jdilla.xyz

Things I wish I knew

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 19:34:46 GMT

For a couple of years now, I’ve been posting things I learned as a way of cultivating curiosity.[0]

But this year I’ve stumbled upon a different sort of thing I want to train myself to notice: things I wish I knew.

I find myself somewhat embarrassed to post these. But why? Probably because I feel like if I were truly motivated, I would be able to figure them out.

I think this is the wrong instinct. Someone out there almost definitely knows the answer to them and there’s a chance they just swing along and tell me. In that case, I’m better off. And some of the most impactful projects I’ve seen first hand have begun with someone wondering, “why is this the way that it is?”

Since sifting my thoughts for these, I’ve found them to be way harder to capture. I’ve had 2-3 hit me and then disappear, only for me to be unable to locate them again. This almost never happens to me with “things I learned.” I wonder why that is?

Now, for my first one:

I wish I understood how individual trust is converted into group/institutional trust and how group/institutional trust converts into societal trust. I feel like I have a good idea on how an individual creates or destroys trust, but don’t think I understand how it converts for a team the size of a small company (say ~25-40 people), let alone a large company (thousands of people) or a society. Say you’re the mayor of a small city and you think a high trust society is important. Is it possible to do anything to foster this? How does it work?

My hypothesis: I assume it’s some combination of credibility, reliability, and lack of self interest. So when people see society work (e.g., civic institutions function well, utilizing judgment, being able to be counted on) and that individuals aren’t profiting at the expense of the group, civic trust goes up. But… I could be wrong. If you feel like you definitively understand this, reach out: jdilla.xyz at gmail dot com.

[0]: I’ll probably keep doing that, because why not? It’s super fun.

Friday threads

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 14:28:27 GMT

How school rankings work. I have so much suspicion of school rankings. First, I am skeptical that they actually measure the effectiveness of schools. Second, I suspect that they direct billions if not trillions of dollars of spending every year when parents go to shop for a home and check school ratings 8 and above.
Snowball earth! Everytime I run into an article or youtube video like this I falll for it. Just go through wikipedia and then dramatize it a little bit for me.
“Surely nothing could “survive,” whatever that means exactly, for 100 million years. But when brought back to the lab and offered nutrients, the microbes began to grow and multiply.” How deep does life go?
The Founder Effect. The closer you are to the original source, the more variation you’ll find.
Albert Hirschman on decision making as the scarce factor in economic development. One of my main observations from working at YouTube was the company was decision constrained, not resource constrained.
Are LLMs reaching diminishing returns? On some level, I find this comforting — I feel confident that I’ll be able to work in a way that compliments the LLM and there will still be room for humans in the loop.
“Alex died suddenly, when he was still relatively young. The evening before he died, Alex said to Pepperberg, “You be good. I love you.” The Great Silence by Ted Chiang.

Friday threads

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 01:12:01 GMT

Ezra Klein on parenting. Three things I took from this podcast:
- “I don’t know of any policy intervention that reliably increases fertility” <- a strong argument that culture more than policy is what is leading people to have less children
- The dueling tension between being the ideal worker — giving 100% to your job, being available, etc. — and the ideal parent as someone who is actively spending time giving their child attention
- A reminder that opting in to these cultural values is at least to some degree a choice.
War on the Rocks: “As I have seen in Ukraine and have observed in other theaters, the introduction of robotic and autonomous systems into the force is liable to increase both the number of people and the diversity of skills necessary within the force.”

The English coined "soccer"

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 14:54:12 GMT

From my friends at Duolingo:

The people that affectionately call their Prince William "Wills" and £5 and £10 notes ~"fivers" and "tenners"~ are responsible for shortening "Association Football" to just "Assoc."—which, when written, looks like it might be pronounced "Assock." (This "Association Football" name is the same as the French Football Association in FIFA!) In late 1800s England, at Oxford, there was also a fad of adding -er to some words. And thus, "soccer" was born. In England. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Quantity precedes quality

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 22:25:21 GMT

Found via Dynomight:

Quality over quantity. I often worry that I write too much on this blog. After all, the world has a lot of text. Does it need more? Shouldn’t I pick some small number of essays and really perfect them? Arguably, no. You’ve perhaps heard of the pottery class where students graded on quantity produced more quality than those graded on quality. (It was actually a photography class.) For scientists, the best predictor of having a highly cited paper is just writing lots of papers. As I write these words, I have no idea if any of this is good and I try not to think about it.

I hadn’t heard this before, but I do find it to be true. Creativity is a habit. The way to quality is through quantity.

Claude Review

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 10:48:45 GMT

You can read my review of Phind, another LLM tool, here.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been using Claude Opus (the paid version of Anthropic’s ChatGPT competitor).

For the first time, I think ChatGPT has been outclassed.

For context, I use Claude for help coding (you can read about my process for coding with GPTs here), for understanding new-to-me technical concepts, and for marketing, business, and technical writing.

Here’s what I like about Claude:

It feels smarter. I’m not sure exactly how to quantify this, except to say it’s like when you sync slightly better with one coworker than another. On coding projects, I notice fewer suggestions that lead me down a dead end or that add unnecessary scope.
It has less of a heavy tone on writing. I feel like ChatGPT gives me decent feedback on my writing, but when I ask it to write for me, it feels like it has been written by ChatGPT (some hallmarks: excessive excitement, over explaining). This is fine in some cases, but in others, I end up having to remove the ChatGPT-ness of it.

With that said, Claude has some pretty big limitations:

Just 5 images per chat is a crime. Screenshots of error messages is the default now.
I really miss the context I’ve been able to add to my own customGPT for my coding project. It’s not a lot of extra information, but having the LLM know my basic directory structure saves a lot of extra messages.
If there is a way to stop a message, edit it, and resend it, I haven’t found it yet in ~3 weeks of daily usage.

Despite all these limitations, given the choice between which one to work with, I am consistently choosing Claude. I wonder what this says about the stickiness of these tools?

Now for the ultimate test: have I cancelled my ChatGPT subscription yet?

No, but for an unexpected reason: the ChatGPT mobile app. I’ve been having voice conversations with ChatGPT mobile, both personally when there’s a topic I want to dig into, and increasingly with my daughter. We pick a topic she’s interested in (e.g., where do dinosaurs come from) and just riff on it. It’s perfect for a curious toddler — she can keep asking questions over and over again. I think this is what Tyler Cowen means when he says creators are competing with LLMs for attention.

We’ll see how long this lasts — I don’t expect that I will continue keeping two LLM subscriptions forever. Hurry up and add a mobile app, Claude team!

Friday Threads

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 10:23:58 GMT

Maggie Appleton on organizing community.
The leveling effect of AI. I saw this study once upon a time and then lost it. In a call center, deploying LLMs improves novice or low skilled employees more than high skilled employees by helping them mimic high skilled employees.
The AI Email Assistant I've Been Waiting for, with Andrew Lee of Shortwave. Great technical deep dive on how to create AI experiences that actually work.
Social Technographics Ladder
This week my daughter and I have started using ChatGPT’s voice feature to ask questions on the way to school (e.g., “Tell me about Dinosaurs”); if you’re a podcaster, this is competition!

Introducing HeyRecap

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 10:07:13 GMT

HeyRecap is the next evolution of Recap Roswell, a project using LLMs to create easily readable summaries for the Roswell City Council.

I started this project with two main goals: 1. When I moved to Roswell, I wanted to get more involved with my local government, but figured I should learn about it before I got involved. To my surprise, despite the nearly $200M city budget, there was very little local news coverage to help me figure out what was happening locally. 2. I wanted to develop a better understanding for how LLMs can be used to solve everyday problems. My hypothesis here was that I could create a system that did a good enough job summarizing the meetings that it isn't worth sending a person to cover.

The first version of the project was a python script that created a summary which I copied and pasted into a Ghost newsletter. This was a great way to get started — to my surprise, ~150 others in Roswell were also interested in this — but it really limited my ability to customize the user experience and it was clear that it wasn't going to be able to scale beyond just my local city council. Plus the copying and pasting was tedious!

So this fall, I set out to build an end-to-end app, the result of which you can see at heyrecap.com. For users, there are two primary benefits to the new site:

Full meeting transcripts - Easily search for the specific information behind the summary without having to watch the entire video.
Customizable email preferences - Users can choose to get email updates for all recorded city meetings, not just city council meetings.

For me, this was a chance to build an app end-to-end with a real, if small, audience, while getting to know my city better. I used NextJS and hosted it on Render. Summaries are produced with transcripts from Deepgram. Clerk is providing me with user authentication services (love them) and Resend with email services. My UI components are provided by shad/cn UI. I have opinions about all of these and may write more about them in the future, but for now I'll just say that it's incredible to have so many services so easily stitched together at my fingertips. More often than not, someone else has done 90% of the hard, frustrating stuff so that you can just integrate it with your project. It's awesome.

Over the next several months, I hope to explore what it looks like to scale this some. I'm not sure there is a business here per se, but I'm interested in the idea that I can run a useful local news organization as a side project using AI. We'll see what comes form it!

Jalapeños are less spicy

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 11:01:43 GMT

From D Magazine:

The standardization of the jalapeño was rapidly accelerated by the debut, about 20 years ago, of the TAM II jalapeño line, a reliably big, shiny, fleshy pepper that can grow up to six inches long—with little to no heat. TAM II peppers have become some of the most popular in the processing business.

The driver of the change was the desire for processors to have predictable levels of spiciness.

Hat tip to Mark for sharing this.

You should go visit Pittsburgh in February

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 15:38:24 GMT

To experience the region's Fish Fries. On Fridays during lent, various Catholic Churches (usually) host fish fries. Growing up, I sort of took these for granted, but now when I go back, I see them through different eyes. It reminds me of something like Basque Cider Season, a sort of cultural coming together that is specific to a place.

Friday threads

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 15:32:14 GMT

The surprising historical accuracy of ancient flood stories in Australia. At this point, I feel like stories passed down are underrated as a way of understanding the past. The bias should be towards assuming there is some truth in it, but that you’re not yet sure what it is.
“Part of this instinct, part of why this is hard to control (at least I think!) is that we sometimes expect a degree of understanding from our kids which they just do not have.” Emily Oster on children and discipline. Guilty as charged here.
How to be more agentic. One for me to practice: Court rejection.
New to me at least: a Deep Fake of London Mayor Sadiq Kahn leads to protests and violence. Several clips of deep fake audio are played over the course of this podcast, including some by the host and I couldn’t tell which were real and which weren’t.
How the wrong side at Boeing won. Makes me think of this quote from Bill Russell:

Let’s talk about statistics. The important statistics in basketball are supposed to be points scored, rebounds and assists. But nobody keeps statistics on other important things – the good fake you make that helps your teammate score; the bad pass you force the other team to make; the good long pass you make that sets up another pass that sets up another pass that leads to a score; the way you recognize when one of your teammates has a hot hand that night and you give up your own shot so he can take it. All of those things. Those were some of the things we excelled in that you won’t find in the statistics.
You can’t tell people anything.

Friday threads

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 21:18:42 GMT

What makes a superfood? . “As a marketer, if your product happens to come out first in something, you might want to look into it.”
How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent. Some favorites:

Be bold
Bring a sense of urgency & move fast.
Ask your naive questions.
Simplify things.
Follow up.
Show up during the hard times.

Nat Bullard’s Decarbonization 2023
Math Team. Such a waste of young life. I hope I never do this to my children.
How Pixar does listening. My favorite tip: free writing thoughts before responding as a way of avoiding group think. I’d imagine that Amazon’s memo culture produces similar benefits.
I’ve been asking ChatGPT a lot recently to help write “Stripe quality documentation” and getting great results. A new milestone for brands is having a style distinctive enough that LLMs recognize it.

Electron speed fact of the day

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 16:00:50 GMT

Thinking about how cool it is that the electrons inside an atom of gold are moving at 58% of the speed of light. pic.twitter.com/tBl6v1lI6x
— Will Kinney (@WKCosmo) February 6, 2024

Resend review / friction log

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 15:57:00 GMT

I've adopted [Resend] (https://resend.com/) for a project. If the Resend team is out there and stumbles across this, I offer this feedback as a gift, nit-picky as it might be.

On the whole I enjoyed it, but the lack of out of the box analytics means I'll probably search around more should I need an email service in the future.

Here are my notes:

Insanely easy to get to sending an email; I was shocked how quickly I got to hello world.
Super straight forward when it comes to organizing and formatting an email. It felt like using React on a webpage.
I don't understand why their batch email caps out at 100 emails; this is perhaps unique to my use case, but I'd like to be able to queue up my entire email list and have them process through it (I'm sending the exact same email to several hundred subscribers).
Sort of frustrating that you have to already have a domain name to try it out; for this project, haven't yet picked my domain name. Luckily I had one handy I could use.
Really disappointed in their analytics offering. I need pretty basic metrics (e.g., sends, deliveries, opens, clicks); best would be grouping the emails by subject so I can see how various messages are performing, but even a domain wide view would've been helpful. Instead I had to build this myself using their webhooks offering, which probably cost me more time than I saved in email formatting.
Along these lines, their webhooks encrpytion, Svix isn't in their docs and I got stuck until I found an implementation example buried in their github repo. It's totally possible that this is my newness as a developer showing through, but given how comprehensive the rest of their documentation related to webhooks is not including this in there feels like an oversight.

The size of Lake Victoria

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 14:36:29 GMT

I was listening to Fall of Civilizations podcast and they referenced the size of Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile river, in Africa as approximately the US State of Georgia.

It turns out this is incorrect. Lake Victoria is 23,146 square miles while the US State of Georgia is 57,513 square miles. However, it is about the same size as the Country of Georgia, which is 26,830 square miles or the state of West Virginia (24,038 square miles). Still incredibly massive, and it's not even the biggest fresh water lake! That honor goes to Lake Superior, which is 49,300 square miles, about the size of Alabama or Greece and holds 10% of the world's fresh water (!).

In either case, Lake Victoria has shot up my list of places to go. I'm sure I knew that it was the source of the Nile river at some point, but there's something romantic about being reminded about all that distance and all that history.

Repackaging knowledge

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 11:19:07 GMT

I’ve been noticing a particular strong point in my use of LLMs: repackaging knowledge.

I’ll use a specific example here from my work at Macro Oceans: I need to understand the research around specific polysaccharides that can be extracted from seaweeds 1) so I can sell them and 2) so I can do further product development with them. To do this, I do a pretty basic lit review. I get a lot of help from GPT in this stage understanding things that are beyond the chemistry and/or biology that I took. But I actually need to distill this into something I understand and have an intuition for, so it's pretty essential for me to take the times to put this into my own words.

At the end of this process, I’ve effectively got a 1 page memo that explains how the polysaccharides work and what their benefits are. From there, I need to turn this into: * 2 slides for the team meeting to help teach internally * 4-5 slides for a sales training deck * a blog post for content marketing purposes * a paragraph to a specific customer for a deal where it's relevant

This is where I think the LLM really shines. The context is set and hallucinations are rare. Perhaps more important, I understand the content well enough to catch things that aren’t quite right. The important part is mutating the form. In tasks like this, I’m frequently able to cut half the time more out of the work compared to what it would take me starting from a blank page.

An implication of this is that the value of proofreading and comprehension as a skill is shooting up tremendously. I’ve always been impressed with the ability of some of the senior executives I’ve worked with to read a memo or a slide deck and immediately pick out the critical issues at hand (Neal Mohan, CEO of YouTube, is fantastic at this). The difference between an average manager and the top ones on this dimension is startling. The average managers fall into nodding along but the really top tier people are engaging with and testing the material they’re being given.

I think this comprehension skill is going to play the role in the next two decades that being a strong writer played in the previous two. Of course these two skills are closely related, but as more people move into a role where they’re reacting to more text than they’re creating, it will become even more important.

Assorted Links

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 14:39:13 GMT

A woman spends 500 days alone in a cave. — via The Browser. Fascinating impacts on her psyche and her body. As an example, her peripheral vision decays since she’s always looking straight ahead with her lamp.
An observation from a podcast with Christopher Nolan that has stuck with me:

“The thing that I’ve learned, that every writer needs to learn, the thing that I know absolutely, is that feeling you have that you can write something, when you know, “Okay, I’ve got it now,” you have to write exactly then and get it on the page, because that feeling will disappear like a fart in the wind. It’ll be gone. You’ll come back to the desk, and you’ll be like, “What was it?” You can write notes. That’s not going to help. You just have to sit down and write it…. It’s a really important thing for everybody to know, because the feeling is so convincing that you’ll always be able to write it. It’s like being drunk, then sobering up, or vice versa. You’re a different person the next day, and you don’t have it anymore, and then you’ve got to think your way back into it.”
Send Samples to your Customers. Absolute fire from Tony. The equivalent of write code and talk to customers for chemical companies
Sea to Sale: I’m participating in a webinar with Greenwave on Kelp and the cosmetics market. Sign up here.
Imagine this from the perspective of the chimpanzees! From Nicholson Baker in the Intelligencer (also via The Browser):

“There was a whole colony of experimental chimps at Holloman. Monkeys went up in balloons and in V-2 rockets. Many of them died. Chimpanzees were strapped into a rocket sled and abruptly decelerated; they were spun, tumbled, ejected from their seats, subjected to wind blasts, and slingshotted in the “bopper.” They died, they were autopsied, or they lived but suffered injuries and were “sacrificed” and autopsied.”

Memory without the brain

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 12:15:13 GMT

A compelling case that plants and animals without brains have memories.

“The neuron is not a miracle cell,” says Stefano Mancuso, a University of Florence botanist who has written several books on plant intelligence. “It's a normal cell that is able to produce an electric signal. In plants almost every cell is able to do that.”

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.

Found via The Browser.

Ripple effects from ad tracking

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 12:11:51 GMT

Speculative from someone who knows the industry well: * The changes Apple made to Ad Tracking have totally ruined the playbook for DTC beauty brands, who can no longer grow using targeted ads on Facebook (this is well known) * A second order effect of this is that it’s making it harder for new ingredients to get adopted, because the DTC brands were usually the most willing to experiment here. * This in turn slows the pace of innovation in the ingredients industry, especially towards cleaner / more sustainable / more natural alternatives.

I can't prove or disprove this, but it does make intuitive sense.

More declining trust in authority

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 11:42:51 GMT

Post by @ianbremmer

View on Threads

Presumably this trust is going somewhere. With congress people, I know it's common for people to say "representatives are crooks, but mine, Jane Smith, is alright." I would be the same phenomenon is happening here.

American squalor

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 02:14:08 GMT

Regulations themselves aren’t the problem, though. Germany, like much of northern Europe, is a high-regulation society, but it’s also high-trust, compared to the US. Here, nice and fully functional things are built without fear of misuse. For Americans, who have both a high-regulation and low-trust society, this is all rather depressing; it’s the combination that means we can’t have nice things.

I like to live here, but the reality is we are rapidly falling behind the rest of the world in liveability, especially when you adjust for our wealth. Our cities are being frozen in time by an absurd, centralised regulatory mindset, which sees human flourishing as dirty and unsafe, and seems determined to wring out the last drops of any soul from our urban spaces. A mindset that manifests as one useless La Sombrita at a time.

By Chris Arnade.

Book Thoughts: Eisenhower in War and Peace

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 20:30:08 GMT

My first book of 2024, Eisenhower in War and Peace by Jean Edward Smith.

One of my favorite biographies. Incredibly well paced and readable.

I think Ike has to be in the top 5 most influential Americans. Some of my contenders, in no particular order:

Washington <- not becoming a King or Emperor is arguably the most influential thing about the country to date
Grant <- wins the Civil War, two term president, leader of Reconstruction
FDR <- 4 term president, New Deal, leads the country through World War II
Lincoln <- holds the country together during the Civil War
MLK <- for the Civil Rights Movement and its impacts

Ike obviously belongs in this list. As much as it pains me to say it, I think he's obviously above Lincoln, who is my favorite of the group, but just isn't on the national stage for long enough.

Here's the case for Ike:

Wins the war in Europe
Incredibly popular 2 term president
Repeatedly refuses to use tactical nuclear weapons in early Conflicts, leading to today's norm of not using them

Assorted other stuff I enjoyed from this book:

Eisenhower had a mistress during his time as the Supreme Allied Commander. Kay Summersby started as his driver and became his companion. The book provides good evidence that when the war was over, Eisenhower cabled Marshall to say he was staying in London with her and divorcing his wife and Marshall said he'd run him out of the Army. Ike then leaves her behind while taking the rest of his staff. The War Department removes her from photos (!) and then Truman destroys the cable to protect Ike (!). And you thought he was boring!
The planning for invasion of Europe reminds me of ~every major product launch I've ever done. They Allies agree super early on, like 1942 that they must invade Europe via France, no other routes make sense and then spend 2 years doing everything but this while Eisenhower reminds them why they have to do it.
The book makes a compelling case that Eisenhower prolongs the war and cedes Berlin to the Soviets by ignoring Monty's advice in September of 1944. I'm not enough of a military historian to critique the case, but it was interesting.
Ike has basically zero command experience before becoming Supreme Allied Commander and was mostly put in as a placeholder for Marshall.
His most important skill was his ability to drive consensus and still make his own decisions.

The imagined history of Ellis Island

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 20:15:56 GMT

Via Marginal Revolution:

The explanation for this is pretty obvious when you think about it. Just as today, people bought tickets and their names were written on the tickets.

I never get tired of the "you were taught this in school, but it probably didn't happen" type of thing.

Indirect driving deaths caused by 9/11

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 15:52:47 GMT

Gaissmaier and Gigerenzer found that Americans flew less and drove more in the year after 9/11, which led to 1,600 more traffic deaths over that period than would otherwise have been expected.

From Range Widely by David Epstein

Arguments about Swiss maps

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 01:14:25 GMT

It pains me to see the warm vineyards and villages on the sunny side of the main Valais valley on the north side of Lake Geneva and the heavily-farmed sunny slopes of the north side of the Anterior Rhine Valley in the shade, while the wooded slopes on the shady side are bathed in blazing sunlight.

From the Swiss National Museum.

A somewhat trivial topic: Swiss relief maps show the sunlight as coming from the Northwest when in real life it comes most often from the South. The article is beautifully rendered. Something about it transports me to summertime in the Alps.

The culprit? Most artists draw with their right hands and write from left to right and so European maps tend to show shade on the right-hand side of the map. Via The Browser.

Disparity in divorce

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 10:49:41 GMT

I saw this yesterday afternoon and it caught my eye:

That study that found men frequently leave their wives when they get sick was retracted/corrected.

Trouble was: People who left the study were actually miscoded as getting divorced.
https://t.co/I2qHTzg6eY
— Leah Libresco Sargeant (@LeahLibresco) January 6, 2024

It reminded me of #49 in my list of 52 things I learned in 2022: If a married woman is diagnosed with a brain tumor, there is a 21% chance that the couple will divorce; if the husband has a tumor, there is only a 3% chance they will divorce, which I found via Rob Henderson.

Based on some googling, I don't think this is the exact same study, but in the spirit of intellectual honesty, I figured I should post it.

There is some nuance, but the general relationship between illness and husbands divorcing their wives no longer holds.

Congratulations to I-Fen Lin and Susan Brown, who found the error, and Amelia Karraker who handled the correction with dignity.

A journey through Pittsburgh's neighborhoods

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 14:26:23 GMT

New to me this week is Dean Bog who does 15 minute videos on various neighborhoods around the city of Pittsburgh.

If you have any interest at all in the city, I suggest you check them out. The Bloomfield video (I think his first one) is a good one to start with, but they're all worthwhile. As someone who grew up in Pittsburgh, I'm amazed at how much they teach me, both about the "facts" of the city and it's culture.

One thing Dean points out is that the city neighborhoods have a distinct feel because of the geography. The hills and rivers mean that two neighborhoods that are side by side on a map may not have any actual connections between each other and so can evolve totally differently.

I found out about Dean via this City Cast Pittsburgh episode where he talks about his process. I'm paraphrasing here, but one thing he does is basically walk around and talk to people until they introduce him to the unofficial mayor of the area, who tells the story of the place.

Phind review

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 14:39:59 GMT

I found Phind via Marginal Revolution and Tyler Cowen's recommendation. Overall, I found it to be close to ChatGPT 4, if not slightly better — and free!

I decided to try it out because the moment last year when it seemed like OpenAI might implode reminded me again how reliant I am on ChatGPT, especially for programming.

As I've written before, I don't really program. Instead, I scope and test. My typical workflow looks something like this:

Overall project definition: I start by asking ChatGPT: I want to build a search feature for my blog that finds the best posts for a given query. What components would go into that?
Based on what I get back, I ask questions or refine the scope. Frequently there are features I can remove or requirements I've forgotten.
Eventually we end up with a set of components we need to build: A search bar in the UI, a results page, an API that takes the query and searches the database (I don't know what actually goes here, I haven't done this yet).
Building begins. I ask ChatGPT to get very specific: write the API that is going to query my database of blogposts for me. Often in this step I give ChatGPT context from other parts of my app (e.g., here is my database schema).
I then take the code as ChatGPT has written it and begin to test it. If ChatGPT asks me to install a library, I check that it exists and seems legit first, but beyond that, I use the code ChatGPT has given me.
It never works the first time! In the process, I do a lot of debugging with ChatGPT, copying and pasting in error messages and seeing what I get back.
Eventually it works; in the process, 95% or more of the keystrokes in the code have come from ChatGPT.

This morning, I tried doing this with Phind.

In terms of overall quality, I found Phind to be in line with ChatGPT 4. I didn't side by side test it, but in the past I've been able to feel pretty quickly when I'm accidentally working with ChatGPT 3.5. I didn't feel this difference working with Phind; if anything, it seemed to have slightly higher quality results for coding tasks.

Here are some of the things I liked:

They have an extra place where you can add context. I found this to be super useful, especially bringing Phind in to a project that I've already been coding on for sometime.
The model is also willing to ask you for extra context where it might be helpful in a way that seems like it improves my overall performance.
Their model responses are more skimmable than the ChatGPT equivalent. Little things like giving some styling to filenames help me move quickly through what I'm getting back.
When their model searches for contextual data, it's much less intrusive than when ChatGPT does the same thing. Once ChatGPT starts searching the internet, it seems to only focus on what it finds there and the extra time / context often doesn't improve what I get back; in fact, I find myself turning it off. With Phind, I didn't even notice that it was seeking out extra information from places like Stackoverflow at first - it just incorporated it into the results.

So why do I say they haven't quite nailed it? It's not clear to me as a user how I'm supposed to use these various fields. I can tell that they're useful and I'm fine with guessing as I go, but I wish they gave me more of a model for how to help them. It would also be helpful to be able to pin or save context (e.g., my directory structure).

So my final verdict, at least after one morning: Pfind is a credible peer for ChatGPT4 for coding tasks.

What will be the limiting factors on LLM improvements

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 00:27:42 GMT

If you were a scale believer over the last few years, the progress we’ve been seeing would have just made more sense. There is a story you can tell about how GPT-4’s amazing performance can be explained by some idiom library or lookup table which will never generalize. But that’s a story that none of the skeptics pre-registered.

As for the believers, you have people like Ilya, Dario, Gwern, etc more or less spelling out the slow takeoff we’ve been seeing due to scaling as early as 12 years ago.

It seems pretty clear that some amount of scaling can get us to transformative AI - i.e. if you achieve the irreducible loss on these scaling curves, you’ve made an AI that’s smart enough to automate most cognitive labor (including the labor required to make smarter AIs).

But most things in life are harder than in theory, and many theoretically possible things have just been intractably difficult for some reason or another (fusion power, flying cars, nanotech, etc). If self-play/synthetic data doesn’t work, the models look fucked - you’re never gonna get anywhere near that platonic irreducible loss. Also, the theoretical reason to expect scaling to keep working are murky, and the benchmarks on which scaling seems to lead to better performance have debatable generality.

So my tentative probabilities are: 70%: scaling + algorithmic progress + hardware advances will get us to AGI by 2040. 30%: the skeptic is right - LLMs and anything even roughly in that vein is fucked.

From Dwarkesh Patel. This is the piece that I've been waiting for someone to right. It doesn't matter if he is right, just the thought exercise of thinking through where the bottlenecks might be is really useful.

Book notes: White Sun War

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 11:48:07 GMT

Mild spoilers ahead

A fictional account of a military history about a war between China and the US and allied forces over Taiwan set in 2028.

I generally enjoyed this book (the narrative was compelling) and found it to be an easy way to develop a feel for the general geography and challenges that a come with a Taiwan conflict.

