested by railroad time.”
From Heather Cox Richardson on the standardization of time.
Skunkworks rules by Eric Gilliam:
- Reduce the bureaucracy to almost zero. Ideally, one person should have almost complete authority over day-to-day decision-making.
- Keep the team ruthlessly small.
- Whenever possible, only take on contracts where there is enough mutual trust with funders and subcontractors to work with them with a minimum amount of bureaucracy. If funder decisions cannot be made swiftly, the project is probably not worth pursuing.
I’d add: Build ambitious things on short timelines. And a bonus quote from Kelly Johnson: “The theory of the Skunk Works is to learn how to do things quickly and cheaply and to tailor the systems to the degree of risk. There is no one good way to build all airplanes.”
“‘Pristine’ landscapes simply do not exist and, in most cases, have not existed for millennia.”
“What makes a good business is industry structure.” — Cal Paterson on the business potential of LLMs.
What long context windows mean for how AI will change work.
AI and material design: AI_innovation. Very relevant to my work at Macro Oceans.
Things I learned
From Sapiens on the origins of suicide:
More typically, among today’s ~U.S. high school students~, 60 percent say they have considered killing themselves, and 14 percent have thought about it seriously in the past year.
Panda related merchandise made up half of all Atlanta Zoo merchandise sales — AJC
Between 1986 and 2018, 12.3M hectares of cropland in the United States was abandoned. Note that this figure does not include urbanization or development. Environmental Research Letters.
Musings
“It wasn’t that Dario had the best ideas, although he had plenty… he just ran 10 to 100 times as many experiments as anyone else. That’s when I knew he would do amazing things.”
From Dion Almaer, Principles of Developer AI Product Development. Reminds me of “quantity precedes quality.”
My latest AI hack for getting out writing more quickly (company project docs, blog posts):
* Record an audio file where I dictate as much as I can about a project
* Add that + any other relevant documentation to NotebookLM
* Ask NotebookLM to write a first draft for me
* Edit that into the shape I want it
I still end up editing out ~50-75% but it gets me passed the empty page as quickly as possible. I estimate I turn a ~half day writing block into something I can do on a 15-20 minute walk + a little computer organization.
People only decide to buy something when they really, really care about it. Otherwise it’s not worth the friction of getting out your wallet.
“The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.” — Marshall McLuhan via Gordon
“If you're not living on the edge you're taking up too much space.” — Stephen Hunt via Ade Oshineye
2024-12-04
Pisgah National Forrest, North Carolina, USA. My favorite place I visited in 2024.
I borrowed this concept from Tom Whitwell as a way of cultivating a habit of curiosity. You can read his 2024 version here. I didn’t make it to 52 things this year, but I stayed curious.
My 2024 highlights: My third child and second daughter was born. I helped Macro Oceans scale a regenerative kelp economy and received an Emergent Ventures grant for my work on HeyRecap, a local news AI experiment.
Here are the things I learned along the way:
- Transplant recipients can inherit memories from their donors — Adaobi Adibe
- The March 2011 earthquake in Japan was so strong that it shortened the length of a day — Earth Sky via my friend Graham
- Plants probably have memories. “On one plant, the touch-me-not, feathery leaves normally fold and wilt when touched (a defense mechanism against being eaten), but when a team of scientists at the University of Western Australia and the University of Firenze in Italy conditioned the plant by jostling it throughout the day without harming it, it quickly learned to ignore the stimulus. Most remarkably, when the scientists left the plant alone for a month and then retested it, it remembered the experience.” — Scientific American via The Browser
- US coal power plants killed at least 460,000 people over the past 20 years — Melissa Lott
- A banana contains the same amount of radiation that a person would get from living next to a properly maintained nuclear power plant for one year — New York Times via Jim Pethokoukis
- Smiling was once considered a sign of drunkenness — Upworthy
- 78 percent of Christmas hits were penned before 1990 — Can’t Get Much Higher
- Lebron and Bronny James are the highest scoring father and son duo in NBA history without Bronny ever scoring a point — @georgemikan
- There are more deaths from alcohol in the US each year than all illicit drugs combined — Charles Fain Lehman
- France last used the guillotine to put someone to death in 1977 — The Rest Is History
- The Barnum effect is when people give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their own personality that are in fact general enough to apply to a wide range of people — Simon Wilson
- Predator-prey models have two stable equilibria: one where predator and prey are in approximate balance and the other where both are extinct — Paul Kedrosky
- A correction from my 2023 things I learned: working moms today probably do not spend as much time with their children as stay at home moms did in 1960 — Lyman Stone
- “Soccer” as a word for the game of football came from the English, not Americans — Duolingo
- Quantity precedes quality. Students graded on the quantity of the art they produce make higher quality art than students graded on the quality of art they produce — Perhaps apocryphal via Austin Kleon
- Jalapeño peppers are getting less spicy over time —D Magazine via my friend Mark
- Electrons within gold atoms are moving at 58% the speed of light — Will Kinney
- Lake Superior is about the size of the state of Alabama — Wikipedia
- The Milky Way builds between two and six sun-size stars a year — Quanta Magazine
- No one’s name was changed at Ellis Island; then, as now, names were printed on tickets. — Rosemary Meszaros and Katherine Pennavaria via Marginal Revolution
- The increase in driving due to 9/11 led to ~1600 more traffic deaths than otherwise would’ve been expected — David Epstein
- A correction to my 2022 list: Men whose wives are diagnosed with a terminal illness are not significantly more likely to get divorced — Retraction Watch
- In 1990, 5% of Americans had a passport; today that number is 48% — Devon Zuegel
- Fernet Branca uses 75% of the world’s saffron — Eater
- Making TB medicine sweet rather than bitter reduced a child’s risk of developing multi-drug resistant TB by over 50% — Bloomberg via News Minimalist
- More than 50% of US couples now meet each online — Eric Klineberg
- The Eiffel Tower’s lighting is protected by copyright — Tour Eiffel
If you think we’d have an interesting conversation about kelp, local news, our anything else, send me an email (jdilla.xyz@gmail.com). I’d love to meet you!
