Blog AF

Although I hate road trips, I love traveling and seeing new places. It didn’t take much convincing after reading about the flower bloom in Southern California to get me excited about renting a car and heading down the highway for 5 hours to see it.

We clearly did not do things right, though. Between missing the fine print on the rental agreement, getting to the campsite after the welcome center had closed, and forgetting to get firewood ahead of time, we were pretty stressed on our ride there. Luckily, getting out of the city and camping in the wilderness has its way of soothing even the most restless of Avys. More...

For some reason, things have been quiet around here lately. I guess work has kept me busy, and I haven’t been too motivated to either take photos or share links on my blog. That’s how you get The Great Link Dump of April 2017.

I wish I had more to share of my day at the races, of my walks through the city, and of these black and white shots. Especially the black and white shots.

This post feels jumbled up. A collection of collections, thrown together due to lack of better options. I’d apologize, but its better than not posting, and I’m hoping it gets the ball rolling again. More...

It has been a linkless month, so here’s a brain dump.

• 2016 Letter to Shareholders, Amazon
  Jeff Bezos - SEC.gov
  
• Solving the Water Jug Problem from Die Hard 3 with TLA+ and Hypothesis
  Nicholas Chammas - Into The Light
  
• The Accident No One Talked About
  Jessica Ciencin Henriquez - The New York Times
  
• Climbing the wrong hill
  Chris Dixon
  
• Amex, Challenged by Chase, Is Losing the Snob War
  Charles Duhigg - The New York Times
  
• Cars and second order consequences
  Benedict Evans
  
• Planning is Guessing
  Jason Fried - Signal v. Noise
  
• Obamacare: The Republican Waterloo
  David Frum - The Atlantic
  
• LEGO Macintosh Classic with e‑paper display
  Jannis Hermanns
  
• Alec Baldwin Gets Under Trump’s Skin
  Chris Jones - The Atlantic
  
• Dole Food Had Too Many Shares
  Matt Levine - Bloomberg View
  
• The Kekulé Problem
  Cormac McCarthy - Nautilus
  
• The welfare state in the age of globalization
  Branko Milanovic - Global Inequality
  
• Love in the Time of Cryptography
  Quinn Norton - Backchannel
  
• Kellyanne Conway Is a Star
  Olivia Nuzzi - New York Magazine
  
• Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies.
  Lillian Salerno - The Washington Post
  
• The Whale – 500ish Words
  M.G. Siegler - 500ish
  

  See also, The Squid.

• It’s a Ruse: Tax Cuts Can’t be Financed by Reducing Government Waste
  Mark Thoma - The Fiscal Times
  
• Vanguard Is Growing Faster Than Everybody Else Combined
  Landon Thomas Jr. - The New York TImes
  
• The Walt Mossberg Brand
  Ben Thompson - Stratechery
  
• Venture Capital is a Capacity Industry with Boom and Bust Cycles
  Albert Wenger - Continuations
  
• Jason Barr on Building the Skyline and the Economics of Skyscrapers
  EconTalk
  
• Vanessa Williamson on Taxes and Read My Lips
  EconTalk
  
• Tax Hero
  Planet Money
  
• The Holiday Industrial Complex
  Planet Money
  
• The Other Mr. President
  This American Life
  
• The Architect of Hollywood
  99% Invisible
  

• Why does Donald Trump demonize cities?
  Will Wilkinson - The Washington Post
  

  This article was awesome. The basic idea it tries to get across is that because cities are multicultural and inclusive, they are also more productive. This vision of the city as a bastion of openness and tolerance, unlike the insular rural communities that voted for Trump, is not new, but the post sparked some interesting conversation online. For example see Noah Smith’s, Ross Douthat’s and Chris Arnade’s takes.

• The Disqus Demo Day Story
  Fred Wilson - AVC
  

  It is always good to hear these insider views of how companies got started. Much like Airbnb selling Obama-O’s, or Drew Houston forgetting his USB drive, these origin myths are just that, stories, but they reinforce the idea that all you need to start a startup is to solve a pain point.

• Complexity and Strategy
  Terry Crowley - Hackernoon
  

  Thinking about technical complexity as a moat is interesting, especially considering the initial discussion about “the shape of the cost-functionality curve.” I definitely believe that there are increasing costs to adding functionality, or as the author says “Features interact — intentionally — and that makes the cost of implementing the N+1 feature closer to N than 1.” This is exactly why a startup can come up with a simple product and blow a big co out of the water. They don’t have to worry about how all the other pieces in the business - and in the code! - interact with each other.

• The eigenvector of "Why we moved from language X to language Y"
  Erik Bernhardsson
  

  Stochastic modeling is a really cool topic, and here we see it applied to the transitions between programming languages.