The device for this book is really clever. The actual book is obviously about events that haven't yet happened and are in the future. But within the book, the author mentions the decision to write this as a narrative history a la Killer Angels as a way of bringing the "historical" people within it to life for a new generation. This confusing to recount but is quite clever within the book.

As of the end of 2023 (and I guess early 2024), the book feels remarkably current. There's lots in it about Ukraine and Russia that feels like it could've been written ~a week ago.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book to me was the degree to which fooling the other side's AI through feeding it false data is the key to victory. You can't beat the algorithm, but you can misdirect it.

Space Force features prominently. I wonder how true to life this part is.

For about the first ~1/3 of the book there's a lot of discussion about "bespoke algorithms", which made me chuckle. What does that even mean?

I wish I had as much faith in US industrial capacity as the author does!

The ending felt like the author decided he was done. It made me think that the most likely equilibrium for such a conflict was a stalemate where China can't quite be pushed off the island but also can't quite control it.

US passport fact of the day

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 19:26:52 GMT

"In 1990, only 5% percent of Americans had a passport. Today, that number is 48%." pic.twitter.com/FWKF8IdxC2
— Devon ☀️ (@devonzuegel) December 19, 2023

Brian Potter on the Apollo Program

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 19:25:37 GMT

Two things I took away from Brian Potter's recap of the Apollo Program:

The mixture between "complicated" innovation and "brute force" innovation; to make the second stage rocket booster light enough to be effective took both totally new design concepts and simply shaving off weight wherever it could be taken off.

Not every effort at weight reduction was solved through clever (if complicated) ideas like cold-strengthened aluminum or the common bulkhead. Much of the effort was achieved by pure brute force: parts would be fabricated, tested until failure, and then redesigned to be slimmer until they broke at exactly the required load (scaled by an appropriate safety factor).

The interaction between new designs, new materials, and new techniques. New designs almost always require a new material or a new technique to be used.

Worth reading!

The rise and fall of steel in Pittsburgh

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 22:38:42 GMT

The furnace proved that coke made from the nearby Connellsville seam of bituminous coal was uniquely able to be used in the blast furnaces that transformed iron ore into pig iron. For decades, coke made with coal sourced elsewhere proved unusable — giving southwestern Pennsylvania an enviable competitive advantage as the second industrial revolution powered explosive demand for iron and then steel.

That technical innovation gave coal-rich Pittsburgh, which was already a successful region for energy-intensive industries like iron and glass, an overwhelming advantage in ore-based steel production.

via Chris Briem. Despite growing up in Pittsburgh, I found this explanation enormously helpful.

Saffron fact of the day

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 12:25:09 GMT

Branca buys 3/4ths of the world's saffron, according to Eater, for their popular fernet drink.

The dangers of coal

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 11:13:37 GMT

US coal power plants killed at least 460,000 people over the past 20 years - twice as many premature deaths as previously thought, with updated understanding of dangers of air pollution (PM2.5) https://t.co/ajJ1An3hBp
— Dr. Melissa C. Lott (@mclott) November 24, 2023

An interesting example of status quo bias. We know that coal is dirty and that it is a part of the electricity system, and these negative health effects are a part of normal operations, so we accept them.

Mary Poppins was right

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 11:11:57 GMT

A spoonful of sugar really does help the medicine go down.

A recent study has found that a fruit-flavored medicine, taken once daily for six months, reduces a child's risk of developing multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) disease by over 50%.

From News Minimalist as reported in Bloomberg.

1) How had this not already been tried? 2) How has this not already been rolled out to all children's medicine?

The dominance of online courtship

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 15:27:07 GMT

BREAKING: if you are looking for love in America, stay right here on the internet.

Nobody is meeting through friends, in bars, at work, at college, or in the neighborhood any more. #ModernRomance ⁦@azizansari⁩ pic.twitter.com/lk36HZf6OQ
— Eric Klinenberg (@EricKlinenberg) December 14, 2023

Eiffel Tower Copyright

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 11:13:30 GMT

If you take a picture of the Eiffel Tower at night, you can't sell it without permission because the lights are copyrighted.

The Eiffel Tower’s lighting and sparkling lights are protected by copyright, so professional use of images of the Eiffel Tower at night require prior authorization and may be subject to a fee. Professionals should therefore contact the Eiffel Tower's management company to learn about conditions for using the images depending on the case.

Via Tour Eiffel

Earthquake fact of the day

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 15:44:18 GMT

The March 2011 9.0 earthquake in Japan was so strong that it altered the earth's axis and shortened the length of a day. From my friend Graham, more information available in Earth Sky

52 things I learned in 2023

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 01:46:46 GMT

Brevard, NC. My favorite place I visited in 2023.

I borrowed this concept from Tom Whitwell as a way of cultivating a habit of curiosity. You can read his 2023 version here.

My 2023 highlights: I joined Macro Oceans full time, launched a low carbon cosmetics ingredient (if you want to see it in a consumer product, check this out) and built Recap Roswell, an AI-based summarizer of our local city council meetings.

Here are 52 things I learned along the way:

Koala fingerprints are so near identical to human fingerprints that they can interfere with criminal investigations. Live Science
Mortality from heart attacks goes up 15-20% on the days of marathons. Anupam Jena
The US military uses dolphins and seals to help protect the nuclear stockpile. Palmer Lucky
The first revolution of 1848, the Sicilian Revolution, began with a single person putting up flyers for a revolutionary committee that didn’t exist. Christopher Clark
Bees play. Scientific American
63% of American 25 year olds were married in 1980. Pew Research
The natural rate of background radiation at the US capitol is above the acceptable threshold for a nuclear power plant. Jack Devanney
Only 1 of the 270 jobs in the 1950 census has been eliminated: the elevator operator. Ethan Mollick
Labelling sesame as an allergen has increased rather than decreased its usage. Alex Stapp
The second leading market for Guinness beer is Nigeria. The UK is first. Ireland comes in third. CNN
More than half of US military enlistees have a family member with military service. Atlantic Council
Every thoroughbred horse alive today descended from one of three stallions. 3 Quarks Daily
The amount of time an average college educated mother spends with her children has doubled since 1965. The Economist via Sarah Constantin

“Serius est quam cogitas (It's later than you think)”

— One of the sundial mottos from Wikipedia that has stuck with me this year.

The most common noun in the English language is time. Dr. Dean Buonomano
The cinnamon you use is a cheap substitute. USA Today
As a share of the occupation, there are twice as many female fighter pilots as there are male kindergarten teachers. Richard Reeves
More than 5 million children were homeschooled in the US in 2021, up from 13,000 in 1973. George Mack
Randomly buying Lego sets provides better returns than most VC firms. Will Manidis
The current mortality rate for the opioid crisis in the US and Canada is worse than the peak of the HIV/AIDs epidemic. The Conversation Bonus: Overdoses are the leading cause of death for people under 45 in the US. George Mack
The dodo was a species of pigeon. Wikipedia
Squash, zucchini, cucumbers, and watermelons are all from the same plant family. Matthew Perkins
How Cocomelon gets made: A child sits in front of a TV watching an episode; an adult stands nearby doing household tasks; if the child’s’ attention drifts from the at any point, they go back and amp up the interestingness. Maryanne Wolf
American cheese was invented in Switzerland. Discovered via the Kroger online grocery app and confirmed via Thrillist. Aside: The food facts from the Kroger App are the most surprising thing about the 2023 list. They’re great! If the Kroger App team is out there, well done!
A brand new ladder fire truck costs just under $1.5m ($1,449,853 to be precise). The Atlanta Journal Constitution
Most of the placebo effect is just reversion to the mean. Jonatan Pallesen
Charles III is the largest landowner in the world, followed by the Catholic Church and the Inuit People of Nunavut. Madison Trust

A square watermelon. Putting this on my shopping list for when I visit Japan.

Square (or cube) watermelons are a thing. The Kroger App confirmed via Wikipedia
Since 2012, 130,000 Indians gained access to electricity every single day. Hannah Ritchie
Obesity rates in the United States haven’t gone down 2 years in a row in the past 50 years. James van Geelen Bonus: If the average passenger weight falls by 10 pounds, United Airlines would save $80 million per year. Sheila Kahyaoglu.
Robert Oppenheimer learned Dutch in just 6 weeks. Los Alamos National Laboratory
The original meaning of filibuster: to lead an unauthorized military expedition in a foreign country. Ryan McEntush
1 million more horses served in World War II than World War I. The Rest Is History
Experiencing abusive leadership from a coach at any point shifts the trajectory of an NBA player permanently downward. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology
There are more pet dogs (~83 million) than children (~72 million) living in the United States. American Veterinary Association
The shipping industry generated as much profit between 2020 and 2022 as it had in the previous 6 decades. Adam Tooze
HIV cases in Sydney, Australia are down 88% to just 11 cases per year. Tyler Cowen
Switzerland, which is landlocked, has 14 ocean going vessels in its navy. SwissInfo.ch
The only accounts we have of a crucifixion performed by the Romans are the four Gospels. Tom Holland
Almost all truffle flavoring is fake. Taste Atlas

The Just City by Jo Walton, my favorite book in 2023.

If grade inflation at Harvard continues at its current pace, the average student in 2028 will have a GPA higher than 4.0. The Crimson
The typical couple takes 3.25 years to go from meeting to engagement. Squawk on the Street.
Orthodox Jews account for just 0.2% of the US population, but 18% of altruistic kidney donations. Mosaic Magazine
China’s population is expected to decline 46% by 2100. Pew Research.
Venetian glass from the 15th century has been found as far away as Alaska. Smithsonian Magazine
100% of civilian deaths on the US mainland during World War II came from balloon attacks. ChinaTalk
The Chimp-Pig hypothesis. Maybe not true, but definitely interesting. Uri Bram
Newborn babies are slightly more likely to be males than females (105 to 100). Our World in Data
The 16 hottest days in recorded global history all happened this summer. Zeke Hausfather
There was an American Winston Churchill, who was also a successful politician and author; he met the British Winston in 1900. Robert Cottrell
Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both applied for the patent for the telephone on the same day. Noahpinion
The total urban population in Europe didn’t surpass the peak of Roman Empire for 1600 years. Rafael Guthmann
Only one of Albert Einstein’s papers went through peer review. Adam Mastroianni

“Do not complain beneath the stars about the lack of bright spots in your life”

— Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.

Prior lists: 2022, 2021

Right now, I am thinking a lot about:

How to use seaweed in every day products
Real world applications of LLMs
Ecosystems, and how to build them
Trust, and how to foster more of it

If you think we’d have an interesting conversation about these topics or something else all together, reach out (jdilla.xyz@gmail.com) or book a meeting.

OpenAI bet

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 19:16:23 GMT

Sam Altman will be back as CEO of OpenAI within 60 days of today.

How to configure your CustomGPT to send emails

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 14:47:27 GMT

Have you ever been deep in a ChatGPT conversation and wanted to email a piece of it to yourself to remember later? Or wanted to share part of a conversation with a friend?

Now with CustomGPTs, you can configure your GPT to send emails on your behalf using SendGrid for free. Here’s how you can do it.

First, some things to be aware of

It is possible to spam people with this. Don’t do that! Also, SendGrid has spam prevention systems in place and pretty soon your email will end up in people’s spam folders never to be seen again. Also, life is too short. Put that energy into something productive.
If after setting this up, you make your CustomGPT public, people will be able to send emails using your email address paid for by you. This is probably not what you want!

To do this you’ll need: * A free SendGrid account (you can sign up here). * An email address you want to use * Access to CustomGPTs

Get set up with SendGrid

You’ll need to verify your email address with SendGrid, which you can do here: https://app.sendgrid.com/settings/sender_auth. It’s pretty self explanatory and they have good docs.
Create a SendGrid API key and hold onto it, you’ll need it in a second. You can do that here: https://app.sendgrid.com/settings/api_keys

Note: SendGrid is free for up to 100 emails a month, beyond that you’ll need to pay.

Create a CustomGPT

Go to create a CustomGPT(https://chat.openai.com/gpts/editor)
Go to the configure tab
Go to add actions
Import the json file: You can place this link in the import schema field or copy and paste from this github file into the OpenAI action schema.
Add your API key to the authentication field with auth type Bearer. Save your action.
In the Instructions field for your CustomGPT, instruct your CustomGPT on how to use the email action. It’s super important that you tell it to only use your verified email address, otherwise you’ll get errors from the SendGrid API, but I also give it a sender name to make things appear a little nicer in my inbox. When you’re done, save the CustomGPT.

My instructions

When using the api.sendgrid.com action to send emails, always use the email address <TheEmailAddressYouVerifiedAbove@example.com> no matter what. The best sender name to use is Name you Prefer to be called.

Send an email

Start using ChatGPT as you normally would. When you want to email something, prompt it to do so.
You’ll get a dialog making sure you’re okay with CustomGPT taking this action. Make sure to press “Allow”. You should see a confirmation message and your email will get sent. In practice, it is a little bulky, but it will get smoother with time.

Things to try next

I haven’t tried this yet, but I suspect I’ll be able to configure the bot with multiple accounts. So I’ll be able to say email so and so from my work email or email my wife from my personal email.

If you get a chance to use this, I’d love to hear how you’re doing it. Drop me an email at jdilla.xyz@gmail.com from your next CustomGPT chat!

Visuals for those who find that easier to follow

Important places in the SendGrid UI

CustomGPT action json import

CustomGPT action authentication configuration

CustomGPT instructions

Making skincare products from seaweed

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 15:49:35 GMT

When Matthew and I were beginning to look at starting Macro Oceans, one of the things that got me interested in the opportunity was the mystery of it: if seaweed is so chemically rich and so easy to grow, why isn't it used for more things?

As we dug deeper into this question, I became convinced that there aren't fundamental reasons why seaweed can't be used for more things; instead, someone had to come along and make it happen.

While there have been many setbacks, false starts, and complexities over the past three years, I haven't seen anything that has changed my mind about this. Seaweed does have natural assets and it should be used for more things.

Today we announced the launch of our first product, Hydrating Marine Polysaccharides, which is our first contribution making this happen.

Hydrating Marine Polysaccharides is a bio active cosmetic ingredient, which means it's the thing that makes a skincare or haircare product make your skin feel better or hair look better. It has proven hydrating properties and a true clean beauty profile: zero waste, fully traceable to the farm in Alaska where it was grown. I'm excited to build on this in 2024!

Some personal reflections

This is my first cosmetic ingredient. I've launched more software products than I can count, but it was fun try this in a new domain. I was surprised at how much transferred!
In particular, cosmetic ingredients reminds me of developer products. The formulator is hiring your ingredient to do a job. This job is functional, but it's also a part of the marketing story for the product.
An added complexity is the brand / incubator / manufacturer relationship. Manufacturers purchase the ingredients, but brands ultimately own the formulas.
I'm really proud of how fast the Macro Oceans team moved to make this launch happen; we had our first planning meetings about this product in March and did our first manufacturing runs in August.

Loving kindness

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 18:58:40 GMT

Orthodox Jews, although they comprise about 0.2 percent of U.S. population, account for some 18 percent of so-called altruistic kidney donations (i.e., those where a living donor gives an organ to a recipient he or she doesn’t know).

From Mosaic Magazine

Impact of ChatGPT on freelancing income

Sat, 11 Nov 2023 12:02:26 GMT

NEW: Generative AI is already taking white collar jobs

An ingenious study by @xianghui90 @oren_reshef @Zhou_Yu_AI looked at what happened on a huge online freelancing platform after ChatGPT launched last year.

The answer? Freelancers got fewer jobs, and earned much less pic.twitter.com/kbtp8uDUPU
— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) November 10, 2023

It is now so much cheaper to access intelligence on demand.

Humane

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 20:50:16 GMT

Predicting it now: Humane will be acqui-hired by OpenAI to be their hardware shop within 24 months.

🐶 > 👶

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 03:00:19 GMT

There are more pet dogs (~83 million) than children (~72 million) living in the United States.

Open AI Dev Day reflections

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 20:14:07 GMT

I'm most excited about

Longer context windows
Lower prices
Custom GPTs. I've got ideas that range from silly to serious that I can't wait to try out
Text to speech – can't wait to try it out

Questions

How should I be thinking about documents at the assistant level vs. the thread level?
I assume the assistant level is more “core” knowledge… but how will this impact performance?
Should I be managing the interplay here between “core” things and stuff that just passes through the threads?
When would I choose to use the Chat API instead of the Assistant API?

Observations

Between Chat / Assistant / GPTs there are a lot of different levels to play in
The value layers (to me) seem to be 1) what unique data can you bring to the model from the real world and 2) what can you make it easy for the model to do in the real world (although this is less well understood so far).
If I'm understanding custom actions correctly (and it's possible I'm not), then I believe that custom actions can only be leveraged by the CustomGPT that creates them. So as an example, only developers with access to the Instacart API could make ChefGPT that creates orders for Instacart. If this is the case, I think this is mistake If I have a service that can do interesting things in the real world (e.g., Instacart), I want to be a tool that can be leveraged by ~all custom GPTs, not just the customGPT that I create. I suspect that this will get changed over time.

I wish

Assistants could leverage the web browsing tool

The mental health of Georgia Farmers

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 01:49:43 GMT

From State Affairs:

The Georgia Rural Health Innovation Center at Mercer University School of Medicine did an online statewide survey between January and April 2022 . The survey drew 1,651 people in the agriculture industry. It looked at their mental health and well-being. Here’s what the survey found:

29% of farmers said they thought of dying by suicide at least once a month.

42% of farmers have had suicidal thoughts at least once in the last year.

47% said they experienced loneliness at least once a month.

49% reported being sad or depressed at least once a month.

39% said they felt hopeless at least once a month.

Truly shocking numbers.

Recap Roswell covered in Appen Media

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 19:43:50 GMT

My side project, Recap Roswell was covered in Appen Media, our local news outlet this week:

“I feel like Roswell, Georgia, the United States would be healthier if we have more of those institutions, or micro institutions, where people are connecting and going through the process of deciding what they think they should do together and then, trying to make that happen in the real world,” Dillard said.

In May, Dillard built Recap Roswell from scratch using ChatGPT, an AI-powered language model developed by the nonprofit organization OpenAI.

For each post, he creates a transcript from the video recording of the latest council meeting. Then, he runs the transcript through the OpenAI API, based on a chain of different requests which synthesizes it down to a quick summary.

“You now are taking hundreds of hours of time and condensing it to something that someone, like yourself, can get through in 15 or 20 minutes,” Dillard said.

I appreciate them taking the time to discuss the project with me!

The rate of reports to child protective services

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 14:13:56 GMT

I found these to be astoundingly high, so much so that I am wondering if there is an error in the data. From the National Library of Medicine:

37.4% of all children experience a child protective services investigation by age 18 years. Consistent with previous literature, we found a higher rate for African American children (53.0%) and the lowest rate for Asians/Pacific Islanders (10.2%).

I have no expertise in this area, but the point of the paper is trying to differentiate between first time investigations and follow up investigations, since presumably children that are investigated once are more likely to be investigated again.

In 2014, 4.57% of all US children had a maltreatment investigation... Of these, about half (2.39%) had no previous investigation in the 2003–2014 database. After adjusting for database-first-time investigation rates as described in the preceding section, we estimate that 2.09% had a true first-time investigation.

It occurs to me that even though I'm a parent, I'm not sure what exactly would cause a CPS investigation and what wouldn't.

If this data is correct, I'm torn between being sad for a whole lot of families and wondering if we're over investigating.

Opioid crisis fact of the day

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 14:05:00 GMT

The opioid overdose crisis has been ongoing for over two decades in Canada and the U.S. The current mortality rate is greater than the worst years of the HIV/AIDs epidemic in these countries.

From The Conversation

The US Armed Forces as a family business

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 00:48:41 GMT

Moreover, in some ways the military has become a “family business” with over half of enlistees having a close family member with military service.

From The draft ended fifty years ago. Can the all-volunteer force survive another fifty?.

One of my less conventional beliefs is that the draft, while annoying for individual people, would be good for the United States because it ensures that the population is more broadly represented in the military.

Ironically, since the draft was ended, the military is the one US institution to see public trust in it increase.

Lego VC

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 10:25:28 GMT

You can outperform most venture funds by buying LEGO.

I analyzed the last 20 years of secondhand LEGO pricing data, and found randomly purchasing sets will match most VC's returns

if you're somewhat intentional about what you buy-- you massively outperform even the best firms pic.twitter.com/RjeuzHfAYq
— Will Manidis (@WillManidis) October 3, 2023

I wonder to what degree this will carry forward.

That's a big pigeon!

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 10:19:36 GMT

The dodo, the giant, flightless, extinct bird was actually a type of pigeon. Imagine St. Mark's square being full of Dodos!

Age limits for elected officials

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 19:24:19 GMT

82% of Republicans and 76% of Democrats support putting a maximum age limit in place for elected officials in Washington, D.C. 82% of Democrats and 68% of Republicans favor one for Supreme Court justices.

This is from Pew Research's weekly round up.

I continue to think this is an underrated idea. If we accept age minimums, why shouldn't we accept age maximums?

Semaglutide fact of the day

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 19:15:19 GMT

United Airlines Holdings Inc. would save $80 million a year if the average passenger weight falls by 10 pounds, Sheila Kahyaoglu, a Jefferies Financial analyst, estimated in a report Friday.

From Matt Levine's newsletter last week.

2023 Gardening Update

Sat, 30 Sep 2023 18:23:46 GMT

In 2022, I was finally stable enough to start an herb garden with my daughter. We started too late in the year to do anything ambitious and basically everything we planted died, except for a sage plant that bravely pushed through the winter.

In 2023, we were more organized. We did tomatoes, basil, oregano, rosemary, lavender, hyssop, and some wildflowers.

Our wildflowers did better than anything else. We actually spilled the seeds all in one spot then had a rain storm scatter them wildly and still they thrived more than anything else. Our front yard has been full of bumblebees and hummingbirds all year. Next year, we're going to forgo the lavender and hyssop, at least in the front patch where we don't get enough sun, and focus entirely on wildflowers.

The basil and tomato plant did well also. Our tomato plant would've probably produced 10-20 tomatoes except it took me too long to realize that the blackish spots I was seeing on it were a big deal. Next year, I'll be using neem oil on it from the beginning of the season.

The hardest thing about gardening is that it requires so much feel. I can't tell you how many times I looked up something happening with a plant to find that it could be a symptom of over watering or under watering... and then I had to try and deduce which is might be. Still, it gets easier with practice.

When I think ahead to next year, I think we'll most likely do: * One or two tomato plants in our raised garden * Basil in the pot I used for the tomato this year; potentially a second pot for basil * Lots more wildflowers in front of the house * I'll keep my trusty sage plant and the oregano, assuming they make it through the winter * I'll skip the rosemary (I don't use that much of it anyway), lavender and hyssop

The basil harvest

Wildflowers from our front garden

Are word processors creating all our problems?

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 18:23:09 GMT

Okay here's a ridiculous (but true) take: word processing is bad.

Before it, document length was bounded by the human capacity to copy long-form text.

After word processing, the tax & legal codes grew without check. And became incomprehensible to anyone but career experts. pic.twitter.com/tZMEBlQb22
— Christian Keil (@pronounced_kyle) September 22, 2023

Speculative, but interesting. A form of the medium is the message.

Book thoughts: A Slave's Cause

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 14:13:57 GMT

I did my best with this book, but I couldn't make it through.

A Slave's Cause by Manisha Sinha is a history of the abolition movement.

I picked it because I was interested in understanding how slavery came to be abolished.. I am still interested in this topic, but one of my goals for the year is to be more willing to put away books that aren't holding my interest, so that's what I'm doing for now. This says more about me as a reader than it does about the author and the book. I'm sure I was not her target reader!

The book is fantastically researched. It seems like the author found every single person in the historical record that opposed slavery and told their story. There are so many people who gave so much to the cause.

My biggest takeaways from the portion of the book I read are:

The sheer number of people across races that saw slavery as evil basically from the beginning. While viewing slavery as immoral was a minority position, it wasn't entirely uncommon.. People knew it was a bad idea.
The tremendous dilemma slavery posed to people who did believe it was wrong and wanted to do something about it. A modern day challenge with some similarity might be trying to avoid anything with greenhouse gas emissions (obviously not a parallel on a moral level). I'm grateful to be born into an era where I don't have to confront this.
The years of work, arguments, and missteps that went into abolition coming to be.

Perhaps I'll revisit this one in the future and if there is book written for more of a general audience that you know of, let me know as I'd happily start there.

The implications of AI as a skill leveler

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 10:43:48 GMT

Ethan Mollick's fantastic One Useful Thing newsletter has an overview of a recent paper he did studying the impact of AI tools on BCG consultants.

One observation in particular stood out to me:

We also found something else interesting, an effect that is increasingly apparent in other studies of AI: it works as a skill leveler. The consultants who scored the worst when we assessed them at the start of the experiment had the biggest jump in their performance, 43%, when they got to use AI. The top consultants still got a boost, but less of one. Looking at these results, I do not think enough people are considering what it means when a technology raises all workers to the top tiers of performance. It may be like how it used to matter whether miners were good or bad at digging through rock… until the steam shovel was invented and now differences in digging ability do not matter anymore. AI is not quite at that level of change, but skill levelling is going to have a big impact.

This data is invaluable, but I think the framing of it (through no fault of the author's) obscures how individuals should be using LLMs. From the perspective of studying the impact of LLMs on a population of BCG consultants, there are low performing consultants and high performing consultants. But as individuals, we are a mix of low performers and high performers depending on the task.

Therefore the implication is that we should be much less afraid of our weaknesses, especially in areas that are complementary to our strengths. The quality (skill?) of being willing to learn by doing is going to be increasingly important, since the LLM will help cover the flaws. Then the way to maximize one's impact is to pick projects where you have a relative strength (beyond the jagged frontier of AI, in Ethan's framing) and pair it with tasks where the LLM can provide complementary, replacement level support.

I can't claim to have mastered this, but over the past 6 months, I've experienced this first hand across a number of domains: programming and in my day job, about material science, chemistry, and technical writing about cosmetics.

My friend Kenneth quipped recently: "What will you do with infinite junior software engineers?", but it's even broader than that. You have infinite access to baseline expertise in basically anything. What will you do with it?

ChinaTalk on Congress

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 13:44:27 GMT

Fantastic ChinaTalk episode on the role of Congress in American civic live with Philip Wallach:

The specific things that stood out to me:

The role of Congress in creating legitimate legislation: The Civil Rights act of 1968 was given legitimacy by the process it went through. The same Southern Senators who filibustered it and fought it all along the way were then able to go back to their constituents honestly and say "we lost, it's time to move on," which gave the legislation staying power. Similarly, debates over WWII policies gave those policies legitimacy with a public who felt burned by WWI.
The facade of representative government: Wallach makes the point that virtually every country in the world has a body that is nominally representative, but in authoritarian countries, they have little to no real power. This is one of the things I find most interesting about the Roman Empire. The Republic falls, but until the end there continue to be Senators running around.

ChinaTalk continues to be the podcast most likely to introduce me to something I didn't know I was interested in

Alaska kelp harvest falls by 30%

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 12:37:31 GMT

From Macro Oceans:

We spoke to half a dozen farmers across the state (if we missed you, please reach out!). All the data was self-reported and although we received updates from the same number of farmers as last year, we know of a few farmers who did not respond, so this total is probably a bit lower than reality. The results: total production in 2023 was 389,900 wet lbs, down 30% on last year.

It's clear to me that the bottleneck for the seaweed industry is customer demand.

The etymology of filibustering

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 17:17:21 GMT

In the 19th century, americans would raise armies to support secession/revolution in latin-american nations. In many cases, the goal was to encourage USA annexation.

This was called "filibustering", and the modern political term stems from this military act:… pic.twitter.com/Sr1xPNFKrU
— Ryan McEntush (@rmcentush) September 10, 2023

Trust and American Church attendance

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 19:01:08 GMT

So many gems in this piece by Ryan Burge, Church Attendance Used to Drive Up Trust, It Doesn't Anymore.

Trust is one of my favorite topics because I think it is one of those invisible things that makes all the difference. A high trust team can move faster and do things a low trust team can't do. Similarly, a high trust society can move quickly and do things a low trust society cannot do. Increasingly over the past 50 years, America is becoming a low trust society.

Some things that surprised me in the article:

The epic decline in trust among Republicans

As Burge points out, this isn't as simple of a story as it might seem. Trust and educational attainment are positively correlated and educational attainment is increasingly a driver of partisanship. However, the Republican coalition is filled with people that are less likely to believe that other people can be trusted than it was 50 years ago.

