Blog AF

• The Unicorn Hedge
  Dave McClure - 500 Hats
  

  As software seeps into our daily lives, everything becomes “tech”. I don’t like that word, it is too broad, and somewhat meaningless. A truck is technology. So is a self-driving truck, but the latter does much more by leveraging software. Every “traditional” company in some capacity uses “tech”, and as time goes on more and more firms depend on software for their daily operations. This is at the root of the reality that McClure describes. AirBnB is considered a “tech” company, but it should be compared against Hilton and Marriott, not against Google and Apple. That’s their actual competition. The hedge is real, and it is only a symptom of the overall trend towards a fully software enabled industry.

• Programming without Programmers? Aka Software Eating Software Development?
  Albert Wenger - Continuations
  

  Software engineering, and the tools required for it, have evolved significantly over time. Barriers to entry have been lowered, making programming accessible for “normal” people, both in terms of monetary costs as well as in the amount of effort required to get started and build something significant. For better or for worse, modern programming languages are english-like enough that they can be grokked by children. Writing machine or assembly language can be seen as an esoteric exercise by today’s standards. On the shoulders of giants, we’ve climbed up several levels on the ladder of abstraction, and as Wenger implies, this is not stopping any time soon.

• Understanding VCs
  Fred Wilson - AVC
  

  The “PR angle” Fred talks about is true of the blogs of VCs, startups, programmers, journalists, and pretty much any other piece of content on the web, even including this curated set of links. We should cast wide nets, and get information from every possible source before making decisions. Remember other people are driven by incentives just as much as ourselves.

• Penny Auctions - How to sell a $180 tablet for $7,264
  Curious Gnu
  

  Whether penny auctions can be classified as gambling or not, they could be a source of really interesting decision theory/behavioral economics research. If you know of any studies particularly worth looking at, please send them my way.

• Milwaukee's Divide Runs Right Through Me
  Bassey Etim - The New York Times
  

  Over the last few weeks, I started watching The Wire. The longer I live in this country, the more I understand the tensions around race and class rooted in years and years of history. I want to spend more time reading about this, and exploring the narratives of the various sides. Building empathy is hard work.

• It really is the future
  Paul Biggar - CircleCI
  

  A follow-up on last week’s post on Docker, and the state of distributed systems on the web. This one being the non-satirical version.

• Five Years of Tim Cook’s Apple in Charts
  Jan Dawson - Medium
  

  Being on the inside, I can’t say much about this, other than: I’m still bullish.

• But What If We're Wrong
  Russ Roberts and Chuck Klosterman - EconTalk
  

  Lots of interesting tid bits on culture, and how our perception of the world changes over time. What will we look back in N years and think “wow, how were we so stupid”?

• Slavery and Racism
  Russ Roberts and Michael Munger - EconTalk
  

  The fact that two white economics professors at prestigious universities talk about this in public is already a big win. Not knowing the history of slavery in the US, this was quite interesting. The “us vs. them” framing, coupled with the Rawlsian ideas towards the end, was the most persuasive part. Incentives strike again.

• On Average
  Roman Mars - 99% Invisible
  

  Had never thought about the fact that someone had to have introduced “average” into our culture. Another great episode from the 99pi team.

• This is strictly a business decision
  Tim O'Reilly - Medium
  

  Incentives rule all our decisions. If the mandate of fiduciary duty is to “maximize shareholder value,” that is what any board will do. Whether the “business decision” was correct or not is a question of short-term vs. long-term thinking, discount rates, and how much the company values its employees. When labor is interchangable, this is not a surprising decision. If the well-being of the employees were somehow baked in into the pricing model, there could be a different outcome.

• Imaging, Snapchat and mobile
  Benedict Evans
  

  As usual, Evans gives us a lot to think about. Our phones aren’t really just phones, and our cameras aren’t really just cameras.

