Blog AF

• Time to revisit how we calculate expectations?
  Cameron Murray - Fresh economic thinking
  

  A simple result that should change how we see one of the assumptions that underlies tons of models in economics.

• Here’s the thing about debt: It’s not nearly as bad as everyone says it is.
  Jared Bernstein - The Washington Post
  
• McDonald's: you can sneer, but it's the glue that holds communities together
  Chris Arnade - The Guardian
  

  I am very happy that I found Chris Arnade. His posts and tweetstorms provide amazing insight into a part of the United States that I otherwise would simply not have access to.

• Silicon Valley's Basic-Income Experiment Is Worth Watching
  Noah Smith - Bloomberg View
  
• How Mark Zuckerberg Led Facebook’s War to Crush Google Plus
  Antonio García Martínez - Vanity Fair
  

  An inside look at how Facebook runs. The content is a little wordy, but I’d like to read more about this story. Will probably end up buying the book.

• Constraints
  Cristina Videira Lopes - Tagide
  

  The evolution of programming languages depends not only on what new languages allow you to do, but what they don’t. Taking away an engineer’s ability to do X also removes a concern from the picture. Thinking about less things at once means you can focus more on what’s left.

• The Partial Control Fallacy
  James Koppel - Path-Sensitive
  
• How “Silicon Valley” Nails Silicon Valley
  Andrew Marantz - The New Yorker
  

  Watching this show would not be half as fun if I didn’t interact with the people it mocks on a daily basis. The caricatures are spot on.

• A map about the people who live there
  Nathan Yau - Flowing Data
  
• Movie written by algorithm turns out to be hilarious and intense
  Annalee Newitz - Ars Technica
  

  Ross Goodwin keeps pumping them out. Non-sensical, bizarre, and a bit over-dramatized, but interesting.

It has been a while since my last post, so here is some random stuff from the last month and a half around San Francisco. More...

• What Tech Workers Can Learn From Harry Bridges
  Kelsey Gilmore-Innis
  

  San Francisco and the Gold Rush, both old and new. Labor, unions, and narratives of success.

• Deep Reinforcement Learning: Pong from Pixels
  Andrej Karpathy
  

  Another in depth look at modern solutions to artificial intelligence and problem solving. As usual, Karpathy makes complex ideas understandable, this time using OpenAI’s Gym to play Pong.

• Video is the new HTML
  Benedict Evans
  

  HTML, Flash, Video, etc, are only a medium. Corporations today are working hard to exploit these new means of distribution.

• Why the World Is Drawing Battle Lines Against American Tech Giants
  Farhad Manjoo - The New York Times
  
• Can social science yield objective knowledge?
  Noah Smith - Noahpinion
  

  Great analogy between natural science vs. religion and natural science vs. social science. As Noah points out, the idea of the “God of the Gaps” fits in quite well. I have long been a fan of Paul Davies and his take on the classic fight. Noah gives a good explanation for why they are, in a way, the same.

• Carts Without Horses
  Aaron Harris
  

  Understanding that developing markets are fundamentally different beasts, and not just waiting for copies of what has already been done, is both challenging, and exciting. Makes me wonder what I could do if I went back home.

• Why Trump voters are not “complete idiots”
  Chris Arnade - Medium
  

  The expanded version of the tweetstorm. Poor people understand optionality, too. If your downside is flat, and your upside isn’t, logic says break the system.

• What happened, what's happening now and what's next
  Benedict Evans
  

  Yes, two posts by Evans today. It’s that good.

• Satan's Credit Card: What The Mark Of The Beast Taught Me About The Future Of Money
  Charlie Warzel - BuzzFeed News
  

  A glimpse into what money might become.

• Autoencoding Blade Runner
  Terence Broad - Medium
  

  The application of these simple machine learning concepts keep impressing me more and more. Autoencoders are a very simple idea. If anything, click through to see the side-by-side video.

• Perlin noise
  Fuzzy Notepad
  

  Few times does a post involving convoluted math and programming seem so clear. The diagrams help a lot, and the jump to 2D is mindblowing.

• The Unnecessariat
  More Crows than Eagles
  

  An interesting take on the rise of trump. Similar to Chris Arnade’s twitter comments on the implicit understanding optionality of Trump voters, who desire volatility.

• Is Everything Wrestling?
  Jeremy Gordon - The New York Times
  

  It is all a charade. At least the WWE embraces it.

• Hodor, Disability, and 'Game of Thrones': A Conversation With English Professor Lauryn S. Mayer About the Ethics of George R.R. Martin's World
  Spencer Kornhaber - The Atlantic
  

  An analysis of how disabilities were seen in medieval Europe, and how those map onto the GoT world. Particularly interesting was the discussion on how mortality and disability can happen to anyone, which is unusual in literature.Spoliers ahead.

• The Rise of the Beer Can
  The Atlantic - Brendan Byrne
  
• How I used lies about a cartoon to prove history is meaningless on the internet
  Jordan Minor - Geek.com
  

  Orwell would be proud.

After four years living in Evanston, and a year away, returning to Chicago was strange. Very strange. I am sad that I didn’t take more photos of the city, with its architecture and its urban landscapes, but I am glad that the reason why I did not do it was that I had too many people to see. More...