A very happy đ Halloween đŚ to you and yours.
Worth your time
The most American Building. My grandfather slept in it while it was unfinished in between training stops in World War 2. My father took classes in it. I went to it on field trips. Itâs a wonderful building.
Preach, Nabeel, Preach. I wonder why âeducationâ rather than âageâ has been what has sorted our politics đ¤.
On relationship between growth and trust, arguing that living through periods of higher GDP growth leads to higher societal trust. On one level, this squares well with the idea that trust is a mixture of competence, commitment, and character, with societies delivering growth being seen as competent. On the other hand, I would expect higher levels of trust to also unlock opportunities for faster growth.
Things I learned
Home field advantage in the NFL is actually real and it basically disappeared in 2020 when no fans were in the stadiums. Via CrĂŠmieux.
More than 98% of new vehicle sales in Norway were EVs in September. From Elective via Anton.
Unconfirmed but from a reliable source: Amazon drivers are paid 12 cents per packaged delivered.
For the first time in 35 years, no rap songs are in the top 40. Rolling Stone.
Musings
Should we care about process or outcomes? Some really successful people (see Tom Brady here ) seem more to favor the process over the result while others favor the result over the process (see Phil Knight / Nike and Sam Altman). How should I make sense of this?
What would have to change for Western Society to become less individualistic? Is it possible for Western Society to become more individualistic? What would it look like to short individualism?
I got to join Marc and Ben from the Supra podcast to talk about how AI is changing how software teams operate.
Three things I took away from this conversation.
First, is that there are some things that AI doesnât change. At the end of the day, youâve still got to define the problem, define the approach, define the details. AI changes the tools, the artifacts, and the process, but it doesnât change the basic facts of problem solving.
Second is AI is changing how software is made at three levels simultaneously: individuals, teams, and organizations. Individuals are trying out tools (e.g., Claude Code) and putting them into their workflow. Then there are some teams that are starting to adopt some of these tools en masse and reorganize their processes around them. Finally, there are organizations that are trying to figure out what all of this means for the âstandardâ way of working and shipping software.
Tools - What are the tools that are available to us? What are their benefits and limitations?
Tactics - How do we coordinate with these tools to achieve a result? What are the artifacts that are created? What is the size and roles of people on the team?
Training - How do we build competence on these new tools and tactics? How do we give people space, opportunity, and resources to experiment?
Values - What does great work look like? What is important and celebrated?
Without all of these working together, organizations will fail to get value out of a transformative technology â and I have to be honest, now is a moment where Iâd rather be at a small company experimenting with new ways of working than at a large company where I have to be concerned about how this works at scale.
Similar to Shoe Dog â and different in the way that Nike is different from Trader Joeâs.
Three things I want to take away from this book:
Joe was incredibly structured in how he thought about problems. He wanted to have a retail store where he paid people well which required him to have goods that had a high price per amount of space they took up. He was willing to cycle through lots of weird ideas (including things like gun ammo) as long as they met this criteria.
Discontinuities. Trader Joeâs would specifically target little edges in product categories. As an example, they would become experts in the regulations for say cheese or butter to build limited edition products. In particular they did this on the product side, carefully understanding product categories, and on the regulatory side, carefully reading the fine print to find edges that others didnât have. An example of a discontinuity is being willing to sell coffee in non standard container sizes or for a limited period of time.
The concept of double entry retailing, which is another way of saying that decisions are interconnected. As an example, paying people more reduces shrinkage.
I didnât know whether or not to laugh or cry when he said that Trader Joeâs target customer is overeducated and underpaid.
This book helped me better understand how retail, goods, and media are interconnected. The transition from network tv to cable tv happens at the same time as Trader Joeâs is shifting away from homogenized consumer packaged goods to the more varied assortment we see today. A similar version of this happened with Facebook and the DTC brands of the 2010s.
My guilty pleasure on YouTube right now are videos claiming Ancient Egyptians had access to advanced technology that allowed them to machine vases out of hard stone. Iâm agnostic as to whether or not this is true, but I canât look away! A second thing that makes these videos delightful is that they all pit themselves against mainstream archeology which just cracks me up. Who are these mainstream archeologists? What are they doing to hinder this message? I see the evidence for advanced manufacturing but these mainstream archeologists seem like a mythical species.
Why is Switzerland so rich? This is good, but I think it misses a couple of things. First, Switzerland was spared the physical and human losses of both World Wars. Second, thereâs a cultural element that the post doesnât speak to. Switzerland is both highly individualistic and highly communal, a mix of live-and-let-live and weâre-all-in-this-together that I believe allows it to make more pragmatic decisions, the benefits of which compound over time.
Someone told me this week that in France they say that there are six reasons someone will pay for something: Security, Pride, Novelty, Comfort, Money, Friendliness.
Dead Framework Theory - the idea that LLMs are freezing frameworks like React into the internet. I thought like this at first, but I no longer think that this is true and I actually think LLMs will make it easier to bootstrap new frameworks provided those frameworks have real advantages over what theyâre replacing because LLMs make it so much easier to adopt new tools.
The actual question was much funnier. My 5 year old made a piggy bank at church, causing my 3 year old to ask, âDaddy, do pigs have banks?â As I think about this, it gets even more puzzling, because I'm not sure he's ever been to a bank.↩
Person Do Thing is on Amazon. Youâre here so you know Uri already, but Iâll just say that my family loves this one and that it makes a great gift for the person in your life that loves games.
The universe as an evolving organism. I have no idea whether or not this is true, but I really enjoy this style of conversation about black holes and space and what we know and what we donât. There should be more of this.
"Life is 10 per cent what you make it, and 90 per cent how you take it" âIrving Berlin. Sometimes I think the quotes at the end of The Browser our aimed directly at me. I promise you my kids will grow up with this one memorized.
A little bit of SSP
I was on the Demystifying Cosmetics Podcast talking about what I learned making high performance biomaterials from kelp.
If thatâs not enough, weâre doing a live show of --dangerously-skip-permissions on Friday at 2 pm ET. Come and hang out.
(I have to be the only person putting out a podcast on beauty ingredients and coding with AI the same week)