• It’s The Future
  Paul Biggar - CircleCI Blog
  

  Overengineering is a real problem. I need to learn more about this new dev-ops world, and play with Docker et al, but the fact is that to get started, a monolith running on Heroku is more than enough. Scaling will be harder? Yes, but you might actually get something done and sell to real users. Good enough is good enough. Once again, short-term vs. long term incentives.

• All the Leaves are Brown and the Sky is Gray
  Cate Huston - Accidentally in Code
  

  Perspective on software engineering impact: Somehow, the industry keeps moving forward as our projects die, 1 by 1. Stay motivated, and learn from your errors.

• The stuff we really need is getting more expensive. Other stuff is getting cheaper.
  Christopher Ingraham - The Washington Post
  
• The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority
  Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Medium
  

  A draft of a chapter of Taleb’s upcoming book. He argues that asymmetrical rules lead to minorities dictating choices when there are large benefits to a concentrated minority and small diffuse costs among the majority. All his examples are negative, but its not hard to think of how this same effect can affect us positively.

• The Night That Obama and Hillary Founded ISIS
  Liz Meriwether - New York Magazine
  

  The world of politics is odd.

• Page dewarping
  Matt Zucker
  

  Math lets us do some really interesting things. This post presents a relatively simple model that solves a real problem for a real person.

• Firms and Inequality
  Claudia Sahm
  

  An analysis on the future of work, and labor compensation. I am not surprised that gains are concentrated in a set of firms, the real question, as Claudia points out, is “is rising worker segregation a sign of reduced competition, greater economic rents, or is it telling us about a change in the nature of production?” My guess? The latter.

• The meaning of trust in the age of Airbnb
  Tim Harford
  

  The fact that we can walk into a store and exchange a piece of paper for a loaf of bread is a sign of trust. Our economies, and our lives, are all based on trust, and Tim’s article explains how important this is in an age where “reputation” becomes currency. Reminded me a lot of Seabright’s Company of Strangers.

Hello there old friends. It has been forever since my last post, and I apologize for that. Here is a mixed bag of technology, management, and politics pieces. My interests haven’t changed, hopefully yours haven’t either.

Expect more frequent updates coming back soon.

• Serverless Architectures
  Mike Roberts
  

  “Serverless” is the Next Big Thing. Serve static stuff on S3, make everything stateless, and plug a bunch of functions in Lambda. AWS once again changing the paradigm.

• The hedgehog and the fox
  Benedict Evans
  

  I like to think of myself as a much more fox-ey than hedgehog-ey person, and I think success comes from getting a fox to surround themselves with hedgehogs. This is true in the AI context, as well as many others. “To think about tech now is to think about many things.”

• Stalking your Facebook friends on Tinder
  Alex Hogue - Literally Words
  

  The internet: where nothing is really private.

• What Did You Do? What Will I Have Done?
  Albert Wenger - Continuations
  

  While the comparisons with WWII are extreme, this is one of those “better safe than sorry” situations. Go vote, I can’t.

• Watch this very chill video of virtual soft-bodied creatures swimming underwater
  James Vincent - The Verge
  

  Some really cool research by Francesco Corucci et al.

• The Uber Engineering Tech Stack, Part I: The Foundation
  Lucie Lozinski - Uber Engineering Blog
  

  It is always interesting to see how others do things. Especially interesting is the migration from python/node to Java/Go, and the heavy usage of OSS projects. I agree that having less languages is good, however, this might be a bit quixotic.

• Central bank digital currency: the end of monetary policy as we know it?
  Marilyne Tolle - Bank Underground
  

  One of the most intriguing aspects of bitcoin is what kind of effects a constant, predictable, and stable money supply would cause in our financial systems. Coming from the Bank of England, this post holds more water than the usual cryptocurrency wonk posts.

• Delusions of Chaos
  Paul Krugman - The New York Times
  

  The world is a mess, its just less messy than it used to be.

• The Unbundled City
  Paul Krugman - The New York Times
  

  Not the usual Krugman. A really interesting take on how the Internet has changed cities. While he thinks of “back office operations,” I think of AWS and outsourced manufacturing.

