Blog AF

• Startup Cargo Cults: What They Are and How to Avoid Them
  Leo Polovets - Coding VC
  

  We all fall prey to cargo cults: following our biases and finding patterns where there might be none, mimicking the inessentials and hoping we get the same results. Think hard about why you do things, and trim as necessary.

• Snapchat Spectacles and the Future of Wearables
  Ben Thompson - Stratechery
  

  There is too much Apple speculation here for me to make strong comments, but go read it. Products don’t exist in a vacuum.

• Economics Has a Major Blind Spot
  Noah Smith - Bloomberg View
  

  A clear exposition one of my gripes about economics as a discipline: Once you layer in tax, after tax, after tax, and your policies start interacting with each other, they no longer achieve the desired effects.
  In the real world, no agent -however rational- can make optimal choices, as they don’t have nearly full information. To make things worse, solutions proposed at a given time might alter the underlying reality before they even go into effect, and no longer work as expected! By the time they are in place, policies are hard to change (this week’s EconTalk touched on that topic) and we deal with it by adding more crap on top. Living in a complex society does not by definition require the levels of complexity of modern legislation.

• Amazon’s Newest Ambition: Competing Directly With UPS and FedEx
  Greg Bensinger and Laura Stevens - The Wall Street Journal
  

  Similar to the recent Bloomberg article. Amazon seems more and more serious about their last-mile effort, and the incumbents are still incredulous.

• Trump was completely wrong about the Fed last night. But I’m glad the topic came up.
  Jared Bernstein - The Washington Post
  

  If the political system in the US is hard, and confusing, the Fed is probably one of the most misunderstood. Even having taken several courses on the topic, understanding the intended effects of central banking, and monetary policy, is tough. Bernstein makes a good case for the importance about better understanding it.

• Uncertainty Wednesday: Limits on Observations
  Albert Wenger - Continuations
  

  Another good one in Albert’s series on uncertainty, easter egg included. “All observation necessarily entails compression of reality,” further compression from our tool’s resolution limits, and even more from measurement error. Regardless of how good your observations are, they will always be uncertain. Moreover, observations themselves can change the underlying state of reality. Not only in the uncertainty principle quantum sense, but also in the user research sense, for example.

• How Slack and Facebook Are Making Access to Information Less Democratic
  Ezra Galston - BreakingVC
  

  There are clear tensions regarding how information is stored and accessed on the internet. In the OSS world, there is a loud group that constantly complains about the IRC => Slack trend, for example. Whether the fringe is becoming more or less accessible, I don’t know, I have not tried to hang out there, but there is an overwhelming feeling of the walls closing in on themselves.

• The Falsity of False Equivalence
  Paul Krugman - The New York Times
  

  The fact that this is not clearer to the public at large is insane. It is a bizarre time to live.

• A mistake is just a moment in time
  Jason Fried - Signal V. Noise
  

  Internalize your mistakes, correct your course, but don’t forget you messed up.

• What San Francisco Says About America
  Thomas Fuller - The New York Times
  

  I lived in Chicago for 4 years, and I never saw levels of poverty and homelessness as intense as I see in San Francisco. However, both cities have poverty. Both cities have homelessness. In Chicago it is a matter of “out of sight, out of mind”, while in SF you see it day in and day out. Market Street and the Magnificent Mile are a stark contrast, but both cases require society to provide solutions. This article is missing a call to action.

• The Free-Time Paradox in America
  Derek Thompson - The Atlantic
  
• Spotify Is Perfecting the Art of the Playlist
  Devin Leonard - Bloomberg
  

  Probably one of the best features in Spotify. Pretty cool story of how it came about.

• Snapchat Releases First Hardware Product, Spectacles
  Seth Stevenson - The Wall Street Journal
  

  A glimpse into the future of media/advertising, an interesting personal story, and a product I’d love to try. The back story of how this story got leaked by Business Insider, and the WSJ ended up being whipped into releasing it early says a lot about journalism in the 21st century, too. A lot to unpack.

• I Used to Be a Human Being
  Andrew Sullivan - New York Magazine
  

  Another piece about the perils of living attached to our screens, and taking a break from the addiction. These have become more and more common, but somehow Sullivan gives a refreshing view.

• The MIT License, Line by Line
  Kyle E. Mitchell - /dev/lawyer
  

  I wish I understood licensing better, but this is a first step. Open source software is amazing. It is one of the reasons computers today are as powerful as they are.

• Compressing and enhancing hand-written notes
  Matt Zucker
  

  Another cool project on image processing by Zucker. Code that solves a real problem, however tiny, is always worth reading.

A collection of photos from the past couple of months. The first few I took for my photo class, but I never shared here, while the later ones are mostly tests of my new lens. Still getting used to it. More...

So much for making an effort to post more consistently… 🙄

• Beyond the iPhone
  Ben Thompson - Stratechery
  

  A few weeks have vindicated Ben’s comments. While everyone was thinking about the missing headphone jack, this article explained the latest iPhone release for what it most likely is: set up.

• The Age of the Wordless Logo
  Kalle Oskari Mattila - The Atlantic
  
• Deep Exploration Into Python: Let’s Review The Dict Module
  Andrew Kelleher - BuzzFeed Tech Blog
  

  In python, everything is a dict. Understanding how they work is really important, beyond the basic idea of hashing keys and mapping to values. This article by should be required reading.

• Things which aren't magic - Flask and @app.route - Part 1
  Ainsley Escorce-Jones
  

  I have been helping a friend level up his python recently, focusing on web development with Flask. One of his first questions? “What does @app.route, do?”

• Why Silicon Valley is all wrong about Apple’s AirPods
  Chris Messina - Medium
  

  Apple, the fashion company.

• Vote as if It Matters
  Paul Krugman - The New York Times
  
• Uncertainty Wednesday: Reality, Explanations, Observations
  Albert Wenger - Continuations
  

  Part two was also really good, and I am very much looking forward to the rest of the series.

• The Morality of Surge Pricing
  Russ Roberts - Medium
  
• Making up Ground
  99% Invisible
  
• The Takeover
  Reply All (Podcast)
  

We went to Lake Tahoe. It was fun. More...