• What if Sociologists Had as Much Influence as Economists?
  Neil Irwin - The New York Times
  

  This is another version of Noah Smith’s Beware of Thinking like an Economist. Here the argument is “there are certain problems that only sociologists can solve,” which is probably just as bad. However, the historical aspect is interesting, especially the fact that there could have been a Council of Social Advisers.

• How the Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It
  Farhad Manjoo - The New York Times
  

  Nothing about Farhad’s argument seems controversial to me. There are still unsolved problems in the vein of “finding a needle in a haystack” where separating signal from noise has become increasingly difficult, but the expansion of content produced by humans can only be a good thing. If we trust that willingness to pay will somehow sort out the good vs. bad content problem in the long run, we’re headed in the right direction.

• The Problem With Facts
  Tim Harford
  

  Starting with the case of Big Tobbaco vs. Medicine in the 50s and 60s, and continuing with Trump and Brexit, Harford makes an argument against ignorance. Agnotology, “the study of how ignorance is deliberately produced,” is a really interesting concept that I had never heard of. The punchline is that we need to get people excited about learning, and make them curious about the world in which they live in, so that they seek out truth on their own. Not an easy endeavor.

• Ask A Grown-Up
  This American Life
  

  Life somehow keeps teaching us that we have no idea what we’re doing. “Growing up” is about learning from your experiences, but there are always new mistakes to make.

• Public key cryptography
  50 Things That Made the Modern Economy
  

  All new technology can be seen as a double edge sword. Luckily, crypto wasn’t killed by the US government.

• The Russian Passenger
  Reply All
  

  The cyber is hard.

• Sorry for the delayed response
  Susanna Wolff - The New Yorker
  

  This happens daily to me. Sorry. Not sorry.

• Voice and the uncanny valley of AI
  Benedict Evans
  

  Like I said last time Evans wrote about this, “voice interfaces seem to be adding more friction than they take away.” Changing people’s habits is hard. I constantly prompt my Echo by saying “Hey Siri,” and find myself thinking of ways to phrase my questions to make them intelligible by the machines. Once or twice a week I get developer emails about “What’s New With Alexa,” but after many months my Echo only acts as a gateway to Spotify, and a party trick whenever there are guests. Voice might be the new platform, but it is nowhere near.

• What Do Economists Actually Know?
  Russ Roberts - NewCo Shift
  

  The issue with modeling of any kind is that there are no alternative realities to compare against. We can only measure what we see, and by definition there are no counterfactuals, nor what-ifs. Making policy decisions under this state of affairs is hard, and the only thing we can do about it is internalize this limitation, knowing that we could be very wrong. Statistical analysis is a tool, and like any other tool, it is succeptible to operator error.

• If There Are an Infinite Number of Parallel Universes, Some Must Be Terrible Places
  Dean Zimmerman - Nautilus
  

  I disagree with the author’s position, but thinking of when the problem of evil meets 21st century math and science is fascinating.

• Patagonia and The North Face: saving the world – one puffer jacket at a time
  Marisa Meltzer - The Guardian
  

  Good reads on the history of large well-known retailers are not usual, as most stories in the genre end up with a strong PR flavor. This article, by virtue of showing the origin stories of two seemingly rival companies at once, achieves a good balance.

• Improving U.S. Healthcare and Coverage
  Stephen Cecchetti and Kermit Schoenholtz - Money, Banking and Financial Markets
  

  Americans are exceptional in their very own ways. This whole healthcare story is a fiasco, and I am amazed that the American people have allowed it to go this long.

• White supremacism is not nationalism
  Noah Smith - Noahpinion
  

  I am reading Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Noah’s arguments in this blog post fit right into the framework that Anderson proposes at the beginning of his book. Nations are made up. Expect a blog post about this soon.

• Triple Pendulum CHAOS!
  Jake VanDerPlas - Pythonic Perambulations
  

  When I look at demos like these, I wish I had kept learning about differential equations after sophomore year of college. Complexity is awesome, and being able to model these crazy patterns with only a few lines of code would be great.

• Update: CRISPR
  Radiolab
  

  The cutting edge of biological research gets more interesting, and more scary, the more I learn about it. Researchers are uncovering really powerful building blocks, but we have very little understanding of the complex relationships in the whole system. The ethical considerations discussed in the last part of this episode are especially worth listening to.

• Hacking The iPhone For Fun, Profit, And Maybe Espionage
  Planet Money
  

  Something I will never understand is how someone can enjoy poring over low level buffer management for hours to find an overflow condition or some obscure vulnerability. Luckily some people like watching water boil with their white hats on, and do it for the greater good, too.