Increasing distrust among people with low levels of educational attainment

Quoting directly from Burge:

The main culprit for that growing divide is that those with low levels of education how grown more distrustful: 60% in the 1970s up to 77% in the 2010s. I think this should be ringing alarm bell for American democracy. There are lots of folks out there with low levels of education who are deeply distrustful of their fellow man.

Religious attendance is now negatively correlated with trust

One of the things that stood out most to me while reading Bowling Alone was the role that churches and other religious institutions played in preparing people to participate in civic life. [0] They were the training grounds of democracy where someone learns to lead at a small level, experiences what it's like, and then decides that they have the capability to take the next step. I know this is true for me; the very first times I led teams at work, I thought back to leading groups at my church in high school, what created credibility, and what destroyed it.

Burge hypothesizes that it might be due sorting, you're less likely to meet people that are unlike you and therefore are less likely become more trusting. I'm not sure if I agree with it, but I don't have a better hypothesis yet. But I do know that seeing this change is sad for me.

0: I can't link to this because I haven't imported blogposts from my old blog yet... shame on me!

Government deficit food for thought

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 18:43:11 GMT

Basic accounting – the Kalecki equation – shows that government deficits and corporate profits are on opposite sides of a ledger that sums to zero. Historically, there’s been a powerful statistical relationship between changes in the government deficit and subsequent changes in profits margins: major increases in deficits have led to rising profit margins over the next few years, and major decreases in deficits have led to falling profit margins. We have just seen one of the biggest decreases in the government deficit in history. It is very likely to be matched by a subsequent drop in profits.

From Entering the Super Bubble's Final Act by Jeremy Grantham.

I lack the experience to critique this perspective, but it is intuitive and I've found myself thinking about it repeatedly since I read the article a couple weeks ago.

🐨

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 23:31:58 GMT

Koala fingerprints are nearly identical to human fingerprints, to the degree that they can interfere with forensic investigations.

ChatGPT as a pull up band

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 00:10:08 GMT

My friend Uri wrote a blog post about different types of supports:

I’m going to call any supportive device that degrades your ability to perform the activity un-aided an enfeebling support.

Of course, this also implies a definition for a better kind of support: a strengthening support not only helps you do something while supported, but also makes you better at doing the thing “by yourself” once the support is taken away.

Before I get into what I disagree with, first I want to say I wholeheartedly endorse the distinction he draws between types of supports. It's really helpful to ask "is this a tool that's helping me build capability or is this a crutch that I'm becoming reliant upon?"

However, one of his examples of enfeebling supports caught my eye:

Tech legend and friend of the blog T.D. worries that chatGPT is degrading people’s coding skills, making them slightly better at coding right now but worse (and more dependent on prosthetics) in the long run.

For me at least, ChatGPT is absolutely a strengthening support. I went years doing only minimal coding because I couldn't build anything I was excited about, sort of the equivalent of being able to do zero pull ups. With ChatGPT, I'm now able to finish things I care about, which is infectious, and I'm learning a bunch as I go. So I humbly disagree with tech legend TD!

The culture that is Swiss branding

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 00:38:16 GMT

Toblerone is moving it's chocolate production out of Switzerland and losing it's logo as a result.

The Matterhorn, that majestic mountain peak that graced Toblerone's packaging since 1970, holds a special place in the hearts of the Swiss people. In Switzerland, it's not just a mountain; it's an emblem of national pride. But here’s why Toblerone has to let go of it—the Swissness Act of 2017, dictates that products should be intrinsically tied to the Swiss geography to bear the "Swiss-made" label and carry Switzerland-related imagery.

From the Trademark Factory's newsletter, which sadly doesn't have a link.

Obesity trends

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 00:23:02 GMT

In the past 5 decades, the obesity rate in the United States has never gone down two years in a row, paraphrased from the Odd Lots Episode linked above.

Totally astounding. I'd be on that changing over the next two years.

Contingencies in history, 1848 edition

Wed, 23 Aug 2023 22:53:40 GMT

The Sicilian Revolution, the first one of the many revolutions of 1848, was kicked off by a single person putting up flyers in the name of a revolutionary committee that didn't exist.

You could argue that if something this small could kick off a revolution, then it was going to happen anyway... and yet, what if no one else had thought to do it?

Via The Rest is History.

Maybe the placebo effect isn't real?

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 17:28:50 GMT

Incredibly, the placebo effect is (mostly) not real.

It is a result of statistical confusion. Whenever you have a group with extreme values, they tend to exhibit regression to the mean. Eg. on average, sick people tend to become more healthy over time.

Thus if you give one… https://t.co/1s0qddGgk4 pic.twitter.com/8AOqGbyGtl
— Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) August 21, 2023

A more compelling explanation than any other I've heard to date.

Forks

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 14:09:53 GMT

My favorite episode of television of the year so far, maybe in two years. It really taps into how being useful to others impacts a person's psyche.

"I wear suits now." Just perfect.

Urban decline and renewal

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 13:18:13 GMT

Modern Europe’s total urban population only surpassed the total urban population of the Roman Empire around the time of Isaac Newton, a whole 16 centuries after the ancient peak (which implies that the rate of urbanization was lower, as 17th century Europe had over 100 million inhabitants, a substantially larger population than estimated for the Early Roman Empire, whose population has estimates ranging from 50 to 75 million).

From Rafael Guthmann.

Weirdly, this reminded me of reading Dr. Zhivago. One of the things I'll always remember about that book is the way society deteriorated around Dr. Zhivago.

The inner life of insects

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 10:57:33 GMT

Do Insects Feel Joy and Pain?

A couple of excerpts:

Bees actively seek out drugs such as nicotine and caffeine when given the choice and even self-medicate with nicotine when sick. Male fruit flies stressed by being deprived of mating opportunities prefer food containing alcohol (naturally present in fermenting fruit), and bees even show withdrawal symptoms when weaned off an alcohol-rich diet.

Recently we confirmed this hunch experimentally. We connected a bumblebee colony to an arena equipped with mobile balls on one side, immobile balls on the other, and an unobstructed path through the middle that led to a feeding station containing freely available sugar solution and pollen. Bees went out of their way to return again and again to a “play area” where they rolled the mobile balls in all directions and often for extended periods without a sugar reward, even though plenty of food was provided nearby.

A delightful read, via The Browser

The adjacent possible

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 20:43:02 GMT

I really enjoyed this episode of Odd Lots with Dr. Ricardo Hausmann discussing the Atlas of Economic Complexity.

I had heard the term before, but hearing Dr. Hausmann describe how countries navigate the product space really brought it to life for me. It's a concept with a ton of richness not just for countries but also companies and even personal growth (running a 10k is in my adjacent possible, running a marathon is not).

One moment that stood out to me was right at the end when Joe Weisenthal asks how the US is doing and Dr. Hausmann actually says our economic complexity is falling and the guests just sort of blow right past it. Talk about a missed opportunity!

My hypothesis would be that the US is increasingly a market for consumers where the production work happens elsewhere. From an adjacent possible perspective, this is a bit dangerous because by not doing these activities we lose access to the adjacent possible.

The lost generation of young founders

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 20:45:28 GMT

In the most recent conversations with Tyler, Paul Graham and Tyler Cowen discuss the question: "Why are there so few great founders in their 20s today?"

While Graham challenges whether or not this is actually true, I want to offer an alternate explanation: they went into crypto and that turned out to be a dead end (for now at least). [0]

Here are some major crypto busts and the ages of their founders:

FTX: Sam Bankman-Fried (31 according to Wikipedia), Gary Wang (30 or 31 according to Wikipedia)
Three Arrows Capital: Kyle Davies and Su Zhu, both about 36 now (34 in 2021 according to this article)
BlockFi: Zac Prince (graduated from college in 2006 according to this website, so about 37-38) and Flori Marquez (on the 2021 30 under 30, so maximum 31 or 32 right now)
Terraform Labs / Luna: Do Kwon (age 31 according to Wikipedia)

So not everyone on that list fits the young founder profile, but had things turned out differently for the industry but here we have 3 founders that would’ve been in their early twenties when their large and successful companies were founded. SBF was well on his way to creating young founder aura about himself when FTX collapsed. Without the failure of these companies / projects, we would have an additional cohort of young founders.

It strikes me that many of these founders were the same age as the people I spent time with while living in SF from 2014-2018, a period when companies like Uber, AirBnB, and Instagram had reached escape velocity. People were searching for the next big opportunity, and many found it in crypto.

I don’t think it was obvious at the time the main way that consumers would interact with crypto would be speculation. The crypto boom / bust cycle has gotten pretty toxic so people are going to see this as a value judgement, but I don’t mean it as one. I had lots of really enjoyable bar conversations with people that went into the industry about where it was going to go and none of them were saying “yeah, this is only good for fake internet speculation.” There was real optimism that killer consumer or industrial use cases would be discovered that leveraged the decentralized nature of crypto currencies and this would lead to new economic models and usher in a new era of peace and prosperity. I never got the crypto use case, but the thing that made me think I might be wrong was the passion of the people leading it to create something new and useful.

This doesn’t excuse any wrong doing by anyone in the industry, but I don’t think that most of the people that got into the industry intended for it to be as scam ridden as it has become. I think it turned out that the speculative nature of crypto projects has outweighed the usefulness of decentralization for end users, leading to Ponzi-esque business models.

Had this turned out differently — if crypto had found real, value producing consumer traction or if the dead end had been more obvious — I think we would continue to have the same pipeline of young founders.

Because of this, I expect the pipeline to return to form in the age of LLMs and climate tech start ups. We’ll see!

Charles II: the world's largest landowner

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 18:38:36 GMT

via the Madison Trust. The full list is at the link, but the top 3 are the English Crown, the Catholic Church, and the Inuit People of Nunavut via an agreement with the Canadian government. Lots of Australian individuals represented as well.

What types of innovation create human flourishing?

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 13:59:49 GMT

I’ve been pondering this question a bit lately as a prompt for where it’s worth focusing time and attention. I do mean flourishing here in the broadest, most sincere sense, although noting that it is tough to truly flourish if you don’t have access to shelter or clean water.

A comment a good friend of mine made a long time ago was about the impact of energy production on human productivity and thriving. Through a certain lens, more efficient and cleaner sources of energy are the only things that matter. This is why people get so excited about fusion.

I think a similar exercise can be done for public health interventions. Access to clean water, for instance, seems like basically a sure bet for adding healthy, productive years to people’s lives.

So here is my hypothesis list, written not with the assumption that is it is all correct, but so that I can refine it over time.

Energy sources: Cleaner, cheaper, more abundant energy
Agriculture: improvements in productivity or efficiency
Public health interventions: including things like clean water and disease prevention
Education: both access and improvements in quality
Land use: More optimal allocation
Transportation: Faster, more efficient transportation
Faster, more effective communication
Expansion of political freedom
Access to credit (probably?)

I’m almost definitely missing something and will refine this over time.

A model of the seaweed industry

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 15:36:40 GMT

I wrote an overview of the seaweed industry for Macro Oceans:

Happy Swiss National Day!

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 15:34:10 GMT

What is neglected by media but will be studied by history?

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 13:23:00 GMT

This is a Twitter thread by George Mack:

What is ignored or neglected by the media -- but will be studied by historians?

Here's the full list of 25 examples: pic.twitter.com/yzj9yGjDz9
— George Mack (@george__mack) July 13, 2023

The ones that stood out to me most:

The fall of mental hospital and the rise of prisons populations. Link
Overdoes are the leading cause of death in the US for people under 45 Link
The boom in homeschooling, from thousands of kids in the 1970s to 2.5 million in 2019, rising again to 5 million in 2021 (likely due to the pandemic school closures). Hard not to believe that this one won't have ripple effects, for better or worse. Link
1 in 5 teens report being almost constantly on YouTube. Somehow, YouTube continues to be underrated. Link
Japan has virtually eliminated homelessness Link

I think the frame of "what will seem consequential to us in hindsight" is an interesting one!

Invention of the telephone

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 13:11:48 GMT

If Alexander Graham Bell had not secured the patent for inventing the telephone, Elisha Gray would have gotten it because they both applied for the telephone patent on the same day (Feb 14, 1876).

That is via Noahpinion in his interview with Kevin Kelley. Kelley's point is that invention is an emergent property of society (what he calls the technium), rather than an individual act.

HIV in Australia

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 13:09:20 GMT

HIV transmission in Sydney has plunged more than 88% from the 2008-2012 average to just 11 cases per year.

It seems it will be possible to greatly reduce or even eliminate HIV transmission.

Via Tyler Cowen.

Square watermelons

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 14:00:32 GMT

From Wikipedia:

Square or cube watermelons are watermelons grown into the shape of a cube. Cube watermelons are commonly sold in Japan, where they are essentially ornamental and are often very expensive, with prices as high as US$200.

They are grown in boxes, which form them to their distinctive shape. I discovered these via the Kroger app, which has distinctly wonderful food facts as it's loading screen.

Practicing scales

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 13:56:05 GMT

I think about this Tyler Cowen question a lot:

What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?

I'm a product manager by trade and, until recently, never really been satisfied with the answers I've come up with. However, I've found one I really like.

I try to come up with two tweet length product ideas per day. I don't judge the ideas. They can be big or small. They just have to be plausible product pitches. I've been doing this for a couple of weeks now and it has been a small enough exercise that I can commit to doing it daily but big enough that I can feel myself stretching. Most importantly, I've noticed more, better ideas coming to me at other parts of the day.

Somewhat related: I really enjoyed this Range Widely post about "pouring out your lesser ideas to get to the great ones."

Where trust comes from

Fri, 21 Jul 2023 14:11:48 GMT

I found this video to be a helpful distillation of concepts I'd heard before with a couple things that were new to me.

I'd known that trust is a combination of credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self interest, but I hadn't heard the sub components before:

Credibility

The words we use
The skills / credentials we bring
How other people experience our expertise

Reliability

Actions we take
Our predictability
Will others find us dependable

Intimacy

Empathy
Discretion

Self interest (destroys trust)

Do you seem to be prioritizing yourself over the group / others

Illegal Chinese border crossings into the US are increasing

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 13:58:07 GMT

From the WSJ via Dan Wang.

The numbers are really small, both in comparison to US boarder crossings and (especially) the population of China. Still the increase is an interesting in what it suggests about the situation in China.

The longevity of infrastructure

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 13:54:27 GMT

The Whiting hydroelectric power plant was built in 1891 and still operates today, and the 2018 Camp Fire in California was caused by a PG&E transmission line built in 1921.

From The Grid part IV by Brian Potter

Hottest days ever

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 13:52:37 GMT

Post by @hausfath

View on Threads

As I said before, two things are true at the same time right now at once: 1. We are not reducing emissions quickly enough 2. The speed with electrification is happening is underrated

Books: The Golden Spruce

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 17:07:13 GMT

I enjoyed this book less because of the story and more because of the sense of place. Like taking a trip to the remote areas of Alaska and British Columbia — and in some ways better.

Disappearing navigation elements (powered by ChatGPT)

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 18:21:59 GMT

The navigation elements on my blog now fade out as you scroll down my blog so as not to clutter your view. This has been bothering me for a while so I decided to clean it up.

You can see a demo below or by scrolling on your screen :)

You can see how I did it here

Childless cities

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 14:00:56 GMT

This piece from the Financial Times really resonated with me.

It hits on something I've experienced: the difficulty of finding a community in an American city that is affordable enough to live in, safe enough to let children play in, and has access to good education. It's so hard to find. In most parts of the US, if you want to have these things, you're pushed to the suburbs.

It seems to me that urban areas have an amazing lack of urgency around this problem.

While reading, I couldn't help thinking of this picture I took during my first week living in Zürich:

In what US city could you imagine this scene?

A group of grade school girls on their way to school all by themselves, without a parent in sight. One of my favorite things about living in Switzerland was that it was not just possible to live in an urban area, but easy.

Change log: image responsiveness

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 02:13:06 GMT

One of my proudest accomplishments from the past year is coding this website with the help of GPT.

When I first built the site, I wasn't sure I was going to finish it and GPT didn't have sharing features, so then I was done and I couldn't share with others what it was like, but it was really impactful for me. This skill that had always been outside of my grasp was now something I could do... and what did that mean for other skills?

Since finishing the site's MVP, I've periodically made changes, but haven't put all the effort into sharing them. I'm going to try and do more of that though, in part because ChatGPT's sharing features make it so easy to do.

So with that prologue, here's my first change log post: images are now responsive on the site. This was annoying me for a while and I'm glad I took the 15 minutes to fix it.

Here's how things looked before:

And here's how things look after:

You can see how I did it here

Marathons and the increase in mortality

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 18:43:28 GMT

Just to give you a sense, the mortality rate for something like cardiac arrest or a heart attack goes up by about 15 to 20% on the day of a marathon. Now, most people are not having cardiac arrest or a heart attack, so the aggregate impact on a city might be limited. But I think if I were to talk to people about the Boston Marathon bombings, most people would say that was a horrific event. But more people die because of marathon-associated road closures every year in a given city with a large marathon than died in the Boston Marathon bombings. But the bombings, what they did are so salient to us. Deaths in these other channels, we don’t even think about that.

That is from David Epstein's newsletter Range Widely. The cause is that the closure of roads along the marathon route makes it difficult to get to hospitals quickly.

An idle thought: I wonder if the same holds true for cardiac arrests during rush hour traffic?

Why are there so many Thai restaurants in the US?

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 15:09:07 GMT

One of my favorite stories of the year. From Vice:

Comparatively, according to a representative from the Royal Thai Embassy in DC, there are just 300,000 Thai-Americans—less than 1 percent the size of the the Mexican-American population. Yet there are an estimated 5,342 Thai restaurants in the United States, compared to around 54,000 Mexican restaurants; that’s ten times the population-to-restaurant ratio. So, why are there so many Thai restaurants in the US?

The Thai government has created a company, the Global Thai Restaurant Company, to make it easier to start and run Thai restaurants. If I understand correctly, they aren't quite franchised (as in sharing a brand name), but effectively provide a pre-planned out restaurant. More from the article:

The Ministry of Commerce’s Department of Export Promotion, most likely run by bureaucrats rather than restaurateurs, drew up prototypes for three different “master restaurants,” which investors could choose as a sort of prefabricated restaurant plan, from aesthetic to menu offerings. Elephant Jump would be the fast casual option, at $5 to $15 per person; Cool Basil would be the mid-priced option at $15 to $25 a head; and the Golden Leaf prototype would cost diners $25 to $30, with décor featuring “authentic Thai fabrics and objets d’art.”

Why go to the trouble? To increase exports and travel to Thailand through gastrodiplomacy.

The value of speed to market

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 14:59:22 GMT

Post by @buccocapital

View on Threads

I interpret this in a couple of ways:

Companies that ship faster have more clarity about the opportunity / better decision making structures internally
Companies that ship faster also learn faster

I also thought it was interesting that the comparative benefit (top quartile vs. bottom quartile) is greater in manufacturing than it is in software.

Update on Meta(verse)

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 15:10:27 GMT

Truly incredible statistic from the Nation on Meta's Metaverse, Horizon Worlds:

Metaverse platform, had only 38 active daily users. The Guardian reported that the monetized content ecosystem in Meta’s flagship product Horizon Worlds produced no more than $470 in revenue globally. Thirty-eight active users. Four hundred and seventy dollars.

I don't consider this to be a definitive statement on the concept of the metaverse, but wow are those numbers small. Found via The Browser.

Shipping profits during the pandemic

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 18:01:43 GMT

"In 3 yrs from 2020 to 2022, the shipping industry generated as much profit as in previous six decades combined. Maersk’s annual pre-tax income soared from $967mn in 2019 to $30.2bn in 2022 — more than investment bank Goldman Sachs or Facebook-owner Meta."https://t.co/Ri0t1sdflo
— Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) June 23, 2023

"In 3 yrs from 2020 to 2022, the shipping industry generated as much profit as in previous six decades combined." Just incredible the way that the pandemic created ripples through different industries.

Wind and Solar generation are outpacing coal

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 18:45:00 GMT

From Politico:

Wind and solar generated more electricity than coal through May, an E&E News review of federal data shows, marking the first time renewables have outpaced the former king of American power over a five-month period.

I believe two things are true at once: 1) we are not reducing emissions quickly enough; 2) the speed with which we are moving away from greenhouse gasses and towards electrification is underrated.

Smoking and obesity correlations

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 18:36:32 GMT

From Café Anne:

I've long suspected an inverse correlation between smoking rates and obesity rates. As society, it seems, we’ve merely swapped one distraction strategy for another in an effort to prevent the VOLCANO OF INNER PAIN from erupting into our everyday lives, haha!

The inverse correlation is nearly perfect. The percentage of people who smoke dropped from 42% in 1965 to about 12% today. Over the same period, the obesity rate climbed from 14% to 43%!

My conclusion? Symmetry is cool! Enjoy your sandwich!

The EV transition

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 20:07:36 GMT

An analysis from Boston Consulting Group found that between 25 and 80 percent of gas stations nationwide could be unprofitable in 12 years — and that analysis was conducted in 2019, before a slate of new policies, including federal tax credits, were passed to promote electric vehicles.

From Grist.

It's not as simple as gas stations becoming charging centers because most people will charge at home (no one fills up their car with gas at home each night) and charging on the road takes longer and so is more likely to be coupled with things besides a convenience store.

Apparently repurposing the sites is easier said than done because of the contamination from the underground gas tanks.

Robert Oppenheimer learned Dutch in 6 weeks

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 01:54:40 GMT

The Rest is History is doing Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, this week.

Here's a fact that blew my mind: he learned Dutch in just 6 weeks in order to give a technical lecture at a university in the Netherlands.

This makes me feel way less proud of the three years I've spent getting to A2 in German...

Nigerian beer fact of the day

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 14:53:12 GMT

Nigeria drinks more Guinness than Ireland and is the second leading market in the world, behind the UK.

via CNN

Somewhat related:

The Guinness Book of World Records was started by a Guinness executive in 1951 to settle a debate: what is the fastest game bird in Europe.

Growing mastery and agency

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 14:45:03 GMT

We should be thinking much harder about ensuring children can make meaningful contributions, and we should be teaching them in ways that are sensitive to the context of the real world. We are not looking for a job but opportunities for mastery: learning and practice beyond the depth one would find along the common path, which demands no such thing.

That is from Simon Sarris's article in Palladium about how a schooling isn't enough for young people.

At this point, probably my most unconventional belief is that we should be giving teenagers more apprenticeship opportunities at companies. I feel weird saying this because it sounds like I want to return to a world where children worked in coal mines, which is very much not what I want. Instead, I think there is a type of learning that happens best hands on with real stakes and that by keeping children away from it we are doing them a disservice.

One of the things I notice with my children, who are very young (under 1 and 3), is that they are happiest when working on something that is outside their comfort zone, but within their capability, especially when it matters to the rest of the family. My three year old has had a toy cleaning set that she hardly ever played with but now uses daily to sweep up after dinner. I don't want to draw conclusions that are too sweeping from what I see observing my kids, but I do suspect there is something there.

Diabetes in India

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 11:00:08 GMT

I found this to be astounding:

A study by the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation and Indian Council of Medical Research has found that over a quarter of India's population is either diabetic or in the pre-diabetic stage, with 101 million people living with diabetes and another 136 million in the pre-diabetes stage. The study also found that 35.5% of the population has hypertension, 28.6% is obese according to BMI measures, and 39.5% has abdominal obesity. The study is one of the largest ever attempted, with over 113,000 participants across 31 states and union territories in the country, and is highly representative of the Indian population. The findings can be used by states to develop health policies to target non-communicable diseases.

That is from News Minimalist, easily my favorite new media of 2023.

Plant families

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 19:26:57 GMT

Squash, zucchini, cucumbers, and watermelons are all from the same plant family: cucurbits.

Tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, and peppers are all from the same plant family: solanaceae.

via my friend Matthew

Light years are relative

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 16:53:03 GMT

I was today years old when I learned that "light years" is actually relative to time on Earth 🤯

E.g. if you're traveling at 99.99% the speed of light to a star that's 4 light years away, it would take you just 3 weeks.

But to your loved ones on Earth, those 3 weeks = 4 years. pic.twitter.com/aMxNqdLswK
— Steven Tey (@steventey) June 11, 2023

See also this article about time in Harper's Magazine. I feel like the more I learn about time the less I know.

Aside: I feel like there is an awesome pop culture book to be written about relativity and quantum mechanics that makes it accessible for people like me; or maybe it exists and I haven't found it yet?

Horse lineages

Sun, 11 Jun 2023 12:37:48 GMT

Every thoroughbred alive today is an offspring of just three stallions: Darley Arabian, Godolphin Arabian, and Byerley Turk, and a select number of mares dating back to 17th and 18th century England. Darley Arabian and Godolphin Arabian were both said to have come from Yemen. The origins of Byerly Turk are less known although he was captured in the Battle of Buda in Hungary.

From 3 Quarks Daily via The Browser

Radiation fact of the day

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 01:38:36 GMT

The natural rate of background radiation at the US capitol is above the acceptable threshold for a nuclear power plant.

Via Jack Devanney

Leadership and performance in the NBA

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 13:32:57 GMT

On the relationship between leadership styles and performance, using NBA coaches and NBA players as the data set:

Specifically, experiencing abusive leadership at any point across the 6 years of the study shifted the trajectory of player performance downward. By moving beyond static relationships and demonstrating career-long performance effects, this finding extends inferences about abusive leadership from prior research. Giving added importance to this finding, the task performance measure was derived from objective performance data (rather than supervisor ratings that typify prior research), and the measure of task performance (i.e., player efficiency) is routinely used within the industry for major personnel decisions (e.g., hiring, salary, renewal).

Here is the paper.

This feels like a giant warning sign to me: look at how much impact positive management can make. Look at how much abusive management costs. If coaching style matters this much for NBA players, how much more important is parenting style?

Engagements in America

Thu, 08 Jun 2023 16:39:01 GMT

"Instead of 2.8M engagements this year, we're expecting 2.4M."

Signet Jewelers CEO Gina Drosos tells @SaraEisen, @carlquintanilla and @davidfaber that $SIG expects the lull in engagements to pass by the end of 2023. pic.twitter.com/LPhpEcUy6v
— Squawk on the Street (@SquawkStreet) June 8, 2023

Things I learned from this:

The typical couple takes 3.25 years to go from meeting to engagement
The industry is in a lull, caused by the pandemic: just 2.4m couples are expected to get engaged this year (vs. 2.8m last year)

Thinking back, I began dating my wife 3 years and 1 month before we got engaged.

The cost of a new ladder fire truck

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 22:53:50 GMT

I'm not sure why this caught my eye, but it did. Our local city just agreed to purchase a new ladder fire truck, a steal at just $1,449,853.

I'm not sure if I would've predicted more or less.

The Stack Fallacy

Sat, 03 Jun 2023 10:29:39 GMT

By Anush Sharma. There's a lot of good stuff in here that I'll just quote directly:

Stack fallacy is the mistaken belief that it is trivial to build the layer above yours.

Database companies believe that SaaS apps are “just a database app” — this gives them false confidence that they can easily build, compete and win in this new market.

In a surprising way, it is far easier to innovate down the stack than up the stack. The reason for this is that you are yourself a natural customer of the lower layers. Apple knew what it wanted from an ideal future microprocessor. It did not have the skills necessary to build it, but the customer needs were well understood. Technical skills can be bought/acquired, whereas it is very hard to buy a deep understanding of market needs.

Product management is the art of knowing what to build. The stack fallacy provides insights into why companies keep failing at the obvious things — things so close to their reach that they can surely build. The answer may be that the what is 100 times more important than the how.

Switzerland has a navy?

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 14:38:10 GMT

Apparently so, although it used to be bigger.

the Swiss flag currently flies on only 14 ocean vessels, well down from the 50 ships in 2017. In that year, an embarrassing shipping fraud cost the taxpayer CHF215 million ($237 million), forcing a rethink of maritime strategy.

via SwissInfo.ch

What Stripe Gets Right

Thu, 01 Jun 2023 13:47:46 GMT

I recently made the decision to leave Stripe and join Macro Oceans full time. This was a difficult decision and was more about not wanting to miss the opportunity to build Macro Oceans rather than quitting Stripe.

While I was working at YouTube, I began doing something that really helped me: team and company cultures the way I would about a friend. They have a lot of good qualities and some faults. [0]

But when you’re working somewhere everyday, even little faults can be really grating, the way that you might have a friend you really enjoy who you can’t stand after two weeks traveling together.