• The Dreaded Weekly Status Email
  Christina R. Wodtke - Elegant Hack
  

  In the modern office, email defines workflows. Communicating over email is hard. Do it right.

• Apple and the gun emoji
  Jeremy Burge - Emojipedia
  

  Related, and somewhat more in depth, is the a16z podcast on emoji. Why do these icons carry so much weight?

• Judaism is not a major player in the history of humankind
  Yuval Harari - Haaretz (Paywall)
  

  Exceptionalism is not just an American problem.
  The only way I was able to get around the paywall was to click on the link from Facebook Messenger, which adds a referrer to the HTTP request. Let me know if you find another workaround.

• What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold
  Jelena Woehr - Medium
  

  Leadership is hard, and requires personal sacrifice. People appreciate that, and can tell when a person in power doesn’t put in the required effort. According to Woehr, Marissa did.

• Rectangular countries
  David Barry
  

  Useless but fun geospatial data analysis, because why not?

Well, “take two” isn’t really fair. I’ve actually been to the festival three times. I hope you’ll see a jump in quality from last year’s.

Pretty crazy how people are willing to be photographed due to the air of professionalism of a DSLR in ways that a smartphone camera wouldn’t allow. As I asked people to take their photos, they would constantly ask things like “Where will these be published?” or “What site are you taking the photos for?” and were oddly surprised when I told them it was for a personal blog. The camera is both a bridge and a barrier.

If you came looking for a specific photo, and it isn’t here, reach out and I’ll happily send it your way. 600 was a lot to post at once. More...

As you can tell from the articles below, I’ve read a lot about consciousness lately. In general, I like the topic a lot, but I was actually trying to find an article on the subject from a couple of years ago that I remember being really good. Sadly, I didn’t find it, but it did take me down the rabbit hole of the Internet, and I found all of the consciousness related posts below, so hopefully you will enjoy those.

• A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning
  Kevin Simler - Melting Asphalt
  

  A graph theory approach to the meaning of life, and, by extension, every one of our actions.

• Square is guilting us into tipping basically everyone
  Ester Bloom - Quartz
  

  Because who wouldn’t tip $3 on a cup of coffee?

• The Facebook of ecommerce
  Benedict Evans
  
• A Technical Glitch
  Ben Thompson - Stratechery
  
• Medieval technology, indistinguishable from magic
  E R Truitt - Aeon
  
• Six centuries of secularity began with the first 'how-to' books
  William Eamon - Aeon Essays
  
• How Did Consciousness Evolve?
  Michael Graziano - The Atlantic
  
• Consciousness Began When the Gods Stopped Speaking
  Veronique Greenwood - Nautilus
  
• Postcards From the Edge of Consciousness
  Meehan Crist - Nautilus
  
• End of Cycle?
  Elad Gil
  
• Why Python is Slow: Looking Under the Hood
  Jake VanderPlas
  
• Why Does Pepperoni Curl?
  J. Kenji López-Alt - The Food Lab/Serious Eats
  

  Yeah, its a post about pizza. To be more accurate, pizza + science.

• Fintech Revolution or Evolution?
  Alex Rampell, Angela Strange, and Charlie Warzel - a16z
  

  In a recent post, I shared Charlie Warzel’s analysis on the future of payments. This episode of the a16z podcast takes a deeper dive.

• Remembering Stonewall
  99% Invisible
  

  Living in San Francisco, and having just attended Pride, this seemed very fitting. A really interesting story, which made me think a lot about how what is socially and culturally acceptable changes over time and space.

• Who Do We Think We Are?
  This American Life
  

  I listened to this several weeks ago, but just noticed I hadn’t posted it. Mostly recommending it for Act 1, which deals with a really hard story. Especially interesting due to the herd mentality of “we do this because it is the way we’ve always done it,” which I hate so much. Other people’s decisions can change our lives forever. Sometimes unknowingly, and for all the wrong reasons.