Prior lists: 2023, 2022, 2021
2024-11-22
Flo’s tweet is my favorite scissor statement of 2024. I felt the sharp edge immediately. I’ve had a career in tech and I like to think of myself as ambitious… and yet when faced with the decision about where to live, we chose proximity to family over proximity to opportunity. At least I can comfort myself that I don’t lack judgement.
Flo’s follow up tweet puts the issue less divisively:
where you live is the single most important career decision you'll make. You should make it with your eyes wide open
No matter what you think about living in the Bay Area, this is almost definitely true. But what if, either by choice or constraint, you find yourself outside a superstar city, but still want to have an ambitious career? What should you do then?
Here is my advice:
Attitude
Keep your ambitions high. Almost every project benefits from considering how to make it 10x more ambitious; even if you don’t take that path, you’ll benefit from the thought exercise.
One of the secrets of the Bay Area is the expectation that you can do something that changes the world. Merely inviting people to do great work increases the likelihood that they will do it, so make a practice of inviting yourself to do it.
Notice that impactful work can happen from anywhere. Consider that Nike, perhaps the world’s most iconic fashion company, is headquartered in Oregon. Ben Thompson, maybe the most influential writer in tech, lives in Taipei. Mr. Beast might be the world’s most popular entertainer and he lives in Eastern North Carolina. All of these are existence proof that geography isn’t destiny. Great work is never the default path so don’t waste your time worrying about what you’re missing out on.
Strategy
Choose your projects wisely. Some projects benefit more from network knowledge than others. As an example, there are going to be a whole set of business ideas that fall out of what people at frontier AI labs understand that will be tough if not impossible to access from outside those networks. That’s fine! There are many problems worth solving. When you’re choosing your work, assess the network tax you’re paying and steer towards ones where this is lower where you can. Keep the ambition high!
Every disadvantage has its advantage. Being outside the center gives you an outsider’s perspective; use it. Extending the AI example, there are going to be applications of AI that won’t be visible to those inside the Bay Area bubble because they solve problems people inside the bubble don’t see. Enjoy being outside the groupthink that leads to Uber for dog walkers.
Be a big fish in a small pond. Most cities, towns, and regions, want to be more like superstar cities and are looking for companies or organizations of their own they can boost. You should be the one they’re boosting! Tobi Lütke, founder of Shopify, has talked about how he was able to make Shopify into a regional talent magnet. Duolingo does this in Pittsburgh. Startups in the Bay Area have to compete with OpenAI, Google, and Meta for talent, but you can be the best possible choice in your own backyard.
Network building
Plan regular trips to the city most connected with your industry and work. Focus those trips on time spent with people as much as you can. Keep your laptop closed. Use your trip as an excuse to bring people together. Attending the right conference does this as well.
Join distributed networks. Some of these are selective (Emergent Ventures, Supra) and others are generally open (StartUp CPG). Use these as a way to meet people and make the opportunity to see them in person if you can.
Learn to build relationships remotely. Building rapport with people that you mostly know from online is different than how you would do it in person. Be more intentional about reaching out, checking in, making up inside jokes. Emojis and memes are your friend.
Set up virtual coffees. If you write a thoughtful note about a problem or topic your target is interested in and if you seem thoughtful and interesting, most people will be willing to set up a virtual meeting with you. The time demand on a virtual coffee is almost always less than an in person one.
Always be posting. Having an online presence will be more important for you than it will be for others. Practice this and use it as a magnet for your work.
There are lots of ways to do great work with focus, intentionality, and creativity. Don’t let your location stop you.
Have anything I missed? Send me an email jdilla.xyz@gmail.com. I’d love to hear it.
2024-11-22
Things I learned
Smiling was once considered a sign of drunkeness. Upworthy.
Observations
A pro / con list means the answer is no.
The essence of being a generalist is:
- Be willing to try just about anything
- Be able to pull yourself to c-minus at just about any task
- Be able to identify which parts of a project need an A+
- Be able to find the people who can do an A+ on those tasks
- Be able to work with those people and help those people work with each other
If you try and tell people 5 interesting things about your product / company / cause, they’ll remember zero. If instead, you tell them just one, they’ll usually ask questions that lead them to the other things, and then they’ll remember all of them because it mattered to them at the moment they asked.
Modern social media rewards information abundance, so if you find yourself with a product / company / cause that has lots of benefits, tell each of those story one at time. People are more likely to remember it and it gives you more to post.
Worth your time
America was supposed to be Art Deco.