Part of my breakthrough was to spend more time focusing on the virtues rather than the faults. I also began to accept that the faults developed over time and would take time to change. This made it easier for me to navigate through the things that drove me a little crazy: it was part of what made the place what it was.

With this context, I want to reflect a little bit about what Stripe gets right, if only so I can remember it. These aren’t the only things about Stripe or a balanced picture of what it’s like to work there, but the things I want to remember and to emulate. [1]

Ambition: Stripe is a place where you are asked to do work that changes the world. Even if you’re starting small, you’re looking towards the bigger picture and asking how you can do more, faster. This can be uncomfortable, but having worked places where this wasn’t a part of the DNA, I really appreciate it.
Brand building: Stripe has mastered the art of elevating their work through story telling and myth making. This is truly cultural. I spent more effort polishing a demo for an all hands than I did for external communications at prior companies.
Talent: Somewhat related to the brand building, the level of talent at Stripe is the highest of any place I’ve worked. [2] The conversations within my team happened at an incredibly high level, which is infectious. It’s fun to work somewhere where you are pushed to do your best work just to keep up with others. Somewhat related, I have so many people I’m going to miss working with.
Engineering culture: The craftsmanship of the engineering teams in particular will always stick with me. Stripe is not a place where the user experience is pushed off onto Product Managers and Designers. This is modeled by senior leaders — engineers are expected to care about making something awesome. As a product manager, this makes my job so much easier. I still have to make the case for priority (should we solve this problem next) or return on investment (is this worth the time we’ll spend on it), but never for quality as a principle.
Responsiveness: Individual Stripes react quickly to problems. You see this on Twitter where posts about problems lead directly to responses. Stripe as an organization reacts to changes, be they market conditions or other strategic factors. New information is put to use quickly.
Ideas: Stripe is a very philosophical place. One of my favorite parts of working at Stripe is a slack channel that is devoted to strategy, but the art of doing great work, building a great company, and where progress comes from. Whenever I was in the midst of a particularly fast paced project or under a deadline, this slack channel kept the creative aspect of the work in my mind.

0: At every company where I’ve worked as an adult, with one possible exception, the good qualities outweighed the faults pretty significantly.

1: I enjoyed my time at Stripe and on some level wish it had been longer. If you’re considering a job at Stripe and want more detail about my experience, feel free to reach out: jdillaxyz@gmail.com.

2: The possible exception here is Bain. The difference that at Stripe the talent level is high and distributed across functions whereas Bain everyone basically did the same thing — corporate strategy.

US marriage rates

Wed, 24 May 2023 14:21:09 GMT

Amazing statistics from Pew. In 1980 63% of 25 year olds were married and 39% had children at home!

I'm agnostic to whether or not this is a good or a bad change, but I'm amazed at how different it is.

Crucifixion facts

Wed, 24 May 2023 09:51:33 GMT

The only accounts we have of a crucifixion by the Romans are the 4 gospel accounts.

That is via Tom Holland on The Rest Is History.

Notes on You and Your Research by Richard Hamming

Mon, 22 May 2023 14:06:28 GMT

You and Your Research is a talk given by Richard Hamming about how to navigate once’s career. It’s packed with insight and is on the short list of essays I feel like I should return to every couple of years.

Some of the perspectives that resonated with me:

The cost of fighting the system: “By realizing you have to use the system and studying how to get the system to do your work, you learn how to adapt the system to your desires. Or you can fight it steadily, as a small undeclared war, for the whole of your life.” Talk about something I needed to internalize when I was 20.
The role of courage in doing great work. A recurring theme is that you have to believe you are capable of solving important problems and work with the intention of solving them. This is definitely something I’ve felt at companies where I’ve worked; some places there is an unsaid feeling that certain things are beyond us as a company where the more successful places I’ve worked (Stripe, YouTube) felt like anything was possible and invited people to believe that.
The humility required to do great work repeatedly. As you become more successful, it becomes harder to work on small problems because you’re now a big person who does big things; but major breakthroughs usually start in small places. This is another theme I’ve felt places where I’ve worked. There’s something interesting, but it’s not yet at scale yet, so it gets ignored, the problem being that when it does scale, you’re too late to make an impact.
The role of framing ones work. You should actively be reframing your work towards what matters; even mundane tasks can be elevated if you think about what makes them mundane or where they fit in the greater context of the project or the company. Similarly, you can also use your weaknesses to uncover opportunities to do great work as other people likely share those weaknesses, so if you find a way to make this task easy for them, then you’ve done something substantial.
The compounding impact of effort. “Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. Given two people of approximately the same ability, one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former.” Even more important when you consider the importance of picking the problems you work on (vs. just adding hours to the day).
Mapping the field. To do truly great work, you need to have a mental map of your field, what the great unsolved problems are, which ones on the brink of being solvable. These are the “important problems”; you also want to have ideas on likely paths for solving them. This helps you notice when there is an opportunity to step in. As an example, time travel isn’t an important problem because there isn’t a “line of attack”, but AGI is because we do.
Find the flaws. Almost a corollary of the previous note, you need to have a sense for where current accepted wisdom is flawed or incomplete (in Hammings words, what are the faults in the current theory). This requires tolerance of ambiguity — you accept the current wisdom but also poke at it
Time to think. You should be reserving time to think about big problems and big solutions to those problems. Hamming reserved Friday afternoons for “big thoughts”.
Be opportunistic. When an opportunity to solve an important problem opens up, drop everything to go after it.
Make room for serendipity Keep your door open to others.
Presentation and selling matters; you have to be able to convince other people of your ideas, which requires meeting those people where they are.
The impact of WW2 on ingenuity. He notes, speaking about WW2: “The war forced them into an uncomfortable situation and forced them to have an open mind, and then they drafted off of that. But the current generation doesn’t have that.” This is a different post, but I’ve seen this theme in a couple of different things I’ve read where the generation that lives through the effort to win WW2 learns certain habits about how to work that they struggle to verbalize. There seems to be a practicality, especially around the little details that make the difference between a successful project and a failure, a desire to see up close and do all of the steps oneself, an simplicity of communication and expectation that others will contribute to the group.

Horses in World War 2

Sat, 20 May 2023 01:46:00 GMT

1 million more horses served in World War 2 than World War 1 (2.5 million to 1.5 million).

That is from the The Rest Is History episode on the Year 1940.

Pair programming with ChatGPT

Wed, 17 May 2023 13:55:22 GMT

I built this blog from scratch using ChatGPT. I want to use that experience to explore what it taught me about how to use LLMs in my work and forecast the potential impact of LLMs.

First, some context around my skill level and the project. By trade, I’m a product manager without a deep technical background. I spend a lot of time around engineers, but I don’t code. About 10 years ago, I took a “learn to code” class which culminated in building a personal blog as the capstone assignment. I finished the project, but barely. From that point on, I settled in at the level of being comfortable scripting in Python, but uncomfortable doing anything beyond that.

About 3 weeks ago, I decided to use a Friday morning to see how far I could get in replacing my blog hosted on Squarespace with one I wrote myself using ChatGPT.

The project is simple Python Flask app with minimal styling. It incorporates a blog, a few static pages, a CMS, and an authentication system. The backend is powered by a PostgreSQL database, which I’ve been told is overkill, but it was important to me to prove to myself I could build an app with a database.

If you had asked me how long this would take me to do on my own, I would’ve estimated about 2-3 weeks of full time, focused work. Doing it on nights and weekends, at least 2 months, maybe more. Using ChatGPT4, I had a working prototype by the end of the first hour and about ~25 total working hours later (spread across 3 weeks of morning work, so 30-45 minutes at a time), it was complete and deployed in production.

I’m not going to pretend that this is the most complicated piece of software ever written, but it is something that is well outside of my skill level without LLM assistance. In a way, focusing on the time spent to accomplish the task is misses the point; it was fun. I was hesitant at first, but as the project took I grew confident. I began to expect that I would be able to solve problems in a domain that had been out of my reach.

My workflow

My workflow has evolved through the project, but at this point it looks lie this: I’ve got a main tab open with a GPT4 chat focused on the project (the same chat every time); the next tab over is a GPT3.5 chat (usually a new chat each time).

The GPT4 chat is where the main action happens and the GPT3.5 chat is where I ask the easy stuff that doesn’t require project context(e.g., remind me how to check what branch I’m in in the terminal using git). This helps me conserve GPT4 queries and is much faster overall. I tried to do more serious coding with GPT3.5, but the quality was so much lower that it wasn’t worth it.

At the beginning of the project I would regularly remind the GPT4 chat of the overall project and my goals at the beginning of each session but I’ve done less of this as time has gone on and not seen a decline in results.

In the main GPT4 thread I run through this basic loop:

Product scoping: I suggest the next feature for us to work on and outline what I think the requirements, both what is in scope and what can safely be out of scope. I play an important role here in making the scope size manageable. As an example, “Let’s start by organizing the directory structure; how should I do that?” is much better than “I want to build a blog, can you do that for me?” I’ve also had the best results when I ask ChatGPT what else thinks we should consider in scope and then explicitly include or exclude it.
Implementation path: I then ask ChatGPT to suggest a plan for implementing this feature. So far, I’ve had the most success when I don’t suggest an implementation path at the outset. My biggest mistakes have been when I have had preconceived notions about how to implement something. ChatGPT and I usually discuss the pros and cons of different paths, and then we select one. Once we’ve chosen an implementation path, I copy and paste the most relevant files or a skeleton outline of the directory so that GPT has context on the coding.
Coding: ChatGPT does almost all of the coding for me. We move step-by-step through the implementation plan. Occasionally I’ll catch ChatGPT drifitng on a variable name and fix it, but it’s not uncommon for me to copy and paste entire files in and ask ChatGPT to work the code into the file for me. The biggest benefit from using ChatGPT here is it’s knowledge of Python packages that I can leverage and its knowledge of how to use those packages.
Testing: Once the code is implemented, I test the app on my local machine, feeding any bugs I back to ChatGPT. I copy and paste the error message and ask how we should fix it. This then kicks off its own mini-loop of implementation path discussion -> coding -> more testing. Once the app runs locally, I then repeat the same loop in production. When everything works, I move on to the next feature.

Typically a small feature (e.g., moving to a secrets file) can be built in ~30-45 minutes. Something more complex like an image uploader or a tags feature might take 1-3 hours.[0] I’ve included a sample feature at the end of this post for a real life example of the above.

Pitfalls

As mentioned above, the largest problems I had were when I assumed a particular path of implementation. One example here is choosing a hosting provider. Because I’ve worked with Firebase/Google Cloud before on a project with a friend I suggested we use that as a backend. (That sound you hear in the background is experienced programmers laughing at me!)

This added a lot of complexity my deployment. I got it working, but ultimately ended up switching to Render, which was simpler and cheaper. If I had gone through the loop above, I would’ve avoided this delay. My lesson from this is that ChatGPT isn’t going to push back on a choice if I don’t explicitly ask for push back. It’s going to try and make it work.

The second biggest pitfall is managing ChatGPT’s context window. Even skimming the code, I noticed directories or files would get misnamed (e.g., image/ would turn into img/).[1] This usually isn’t that big of a deal, but a big reason why I end up copying and pasting in my files into ChatGPT is to catch exactly this type of mistake.[2] Worst case, I catch it running the app locally.

Finally, I had one issue in deployment where GPT became pretty distracted by the possibility that there was a bug in Render’s deployment engine. I was pretty sure this wasn’t the case as the app had worked in the previous deploy, but every answer kept coming back to contacting Render customer support until I explicitly asked it to rule this possibility out. Once I did this, we found and fixed the problem.

It’s worth reflecting for a moment on just how human these pitfalls are. Anyone who has ever been a manager has had a situation where the team doesn’t push back on a direction because they weren’t explicitly asked to, small changes in naming are akin to typos and the who among us has not been fixated on the idea that there could be a bug in someone else’s code that is causing our problems?

Impacts

Economic impacts

The potential economic impacts of LLMs are a hot topic of conversation. I think it’s interesting to look at this project through that lens.

Previously, I was using Squarespace for hosting + website design, costing ~$168 per year. Now I’m using Render for hosting, costing ~$84 per year and I’ve got a monthly chat ChatGPT membership of $20 per month. So the LLM has reduced the time cost of customization and shifted spending towards hosting services and, of course, LLM access. Including the full cost of the ChatGPT membership for the month I spent building puts me at a savings of $64.

At least at first glance, this fits for me:

There’s a productivity benefit, both in terms for what I can accomplish and in terms of savings.
The LLM provider takes a portion of the benefits
Services that provide customization (in this case, Squarespace) are being commoditized
Customizability at the most basic layer is even more important, because it's the limiting factor (I'm not longer limited by my ability, but by what is possible in the programming language I've chosen)
Services that enhance management of physical infrastructure, which compliment the customization benefit from the change, particularly if they are friendly to beginners like yours truly.

Reducing the cost of something means you get more of it. It just became a lot less expensive to create software tools. I would predict this means that we get a lot more of them in a lot more niche areas. Business problems that couldn’t support a custom solution before will absolutely get one.

Labor market impacts

Somewhere over the course of the last month I saw a paper that studied the impact of LLMs in a call center. That study, which of course I can’t find, found that the LLMs had the greatest impact on the lowest productivity workers: new workers and under performing workers.

This definitely matches my experience. For about 6 months now, I’ve been using ChatGPT on things directly related to my expertise: product management. I’ll regularly feed in product requirement docs, strategy docs, important emails. The feedback I get is useful, but marginal. It makes it 5-10% better, not 50% better.

But programming is well outside my area of expertise. I’m not even sure I can characterize the impact of ChatGPT in percentage terms. It’s an order of magnitude difference.

The world I know well is software engineering teams. Coming out of this experience, it became clear to me that a lot of change is coming to this world.

At minimum, committing LLM generated code is going to become a part of the Product Manager and Designer work flow. I suspect that within 2-3 years, a PM of my level will be expected to come to the meeting with a strategy and a prototype product (maybe 2-3) running in production.[3]

Somewhat more speculatively, I’d assume that Product, Engineering, and Design are going to become more similar as disciplines, with the differences becoming one of emphasis, sort of like a Product Manager vs. a Technical Product Manager, with TPMs focused on more heavily technical codebases. So instead of having teams with ~1 PM, ~5 Engineers, ~1 designer, you’ll have a mix of Product, Design, and Engineering focused creators.

Finally, I want to endorse this tweet from Amjad Masai:

People constantly ask me “given how good AI is at coding is it still worth it to learn to code?”—

Are you crazy? The ROI on learning to code has 10x’d with AI.

Learn the basics and with some tenacity you can build your dream MVP.

Links to get started in thread:
— Amjad Masad ⠕ (@amasad) April 16, 2023

At the time I first saw the tweet, I sort of dismissed it, but after this experience, I think he’s right. The little bit of technical skill I had (e.g., understanding how to open the terminal, knowing how to write a little python) has opened up a whole new world of potential for me.

Where does this ultimately take us? I suspect that software development and a lot of other things is going to look a lot more like the Creator economy: low barriers to entry, high returns for the biggest stars, and a good living for those who can find their niche.

I suspect that this extends beyond software as well. There has never been a better time to be curious and self taught.

Feature requests

I wouldn’t be a PM if I didn’t come out of this experience without a list of feature requests.

Threads. ChatGPT absolutely needs the ability for me to ask follow up questions about one of the steps in the context of that step. I get my 5 steps to implement a feature and then I’m constantly scrolling back up to figure out what step 3 was again.
I need some way to give ChatGPT a view of my project’s directory structure, particularly the pieces that are unique to the project and aren’t inherited from a package. I spend a lot of time reminding ChatGPT of what the project looks like (maybe an easy way to do this exists!).
It would be awesome to be able to integrate terminal with the LLM and be able to reference what happens within it. It would save me a lot of copying and pasting.

[0]: It’s worth keeping in mind here when looking at these time estimates that these are features that I would be very unlikely to be able to build on my own.

[1]: GPT3.5 has way more problems with this than GPT4.

[2]: I find it also helps with managing the context window.

[3]: I see some echos here to analytical tools. Some PMs I’ve known a generation ahead of me have told me that when they got started knowing SQL wasn’t expected and that over the course of their career it became a part of the PM job.

Example feature: Image storage and hosting

Potentially not the best example since not much code was written, but a good example of a problem I didn’t know how to solve myself. Total time including redeploys and testing: about 1 hour

Me: hello! I would like to work on how images are stored and used on my blog.

right now, I have a /images route where I upload images. this ends up in a app/static/img directory which I reference in my markdown to get the images to show up. this works really well.

however, I’ve noticed a problem. every time I redeploy the site, all of my images get deleted. the reason for this is that Render rebuilds my app from github and none of these images are on github, they’re only in the production environment.

What are my options to solve this problem? Ideally it will stay pretty simple and low cost.

ChatGPT: You have several options to tackle this issue. Here are a few:

Cloud Storage: One of the most common approaches is to store your images on a cloud storage service, such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage. These services are designed for storing and retrieving any amount of data at any time, and they provide high durability and availability. When you upload an image, instead of saving it to the local filesystem, you would upload it to the cloud storage. In your posts, you would then reference the URL of the image on the cloud storage. This approach is scalable and doesn't depend on your application's deployment.
Database Storage: Another approach is to store the images in your database. However, this can quickly use up your database storage space and may not be as performant as other solutions, especially for large images.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): Services like Cloudinary or Imgix can store your images and also offer additional features like on-the-fly image resizing and optimization. They provide SDKs to upload images directly from your server and give back a URL that can be saved in your database and used in your application.
Volume Storage (Render Specific): If you're using a platform like Render, you could consider using their SSD-based persistent disk option. This allows you to have a separate disk that isn't wiped out when your app is redeployed. You would have to configure your app to store images on this disk.

Choosing the right option depends on your specific use case, the volume of images you expect to handle, your budget, and the complexity you're willing to introduce into your application. The cloud storage option is often a good compromise between cost, complexity, and performance.

Me: Which of these options will be the lowest cost?

ChatGPT: The cost of each option can vary significantly based on the amount of storage you need, the amount of data transferred, and any additional features you use. Here's a general comparison:

Cloud Storage (Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage): These services typically charge based on the amount of data stored per month, the amount of data transferred out of their network, and the number of requests made (e.g., upload, download). For a small to moderate amount of usage, these costs can be quite low (a few dollars per month).
Database Storage: If you're already using a database, it might not cost you any more to store a small number of images in it. However, for larger amounts of data, this could require upgrading to a more expensive database plan. Also, databases are typically not optimized for storing large binary files, which can lead to performance issues.
Content Delivery Network (CDN) services (Cloudinary, Imgix): These services often have a free tier for a limited amount of storage and data transfer, but costs can increase quickly with heavier usage. They also offer additional features, like image resizing and optimization, which can justify the cost.
Volume Storage (Render SSD-based persistent disk): Render charges $0.10 per GB per month for SSD-backed persistent disks. If you're storing a large amount of images, this could be a more cost-effective option compared to others.

In summary, for a small blog with moderate image usage, a cloud storage service like Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage is likely to be the most cost-effective option. However, if you expect your blog to grow and image usage to increase significantly over time, you might want to consider a CDN service or Render's SSD-based persistent disk, which offers better scalability and performance.

Me: Let’s rule out database storage. What would the simplest option be, given that I’m already using Render?

ChatGPT: If you're already using Render, the simplest option would likely be to use Render's SSD-based persistent disk storage. It's directly integrated with the rest of Render's services, so you wouldn't need to set up any additional accounts or learn to use a new platform. Here's a basic outline of the steps you'd need to take:

Create a new disk in your Render dashboard. You can specify the size of the disk (in GB) when you create it.
Attach the disk to your service. You'll need to specify a mount path for the disk, which is the directory in your service where the contents of the disk will be accessible. For example, you might choose to mount the disk at /app/static/img to match your current image directory.
Update your application to save uploaded images to the correct directory. If you're already saving images to app/static/img, and you chose to mount the disk at /app/static/img, you might not need to make any changes.
Update your image serving logic to serve images from the correct directory. Again, if you're already serving images from app/static/img and you mounted the disk at /app/static/img, you might not need to make any changes.

With this setup, uploaded images would be saved to the persistent disk, and they would survive redeployments of your service. Note that the disk is tied to the specific service it's attached to; if you delete the service, the disk and all of its contents will be deleted as well.

Me: okay, I’ve created a new disc on render mounted at app/static/img.

below is my image uploading logic from my routes.py file and my config.py files. do you see any changes I need to make?

image logic from routes.py:

 
def images():
    form = UploadImageForm()
if request.method == ‘POST’:
    if ‘image’ not in request.files:
        flash(‘No file part’, ‘danger’)
        return redirect(request.url)
    file = request.files[‘image’]
    if file.filename == ‘’:
        flash(‘No selected file’, ‘danger’)
        return redirect(request.url)
    if file and allowed_file(file.filename):
        filename = secure_filename(file.filename)
        img = Image.open(file)
        img.save(os.path.join(app.config[‘UPLOADED_IMAGES_DEST’], filename))
        flash(‘Image uploaded successfully’, ‘success’)
        return redirect(url_for(‘images’))

# Get a list of files in the directory
image_path = app.config[‘UPLOADED_IMAGES_DEST’]
all_files = os.listdir(image_path)

# Filter out any directories and create image info dictionaries
image_files = [f for f in all_files if os.path.isfile(os.path.join(image_path, f)) and f != ‘.gitkeep’]
images = [{‘filename’: f, ‘size’: os.stat(os.path.join(image_path, f)).st_size} for f in image_files]

return render_template(‘images.html’, images=images, form=form)

here is the config.py file:


import os
from dotenv import load_dotenv
load_dotenv()
BASE_DIR = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(file))
class Config:
    SECRET_KEY = os.environ.get(‘SECRET_KEY’) 
    SQLALCHEMY_TRACK_MODIFICATIONS = False
    LOCAL_DB_PASS = os.getenv(‘LOCAL_DB_PASS’)
    PROD_DB_PASS = os.getenv(‘PROD_DB_PASS’)
class LocalConfig(Config):
    DB_NAME = “db”
    DB_USER = “user”
    DB_PASS = Config.LOCAL_DB_PASS
    DB_PORT = 5432
    DB_HOST = “localhost”
    SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI = f’postgresql+psycopg2://{DB_USER}:{DB_PASS}@{DB_HOST}:{DB_PORT}/jdillaxyz_local’
    UPLOADED_IMAGES_DEST = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(file)), ‘static’, ‘img’)
    ALLOWED_EXTENSIONS = {‘png’, ‘jpg’, ‘jpeg’, ‘gif’}
class ProductionConfig(Config):
    DB_NAME = “db”
    DB_USER = “user”
    DB_PASS = Config.PROD_DB_PASS
    DB_PORT = 5432
    DB_HOST = “sample-url.render.com”
    SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI = f’postgresql+psycopg2://{DB_USER}:{DB_PASS}@{DB_HOST}:{DB_PORT}/{DB_NAME}’
    UPLOADED_IMAGES_DEST = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(file)), ‘static’, ‘img’)
    ALLOWED_EXTENSIONS = {‘png’, ‘jpg’, ‘jpeg’, ‘gif’}

ChatGPT: The image uploading logic and your config file look correct assuming the mount path of the disk you created on Render is at app/static/img. This path should be the same as UPLOADED_IMAGES_DEST in your ProductionConfig class. Your application is saving the uploaded images in the app/static/img directory and also serving images from the same directory. So, if the persistent disk on Render is correctly mounted at app/static/img, there should be no issues and your images should persist across deployments. Just remember to commit and push any code changes to your GitHub repository so that the latest version of your application is deployed on Render. If you still face any issues, then the problem might be related to some other part of your code or it could be a deployment issue on Render. In that case, you might want to check the Render logs for more details on the error.

Me: hmm, okay when I test in production images aren’t saving. I’m wondering if this is related to my file structure.

here’s what my directory structure looks like: jdillaxyz/ -app/ |- static |- img in render, I’ve made the mount path /app/static/img

is that correct?

ChatGPT: If the root directory of your project (where your application starts running from) is jdillaxyz, then your mount path in Render should be app/static/img, without the leading slash. The leading slash /app/static/img would point to a directory at the root of your file system, which is not where your application is. Change your mount path in Render to app/static/img, and then check if your images are being saved correctly. If they still aren’t, it may be worth checking the application logs to see if any errors are being thrown when you attempt to save an image.

Me: When I try to use app/static/img I get an error message from Render: “Must be an absolute, non-root path.”

What should I do instead?

ChatGPT: I apologize for the confusion, you’re correct. The mount path in Render should be an absolute path, so it should start with a slash. The path you mentioned (/app/static/img) should be correct if the app directory is at the root level of your project. However, this will mount the disk to the absolute path /app/static/img within the container that Render creates. If your application starts in a directory other than the root directory of the container, you will need to adjust the path accordingly. If your application starts in the /jdillaxyz directory within the container, the mount path would need to be /jdillaxyz/app/static/img. The exact mount path will depend on the structure of the Docker container that Render is creating. One way to verify this is by checking the logs of the running service in Render to see what the current working directory is when your application starts. You could add a log line in your application to print out the current working directory. In Python, you can do this with: /import os print(os.getcwd()) This should help you determine the correct absolute path for the mounted disk.

Me: I pretty certain it starts from the root directory because this is where my run.py file is. I’ll try /jdillaxyz/app/static/img and report back.

ChatGPT: Sounds like a good plan! Sometimes, the exact structure can vary depending on how the Docker container is configured, even if the run.py file is in the root directory of your project. If /jdillaxyz/app/static/img doesn’t work, you might want to try adding that log line to print out the current working directory, just to be sure. Feel free to update here if you encounter any issues or if you have further questions. I’m here to help!

Me: hmm, okay, that didn’t work. where should I put the print statement? in my__init__.py file?

ChatGPT: Yes, you can put the print statement in your __init__.py file. Specifically, you can add it right at the beginning of the file, before the imports. Here’s an example:

import os print(“Current working directory: “, os.getcwd()) # your imports start here from flask import Flask from .config import LocalConfig, ProductionConfig … This will print out the current working directory when your application starts. This should help you understand the root directory from which your application is running in the production environment, and thus help you set up the correct path for your disk mount. Remember to check the application logs in Render to see the printed output. After you’ve confirmed the working directory, don’t forget to remove the print statement.

Me: wouldn’t this always be the directory the __init__.py file is in?

ChatGPT: The os.getcwd() function returns the current working directory, which is the directory from which your Python script is executed, not necessarily the directory where the __init__.py file is located. In a local development environment, this will often be the directory where you run your python or flask run command. However, in a production environment like Render, it may be set differently according to the platform’s configuration. By printing out the current working directory in the production environment, you can determine the correct absolute path to use for your disk mount.

Me: okay, the print file gave me: /opt/render/project/src

ChatGPT: That means the root directory for your application in Render's environment is /opt/render/project/src. Now, considering your project structure, where app/static/img is a directory within your project, you should be able to use /opt/render/project/src/app/static/img as the mount path for your disk in Render's settings.

After you make this change, adjust your UPLOADED_IMAGES_DEST in ProductionConfig accordingly:

python UPLOADED_IMAGES_DEST = os.path.join('/opt/render/project/src/app', 'static', 'img')

Once these changes are made, redeploy your application and try uploading an image again. It should now be stored persistently on the disk you attached.

From there everything worked as expected. Feature done!

100% of WW2 civilian deaths on the US mainland were from balloon attacks

Sun, 14 May 2023 17:29:14 GMT

Six civilians died on the US mainland during World War II, all from a balloon bomb launched in Japan that landed in Eastern Oregon. These were the only civilian deaths of the war on the US mainland

Via ChinaTalk: Balloon Talk Emergency Edition.

India fact of the day

Sat, 13 May 2023 23:18:04 GMT

Since 2012, @timesofindia could have run a daily headline:

"130,000 Indians gained access to electricity today".

Every *day*. https://t.co/kOlkl9zlVZ
— Hannah Ritchie (@_HannahRitchie) February 5, 2023

Swiss cheese

Sat, 13 May 2023 01:02:45 GMT

American cheese was invented in Switzerland by two food chemists, Walter Gerber and Fritz Stettler. Apparently it's made from emmental with sodium citrate added to extend the shelf life.

Discovered via the Kroger App (not joking! they have crazy interesting food facts on their loading screen) and confirmed via Thrillist.

The other Winston Churchill

Fri, 12 May 2023 13:38:48 GMT

This is the clearest evidence yet that we’re living in a simulation. I learned recently that there was an American Winston Churchill, who was also a politician.

The American Winston Churchill won election to and served in the New Hampshire House of Representatives in 1903 and 1905 and lost the Republican primary for governor in 1906.

Even more amazing, the two Winstons met in 1900, where the British Winston said to the American Winston: “I mean to be Prime Minister of England, it would be a great lark if you were President of the United States at the same time.”

For this discovery, I thank Robert Cottrell, founding editor of The Browser, who included it in one of his recent emails to subscribers.

About time

Thu, 11 May 2023 14:00:36 GMT

A beautiful essay about the nature of time by Tom Vanderbilt. My favorite excerpt:

"For now, such clocks can at least confirm the old physics. “If you were to lift this clock up a centimeter of elevation,” Hume told me, “you would be able to discern a difference in the ticking rate.” The reason is Einstein’s theory of relativity: Time differs depending on where you are experiencing it. When standing upright, your head exists at a slightly different timescale than your feet. But with this accuracy comes a sobering reality. “There are not just two times,” notes the physicist Carlo Rovelli in The Order of Time. “Times are legion: a different one for every point in space.” What we think of the present, he writes, “does not extend throughout the universe.” Rather, “it is like a bubble around us.” The “well-defined now,” as he calls it, “is an illusion.”"

Found via The Browser.

Military dolphins

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 15:05:20 GMT

In addition to dogs, the US armed forces includes dolphins and seals employed by the US Navy.

Discovered via Joseph Noel Walker’s conversation with Palmer Lucky

Update: More on military dolphins and their role protecting the nuclear stockpile via Marginal Revolution.

It’s a boy!

Thu, 20 Apr 2023 10:04:29 GMT

Things I learned today, via Our World in Data: sex ratios at birth are slightly biased towards boy babies for biological reasons. The “natural” sex ratio is about 105 boys born for every 100 girls.

Why is this? Miscarriage rates are slightly higher for female babies than for male babies, although this varies by phase of the pregnancy.

So the next time you’re guessing a baby’s sex, the odds are in your favor if you guess it’s a boy!

Trends for the next decade

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 19:26:06 GMT

Trends for the next decade For a lot of reasons, as I survey the landscape of technology, I wonder about the trends and opportunities that will shape the next decade. I remember clearly seeing the iPhone in 2007 and being aware that mobile devices were going to be a big deal for a long time.

So what trends rise to this level now? I see four that I would bet on (although I’ve stopped short of crafting falsifiable bets for them… maybe later).

Electrification of everything. This trend has two sides: supply of electricity and consumption of electricity. Global warming, of course, is the macro driver of this trend, but electric cars are the most important thing driving it right now. On the supply side, they create demand that pulls in new technology for supplying electricity and scale. On the consumption side, they are driving electrification technologies (batteries, but also others) that will be reused for other use cases. We are on a path towards carbon emitting fuels being antiquated / confined to niche use cases and electric being the default power source for everything. This is the trend I’m most intellectually confident of.
Generative AI / Large Language Models. As someone who has now become a daily user of ChatGPT, Bing, and GPT Playground, I’m feel most strongly that this is going to be impactful. I see in my own work places where I’m able to get certain tasks done in a fraction of the amount of time that it would’ve taken previously. And I’m willing to bet that every consumer app from this point forward is going to be built with Generative AI / LLM capabilities in mind, in the same way that apps built after 2007 began to assume mobile phone capabilities. This is the trend I believe in the most (emotional confidence?)
Distributed work. I’m choosing my words carefully here and specifically not saying remote work because it seems clear to me that people and companies don’t really want to be entirely remote. The end of the pandemic makes it seem like this is over, but in reality it has just begun because the equilibrium has shifted away from the pre-pandemic norm of 5 days in the office, but a new equilibrium hasn’t fully formed yet [0]. The more time goes on, the weirder this is going to get, not just for companies, who have to figure out how to offer jobs / benefits / compliance ~globally or nationally, but cities and regions that are going to see patterns of living change substantially.
Decarbonization / carbon removal technologies. This is the trend I’m least confident of, however it is obvious that the only way we’re going to meet net zero carbon on the time horizon that we need to is by getting good at pulling carbon out of the atmosphere (and avoiding using it in the first place). I’m distinguishing this from the electrification like this: switching from gas heat to a heat pump is electrification; switching from a coal power plant to a nuclear power plant or coming up with clever ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere is decarbonization. It’s possible that the energy in this space dissipates, but I think that as we move forward in time it will become ever clearer that having a capacity for pulling carbon out of the area is a necessity and the cost of doing this will put pressure on companies to stop putting it there in the first place.

Thought about it, but decided against it.

I see potential in each of these but couldn't quite bring myself to commit to them.

Restoring of manufacturing. I just don’t totally believe that American society is going to bring non-defense critical manufacturing back, although I’d love to be wrong.
China’s demographic decline. I think this is an underrated trend, but the impacts are more than 10 years away.
The demographic ascent of India. Same rationale as above, but less confidence.
Loneliness. As more and more friction gets pulled out of substitutes for human interaction like video games and Netflix, I think loneliness is going to become the default state for more and more people. I also think the pandemic pulled forward growth in loneliness in the same way it pulled forward growth in remote work and online grocery ordering. This is the one I got closest to including in the main list.
Decline in religiosity in the United States Mainstream Protestant religions seem poised to die out over the next ~20 years. What happens next? Will they consolidate? Or will new movements substitute for traditional religious (this is one way I think about Qanon).

[0]: It seems like the emerging equilibrium is something like this: 1 day a week for teams that are more or less local to an area, 3-4 times a year for teams that are distributed across regions; but how much longer will there be a critical mass of people within regions where it is feasible to do a day a week on the office?

Fighter pilots and kindergarten teachers

Thu, 16 Mar 2023 18:09:41 GMT

As a share of the occupation, there twice as many female fighter pilots as there are male kindergarten teachers.

This is from Richard Reeves on the Ezra Klein Show

15th century Venetian beads found in Alaska

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 11:06:20 GMT

Not new but new to me; interesting never less. From Smithsonian Mag:

Archaeologists dug the beads up in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Now, a new study published in the journal American Antiquity asserts that the glass objects are among the oldest European-made items ever discovered in North America.
Per the paper, Michael Kunz of the University of Alaska Museum of the North and Robin Mills of the Bureau of Land Management studied ten glass beads found at three sites along Alaska’s Brooks Range. The researchers used mass spectrometry carbon-dating to analyze trace amounts of twine discovered alongside three of the beads and date the artifacts’ creation to between roughly 1397 and 1488.

The beads provide evidence for overland trade networks reaching Alaska from the East (Siberia).

The Just City by Jo Walton

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 18:16:42 GMT

A book about volition, equal significance, and excellence. Easily my favorite book I’ve read recently, and a shoe-in for my top books list.

The concept of the book is that the goddess Athene attempts, as an experiment, to create Plato’s Just City according to Plato’s republic. She and Apollo choose to participate in the city. The book is about what happens next.

The internet describes it as a science fiction book, which isn’t wrong, but also isn’t how I would introduce it because I think it over emphasizes specific aspects of the book at the expense of others. Sort of like saying Hamlet is a play about the Danish Monarchy. It’s not wrong but it’s also not exactly right.

I won’t spoil the plot any further, but I will say that I have fallen deeply in love with several of the characters in this book (agape, not eros).

This book gave me the sensation all my favorite books have given me: a relentless need to finish them and a panging sense of loss, knowing that I will never be able to read them for the first time again. For me, if reading is about anything, it’s about finding a book that makes me feel this way again.

I’ll leave you with a quote from the book that reminds me of what I want to remember most from it:

On my temple in Delphi there are two words written: Know Thyself. It’s good advice. Know yourself. You are worth knowing. Examine your life. The unexamined life is not worth living. Be aware that other people have equal significance. Give them space to make their own choices, and let their choices count as you want them to let your choices count. Remember that excellence has no stopping point and keep pursuing it. Make art that can last and that says something nobody else can say. Live the best life you can and become the best self you can. You cannot know which of your actions is the lever that will move worlds. Not even Necessity knows all ends. Know yourself.

Special thanks to Uri for introducing this book to me. I loved this book!

Georgia should implement ranked choice voting

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 14:42:58 GMT

My column for State Affairs about why Georgia should implement open primary, ranked choice voting.

The current system, where any election goes to a runoff when a candidate doesn’t clear 50% of the vote, is a burden on voters, the State, and the candidates for office.
The state legislature should act now to fix this by implementing open primary, ranked choice voting statewide for a fairer, more responsive, and more efficient electoral system.
This might sound complicated at first, but really it’s quite simple. An open primary means all candidates, regardless of party, compete on equal footing to be included in the general election. Ranked choice means that in the general election, voters rank their candidates in order of preference. Instant runoff means that if a winner doesn’t emerge in the first count, then a runoff is held instantly to determine the winner, rather than holding an additional election.

Structural changes like this are an underway to improve the quality of our democracy. I do not mean this in the sense of “put the finger on the scales for a particular party I like right now” but in the sense of “make sure that the parties we have 10 years from now are the best version they can be.”

Liftoff by Eric Berger

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 18:23:26 GMT

I’m late to link to this, but here are my Book Thoughts on Liftoff by Eric Berger, which is about the early years of SpaceX:

I picked up this book to better understand how big leaps forward in hard tech innovation happen, but as I got to the end, including the annecdote above, all I could think about is whether or not history is contingent.

I didn’t put this in the Book Thoughts post because it somehow felt out of place, but here are the factors that seemed most essential to SpaceX’s success (not necessarily in order):

Have a big mission. This helps to pull in talent in a way that smaller projects don’t
Be as iterative as possible in taking on technical challenges. Your speed of failure is inversely correlated to your speed of learning. In a way, the culture of tight deadlines at SpaceX helped with this because it forced the organization to learn from reality rather than debate.
Either buy things off the shelf or make them yourself. If you try and find a middle ground between off the shelf and fully customized, you risk getting neither of the benefits.
Early customers are in many ways investors. They need to be treated as such, since they’re likely to not get the full benefit of your company existing.

Cost overruns by project type

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 20:30:11 GMT

This is an amazing table of the cost overruns of mega projects

Nuclear storage has a mean cost overrun of 238%, while with nuclear power its 120%

Solar power has a mean cost overrun of 1%https://t.co/1zsdkTWfgZ pic.twitter.com/ViOrj0dpnB
— Philip Oldfield (@SustainableTall) January 28, 2023

The loneliness epidemic

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 17:28:26 GMT

One third of Gen Z and Millenials consider themselves lonely or extremely lonely. For men, this figure rises to 41%.

This comes via Dan Frommer at the New Consumer. I think this is an underrated problem that our society doesn’t really prepare people for. We talk about having good eating or financial habits, but almost never about having good social habits.

Somewhat related: my thoughts from reading Bowling Alone.

The truffle on your truffle fries probably isn’t truffle

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 11:53:56 GMT

I’ve never been into truffle infused flavor and I suddenly feel very justified in this.

There are no white and black winter truffles out of season. They cannot be frozen, cooked, sterilized, packaged, or stored. If you had a dish with an intense truffle flavor out of season - it was most definitely a scam as it is impossible to serve those truffles out of season.

This is from Matt Babich at Taste Atlas. The ingredient used to make most truffle flavoring is a peturoleum derivative. See also cinnamon.

Fear of cows

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 14:48:09 GMT

Since 1890, there have been 27 documented humans killed by mountain lions in North America. Cows, by comparison, kill about 20 people each year.

From Craig Childs at The Last Word on Nothing via The Browser.

Things I’ve used GPT for recently

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 14:34:13 GMT

Coding - went sideways, invented a library and funcitons within that library that seemed plausible.. but weren’t real

Writing an update email to Stripe Apps developers, which I then proof read. It was fine! Saved me probably 10 minutes.

Taking a complicated sql query a data scientist had written last year and rewriting it so I could get the list of one particular set users that made up one of the sums; it was able to this for me while I was in a meeting. Saved me ~20 minutes (more likely, I never would’ve made the time to do this task).

Asking it for feedback on PRDs - didn’t really get much here

Having it make a company wide email more pithy (accepted some of the suggestions)

Making 1 email to individuals in a group into 7 unique emails with the same message

Learning German

A recipe for Thai Curry in a crockpot

Gas stoves, not as clean as you think

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 14:31:03 GMT

Or at least make sure there is really good ventilation.

According to a study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, “almost 13% of current childhood asthma in the US is attributable to gas stove use.”

One of the ideas that I think is underrated is the impact of clean air and clean water. It seems like every study I see points in the same direction.

Claims about eco-anxiety and teenagers

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 14:26:44 GMT

75% of people aged 17-25 suffer from eco-anxiety, according to Mary Sherman. Found via Sean Arians.

Not your grandparent’s cinnamon

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 11:53:32 GMT

The cinnamon we eat in the US today is a cheap substitute of the one that was popular in the US prior to the Vietnam war. From USA Today:

In the 1950s, most of the cinnamon Americans consumed was the Saigon variety from Vietnam. Saigon cinnamon – the peeled and ground inner bark of an evergreen tree native to mainland Southeast Asia – has a rich and slightly spicy flavor thanks to high levels of essential oils and a flavonoid called cinnemaldehyde. When the U.S. government imposed a trade embargo on Vietnam beginning in 1964, Saigon cinnamon became almost impossible to import, and spice sellers were forced to find another way to fill American cupboards.

They chose and Indonesian variety, Korintje, that is more bitter and has less depth. Even though the trade embargo has ended, the store-brand cinnamon we use has not recovered.

Commercially available ground cinnamon – almost always the Indonesian Korintje variety – is often mixed with fillers. Scientists at the Indian Institute of Spices Research used a process called DNA barcoding to test market samples. They found that 70% contained powdered beechnut husk, ground hazelnut or almond shell dust, dyed and aromatized using cinnamaldehyde and marketed as cinnamon.

Found via Hayden Higgins.

Merry Old Christmas

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 10:25:51 GMT

New to me, although maybe it shouldn’t be. Old Christmas is a relic of the Julian calendar, celebrated in rural parts of West Virginia until relatively recently on January 6th. From West Virginia Public Broadcasting:

In the late 1500s, Pope Gregory XIII changed the calendar to match the solar cycle more closely. To do so, the Julian Calendar had to be reduced from 376 to 365 days, eliminating 11 full days. Some countries, though, resisted the change and kept the old Julian Calendar. It took nearly 200 years for England and Scotland to come around. Both countries adopted the Gregorian Calendar in 1752.
About this time, many of these English and Scots were emigrating to the Americas and settling in Appalachia. Some didn’t know about the change or refused to adopt the new Gregorian Calendar and kept the extra 11 days in their calendars. This meant that for them, Christmas fell on January 6 rather than December 25.

Ecoanxiety

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 17:58:41 GMT

https://twitter.com/ag_guy04/status/1611023399509266432

Probability of microbial life on Mars

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 00:33:27 GMT

From Why Not Mars by Maciej Cegłowski

"At this point, it is hard to not find life on Earth. Microbes have been discovered living in cloud tops[28], inside nuclear reactor cores[29], and in aerosols high in the stratosphere[30]. Bacteria not only stay viable for years on the space station hull, but sometimes do better out there[31] than inside the spacecraft. Environments long thought to be sterile, like anoxic brines at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea[32], are in fact as rich in microbial life as a gas station hot dog. Even microbes trapped for millions of years in salt crystals[33] or Antarctic ice[34] have shown they can wake up and get back to metabolizing[35] without so much as a cup of coffee."

As Ceglowski points out, this should make us pretty confident that microbial life already exists on Mars, if only from a stray asteroid.

Harvard’s average undergrad GPA 🚀

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:53:35 GMT

As of 2020, the average undergraduate GPA at Harvard is 2020. From Aden Barton in The Crimson via Orin Kerr.

“If grade inflation continues at its 2021-2022 pace, for example, the average GPA of the Class of 2028 would be over 4.0.”

Remembering Frances Hesselbein

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 19:26:58 GMT

When I saw that David Epstein (who’s writing I love) was writing about Frances Hesselbein again, I sort of rolled my eyes. She is at the center of his book Range (which I love — probably the book that impacted me most in the past 5 years).

But his remembrance of her is too good not to share. My favorite nuggets:

Her life philosophy as: “doing what’s needed at the time.”
She repeatedly declines offers to move up through the ranks of the Girl Scouts, ultimately becoming the CEO and turning the organization around; reading between the lines, it seems like in some ways declining advancement gives her more space to maneuver as she isn’t invested in protecting her reputation.
The ending quote: “Leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do.”

The story of VaccinateCA

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 11:31:11 GMT

Long but so worth the read. The story of how a band of volunteers who became the go to data source for vaccine availability in the US, even being relied upon by Google Maps as their go-to data source, saving lives in the process.

Some things I thought and felt while reading it:

A deep sense of admiration and inspiration. This is American ingenuity at its finest. Solving the problem in front of you however you can, never being satisfied. A lot of the best aspects of the Stripe culture are also on display.
Sadness or a sense of missing out. Why didn’t I know this existed? Why didn’t I help out? I told my wife, in what was perhaps an over reaction, that I felt like I had missed my chance to do something that matters by not participating in this.
I think this does a good job of making the case that in practice simplicity and equity go hand-in-hand even if the additional complexity is meant to increase equity. Another way to say this is that if your goal is equity, you need to have a high bar for additional complexity.
Such a startlingly good example of “do the simple thing first.” Before you build a real time system for national vaccine tracking, call pharmacies and make a list.
I have some skepticism towards the claim that pharmacy websites were “broken by design.” I would’ve liked to have seen more there.
I agree with this wholeheartedly: “We as a society accepted so much mediocrity during the pandemic, and we do to this day.”

Labeling sesame as an allergen is increasing usage rather than decreasing it

Sat, 24 Dec 2022 21:39:32 GMT

Sesame will soon be required to be labeled as an allergen on food, which is leading to more sesame being used in food.

Food industry experts said the requirements are so stringent that many manufacturers, especially bakers, find it simpler and less expensive to add sesame to a product — and to label it — than to try to keep it away from other foods or equipment with sesame.
As a result, several companies — including national restaurant chains like Olive Garden, Wendy’s and Chick-fil-A and bread makers that stock grocery shelves and serve schools — are adding sesame to products that didn’t have it before. While the practice is legal, consumers and advocates say it violates the spirit of the law aimed at making foods safer for people with allergies.
“It was really exciting as a policy advocate and a mom to get these labels,” said Naomi Seiler, a consultant with the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America whose 9-year-old daughter, Zoe, is allergic to sesame. “Instead, companies are intentionally adding the allergen to food.”

Via Alec Stapp

The most common noun in the English language…

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 10:59:35 GMT

is “time” according to Dr. Dean Buonomano on the Ezra Klein podcast.

Relatedly, Wikipedia’s list of sundial mottos will leave you with something to think about.

Frohes Lichterschwimmen

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 00:54:28 GMT

Das Lichterschwimmen via 8008-mb.ch

A wonderful Zürich tradition that I just learned about this year: the Lichterschwimmen where students float lanterns down the Limmat through the center of the city. Some how we missed this while we lived there! I’ll have to go back and see it.

Elevator operators gone extinct

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 14:59:43 GMT

Just one of the 270 jobs in the 1950 census has been eliminated by automation... elevator operator.

Other jobs that were expected to be automated by tech, like bank tellers by ATMs, just shifted the nature of the job. Hopefully, AI follows this pattern. https://t.co/F7dGbApCyH pic.twitter.com/Ck5b0ae3eO
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) December 20, 2022

Parenting culture in the United States

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 15:43:06 GMT

The average college educated mother in the United States spends ~2 hours a day with her children. Amazingly, this is a 100% increase from 1965.

From the Economist via Sarah Constantin

Before peer review

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 12:02:19 GMT

Only one of Einstein’s papers was ever peer-reviewed, by the way, and he was so surprised and upset that he published his paper in a different journal instead.)

Via Adam Mastroianni, who makes a compelling case against peer review.

It does seem that writing publicly and emphasizing auditability (sharing of data and code) would be more important than anything else.

Stripe Apps Marketplace open for all developers

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 18:33:49 GMT

We reached an important milestone for Stripe Apps last week: the marketplace is now open for all developers!

Expanding the ability to publish apps into the Marketplace has been a top focus for the team since the summer. I’m particularly passionate about this launch because I think the promise of Stripe Apps is best realized in the niches — developers making products for merchants with specific needs that will only be possible if anyone in the world is allowed to bring their creativity to bear on the problem.

I’m excited to see where this one goes!

Congratulations, Argentina!

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 20:19:02 GMT

Congratulations to Argentina and Lionel Messi on winning the World Cup. Thrilling game.

I saw Messi play in person in 2019 and it remains one of the three most impressive in person sporting performances I’ve ever seen. What I’ll remember most about watching the game, besides the atmosphere was how different Messi was in person.

He sat the first half of the game and then came in for the second half. Everyone else on the field was a football player; he was a great white shark. He scored the game’s only goal and was so business like about it. It felt like he could’ve scored it whenever he wanted and chose to do it then and not to do it again so as not to show up his opponents. I’m glad that guy has won a World Cup.

Macro Oceans has opened up its pilot manufacturing facility

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 17:54:11 GMT

Macro Oceans has opened up a pilot manufacturing facility in West Sacramento. Congratulations to the team on the milestone. Coverage by the Sacramento Biz Journal is here.

India/China facts of the day

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 17:17:14 GMT

India is going surpass China as the most populous country in the world next year, according to Pew Research. China’s population is expected to decline by 46% by 2100 according to the UN’s middle of the road projection.

The population cliff ahead of China is astounding. And a fact that has been true all my life (China is the most populous country in the world) isn’t true any longer.

American expectations

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 14:38:47 GMT

In the United States, 39% of adults say they believe “we are living in the end times,” while 58% say they do not believe we are living in the end times, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.

Christians are divided on this question, with 47% saying we are living in the end times, including majorities in the historically Black (76%) and evangelical (63%) Protestant traditions.

From Pew Research. I wonder what the trend line is like here.

The emotional aftermath of the pandemic

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 13:26:00 GMT

In the past five years, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), “people have reported losing a staggering $1.3 billion to romance scams, more than any other FTC fraud category.” In 2021 alone, that number was $547 million, which was a nearly 80 percent increase compared to the previous year.

That is from RF Jurjevics at Vice writing about romance scams targeting women and the men who’s social media photos are used by the scammers. Found via The Browser.

How Cocomelon gets made

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 20:25:52 GMT

From Ezra Klein’s show with Maryanne Wolf about the children’s show Cocomelon

[They] have set up a room, the place that makes Cocomelon, where they will have a kid watching the show. And set up next to it is another screen that shows an adult just doing normal household tasks, just sort of wandering around doing whatever you do in the house. And if the child becomes distracted from Cocomelon by what the adult is doing, they go back to the edit and they amp up the interestingness, the cuts, the whatever makes a Cocomelon episode interesting.

As a product manager, I admire the understanding of the use case and the commitment to execution, but as a parent…

52 things I learned in 2022

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 13:19:42 GMT

Triple Falls, Dupont State Park, North Carolina, part of the Appalachian mountains and the most beautiful place I went in 2022.

I borrowed this concept from Tom Whitwell as a way of cultivating a habit of curiosity. You can read his 2022 version here.

My 2022 in a nutshell: I had a son, moved back to Georgia, launched Stripe Apps, and helped the team at Macro Oceans build the kelp economy of the future.

Here are 52 things I learned along the way, with some quotes and pictures that inspired me mixed in:

It’s physically impossible to meet the domestic weight limit for a USPS small flat rate priority mailbox. The weight limit on the box is 70 lbs; filled with osmium, the densest substance known to man, it would only weigh 61.48 lbs. Paul Sherman.
Elks are able to tell the difference between public (where they can be hunted) and private land (where they cannot). Todd Hollingshead.
45% of Gen Z feels most like themselves online rather than offline. Dan Frommer. This is the strongest case I’ve seen for the metaverse yet.
Steve Kerr has won the NBA finals 40% of the time since entering the league in 1988. Trond Wuellner.
There are 15 to 20 million beavers currently living in North America, down from a peak population 400 million (!). Sacramento Bee (paywall).
60% of the world’s cosmetics are produced in the provinces of Cremona, Lodi, Bergamo, and Milan; it's called the Cosmetic Valley. Lisa Dansi.
1 in 3 homes in the United States is owned by someone age 65 or older. Tony Fratto.
Adding iodine to salt increased IQs in the United States by 15 points. Ethan Mollick.
Helen Keller was one of the founders of the ACLU. Ross Simonini.

“Just because nobody complains doesn’t mean all parachutes are perfect.”

— Benny Hill

Though the name "Tiffany" sounds modern, it dates from the year ~1200; thus the phenomenon where something sounds modern but is actually old is called the Tiffany problem. Helen Zaltzman.
The “British Isles”, “Great Britain”, and “the United Kingdom”, are not interchangeable terms. The British Isles is the collection of islands, including Ireland. Great Britain is the big island which includes England, Scotland, and Wales. The UK is the legal union between England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Tim Watkins.
Julius Caesar was not born via cesarean section. The name most likely comes from the latin verb caedere, to cut. Wikipedia. Bonus: Carthage was not plowed over and sowed with salt by the Romans; an erroneous article in the 1930 edition of Cambridge Ancient History is the source of this claim. Wikipedia.
Croissants aren’t French; they’re Austrian. Amanda Fiegl.
Pizza isn’t Italian; it's Neapolitan. At the turn of the last century, you could get a pizza in Buenos Aires, New York, or Sao Paulo, but not in Rome, Florence or Venice. This is because pizza was exported out to the world from Naples before being reimported. This pattern is called the “pizza effect” and has also happened with yoga and the day of the dead. H.D. Miller.
Punctuation wasn't invented until the late 4th / early 5th century CE, when St. Jerome introduced it. Priscilla Long.
The Pyramids of Egypt were not constructed with slave labor; evidence shows that the laborers were a combination of skilled workers and poor farmers working in the off-season. Wikipedia.
The term “catfish” as in to “lure someone into a relationship using a fictional online persona” has a delightful backstory. It goes like this: a fisherman was transporting cod from Alaska to China. The cod would stop moving during the journey and their flesh would be come bland and mushy. So the fisherman reasoned that he could improve the taste of the cod by adding a catfish to the tank. Since catfish are natural predators of cod, the cod would have a reason to swim around during the journey. Except, wait a moment, this backstory itself is made up! It’s told by one of the people in the documentary Catfish(that later became the MTV TV show) to justify the actions of his wife, who was catfishing people online. Alexi Mostrous.

The Upper Nepean by WC Piguenit

Joe Biden was born closer to Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration (March 4, 1865) than his own (January 20, 2021). Michael Goodwin.
The bright yellow of Swiss PostBuses is derived from the imperial colors of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, who established a postal service in the 15th century. The shade is one of three colors protected by trademark in Switzerland. Financial Times (paywall).
The route used for ticker tape parades in New York City was first used for the Marquis de Lafayette on his visit to the city in 1824. Mike Duncan.
The BBC operates from the same corporate charter as the East India Trading company. William Dalrymple.
Queen Elizabeth reigned for almost 30% of US history (28.5% if you're dating from 1776; 30% if you're dating from the ratification of the constitution in 1788). Matt Glassman
In 1833, the British government passed the Slavery Abolition Act, paying off slave owners to gradually free enslaved people across most of the empire. To finance the payments, the government took out a £15 million loan; it was fully repaid in 2015. William MacAskill.
The cologne worn by Napoleon is still on sale. Jude Stewart.
There are 10 companies operating today that were founded before 1000 AD. Razib Khan.
The Trevi fountain in Rome is served by a functioning Roman aqueduct that is over 2000 years old. Garret Ryan.
Nintendo, founded in 1889 (!) and the Ottoman Empire, which fell in 1922, coexisted for 33 years. Tim Urban.
The administrators of the Roman Empire had no offices. Marc Andreesen.
The reparation payment placed on Germany by France at the end of the first World War was calculated to be the same amount plus interest that Bismark had placed on France at the end of the Franco-Prussian War. How did Bismark get this number? By calculating an amount identical to what Napoleon has imposed on Prussia in 1807. Mike Duncan.
Aldous Huxley taught George Orwell at Eaton. Bonus: George Orwell is credited with coining the phrase “cold war”. Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook.
Our most recent common ancestor (probably) lived no earlier than 1400 BC and possibly as recently as AD 55. Douglas Rohde.

“A tiger doesn’t proclaim his tigritude, he pounces.”

— Wole Soyinka

The amount of land devoted to agriculture worldwide has peaked. Hannah Ritchie.
Felix Hoffman invented aspirin and heroin 11 days apart. Dan Shipper.
Apothecary, boutique, and bodega are all evolotions of the Greek word “apotheke”, entering English from Latin, Provençal French, and Spanish respectively. Ted Strong.
There are ~14 dead people for every person living today. Ethan Mollick.
The “sailing ship” effect describes the tendency of legacy technologies to experience a burst of rapid improvements before they fade into irrelevance, as clipper ships did alongside the rise of steam ships. Ethan Mollick.
Per capita CO2 emissions worldwide appear to have peaked in 2012; 2021 was 4% lower than the peak. Glen Peters. Bonus: Per capita co2 emissions in the US are down to 1920s levels. Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser.
In October of this year, Greece’s entire electrical grid ran completely on renewable energy for the first time. Bill Chappell.
The Bank of Japan in Hiroshima, which was just 380 metres from the hypocenter of the atomic blast in 1945, reopened within just two days of the bombing.” William MacAskill.
The Appalachian Mountains run through the territory of 3 countries: the United States, Canada, and France. Wikipedia. Bonus: France’s longest international border is with Brazil. Incunabula.
All eels in North America and Europe spawn in the Bermuda triangle. Emily Finch.
All US commercial auto production halted completely from February 1942 through October 1945. Robert Putnam.

Poppies by Robert William Vonnoh

In the dating market, six inches in height for men is equivalent to $175,000 in annual salary. Rob Henderson.
College educated Americans are more likely than any other demographic group to attend religious services Ryan Burge
Playing a video game together for 45 minutes increased team productivity by 20%. Todd Hollingshead.
The optimal conversation size is 4 to 5 people; at 6 it starts to break into subgroups (4 and 2 or 3 and 3). Matt Webb.
Police cars kill more people annually in the United States than Hurricanes. The key part here is that they are cars (and even more importantly SUVs), not that they are operated by police. Larger cars are more dangerous for pedestrians. Alissa Walker. Bonus: Getting rid of your car by choice makes you measurably happier. David Zipper
57% of Americans have never lived outside their home state; 37% have never lived outside their hometown. Steve Hind.
If a married woman is diagnosed with a brain tumor, there is a 21% chance that the couple will divorce; if the husband has a tumor, there is only a 3% chance they will divorce. Rob Henderson.
Since 2017, the Episcopalian Church has been conducting more burials every year than baptisms. Ryan Burge.
The percentage of Americans who say they don’t have a single close friend has quadrupled since 1990. Jennifer Senior.
On average, time spent with your famiily peaks at 15, with friends peaks at 18, with coworkers peaks at 30, with your children peaks at 40, and with your partner peaks at 70. Time alone peaks at the end of your life. Derek Thompson.

This year, I began tracking for the first time the people and websites that pointed me to the place where I found the things I learned. The two most common where The Browser and Marginal Revolution. If these aren't already a part of your regular reading, you should consider them. The third, surprisingly, was Twitter. I hope it continues to survive in 2023!

My list for 2021 is here.

If you think we’d have an interesting conversation, please reach out; I’d love to chat. You can send me a note at jdilla.xyz@gmail.com.

US housing market fact of the day

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 16:47:13 GMT

1 in 3 owned homes in the US belongs to someone 65 or older. Pointed out by Tony Fratto from a recent episode of Odd Lots.

Climate change: progress and setbacks

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 16:29:16 GMT

This week Greece’s electric grid ran entirely on renewable energy. And it looks like per person CO2 emissions have probably peaked.

However at the same time, the Alaska snow crab population has collapsed (although fishing methods may also have played a role).

My mental model for the climate change story is that for the foreseeable future, there’s going to be significant progress on renewable energy, decarbonization, and the like. It’s actually going to be shockingly fast. Eventually carbon removal is going to be figured out and costs will fall pretty quickly. A critical mass of people have accepted that decarbonization is a problem that has to be solved and it is technically feasible to solve it (with some innovation required along the way).

Alongside this though, a fair amount of environmental cost going to be paid and people and communities are going to suffer because of it. To a large extent, these costs are no longer preventable - the time for that was 10 years ago.

I’m not advocating for this path, but think it’s the likeliest outcome and if you suffer from climate anxiety, it will be crucial to remember that both those things things are happening at the same time.

Book notes: Bowling Alone

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 15:01:57 GMT

Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam, is a classic book about trust and society. As a part of my obsession with trust, I felt like I had to read it. The book, which was published in 2000, is about the decline of social trust in the United States. I didn’t find it to be dated — if anything, I think the additional distance from the publish date helped the book. From the vantage point of 2022, I felt like the book previewed some of the challenges that lay ahead of American society when the book was written and was detailed enough to help me hypothesize about how trends since 2000 may or may not have continued since then. It’s a classic for a reason!

The main idea of the book is that social trust — the invisible quality that makes us feel a bond with our fellow human — has been decaying in the United States. This much I (and I suspect many others) knew about the book even without reading it because it gets cited a lot.

This is a big deal because social trust makes it possible for society to function efficiently. Business and government work better in high trust societies. Additionally, according to Putnam, trust and participation seems to be closely linked to personal health and happiness.¹

So what leads people to have trust in their community and society? The book isn’t as explicit here as I wish it would be, but far as I can tell, though, the critical factors are:

Having relationships with people in the community; spending informal time together, having both close friends and friendly faces in the crowd; in everyday life, this looks like things like game nights, card games, social dinners, church attendance, and yes, bowling leagues
Feeling agency over how the community is organized; in particular, joining in a group activity with other people to solve a community problem seems to be a particularly powerful contributor to trust; in everyday life, this looks like things like club membership, running for office, serving in a volunteer group

Trust in the United States has been falling pretty steadily since the late 1960s.

Data from Bowling Alone, thanks to Engaging Citizens and Building Social Capital: The Exceptional Civic Story of Portland Oregon and the Role of Information Technology. Steve Johnson, Ph.D for the visualization.

Putnam makes a convincing case that this is not just people changing the way they answer a survey question, but a general decline in social capital. Across almost every dimension he studies — church membership, bowling leagues, running for office, formal involvement in volunteer groups (like the Lions club), sports leagues, volunteering at local charities, dinner parties, you name it — Americans are less involved and less trusting by the end of the 1990s than they were in 1960s.

Moreover, this pattern holds across different groups. People with more education are more likely to be involved and trusting than people with less education, but both cohorts are less involved and less trusting than they were 30 years ago. Same with race, gender, and income. It really is striking how many different cuts of data tell basically the same story — a decline in trust and participation starting in the late 1960s.

I want to pause on this for a minute, because I think it’s an underrated point. America in 1998 was not producing social capital at the same rate it was in the 1960. While America in 1960 had many flaws, black people and women of the 1960 reported higher levels of social trust than did their counterparts of the 1998. This isn’t to say that we should seek to go back to the way society was in 1960, but it is worth understanding – after all, wouldn’t we expect a more equal society to have higher levels of social trust? Putnam suggests that it was the social cohesion of the 1960s that allowed America to make the steps it made towards racial and gender equality – the implication being that lower levels of trust are causing us to miss out on further progress.²

The one exception to this trend of declining participation are social activities that can be done alone. So as an example, people don’t join a local volunteer group, they write a check to an issue based organization; they don’t join a bible study, they are spiritual at home. Individual activities, however, don’t create trust.

So where is all this trust going? The book makes the case that there are four factors worth considering:

Generational replacement. The generation that lived through World War II seems to have had particularly high social trust that they learned as a part of their formative years. This social trust habit hasn’t been passed down (or hasn’t been activated?). This is by far the largest contributing factor.
Time spent watching TV.³ Or said differently, as our entertainment options at home have gotten better, we’re less likely to venture out into the real world and do the sorts of things that lead to trust. For individuals, the time spent watching TV is the “single most consistent predictor” the author discovered.
Commuting. At least during the period when the book was being written, time spent commuting was going up. Almost by default, commuting in a car happens alone and is time that can’t be spent on other things. Additionally, it’s not just commuting workers who pay this penalty; in communities with long commute times, even retirees are less involved.⁴
Financial pressures are causing us to spend more time working and leave us with less time to spend on leisure. Before reading the book, I would’ve guessed that this would be the dominant story, but it doesn’t appear to be. There does seem to be some pull away from community engagement due to work, but it very much appears to be on the margin.

So where do we go from here?

First, from the vantage point of 2022, I have a hard time not seeing a lot of the trends outlined by Putnam getting worse. Based on what Putnam said about the impact of TV on participation, it’s hard to imagine that social media and online gaming have made the situation better. Add to this the pandemic, which broke the habits of engagement for many people, and it’s easy to see how people might start to feel like the world is spiraling out of control for them. I would predict this to continue in the near term!

The one silver lining I see is that I feel like the pandemic and shift to remote work has made it significantly easier to create social capital online. In an additional chapter from the 2020 version of the book, Putnam discusses the potential impact of the internet on social capital and posits that it will be good for organizing, but bad for creating relationships that lead to meaningful change. Based on my experience, I think that this was true before 2020, but sometime during the pandemic, it shifted. Since about mid-2020, I’ve seen a significant uptick in the number of professional relationships I have with people I’ve never met in person (even outside of my current company); a handful of these people have become legitimate friends. This feels like something I’ll have to learn how to cultivate through the rest of my career.

Second, reading this book has made me feel more strongly that we should be nudging young adults towards civic service and potentially even have mandatory/highly encouraged civic service programs. Based on the generational replacement chapter, it seems likely to me that one’s habits towards trust and civic participation are set somewhere between the ages of 18-28, so nudging people towards service during this time in their life should pay dividends for years to come.

Third, it became clear to me while reading this book that I needed to have a personal social capital plan in the same way that I have an exercise routine and other personal health habits. Finding both informal ways and formal ways to be a part of the community matter for individual happiness as well as community outcomes and I should be intentional in how I invest in it. Ideally civic leaders would latch onto this message and start to reinforce it within the communities they lead.

Finally… at some point while reading this book and looking at all of the charts where things go sideways starting between 1968 and 1974, I started to think of this chart of productivity in the United States.

Macro Market Musings

Could there be a relationship between declining trust and declining productivity? At least at an intellectual level, this makes sense: if more trust allows two people or four people to be more productive together, why wouldn’t more trust allow a society to be more productive?

Interestingly, whilte Putnam does discuss the importance of trust to economic productivity and he shows a lot of charts, he never shows this one. Even more interesting, while I’ve seen a lot of musings about the causes of the Great Stagnation, I’ve never seen anyone put forward declining social trust as an explanation; it doesn’t mean it’s not out there, but I’m surprised that I haven’t run into it. I’d like to do more reading here!

1: An alternate version of this book is the self help version – Bowling Alone: Why the key to health and happiness is cultivating friendships and community involvement
2: wonder if this means that some of the nostalgia for an earlier American age is in fact driven by a longing to return to a higher trust society? Another interesting question is whether more social conformity / segregation is needed to create higher levels of social capital; I’m not sure I agree but would love to see data.
3: This is where I hear a voice in the back of my head saying “after the defeat of Carthage, the Romans became complacent and decadent…”
4: It’s interesting to imagine how more flexible work arrangements could change this.

The price of floppy disks

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 18:49:12 GMT

A great reminder that price is a function of demand and supply:

Another thing is that I don’t know what my inventories are worth. I know that ten years ago I bought floppy disks for eight to 12 cents apiece. If I was buying a container of a million disks, I could probably get them for eight cents, but what are they worth today? In the last ten years they’ve gone from ten cents to one dollar apiece, and now you can sell a 720KB double density disks for two dollars. I just don’t know what the market will do. It’s very hard to run a business when you don’t know what your product is worth.

That is from Eye on Design’s article about Tom Persky, the last man selling floppy disks.

Alaskan Seaweed Update

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 18:59:31 GMT

The Alaskan Seaweed crop has expanded ~30x since 2017. That is from Macro Ocean’s grower survey in partnership with the McKinley Research Group.

The role of real world action in happiness

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 14:46:57 GMT

I was struck by this excerpt from the most recent edition of Range Widely by David Epstein. Here he is interviewing Brad Stulberg, author of the book The Practice of Groundedness:

DE: Ah. Fair enough. Seems like good advice. And on the advice note, you’ve actually reminded me of an unrelated piece of advice you espoused that I took to heart: to get involved with some real live Homo sapiens in my community. I acted on that one by joining the board of a phenomenal early childhood education center focused on poor families in my area. I’ve definitely found it challenging; it has led me to do some event logistics — not my strong suit. But I’ve also found it uniquely rewarding, often even more so than volunteering I’ve done with much more prominent national nonprofits. Please explain.
BS: I’m so glad you said this! Here’s the deal: at the risk of sounding woo-woo (though decades of psychology research and clinical practice support this) we are looking for love in all the wrong places. When we are intimately involved with other human beings in the real world, working on meaningful projects, having meaningful conversations, and striving toward meaningful goals, we don’t feel the need to go on the internet to look for status, validation, and love there.

I’ve been reading Bowling Alone which in many ways anticipates these themes. As a society, we have retreated from in person, coordinated action, towards activities that can be done individually and in aggregate, we’ve gotten less happy.

I wonder if we should be thinking about in person participation the same way we think about exercise — something that’s required for us to have healthy and fulfilling lives?

Queen Elizabeth II fact of the day

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 15:52:37 GMT

Image by Cecil Beaton, Public Domain

Queen Elizabeth has reigned for an incredible 30% of US history. That is from Matt Glassman.

Economic growth is increasingly decoupling from increased CO2 emissions

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 03:50:08 GMT

This is chart via Max Roser. You can argue that decarbonization isn’t happening fast enough, but it’s definitely happening.

The Einstellung Effect

Sun, 04 Sep 2022 17:15:26 GMT

Via Ethan Mollick, who is an excellent twitter follow,

It is our tendency to fixate on the 1st solution we come up with, preventing us from finding better ones

I’ve definitely felt the pull that comes from my first idea on how to solve a problem and how difficult it is to set it aside. Sadly the abstract doesn’t give any strategies for neutralizing the effect.

Our closest common ancestor

Sat, 03 Sep 2022 17:51:20 GMT

is closer in time than you think it is. From Scientific American:

In 2004 mathematical modeling and computer simulations by a group of statisticians led by Douglas Rohde, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, indicated that our most recent common ancestor probably lived no earlier than 1400 B.C. and possibly as recently as A.D. 55. In the time of Egypt’s Queen Nefertiti, someone from whom we are all descended was likely alive somewhere in the world.

The mechanism here, which is intuitive as soon as you understand it is that the number of branches in your family tree grows exponentially as it goes backwards. But that’s not all:

“Branches of your family tree don’t consistently diverge,” Rutherford says. Instead “they begin to loop back into each other.” As a result, many of your ancestors occupy multiple slots in your family tree. For example, “your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother might have also been your great-great-great-great-aunt,” he explains.

Some other surprising estimates from this article:

It is estimated that everyone alive today in South America has at least some European ancestry
It is estimated that “nearly everyone of Jewish ancestry has ancestors who were expelled from Spain beginning in 1492”

Via Max Roser

Notes on the Gallic Wars

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 19:07:21 GMT

By Lionel Royer - Musée CROZATIER du Puy-en-Velay. — Public Domain

Inspired by my recent favorite podcast The Rest is History, I finally read the copy of The Gallic Wars that I had lying around. It is Julius Caesar’s account of conquering the various peoples of Gaul and bringing their territory firmly under Roman rule.

The book is surprisingly readable and relatable, even two thousand years later. The fact that it was Caesar’s own account of his campaigns is really fantastic. Even though you can’t take it all at face value, how often, even in the modern era do we have a first hand account from someone of Caesar’s stature?

I love the fact that Caesar wrote these accounts in order to raise his own status in Rome. The image that came to mind for me are the giant status updates that teams send inside of tech companies to keep everyone up-to-date on project status and build momentum. Julius Caesar was literally doing this!!! And he became dictator for life!

Caesar comes across as charismatic. His ability to project confidence and rally his teams despite the odds ahead of them is compelling. You can see why the men wanted to follow him. He both pushed them and related to them. Like a character from The Sopranos or The Wire, you root for him despite the human cost of his actions. He claims to have killed a million Gauls. Historians consider this to be an exaggeration… but still, this is who you find yourself rooting for!

The high point of the book is the Siege of Alesia, where the Romans surround their foe Vercingetorix in Alesia and then put a wall around their siege in order to hold off the force that had been sent to relieve Alesia. Absolutely astounding and not the sort of thing that works out for a lesser general. If you’ve never heard of this, take the time to read the wikipedia article. It’s worth it.

Vercingetorix is a tragic figure in his own right. His appeals to liberty and self rule resonate today. He is clearly a talented leader, going toe-to-toe with Caesar. And yet he comes on a little too late and is not quite able to unify the Gallic tribes enough to prevail. I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a novel / movie / Netflix show made from his perspective yet.

I’m not a military historian, but I was struck by how often Caesar created advantages for himself by showing up places where his enemy didn’t expect him to be or by understanding what his enemy was going to do via intelligence. He also does a great job of weighing the cost of inaction — frequently the risks he takes are due to his assessment that delaying an engagement is an even greater risk.

Despite the readability, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re already interested in the topic. I am a total dork for Roman history and I still got lost in the names of tribes, commanders, and local rulers.

Small things at big companies

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 13:52:53 GMT

“The new always looks so puny — so unpromising — next to the reality of the massive, on-going business.” — Peter Drucker in Innovation and Entrepreneurship

No matter how big the ambitions are for something, they always start small. But big companies have big expectations. This incongruence makes starting new things at companies particularly challenging.

Some types of these expectations:

Big companies expect big results. If you’re a start up, a $1B market opportunity looks life changing; if you’re Apple, not so much. This creates a tension where interesting ideas that look small today don’t get funded unless someone is willing to promise big results. The incentive here is to overpromise because if you overpromise, you might get lucky and more or less hit expectations. But if you underpromise, you won’t get funded and you never even get started. So you overpromise because you have to, but overpromising creates pressure to generate results where the opportunities might not yet exist.
Your teammates have expectations about their jobs. Your ability to define their your role is extremely important within larger companies. If you don’t define what you’re responsible for and what you’re not responsible for, you won’t get anything worthwhile done. But starting something new frequently requires small amounts of a specific types of skills. You don’t need someone to do full time content marketing or partner management, you just need someone to roll up their sleeves and work on a specific project. So on the internal start up, you run into a lot of people saying “that’s not my job” or “I’m sorry, I don’t have time for this.” This is a particular challenge for less common functions where the model is to embed someone in the team (vs. project based or on demand staffing), because if you don’t have enough work to justify at least a quarter of a persons time for the foreseeable, you risk not getting anyone at all. This also shows up in small ways where people push back on owning specific projects almost reflexively — after all, in their last role at the same company this would’ve been someone else’s job and a major part of their success to date has been their ability to define their role.
Performance assessment. Even if the people you’re working with are willing to do whatever it takes to succeed personally, the institution is going to push back against this. As companies get bigger, they develop career ladders. These ladders define the skills necessary to progress at a given level within a given function and inevitably describe what success looks like in the core business better than whatever new thing you’re working on. This will be a problem both for people on your project, who risk paying a penalty for doing work that isn’t at their level and people considering joining your project and comparing it against the career trajectory offered by other options.

So how do you succeed in spite of this? I can’t claim special expertise, but here’s what I’ve observed to work:

Understand the incentives. If you understand it, you see it coming, and avoid the worst of it. Some of it you can mitigate with planning and some of it you just have to accept. This is the tax you pay in exchange for not having to build something new while chasing funding and setting up IT systems.
Reward effort. The people you’re working with are multifaceted. Most people, particularly those in high demand professions, aren’t optimizing purely for the next promotion or personal prestige. If you’re excited about them going outside of expectations to do what’s best for the team, they’re more likely to keep doing it, even in the face of incentives to do otherwise.
Create a safe haven for experimentation. Progress on new things isn’t linear and people need the space to mistakes. It’s much easier to do this without needing to create the artifice of consistent results. So make that space where you can. If you’re more junior, this might look like a side project outside of your formal OKRs. As you get more senior, give your people the space to dabble around in areas that have the potential to be productive without demanding that they show results.
Even better, have a plan to create the artifice of consistent results. Teams and leaders that are really cooking are actively experimenting with one part of their portfolio while banking results with another part of their portfolio. By doing this, they’re able to shield the experiments from the need to produce results right away and can use the lessons they’ve learned to drive the next set of results.

1 day a week in the office

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 11:00:58 GMT

From Bloomberg:

A full 50% of office visits globally were just once a week in the second quarter, up from 44% in the first quarter, according to data from Basking.io, a workplace-occupancy analytics company. At the same time, fewer people made the commute four to five days a week, especially in large cities.

I’m surprised that the norm here is 1 day a week. Right now I assume that most people live close enough to an office to make this work and are basically coming into the office to have all their 1/1s in person.

I think the longer term equilibrium for jobs that can be remote is going to be ~1 week per quarter mandatory in person together with the rest distributed. I do think that some people will choose to go in more often, especially if there is a critical mass of people that live nearby.

We’ll see!

Just try it

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 00:52:55 GMT

I appreciated this observation from Austin Vernon’s post on the potential for Geothermal energy: When it comes to low information environments, just trying stuff is powerful. Only the simplest models are worth using.

He gives this example from fracking and low quality sand:

Models that predict frac (sic) job performance have consistently lost to some engineer saying forget it and upping how much sand and water gets pumped downhole. Besides failing to predict the success of slickwater, models didn't account for the success of low-quality sand. Until recently, the industry used only the most spherical sand at great expense. Theoretically, spherical sand should drastically improve permeability over wonky sand. Sourcing this sand from places like Wisconsin became a problem once oil companies started using trains worth of sand in a single well. Eventually, companies sourced local, low-quality sand at a much lower cost and rarely saw performance decreases. They bought more sand on the same budget and made better wells. Each formation eventually reaches a limit where further intensification doesn't help. The industry always finds that point empirically.

This reminds me of a theme from one of my favorite books, Range: when planning a career, there’s not a great way to know in advance what is going to fit for you, so experiment — have hobbies, change jobs, take on projects.

Happy Swiss National Day

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 13:20:25 GMT

Alpfahrt im Sommer, Albert Manser - 1980 via Artnet.com

What Google gets right

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 13:12:39 GMT

It’s somewhat popular now to throw shade at Google¹, particularly as a place to work: it’s big and bureaucratic, it’s not a good place to start your career and so on. I understand this impulse, but I disagree with it. Particularly for its size, I think Google is really effective company and rather than bagging on it, people should think about what has allowed it to stay as effective as it has despite being as big as it is.

I think people typically misunderstand Google in two key ways that then causes them to misjudge it:

Google isn’t a start up. It is one of the largest companies in the world, with more than 150,00 employees and about as many contractors. Its peer companies, in terms of number of people, are General Motors, Darden Restaurants, and Aeon, to name a few. Just to try and put this into context, my entire current company (Stripe) is smaller than my product area at Google (YouTube).

Because many people still remember Google as a younger, smaller company, they judge Google’s agility against much younger and smaller companies instead of against its peer set. Certainly it’s less agile than it once was, but on a size adjusted basis it’s one of the most agile companies in the world.

Google is much more decentralized than a typical company. I joke that the best way to think about Google is a university attached to a money printing machine. Like a university, Google has many different departments that really aren’t trying to coordinate with each other. This is by design. You may not agree that this is the right strategy, but I think you have to understand it to effectively evaluate the company.

So what does Google get right? Here are four things that come immediately to mind for me.

Product focus: an incredible amount of attention is paid at all levels of the company to the specifics of the product — what it actually does for the user. As a typical YouTube product manager, I regularly had to review product details with head of product, head of engineering, and other very senior leaders. These leaders, several levels up from me, were more well versed in the specifics of my product area than my manager or my head of product was at much smaller companies. This product focus isn’t top down, but cultural, which makes it much more powerful. People at Google encourage other people at Google to use their products and have opinions about how they should work.
Distributed decision making: For me, this is where the misunderstandings about Google begin to really show up. Google is incredibly effective at decision making for a company of its size. An incredible amount of relatively high stakes decisions can be made at Google very quickly. As an example, if my team made a product change that positively impacted our key metrics, I could have that launched globally to billions of people in two 15 minute meetings.

Additionally, Amazon gets a lot of mileage out of the Bezos API mandate, but it’s pretty common at Google as well to have some internal help text and an API be all that is needed for different orgs to collaborate. Additionally, as long as team incentives are aligned, it’s pretty easy for individual teams in different orgs to collaborate without any formal sign off from their Product Area Leads.

Where things do get complicated at Google is major collaborations across product areas where there is a lot of ambiguity. So for instance, if I wanted to get a couple of teams from Google Maps and a couple of teams from YouTube to collaborate on a set of features with high but uncertain potential, I knew that this was going to be a difficult and challenging path. And yet, as difficult and challenging as this would be, on a per person basis, it was much easier to get collaborations like this to happen than at <1,000 employee companies that I’ve worked at.
Talent friendliness and talent development. The slides and free lunches are really easy to make fun of, but Google legitimately tries to be a good place to work. The default policies are sensible and friendly to employees. When they make a change, they try to make sure to not punish their people along the way. It isn’t perfect, but especially for its size it’s really good.

Beyond its policies, Google is a great place to develop your career if you’re thoughtful about it. As long as you’re keeping up with your day-to-day work, you can get exposure to almost any career path as a twenty percenter (once again, think of a university rather than a traditional company). Here the breadth of Google’s product offerings is a real asset; you can get exposure to almost any discipline or industry without changing companies.

Caveats: I worked at Google for about two and a half years, entirely at YouTube and mostly in the Zürich office. Google is a big place that varies a lot by team, so it’s entirely possible that my experience is an outlier. There are also many legitimate criticisms of the company that I’m not the best person to articulate.

Notes: 1: Alphabet

The crisis never ends

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 10:35:32 GMT

The podcast Revolutions by Mike Duncan is probably my favorite one these days. It follows the history of different revolutions, starting with the English Revolution in the first season and continuing through to the Russian Revolution in the current and final season.

Episode 100 of the Russian Revolution season is titled History Never Ends and it tells the story of how Lenin and the Communist Leaders, in the aftermath of the October Revolution, continuously sought a “breathing spell”, when things would calm down and they could implement Communist principles and begin improving the lives of the people. From the show:

This was the logic behind the treaty of Brest-Litovsk: make peace at enormous cost because we need a breathing spell. This was the great prize to be won during the civil war. If we defeat all our enemies, we shall be able to finally work in peace. But this breathing spell they yearned for was a mirage. And it's always a mirage. We all know from our own daily lives, that fabled next week or next month or next year, when we will finally be able to do all the things we have to put off today because we're too busy, too harried and dealing with too many other emergencies, big and small, sudden deadlines that force us to drop everything, unexpected events that just upend our lives, except when we get to that next week and next month and next year we find the same set of unexpected emergencies, often the same type in category that have stalked us throughout our lives. And we are forced back into our natural state of scrambling a reaction and improvising a response.

What’s true for revolutionaries and history is also true for companies and products. There are only two modes: minor crisis and major crisis. Breathing space almost never materializes. It’s exceedingly rare for a product or company to have sufficiently cleared the field of all rivals such that there are no short term concerns¹.

So what are the implications for leaders?

You have to learn to differentiate between the different types of crises. One potential frame here: do you have more momentum or problems? Another: if you look across all the products and companies you know of, how would this season rate? If it’s not obviously a time of major crisis, it’s probably a time of minor crisis.
You have to make the time and space to work on the long term. The time when it will be easy is never going to come and if you don’t do it today, it won’t be easier tomorrow.
Expect a background level of chaos and messiness. Learn to perform at a high level in the midst of it.

Notes:

In my observation, companies tend to make some of their worst decisions in their moments of least crisis
An unrelated fact I learned from this episode: the reparations placed on Germany by France at the end of World War I was calculated to be the same amount plus interest that Bismark had placed on France after the Franco-Prussian War. How did Bismark get this number? By calculating an amount identical to what Napoleon imposed on Prussia in 1807.

Book notes: Shoe Dog

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 00:30:05 GMT

Shoe Dog is the story of Phil Knight and the founding of Nike through the first 12 years of its existence. It’s a great entrepreneurial story, one that I would recommend to anyone starting a business, because of how honest it is about the journey.

As an outsider, one thing that seems to surprise first time entrepreneurs is how much time they spend solving problems that are both existential and completely unrelated to the company’s core mission. Knight spends the better part of a decade fighting through pushing through challenges like balancing his startup with his day job, finding a bank willing to fund his growth, and personnel issues before he finally gets to the point where he can say: “the problems were never going to stop, I realized, but for the moment we had more momentum than problems.” I think this is a good frame: do you have more momentum or problems?¹

Another thing I appreciated about this book was getting to know Nike before it was dominant. All my life, Nike has been the premier sportswear brand. I had no idea that it began life as Blue Ribbon. Or that it started out importing another company’s shoes, basically taking advantage of outsourced production. Or that it only launched the Nike brand when its production partner tried to go around it to distribute in the United States.

One final story from the book: the name almost wasn’t Nike. Knight’s most trusted lieutenant had observed “that seemingly all iconic brands—Clorox, Kleenex, Xerox—have short names. Two syllables or less. And they always have a strong sound in the name, a letter like “K” or “X,” that sticks in the mind.” Despite this insight, he very nearly named the company Dimension Six.

1: A benefit of having an executive team of distance runners: they have a high tolerance for pushing through pain towards a goal.

In praise of the least bad option

Thu, 02 Jun 2022 10:00:16 GMT

Often when I find myself stuck, it’s because I don’t have conviction about how to move forward. One option gives me part of what I think is important, another option gives me another part, but no option gives me everything I want. I can spend a lot of time churning with indecision, looking for an additional option that doesn’t exist.

Oddly, I find these situations harder to deal with in my personal life than in my professional life. It seems that at work I expect to be faced with choices where there is no ideal outcome, but running into this situation in my personal life is more distressing.

Recently I’ve been struck by the power of laying out the options that exist and “simply” choosing the least bad one. In practice, this looks more like:

Lay out the options
Make sure no other options exist
Identify the least bad one
Is there anything I can do to make this option even less bad?
Pick the least bad option
Decide to revisit the decision and/or how to move towards the ideal option in the future

A common pattern I see in the people who’s work I admire is consistently choosing the least bad option¹. If you can do this regularly, you can improve a situation a lot over time. And remembering this seems to reduce the mental toll of not having an ideal option

So here’s to the least bad option: humbler and less satisfying than the best option, but powerful nonetheless.

1: I think of this Jon Gruber column about how Apple rolls, which I revisit about once a year.

Introducing Stripe Apps

Tue, 24 May 2022 17:54:20 GMT

I’m really excited to finally show the world Stripe Apps.

Stripe apps lets developers customize a user’s Stripe experience. They can make workflows simpler, like the Intercom app, that makes it easier for a support agent to see who they’re refunding a payment for and reply inline. They can make collaboration easier, like the Render app, that makes it easier for a company that uses Stripe to process payments to make that data accessible to PMs or Analysts on the team. Or they can make it easier for businesses to get financing based on their Stripe financial data, like FounderPath, that helps SaaS founder access capital more easily.

This has easily been the most ambitious launch that I’ve ever worked on. Recruiting 35 launch partners seemed impossible when we started and yet here we are with more than 50. I’ll probably write more about what I learned while doing this in the future, but for now I’ll just say that ecosystem product management reminds me of the way I felt when I first started being a platform PM.

There’s a fair amount of terror, that comes from not having direct control over people’s roadmaps and decisions. There’s a sense of accomplishment that comes with understanding how to use a focus on the user and attention to detail to get people to move in the same direction. There’s a thrill that comes with making something much higher impact than any one team or individual could make on their own.

You can see the entire list of amazing launch apps here or start building an app here. You can find coverage of Stripe Apps in the Stripe Newsroom, Hacker News, Tech Crunch, and Venture Beat.

Update: Stripe Apps covered by Ben Thompson in Stratechery.

Content gaps on YouTube

Sun, 08 May 2022 17:27:06 GMT

The last major thing I worked on at YouTube has finally shipped: a way for Creators to find inspiration for videos using YouTube data on what people have been searching for.

This feature is particularly useful if you’re trying to find your niche on the platform. You can brainstorm topic areas and then use those to find search terms where there isn’t enough good content today, allowing you to get started.

I’m proud to have played a small part in bringing this into the world.

Tyler Cowen and Thomas Piketty on Sonderfall Schweiz

Sat, 23 Apr 2022 18:22:49 GMT

A public water fountain in my old neighborhood in Zürich.

From the Conversations with Tyler podcast:

COWEN: If I visit every major country in Europe, what I observe is the highest living standard is arguably in Switzerland — Norway and Luxembourg aside. Switzerland has one of the smallest governments, and they attempt relatively little redistribution. What is your understanding of Switzerland? What if someone said, “Well, Europe should try to be more like Switzerland. They’re doing great.” Why is that wrong?
PIKETTY: Oh, Switzerland. It’s a very small country, so it’s about the size. . . . Actually, it’s smaller than Île-de-France, which is a Paris region. Now, if you were to make a separate country out of Île-de-France, GDP per capita, I think, would actually be higher than Switzerland. Of course, you can take a wealthy region in your country and say, “Okay, I don’t want to share anything with the rest of the country. I’m going to keep my tax revenue for me. I’m going to be a tax haven based on bank secrecy.” That’s going to make you 10 percent or 20 percent richer. I’m not saying —
COWEN: It’s been a long time since Switzerland relied on bank secrecy, right? Following 9/11, that Swiss advantage largely went away.
PIKETTY: Oh, that’s wrong. Oh, you’re wrong on this.
COWEN: It’s the US that’s the secrecy haven.
PIKETTY: No, it still brings . . . No, no, I can tell you in terms of the banking sector and the status as a tax haven still brings an additional income of at least 10 percent or 20 percent to Switzerland. But I agree with you, Switzerland would still be rich even without this. But they would be a bit poorer, and they will certainly not be richer than if you compare to, say, the Paris region GDP per capita or the London region, if you take the wealthiest region. It’s important to compare countries of comparable size, regions of comparable size….
COWEN: But Switzerland is a real country with a diversified economy.
PIKETTY: Yes, sure.
COWEN: Very little of it is poor.
PIKETTY: The Paris region is a real region.
COWEN: But that’s a clustering effect within France. France is much poorer than Switzerland. Could not France bring Swiss prosperity to —
PIKETTY: This is not comparable in size. I don’t think it makes sense. Again, if you want to compare a region of about 5 million,10 million inhabitants — which is the size of Switzerland — you find many other regions with comparable GDP per capita all across Europe.
There are many good things with Switzerland, by the way. I think the local democratic system has lots of good aspects to it. The education system has . . . I think there’s a lot to learn from each of these experiments.

I feel lame excerpting this part since it’s the same part that Tyler excerpted, but Switzerland is one of my obsessions so here we are.

A couple of observations…

At least as far as I can tell from the internet, Piketty is wrong about GDP per capita. The latest GDP per capita I could find quickly for Île-de-France was $69,423 in 2016 (from Wikipedia). Swiss GDP per capita was $83,073 in 2016 according to the World Bank. The Swiss figure is in 2020 US dollars. I’m not sure what year the Île-de-France figures are in, but if you assume it’s 2016 dollars, then that would put the Île-de-France GDP per capita figure at $74,862 (based on this admittedly less than fully convincing website). Still less.

This doesn’t invalidate Piketty’s point larger point about scale . Before I lived in Switzerland, I had several people who had lived there mention how small of a country it is when comparing it to the US. At the time, I would roll my eyes.

But having lived there, I’ve changed my mind. It is a really small country and this seems to make some problems more tractable. US federalism and Swiss federalism get compared a lot and they are similar in many ways. But Swiss Cantons, which relate to the Federal government the same way that US States do, are closer to US counties in terms of population and land mass. There’s a lot more consensus about how things should work at the US county level than there is at the US state level, which makes choosing a direction easier. (Aside: You could argue that the implication here is that even more US governance should happen locally, but I wonder if at some point that would erode the benefits of scale that the US enjoys.)

Even with the caveat of size, I still think Switzerland is super impressive. The way I describe it to Americans is that the entire country is like the wealthiest US suburbs. Everything just works. The infrastructure is well maintained. It’s clean. The bureaucracy is friendly and easy to navigate. It’s safe enough to leave your door unlocked. There aren’t that many places in the world where 8 million people live that you can say that about.

The last thing I’ll say is that I don’t think the Swiss secret is simply less government and less redistribution, although I do think these are assets for Switzerland. If I had narrow it down, I would say that the political culture of trust and compromise and the high investment in human capital are the driving factors. If anything, I think these are what allows the government to be both small and effective… which I think places me closer to Piketty’s answer than Tyler’s question.

Social integration, trust, and education in America

Sat, 23 Apr 2022 17:32:12 GMT

From Daniel Cox at the Survey Center on American Life:

College graduates live increasingly different lives than those without a college degree. They are more socially connected, civically engaged, and active in their communities than those without a degree. I find that college graduates have more extensive systems of social support and a larger number of close friends. Consequently, they feel lonely and isolated less often.

The whole piece is interesting. The message is pretty clear that American Society “works” for people who go to college in a way that it doesn’t for those who don’t. The differences in levels of social integration are striking and somewhat confusing. It’s intuitive to think that this is just financially driven; if you have more money and stability, it’s easier to make friendships and get involved in the community… but it’s also not clear that this is the root cause (at least from this work).

Some other things that stood out to me…

The relationship between litter / graffiti and trust in one’s neighbors:

Americans living in neighborhoods where trash and graffiti are common express far lower trust in their neighbors. Less than half (45 percent) of Americans who say garbage or litter are everywhere in their neighborhood say they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in their neighbors. Eight in 10 (80 percent) Americans who live in places where there is no trash or graffiti nearby say they trust their neighbors at least a fair amount. This pattern holds across community types. Feelings of trust are higher in places without trash, litter, or graffiti marring the physical environment, whether that’s a dense urban neighborhood, a suburb, or a town.

A similar dynamic exists with tap water:

Americans who trust their tap water express a stronger connection to their community and the people who live there than those who do not trust their tap water. A majority (58 percent) of Americans who say they would be very comfortable drinking water from their tap say they feel closely connected to their neighborhood—a feeling shared by only 44 percent of those who say they would be very uncomfortable drinking unfiltered tap water.

Both of these are pretty intuitive if you think about it — if a place is dirty, you probably aren’t going to feel comfortable there. If you don’t think you can trust the tap water in a place, you’re unlikely to feel really at home there.

Being involved with a place of worship seems to help with social integration, which makes sense:

Regardless of educational experience, Americans who belong to a religious congregation are much more active in community life and report stronger social connections. Overall, Americans who are members of a place of worship are much more likely than those who are not to volunteer in the community at least a few times a year (47 percent vs. 23 percent), talk to someone in their community they do not know well (64 percent vs. 54 percent), and attend a community meeting or local event (60 percent vs. 41 percent). They are also more likely than others to feel connected to their neighborhood and the people who live there (58 percent vs. 46 percent).

But so does living near stuff to do:

Simply living near a public park, library, coffee shop, or bar is strongly associated with greater community engagement, higher feelings of social trust, and connection to the community.

So to summarize:

there’s clearly a relationship between going to college, participation within society, and trust — it’s not clear what the driver is here.
- my best hypothesis is that the people that are naturally inclined to go out and do stuff are now being routed into college (that’s the default path and you have to work hard to get off of it) and that this accounts for most of what we’re seeing, but I can’t prove this.
it seems like having communities that are clean and that provide quality basic services is correlated with trust
being involved with a religious organization is correlated with participation
living near stuff (reducing the friction of participation) is correlated with social trust

Slack’s eroded value proposition

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 14:56:10 GMT

Over the weekend, I read We Don’t Sell Saddles Here where Stewart Butterfield outlines how Slack plans to take over the world. It’s a great piece and worth reading if you’re planning on launching a new product. It really captures the dynamism that Slack had in the early days.

This part in particular stood out to me though:

The best way to imagine the reward is thinking about who we want our customers to become:
* We want them to become relaxed, productive workers who have the confidence that comes from knowing that any bit of information which might be valuable to them is only a search away.
* We want them to become masters of their own information and not slaves, overwhelmed by the neverending flow.
* We want them to feel less frustrated by a lack of visibility into what is going on with their team.
* We want them to become people who communicate purposively, knowing that each question they ask is actually building value for the whole team.

As someone who uses Slack every day, I had a visceral reaction to each of these propositions. I never feel relaxed when using the app and I almost always feel overwhelmed by the flow of information.

The app became what it set out to fix — in many ways, the reduction in friction, which made it so addictive, made many of the problems it set out to solve worse.

Product is the art of the possible

Sat, 09 Apr 2022 18:01:36 GMT

Otto von Bismark, Chanellor of Germany, who said: ““Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best”. Image is from Wikipedia.

Sometimes you have the opportunity to give a user an insanely great product. The organizational support, project funding, and technology all line up to give exceed user expectations. These are rare opportunities — enjoy them!

Most of the time you’re missing one of the key ingredients: project funding, technology, or organizational support.

Frequently the limiting constraint is a political one. You can’t launch the new product to all users because the sales team is afraid of how enterprise partners will react. You have to launch sooner than you want because a leader has drawn a line in the sand. A partner team won’t change their roadmap to help you with a dependency.

These political constraints can be the most frustrating because they seem arbitrary. But that doesn’t make them any less real. The best product leaders I know play the long game. They make the case for the best theoretical path, but are willing to accept the best one available. Then they move on to the next iteration. After all, iconic products are built one well thought-out iteration at a time. This flexibility gives them credibility with others, which gives them more space to operate in the future.

It’s common for companies to talk about product managers as mini-CEOs, masters of their own feature set. In many situations I’ve seen, this is actively unhelpful because it doesn’t prepare the product manager or their stakeholders for the reality of what the pm is being asked to do: find the possible, the attainable, the next best.

Nothing works (without trust)

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 22:21:12 GMT

Delightful treatment of the idea that efficient markets produce products that work by Dan Luu.

The whole thing is worth reading, but the most interesting section to me was the one on trust in between firms and within firms.

Coming back to when it makes sense to bring something in-house, even in cases where it superficially sounds like it shouldn't, because the expertise is 99% idle or a single person would have to be able to build software that a single firm would pay millions of dollars a year for, much of this comes down to whether or not you're in a culture where you can trust another firm's promise. If you operate in a society where it's expected that other firms will push you to the letter of the law with respect to whatever contract you've negotiated, it's frequently not worth the effort to negotiate a contract that would give you service even one half as good as you'd get from someone in house. If you look at how these contracts end up being worded, companies often try to sneak in terms that make the contract meaningless, and even when you managed to stamp out all of that, legally enforcing the contract is expensive and, in the cases I know of where companies regularly violated their agreement for their support SLA (just for example), the resolution was to terminate the contract rather than pursue legal action because the cost of legal action wouldn't be worth anything that could be gained.
If you can't trust other firms, you frequently don't have a choice with respect to bringing things in house if you want them to work.
Although this is really a topic for another post, I'll note that lack of trust that exists across companies can also hamstring companies when it exists internally. As we discussed previously, a lot of larger scale brokenness also comes out of the cultural expectations within organizations. A specific example of this that leads to pervasive organizational problems is lack of trust within the organization. For example, a while back, I was griping to a director that a VP broke a promise and that we were losing a lot of people for similar reasons. The director's response was "there's no way the VP made a promise". When I asked for clarification, the clarification was "unless you get it in a contract, it wasn't a promise", i.e., the rate at which VPs at the company lie is high enough that a verbal commitment from a VP is worthless; only a legally binding commitment that allows you to take them to court has any meaning.
Of course, that's absurd, in that no one could operate at a BigCo while going around and asking for contracts for all their promises since they'd immediately be considered some kind of hyperbureaucratic weirdo. But, let's take the spirit of the comment seriously, that only trust people close to you. That's good advice in the company I worked for but, unfortunately for the company, the implications are similar to the inter-firm example, where we noted that a norm where you need to litigate the letter of the law is expensive enough that firms often bring expertise in house to avoid having to deal with the details. In the intra-firm case and you'll often see teams and orgs "empire build" because they know they, at least the management level, they can't trust anyone outside their fiefdom.
While this intra-firm lack of trust tends to be less costly than the inter-firm lack of trust since there are better levers to get action on an organization that's the cause of a major blocker, it's still fairly costly. Virtually all of the VPs and BigCo tech execs I've talked to are so steeped in the culture they're embedded in that they can't conceive of an alternative, but there isn't an inherent reason that organizations have to work like that. I've worked at two companies where people actually trust leadership and leadership does generally follow through on commitments even when you can't take them to court, including my current employer, Wave. But, at the other companies, the shared expectation that leadership cannot and should not be trusted "causes" the people who end up in leadership roles to be untrustworthy, which results in the inefficiencies we've just discussed.
People often think that having a high degree of internal distrust is inevitable as a company scales, but people I've talked to who were in upper management or fairly close to the top of Intel and Google said that the companies had an extended time period where leadership enforced trustworthiness and that stamping out dishonesty and "bad politics" was a major reason the company was so successful, under Andy Grove and Eric Schmidt, respectively. When the person at the top changed and a new person who didn't enforce honesty came in, the standard cultural norms that you see at the upper levels of most big companies seeped in, but that wasn't inevitable.

I’m not sure at the moment how much I agree with his approach to build vs. buy decisions but I know I agree with his assessment that the essential ingredient for productivity is trust.

Great Generalists of History: Charles Durant

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 03:15:54 GMT

Seaweed from Charles Durant’s collection — more here.

Unlike the typical seaweed collector, Durant was not a British woman but an American man, an inventor and scientist. Born in 1805, he seemed to assume, like many educated men of his era, that no aspect of the mechanical, physical, or natural world was beyond his ken. His biography is a litany of claims-to-fame.16 With a hot-air balloon ascent from Battery Park, New York in 1830, he made his name as the first American aeronaut, staying aloft for two hours in a balloon he’d sewn himself. His second ascent, in 1833, was attended by President Andrew Jackson and thousands of others, during which Durant dropped leaflets featuring his own ecstatic poetry. These poems, about the virtues of ballooning, seem to have been the world’s first instance of aerial propaganda. He was the first US manufacturer of silkworm gut, a filament used for fishing line, and his raw silk and cocoons took high awards. He turned his attention then to Mesmerism, a faddish belief in clairvoyant hypnosis that was sweeping the nation. After infiltrating Mesmerist circles by pretending to find the practice credible, he wrote one of the first anti-Mesmerism screeds to be published in America, in which he debunked the supposed science with great relish.17 After that book, Durant became interested in hydraulics. He maintained a year of technical correspondence with Ellis S. Chesbrough, chief engineer of Boston’s waterworks, and soon-to-be engineer of Chicago’s sewage system. Their letters were published as Hydraulics: On the Physical Laws that Govern Running Water (1849).

Charles Durant went on to write the first American book on seaweed, and according to this article, at least, the best one. The whole article is worth reading, especially if like me, you’re interested in seaweed.

Claims about the industrial revolution

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 03:06:39 GMT

The geography of the industrial revolution in Britain was shaped in part by the corrupt, rentier economy of London in the eighteenth century. The various by-laws, regulations and tax regimes in and around London largely precluded the establishment of new industrial processes. This drove industrial investment to the midlands, and especially to the steep and narrow valleys of Yorkshire, Lancashire and South Wales, where there was abundant water-power to drive the new industrial machinery. The need to efficiently pump water provided the impetus for the development of steam, driving industry forward.

From Does Britain Exist by Tim Watkins. You often hear about regulations constricting growth and leading innovation to happen elsewhere, but I think this is the first time I can remember someone citing a specific example.

Thanks to the Browser for the recommendation

Applying export subsidies to skill development

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 17:07:30 GMT

I love this post by Uri Bram on export subsidies and how they could be applied to personal skill development.

Here’s Uri on export subsidies:

South Korea is one of the greatest development stories rarely told. In just 60 years, they've taken 50 million people from largely rural poverty to a higher GDP per capita than Japan's - it's a bonkers achievement. How did they do it?
Through export subsidies. For the full story, read How Asia Works, but the short version is that Korea strategically brought its manufacturing sector up to scratch by subsidising firms conditional on them successfully exporting products; that is, on selling things abroad on the open market to people who had plenty of other options and no particular reason to buy Korean.

His really interesting idea is how you might apply this to skill development:

So paying your kid's costs while they do a writing degree is not an export subsidy, it's just a regular-subsidy. But promising to match any money they make from submitting freelance articles to magazines? This is what we'll call a Personal Export Subsidy. By supplementing the money they make from successfully placing freelance articles, you're letting an impartial external arbiter (the various magazines) decide whether your kid's work is actually worth something, while acknowledging that in the early days you'll need to increase that "something" for your kid to survive while climbing the ladder.

I’ll add to this that you think of things like the YouTube Shorts Fund as a sort of export subsidy for short form video creation. Another example of this is venture capital, particularly at early stages where funding is pretty directly tied to showing some form of commercial traction and the bar for company traction gets raised as the company matures.

The value of generalists

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 23:58:45 GMT

Product management is a generalist’s field. You do a little bit of user research, a little bit of strategy, a little bit of design and a little bit of engineering. Everyone you work with is better at what they do than you are, yet you still have to find a way to help them.

Within a field of generalists, I am a generalist PM. I’ve worked across agriculture, ad tech, consumer social, and most recently fintech. This makes me doubly a generalist.

Perhaps because of this, I am especially appreciative of the art of being a useful generalist, which Ross Simoini captures so well in this article. Here’s an excerpt:

In this way, the generalist must have a high tolerance for complexity, confusion, and uncertainty. Generalism does not offer the clearly tiered progression offered to the specialist. Working across various fields means you will likely spend long periods being unskilled at them. The generalist can acquire new talents, but they are also a perpetual amateur in a cycle of discovery and failure. There are benefits to this process: slowness encourages a certain quality of attention; novelty encourages a sharp perspective; and an outsider’s position keeps you immune from the insider’s tunnel vision.
Specialism, on the other hand, offers an easily measured form of success. In fact, specialization usually defines a spectrum of success and failure.“Best” and “worst” can exist only when the boundaries of success have been narrowed to a single parameter: the best RBI hitter in baseball; the most dividends earned in a single day.

I left this article thinking there should be a Society for Generalists the way there is are professional groups for specialities. Worth reading the entire thing, especially if you’re a generalist.

John Cleese on where creativity comes from

Sun, 06 Mar 2022 00:18:44 GMT

A brilliantly insightful speech on how to foster creativity . Here's a quick summary:

Now here's the negative thing: Creativity is not a talent. It is not a talent, it is a way of operating…
You see when I say “a way of operating” what I mean is this: creativity is not an ability that you either have or do not have.
It is, for example, (and this may surprise you) absolutely unrelated to IQ (provided that you are intelligent above a certain minimal level that is) but MacKinnon showed in investigating scientists, architects, engineers, and writers that those regarded by their peers as “most creative” were in no way whatsoever different in IQ from their less creative colleagues.
So in what way were they different?
MacKinnon showed that the most creative had simply acquired a facility for getting themselves into a particular mood — “a way of operating” — which allowed their natural creativity to function.

Cleese describes an “open mode” where sort of meander or play with a problem. In open mode, there's no right or wrong. Crucially, it's extremely difficult to be open with time pressure. He tells relays this story about how Alfred Hitchcock would help move his writers into “open mode”:

“When we came up against a block and our discussions became very heated and intense, Hitchcock would suddenly stop and tell a story that had nothing to do with the work at hand. At first, I was almost outraged, and then I discovered that he did this intentionally. He mistrusted working under pressure. He would say “We're pressing, we're pressing, we're working too hard. Relax, it will come.” And, says the writer, of course it finally always did.

Then there is a “closed mode”, where we implement our solution and are rigorous about speed, efficiency, details, and outcomes.

The most creative people as ones who can move most quickly between these two modes.

Cleese then gives 5 tricks for getting yourself into open mode:

Space where you will be undisturbed at least until a specific time.
Time to get into open mode, usually at least 30 minutes, where your mind wants to go back towards execution. Then after about 60 more minutes, usually the most creative time is past and you need a break.
Time to play with the problem, to stick with the discomfort of not having a solution. The most creative people spend the most time in this space of not knowing or considering alternatives before picking a path.
Confidence in yourself, to handle the discomfort of not knowing the answer, and to be wrong as you try things out.
A 22 inch waist (humor) , Cleese's way of reminding us that nothing moves us into open mode faster than humor.

I have bookmarked this to read again in 6 months. Sent to me via the Flux Collective .

Is the great resignation over?

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 17:26:26 GMT

That is the subject of my latest Browser Bets episode with Andrew Flowers of AppCast.

Here’s a snippet:

Andrew: The quits rate in the US had an all-time high of three percent in November of last year, that's the latest data we have. So what does that mean? It means in November three percent of all workers quit their job and in the 20 years that the bureau of labor statistics has been tracking this that's the highest point. My bet in quantitative terms is that the quits rate in the US by the end of 2022 is going down below two and a half percent which is where it it peaked before the pandemic.

I respect Andrew a lot, but I actually think he’s wrong here. I mention this in the show, but I’ll say it more succinctly here. I think three things are going to keep this number high for the rest of the year:

A structural shift towards remote work. I’m on the record as thinking that back-to-the-office is never going to happen for a certain categories of workers. But adjusting to this new normal is going to take time and some employers are going to try to force employees back… and these employees are going to quit to take jobs that allow for more flexbility.
The retirement of the Baby Boomers. This is simply a demographic tailwind, perhaps pulled forward by employers trying to enforce return to work (if you’re going to retire in 6 months anyway, do you really want to commute again?)
Remote jobs will have a higher natural quit rate. If you’re a remote worker, there’s way less friction in quitting a job. There’s no new commute, there’s minimal disruption in your schedule. You get shipped a new computer and log in to different video calls. For remote first workers, it’s going to be easier to hop between jobs and this will show up in the numbers.

Only time will tell who is right. You can join in on the bet here.

Trust in society and trust in markets

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 17:48:13 GMT

I loved this podcast between Ezra Klein and Alex Tabarrok for multiple reasons, not the least of which is my continuing obsession with the importance of trust in flourishing societies:

ALEX TABARROK: I mean, very similar to this, I think undermining trust in government. Andriei Shleifer has some work showing that trust, as you know, is down in the United States. And the kind of weird thing is, is that trust in government is down, but actually, this doesn’t lead you to kind of a libertarian paradise where people say, I don’t trust the government, let’s use the market.
Actually, what happens is trust goes down in all kinds of institutions. And if anything, people become more in favor of government. Not that they actually think it’s going to work, but they just think everything is unfair. And they think that nothing is going to work, and they become removed from the political process. But decline of trust doesn’t lead you to something which I want. And it’s unfortunate, in a way, because you would hope that people would sort of — well, if not the government, then the market. But that’s not the way it works.
Oddly enough, right, the societies in which people have the most trust, not only do they trust the government more, but they actually also trust markets more. These things work together. So if you have a lot of trust in government, then you’re actually willing to have free trade because you figure, well, the bottom half of people are still protected. You’re willing to have vaccines, which actually gets the economy going. So it turns out that trust in markets and trust in governments correlates actually pretty highly.

And later:

EZRA KLEIN: But that strikes me as somewhat to the side of the issue I’m bringing up here, which is that if you want to align the incentives of more groups to push for more overall growth, as opposed to pushing for just their slice of a stagnant pie, to mix my metaphors here, then you actually want lower levels of inequality. And I even see that in the housing example you turn to there. I’ve attended these meetings in S.F., and I try to watch what happens with them.
And something you cannot miss in a city like this, which has insane levels of internal inequality, just insane, like nothing I’ve ever seen, is that there’s no trust.

This certainly matches my intuition that trust in society is self reinforcing. But how to start moving towards trust to begin with? That I wish I had a better answer to.

Speed and resilience in mega-projects

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 05:25:14 GMT

Notre Dame Cathedral in the spring of 2019

I’ve researched and consulted on megaprojects for more than 30 years, and I’ve found that two factors play a critical role in determining whether an organization will meet with success or failure: replicable modularity in design and speed in iteration. If a project can be delivered fast and in a modular manner, enabling experimentation and learning along the way, it is likely to succeed. If it is undertaken on a massive scale with one-off, highly integrated components, it is likely to be troubled or fail.

That is from Bent Flyvbjerg in HBR.

Two things this article pointed out that I hadn’t considered before:

Long timelines in a project create risk because it leaves more time for things to go wrong. I’ve rushed to ship a product before for fear of the competition, but the concern is more general than that. The longer it takes to get going, the more likely that the environment changes — a project sponsor leaves the company or an interested beta customer changes their plans. Even more so for public works.
Projects that are useful in stages are more resilient. I’ve prioritized shipping a project in iterative chunks as a way of testing a hypothesis about my product before, but never considered that the faster you get a project producing, even partially, the more time its benefits compound and the faster it pays back it’s costs.

The entire article is worth a read, especially if you’re in the midst of planning or executing a major project. The example of the Madrid subway is both obvious and eye opening.

One more thing it made me consider: modularity creates resiliency. One of the ways cathedrals like Notre Dame were able to be built over hundreds of years was by using patterns that were easily understood and able to be extended. Calamities could come and derail projects, leaders could die, but new ones could take their place and take up the work again because of the modularity of the system.

Thanks to The Browser for bringing this one to my attention.

A serial 80 percenter

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 21:58:49 GMT

I’ve always thought of myself as an 80 percenter. I like to throw myself passionately into a sport or activity until I reach about 80 percent proficiency level. To go beyond that requires an obsession and degree of specialization that doesn’t appeal to me. Once I reach that 80 percent level, I like to go off and do something totally different; that probably explains the diversity of the Patagonia product line — and why our versatile, multifaceted clothes are the most successful.

From Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard, the founder and owner of Patagonia. Reminds me of David Epstein’s book Range and the compounding value of exposure to different problem types for innovation.

Probably a good habit to ask “What new skill have I reached 80% proficiency at recently?”

The limitations of the monetary incentives

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 18:14:10 GMT

I really enjoyed this interview between Casey Newton of the Platformer and Molly White of Web3 is going just great.

In it, Molly made a point I’ve thought about before but not been able to fully articulate, which is that in an effort to align incentives financially, many web3 projects undermine their own effectiveness:

There also aren't really intrinsic monetary incentives for people to contribute to Wikipedia, which I think is a very good thing. Where people are paid to edit Wikipedia by outside parties, it warps the incentive to contribute into one that's very different from (and sometimes at odds with) the incentives for most community members, and is often a very negative thing.

She references Everipedia, a blockchain-based wikipedia alternative:

If you look at their recent blog posts, it's all about how many tokens their editors have supposedly earned, and it even brags about the fact that "Over 70% of stakers have locked their IQ up for over 3.5 years to earn max APR". This is the same token that people are supposed to be spending to edit and vote on the quality of edits, but they're excited that people are locking them up on staking platforms? The goal is not to create a reference work, it's to make money off the token.
Speaking more broadly, monetizing things just shifts the dynamics in enormous ways. We've seen this same thing happen with play-to-earn gaming, where people start doing things really differently when monetary incentives are added.

I think this is a really smart point and poses problems for Web3 projects.

Financial incentives aren’t always the best way to get people to do what you want (see the daycare that started charing parents for being late and then saw an increase in tardiness), except that it’s worse than that for Web3 projects because it makes it harder for them to tell if they have product market fit. Because there isn’t a great way to distinguish the speculators from the true believers, it feels like the project has true momentum, when all it has are people trying to make a quick buck.

Bets with Tom Chivers

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 23:08:05 GMT

Another episode of Browser Bets, this time with Tom Chivers. We made bets about Boris Johnson’s future as Prime Minister of England and the likelihood of AI wiping out humanity.

Bets aside, my favorite part was processing the experience of going through COVID together. Tom and I had never met before this conversation and live thousands of miles away from each other, yet we instantly had this shared experience to talk about. This is pretty unique. Watch the whole thing.

Thinking about office spaces

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 17:11:32 GMT

Office spaces are dangerous

My conversation with Helen Toner

Wed, 19 Jan 2022 21:13:50 GMT

I did an interview with Helen Toner for The Browser where we made bets on China’s economic development, the possibility of an AI delivered milkshake, and quantum computing.

Phares Kariuki on the origins of trust in a society

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 19:10:27 GMT

One of the things that living in Switzerland caused me to appreciate is the impact of trust in society. Switzerland measures as an exceptionally high trust society.

When you live there, it’s something you can actually feel. The way I describe it to people is that in Switzerland, everywhere feels like high end American suburbs (holding aside for the moment that not everyone feels welcome in American suburbs). Things just work. You can leave your door unlocked.

I have a hypothesis that this trust is self reinforcing. Because people trust each other, additional things are possible. Because of these things, people trust the system. My example here is the Swiss Recycling system, although I’m sure someone could come up with something better.

Because of this experience, societal trust has become something I really want to better understand. Where does it come from? How can we make more of it? What destroys it?

With that background, I loved this interview between Phares Kariuki and Uri Bram. The whole thing is worth reading, but Phares offers two hypothesis about what creates trust and one about what destroys trust.

Trust creator #1: Violence

How you move from one equilibrium to another, from observation seems to be violence. It is cruel to think about but Europe went through countless wars in order to integrate.

Trust creator #2: Contract enforcement

The primary thing that can be done to increase trust in society is to have a level of justice for crime / breach of contract. This enforces good behaviour and dissuades bad behaviour; places with high trust have the highest rates of contract enforcement but also contracts aren't needed -- folks can shake on it.

Trust destroyer: Foreign interference

Phares Kariuki: Additionally, I've seen high trust societies get decimated by foreign interference (Korea, Somalia, Germany).
Uri Bram: I’d love to hear more about the Somalia example -- I think some people reading this might be surprised to hear it had a previous high-trust phase.
Phares Kariuki: The Somali were one people, largely Sunni. Their territory covered part of Eastern Ethiopia, North Eastern Kenya. They were split into multiple countries during the colonial era, with Kenya famously oppressing them during the Shifta wars of the 70s. They wanted to secede. The interference in their leadership due to the Cold War led to oppression and clan based mistrust; the fallout stands until today.

The Origins of St. Moritz and the genius of Swiss branding

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 20:18:31 GMT

St. Moritz in the winter

How St. Mortiz, a town in the Engadin Valley became a tourist destination:

Johannes Badrutt, the business-savvy owner of the Engadiner Kulm hotel in St. Moritz, is celebrated as the father of winter tourism. According to legend, he spent a rainy evening in September 1864 by the hotel’s fireplace, talking to visitors from London. Badrutt claimed that on especially sunny winter days it was possible to walk around the area without a coat because of the warmth of the sun. He encouraged the English tourists to return in winter and see for themselves, offering to pay their travel costs if his account proved untrue. Travelers could not resist this intriguing bet and returned in mid-December—arriving under a bright sky and covered in sweat. They stayed until March.

From Lapham’s Quarterly. The Swiss don’t have a reputation for branding experts, but they should. It is one of the best and most subtly branded countries in the world. See also this article on Little Switzerland’s.

Both articles were brought to me via The Browser.

2021: The Year That Was and Wasn’t

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 21:48:41 GMT

I contributed to a piece for the The Morning News about what 2021 will be known for and what we thought it would be known for, but didn't pan out.

My prediction for what we'd remember the year for is the breakout of electric vehicles. From the piece:

2021 was the year that the electric car won . Electric-car makers have sky-high valuations and traditional car makers are plunging billions of dollars into electric-car manufacturing and telling markets that 40 percent or more of their sales will come from electric vehicles by the end of the decade.

I almost had commercial fusion energy in this spot, but decided the evidence for it actually happening isn't strong enough yet.

For what was supposed to happen, but didn't pan out, I had return-to-office. I go on to predict that return to office will never really happen for most workers.

Covid is going to continue to cause havoc over the course of 2022 and 2023, whether it's additional variants or concern about breakthrough cases. While this will diminish over time, by the time it does, any job that doesn't explicitly require the worker to be in person will have moved to remote-first by default and any company that tries to buck this trend will be at a disadvantage in the marketplace.

Omicron, of course, is an example of how return-to-office will continue to be delayed. Eventually it will get too hard for companies to put the genie back in the bottle.

52 Things I learned in 2021

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 18:19:28 GMT

Luzern, Switzerland, my favorite place I visited in 2021

Last year, I was reading Tom Whitehall's 52 things I learned in 2020 and thought “what a clever way to build the habit of curiosity,” so I decided to copy it (here is his 2021 version , if you're interested). With that background, here are 52 things that were new to me or caused me to think differently in 2021, loosely organized by category.

Nature

1) Greenland sharks commonly live 200+ years. Some are likely still swimming from before Shakespeare was born. They don't reach sexual maturity until 150 years of age and their normal pregnancy is 12 years long. Source .

2) You can walk from Norway to Canada. Or at least you can if you're an arctic fox. Source .

3) Human made stuff weighs more than all life on Earth , by one measurement at least. Source .

4) The importance of clean air: $ 700 air purifiers in Los Angeles improved test scores by almost as much as if almost as much as it would if class sizes were reduced by a third, according to David Wallace Wells , who estimates that 10M lives a year are lost due to air pollution.

5) Many countries in the world are transitioning towards reforesting . Scotland is the best example, after bottoming out around 4% of land area with forests in 1759, it's at 18%, close to where it is estimated to have been in the year 1000 AD, when it was 20%. From Our World in Data .

6) You can use sound to put out fires. Via Ted Goia .

7) 18 of the 20 horses that raced in this year's Kentucky Derby were descended from Secretariat . Juliette Kayyem

Switzerland

8) The Swiss constitution regulates the number of second homes in various communities, capping it at 20%. This is just one example of the way that the Swiss constitution is different than the American one - it can be (and is) frequently amended by referendums that get incredibly specific. From Why Switzerland.

9) From 1872 through 2003, no sitting member of the Bundesrat (Swiss Federal Council) was not re-elected. From Why Switzerland.

10) LSD was first synthesized in Basel, Switzerland. Via Crooked Timber.

11) The concept of concordance, the Swiss political model of seeking mutually acceptable compromises between competing political factions or between management and labor. From Why Switzerland and my friend Lovro.

California

12) The bear used as the model for the California state flag was the pet bear of William Randolph Hearst . The bear's name was Monarch. Via the Voice of San Diego podcast .

13) Palm trees are not native to California. They were imported to make it look more like the holy land. Via Justin EH Smith ; special shoutout to Scott Lewis who also regularly points this out.

14) In California, any item can use the recycling symbol , regardless of whether or not it can actually be recycled. California is seeking to change this. I can't believe this needs to be legislated. Via the NYT .

15) The city of San Diego uses 30% less water than it did in 1990. That is an overall reduction, not per capita. This happened despite the city growing by about one third during that time. Via the Voice of San Diego podcast .

16) Joshua Tree National Park is larger than the state of Rhode Island . I hope to visit at least a corner of it in 2022. Via Wikipedia .

17) The original name of Bank of America was Bank of Italy. It was founded in San Francisco. Via California: A History .

18) The Los Angeles Clippers have never retired a number. Via Bill Simmons .

19) The most decorated American unit in WW2 were Japanese Americans serving in Italy. From California: A History : “Four months later, some 110,000 Japanese aliens and Japanese Americans were behind barbed wire, where they would remain for the next three years and more, except for those young nisei who volunteered for the draft in 1943 and, assigned to the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, fought their way up the Italian peninsula in 1944 and early 1945, emerging as the most decorated combat units of the war. "

Governance

20) The US Military is the one US institution that has gained trust since the 1970s . Improvements in diversity of hiring, reducing the gap between stated and actual values, the volunteer army, and the Gulf War success are credited with improving their standing. Via Amanda Ripley . I love this framing of the origins of trust, from the same article:
Typically, trust gets traced back to three central ingredients: ability, benevolence, and integrity. Ability captures the obvious, rational reason to trust something or someone: they seem to know what they are doing. Benevolence reflects the sense that an organization has our best interests at heart, that they are motivated by the forces of good. And integrity means that the institution has strong, admirable values to which it adheres, even under pressure to do otherwise.

21) When median rent starts to exceed one third of median income, homelessness starts to rise rapidly . You could argue that I should have put this in the California section. Via Chris Glynn and Alexander Casey .

22) Zoning reform by itself doesn't lead to development (affordable or otherwise). Minneapolis removed zoning restrictions in 2018 on duplexes and triplexes and a grand total of three got built by 2020 because of a lack of changes to the building code. From Strong Towns .

23) Scaling back prosecution of small, non-violent crimes reduces violent crime by keeping people out of the criminal justice system . It seems that going to prison increases the likelihood of committing future crimes. From reasons to be cheerful.

24) Famously bike friendly Amsterdam was as car choked as many other world cities as recently as the 1970s. From The One-handed Economist .

25) The role of deregulation in the shale boom . The Energy Policy Act of 2005 allowed for drilling of oil on public land to skip environmental review as long as the project met predetermined limits. This led to more certainty for investors, more rapid turnaround in projects, and rapid technological innovation. We should do the same thing for carbon neutral technologies (eg, geothermal). From Eli Dourado .

26) The average time to complete a National Environmental Protection act environmental review now takes 4.5 years to complete and is more than 600 pages long. From James Pethokoukis .

27) It took just 16 days to plan the Central Park Zoo. The Power Broker .

28) Lack of resilience seems to be a primary factor in civilizational collapse (at least this is how I understand Spencer Greenberg's conversation with Samo Burja ). I'm editorializing a bit here, but I think we have to find ways to improve environmental (or societal) outcomes without putting a straight jacket on our society,

29) Non-violent protest is statistically more likely to create lasting social change than violent resistance . I heard this first while listening to the amazing City of Refuge podcast and didn't quite believe it, but was pointed to Erica Chenoweth's book Why Civil Resistance Works by the show's producer (this podcast is a good introduction). The way this works is that stable social change ultimately requires buy-in from people, especially leaders of institutions. While violence can be an effective short run deterrent, overtime it repels people.

American society

30) Americans are rapidly becoming less likely to think God exists. Especially Gen Z. Via Ryan Burge .

31) Unmarried young adult Americans are having sex less often . The driving factor seems to be later marriages and, increasingly, religious observance. Via Lyman Stone .

32) The great downsizing is coming. The leading edge of the baby boomers are 75 today and the share of 80 year olds in the population is set to increase rapidly over the next 10 years , which is important because 80 is when people tend to downsize and move into nursing homes. Via Calculated Risk .

People

33) When in a group of people who speak different languages, the chosen language for conversation tends to be the one known best by the participant that knows it least well, not the one that most people speak best, or the one with the highest average proficiency. Via Eurozine .

34) People who have been connected tend to double down out of embarrassment rather than change their minds. Via Brooke Harrington .

Health

35) The phenomenon of terminal lucidity , where patients with dementia become themselves again shortly before they pass away. From The Guardian .

36) Obesity is almost definitely not caused by overeating, will power, or self control. In 1975, no country in the world had an obesity rate greater than 15% ; today this is common . From Slime Mold Time Mold .

37) AIDs has existed for almost 100 years , not just since ~ 1980. It is thought to have been in the US as early as 1940. Via Sarah Schulman on the Ezra Klein show .

38) The placebo effect is getting stronger in the United States. “The implications of this are pretty serious - the placebo effect in the United States has actually become quite a lot stronger over time, meaning that drugs that once would have been approved may not be now - because their performance relative to that of placebo is less convincing. "From All That Is Solid .

39) Orphans were used to transport the smallpox vaccine across the Atlantic from Spain to Venezuela in 1803 . They were intentionally given cowpox, which prevents smallpox, two at a time across the ocean until they made it to Caracas (this is where the root word for vaccine comes from, cow is vaca in Spanish). It's unlikely that the orphans were asked if they wanted to do this, but they likely saved thousands of lives. Via The Atlantic .

Life hacks

40) Be careful about your heuristics. Over focusing on what is easily measurable can cause you to miss what's truly important. This is called the McNamara fallacy. It's best summed up by this quote by the Great Bill Russell: Let's talk about statistics. The important statistics in basketball are supposed to be points scored, rebounds and assists. But nobody keeps statistics on other important things - the good fake you make that helps your teammate score; the bad pass you force the other team to make; the good long pass you make that sets up another pass that sets up another pass that leads to a score; the way you recognize when one of your teammates has a hot hand that night and you give up your own shot so he can take it. All of those things. Those were some of the things we excelled in that you won't find in the statistics. Via Aeon .

41) Be more adventurous with your experiments. At Bing, 2% of experiments led to 74.8% of gains. This suggests that we're probably being way too conserative with what we're testing. Via University of Chicago Press .

42) Habits are very sensitive to environments. If you are having trouble breaking a habit, try changing your environment; if your environment is changing, be intentional about your habits. Via David Epstein .

43) Don't forget to look for what you can remove to solve a problem . We systematically overlook subtractive changes that could be beneficial (removing something to improve it). From Scientific American.

44) Forecasts made after a vacation are more accurate. Source .

45) You can't self talk and scan your peripheral vision at the same time . From Allan Parker via Oscar Trimboli .

Wisdom

46) Busyness is a form of laziness , which I heard for the first time from my friend Uri Bram in his interview with Oliver Burkeman . I think about this at least once a week.

47) Fundamental error attribution , where we explain our faults as due to our situation and the faults of others as due to their characters so applies to friends vs. enemies. So if we have a friend who makes a mistake, we're more likely to attribute it to their situation, and if it's an enemy, we're more likely to ascribe it to their character. The key is to try and figure out what the other person thinks went wrong from their perspective. From non zero .

48) The most precious resource is agency : “This is not worship of employment, but a simpler observation: It seems that the more you ask of people, and the more you have them do, the more they are able to do later on their own. It is important to note that while we shouldn't allow children to be bobbin boys, no one would describe Steve Job's summer job at 13 as his exploitation. We should be thinking much harder about making sure children can make meaningful contributions to the world." From Simon Sarris and a theme of the parenting books I read this year, Montessori Toddler .

I'm not sure how to categorize these

49) France has more successful jailbreaks by helicopter than any other nation . GQ

50) The world's first unicorn was United States Steel, founded in Pittsburgh PA . Via Google Arts and Culture .

51) The original definition of the word weird: destiny-changing power. From Grow by Ginko .

52) Mariah Carey made 1.9M from All I want for Christmas is you in 2020 ( NBC Philadelphia via Conor Sen )

House of Broken Angels

Sat, 04 Dec 2021 21:49:24 GMT

House of Broken Angels Cover

I picked up House of Broken Angels as another stop on my literary tour of California, but after reading it, I wouldn’t call it a California book. It’s a San Diego book, through and through. I’m not sure how it reads to someone who hasn’t lived here, but even as a relatively new resident, I recognized places and neighborhoods.

House of Broken Angels is the story of two half brothers, both named Angel, of a man from Tijuana as the elder Angel (Big Angel) nears death from cancer. The two Angels wrestle (figuratively and literally) with each other’s and their father’s sins, as do the rest of their families. It’s a book about how short life is and about how frail humans are.

The other thing that places this book in San Diego is the connection the characters have to Tijuana, where the main character immigrated from. The two cities, just 20 miles a part, share an economic and social relationship. They mayors regularly meet with each other. Now that I live here, this seems obvious, but it surprised me at first.

The book brings the relationship between the two cities to life. The Angels’ father is from Tijuana, but immigrates to San Diego when he leaves his first wife (Big Angel’s mom) for his second wife (Little Angel’s mom). When I lived in Europe, one of my favorite things were the border regions where cultures bled into each other. The Italian part of Switzerland, which feels like both Italy and Switzerland, the northern part of Spain, the feels both Spanish and French. San Diego has elements of that. This book the way that people, relationships, and culture move back and forth across the border.

To me, the best part about this book was the way that it approached the end of life, the yearning for one more Christmas morning, and regret over mistakes. The other thing I’ll take from it is some understanding of the Mexican-American San Diego experience.

Dr. Maggie Lieu on when humans will make it to Mars, robot maids, and the standard model of cosmology

Sat, 20 Nov 2021 21:56:47 GMT

The brilliant Dr. Maggie Lieu aka Space Mog was kind enough to join me on Browser Bets. I was surprised to learn that she volunteered to go to Mars and was very nearly selected.

Our bets:

Bet 1: Humans will land on Mars by 2035 James says before, Maggie says later. Maggie thinks it will be China, James hopes it will be the US.

Bet 2: We’ll have generalizable robots in our houses by 2035 Maggie says no way, James says yes out of an unfounded sense of optimism.

Bet 3: The standard model of cosmology will be overturned by 2035 by something that aligns quantum physics and relativity. Maggie says yes, James says no.

My conversation with Sebastian Park

Sun, 31 Oct 2021 18:58:42 GMT

Sebastian is an e-sports executive, investor, and entrepreneur. We made bets about the future of NFTs, the Creator Economy, and UGC gaming. In between, I learned about how working for Darryl Morey influenced how Sebastian thinks about predictions.

Here are the bets we made:

The future of NFTs: No more than 2 of the top 50 NFT projects on OpenSea.io will still be there in October 2023 (Last 30 day trading volume)
The future of the Creator Economy: If you look at the top 10 web3 companies in 2023, less than 30% of the value will come platform companies.
The future of UGC gaming: By 2030, we will see the same fragmentation in gaming that we do in video. More hours of playtime for top UGC game platform more than the top studio game.

A transcript is available here.

Grapes of Wrath

Tue, 26 Oct 2021 18:56:43 GMT

The next book in my literary survey of California has been Grapes of Wrath, the iconic novel that I missed in high school.

The book tells the story of the Joan family as they leave Oklahoma and head west to California, driven by the Great Depression, mechanized farming, and poverty.

[I’m not going to review the book since I don’t think that’s useful for a book of this stature. I’m just going to reflect on it. I’m also not going to worry about spoilers, so if that bothers you be warned].

The book is extremely well paced. Steinbeck slowly turns up the pressure, showing how poverty forces the Joads from one no win situation to another. After enough least-bad options, the family eventually breaks apart. The slow creep of ruin really affected me, as did the images of starving children and pregnant women.

I was surprised at how deep I was into the book before I realized how bleak the ending would be. There wouldn’t even be the satisfaction of a shootout.

The ending! I can’t believe no one I knew let on even a little bit about how weird it is. I can’t claim to understand it.

It’s impossible to read this book now and not think of the homelessness crisis in California. I’m sure some of the members of California’s current tent camps would agree with Steinbeck that the police cause more injustice than the people.

For better or worse, the claiming of land is a part of the California psyche. Wether it is water rights, land claims, zoning, or the right to keep your view in a California beach town, there is a preoccupation with protecting one’s claim from others in the golden state.

I think the biggest thing that this book added to my understanding of California is an appreciation for how turbulent the period mass inward migration was, even though it is a crisis that has now passed. I think I understand better why it was such a big deal.

On the whole, I enjoyed the book. Although I liked East of Eden more, I thought the characters in Grapes of Wrath, particularly the female characters were more fully imagined.

One year with Doulingo

Wed, 13 Oct 2021 16:00:33 GMT

I'm more proud of this than I have any right to be. This morning I made it to 365 straight days of practicing German on Duolingo. Unsurprisingly, after using it for this long, it's become one of my favorite apps (1).

When I first started using Duolingo, it was as a supplement to tutoring sessions with a teacher, but when we moved from Switzerland, I no longer had the bandwidth for classes. Since then, my German practice has been Duolingo, the NZZ podcast Akzent, and reading the occasional children's book to my daughter. I have to admit, I'm surprised at how effective Duolingo is. I can tell from my other German language activities that I'm better today than I was 3 or 6 months ago.

Here's what I love about the app:

They've mastered habit building. For me, learning a language is all about reptition and Duolingo is the easiest to use repeatedly. Just like the best camera is the one you have with you, the best language app is the one you use most often. Duoling nails this.
They have so many overlapping ways that they incentivize good language learning habits:
- Streaks, to get you in the app every day
- Hearts, to incentivize you to not rush through the course
- Experience points, which incentize depth of knowledge
- Gems, which pay off if you reach your goal
- Leagues, which create social pressure / competition
- Badges, which reward continued investment
- Crowns, which reward completing lessons
- "Cracked" lessons, which reward revisitng material. I think this is everything, but I'm probably missing something.
The overall playfulness of the app, which comes out in the sounds they use when you're right or wrong, and the characters that they use in their lessons

After 365 days, here's what I wish they'd do differently:

I'm never sure if I'm using my time in the best possible way. Learning a language is a tradeoff between picking up new material and going back and practicing mistakes. All the features Duo has makes it tough to know if I'm in the right spot. I wonder if there is a TikTok-esque version that drops you in and just drills you based on where you stand algorithmically.
Duo really isn't great at reading comprehension. They have a stories feature that helps with this, but it's sort of off to the side. As a user, I'm left to figure out how to integrate these two experiences (which is basically my previous criticsim).
They haven't solved speaking practice. They have cool features that get you to pronnounce words, but there's nothing like live conversation and having to truly think in another language. They have an "events" feature where you can join free or paid groups, but it's super buried.
I'm surprised they don't have a platform for language teachers. I would happily sign up for a 30 min or 1 hr weekly practice session with a language teacher, yet I'm left to go off platform to find this person. When I find them, the first session is going to be an assessment, which Duolingo should be well positioned to provide.
I can't believe they don't have gear (t-shirts, hoodies) or digital stickers that you can buy that only gets unlocked once you get to a certain level. Seems right up their alley. So here's to another year. I sort of imagine that afer I progress to a certain level, I'll need other resources. But we'll see!

1: I'm obligated at this point to mention that Duolingo is a Pittsburgh company

Where I was from

Tue, 28 Sep 2021 20:59:12 GMT

Photo by Joel Mott on Unsplash

Earlier this year, I moved back to California. I am a Californian by marriage and a somewhat reluctant one at that. The muted seasons and even the beautiful beaches, which I sometimes enjoy, aren’t really my thing. And yet this is where life has taken me again.

In an effort to make the best of it, I resolved that if I’m going to live in this state, I’m going to appreciate it, and I kicked off a California reading tour.

The latest book in my survey is Where I was from, a memoir by Joan Didion. I’m still at the beginning of my California reading journey, but so far this would be the first book I suggest anyone read if they want to understand the state.

Where I was from is about the author’s relationship with California, how her understanding of California changed as she grew up, how the California of her youth faded away, and her relationship with her parents as they grow old and ultimately pass away. It’s exceptionally well written. It weaves the author’s family history into notable events from California history and both of these into the human experience of leaving behind a version of a place, of yourself, and of those you love you as you age.

Where I was from isn’t primarily a history book. Perhaps because of this, it has unlocked California for me in a new way, like how meeting a friend’s parents for the first time helps explain who they are.

It’s common to talk about California’s boom/bust cycles because of the gold rush, but it’s also apt. After all, this is a state that’s population has increased by more than 50% in a decade 5 times since 1850¹. Didion’s book spends time on less famous booms: the aerospace industry after the Second World War and the development boom of the 1960-80s when the great ranches of California were broken up and developed into communities.

The aerospace boom is told through the perspective of Lakewood, California, a suburb that grew up next to the McDonnell-Douglas plant, and then struggles with its identity as that industry moves away in the waning days of the Cold War.

The development boom is told through the stories of the heirs of the Irvine and Hollister estates, great California ranches passed down intact from Spanish and Mexican land grants. These heirs proceed to break up these great ranches to make suburbs and shopping malls, along with a tidy fortune.

For Didion, the settlers that rushed West during the gold rush, the families of Lakewood and the heirs of the great ranches all have a common Californian experience: Each generation rushes headlong to make California into their version of paradise. Some make it and prosper and others are left behind. In in doing so, they change California. In the end, those who profited most from the changes look back and wonder what they’ve lost in the process².

Didion’s Californians are not fearless and self sufficient pioneers, but real people terrified of getting caught in the mountains before the weather turns. They benefit greatly from the investments of the Federal Government, be those investments railroads, aqueducts, or jet planes. Their experience of striving to change the world and then having to live with the consequences is a human one. If there is something uniquely Californian, it is the speed and the scale with which those changes take shape.

The best example I have of how this book has changed how I view California is Cannery Row in Monterey. Today, Cannery Row is a tourist trap. A couple of the old canning operation buildings are preserved but no actual fishing or canning continues. When I had visited it in the past, all I saw where the tschotskes and doodads. But now I see it differently: a monument to a past generation of Californians who strived to build a new world and succeeded, only to have that way of life slowly become irrelevant and fade away³.

Notes

I didn't have anywhere to put this, but I especially appreciated the Didion's mother's observation that California had become "all San Jose."

1: California’s growth is really stunning. The first decade where it didn’t grow more than 20% was 1980.

2: The addendum to this book set south of Market street in San Francisco about the tech industry almost writes itself. I also appreciated the author's observation that it is especially Californian to feel that anyone who shows up after you is altering the state beyond repair.

3: In a typically Californian way, just up the street from Cannery Row, an industry that literally fished itself out of existence, is the Monterey acquarium, with emphasizes the importance of ocean conservation.