Blog AF

• Knowledge (2015)
  Albert Wenger - Continuations
  

  In this post, Albert defines knowledge from a humanistic perspective. It nicely ties into a recent article I shared about nihilism. Knowledge only matters if it is worth reproducing.

• Learning and mastering isn’t the same
  David Heinemeier Hansson - Signal V. Noise
  

  Slowly, one abstraction at a time, software engineering has become more and more accessible. The advent of Ruby on Rails marked the beginning of a wave that lowered the barriers to entry for programming, particularly web development, for thousand of engineers. I am one of them. Now it is time to put in the hours and master the craft.

• Story of My Life: How Narrative Creates Personality
  Julie Beck - The Atlantic
  

  We contain multitudes. Our idea of the “self” is just an aggregate of layers of all previous actions and states of mind, wrapped in a narrative that also changes over time. It’d be an interesting exercise to try and model this computationally, somehow.

• When You Change the World and No One Notices
  Morgan Housel - Collaborative Fund
  

  Real innovation takes time. It is, however, important to remember that cycles are contracting. Innovation itself is accelerating, and that needs to go into our decision making models, too.

• How Apple Helped Create Ireland’s Economies, Real and Fantastical
  Adam Davidson - The New Yorker
  

  The events that are developing in the EU right now are potentially more important to the future of global culture than most people realize. Whatever conclusion comes from this case might define sovereignty and jurisdiction across national and supranational borders. As Tim Cook posits in his letter, “at its root, the Commission’s case is not about how much Apple pays in taxes. It is about which government collects the money,” and that is the actually interesting question here.

• How Harambe Became the Perfect Meme
  Venkatesh Rao - The Atlantic
  

For my birthday, Hannah bought us a tent and a couple of sleeping bags. This past weekend we got to use them for the first time at Humboldt Redwoods State Park. It was a lot of fun.

In honor of the occasion, and because I am slowly contracting gear acquisition syndrome, I got myself a new 50mm f/1.4. The blur quality is amazing, but I am still not used to the focal length. Below is a mix of photos taken with that one, and the 24mm. More...

• Labor Day: From the Job Loop to the Knowledge Loop
  Albert Wenger - Continuations
  

  What is the point of work? What should people spend their time on, and why? Wenger argues that we are about to enter a post-capital and post-labor world. I still haven’t decided if I should read his book now, as a draft, or when it is published in a few months.

• Are We Really So Modern?
  Adam Kirsch - The New Yorker
  

  I should make an effort and learn more about history and philosophy. We are solving different immediate problems, but ultimately trying to answer the same basic questions as those that came before us.

• The Pill, the Condom, and the American Dream
  Derek Thompson - The Atlantic
  

  In a complex world, second order effects tend to be more important in aggregate than one would expect. Increased access to birth control results in better care for the kids who are born, and eventually a better society.

• What to Make of Andreessen Horowitz’s Returns?
  Mark Suster - Both Sides of the Table
  

  Not often do you get a VCs view on another fund. Suster gives us some great insights in his piece.

• How Uber Drivers Decide How Long to Work
  Noam Scheiber - The New York Times
  

  No data was released, but here is the original paper, in case you want to take a look.

• Trying Not to Try
  Edward Slingerland - Nautilus
  

  Thinking fast and slow, from the angle of Butcher Ding and chinese philosophy. When your conscious mind lets go, the body can take over.

• Will Amazon Kill FedEx?
  Devin Leonard - Bloomberg
  

  Amazon is an impressively interesting company (as an aside, the old timey look of the photos is great, too). The original bits and atoms startup, which somehow keeps innovating.

• All about Microservices
  a16z (Podcast)
  

  Starting a career in software engineering during the days of AWS and Heroku gives me a strange vantage point. The story of how Netflix switched their whole infrastructure would not be half as impressive if I didn’t understand the role of culture in organizational change. The fact is that “this is how we do things around here” can make or break you. This episode talks about the architecture that underlie the modern web stack.

• Big data, Google and the end of free will
  Yuval Noah Harari - The Financial Times
  

  Harari discusses the jump from religion, to humanism, and now Dataism: Letting go of “religion” and “feelings” to guide our choices, and allowing computers to make decisions for you. As much as “knowing thyself” is great advice, making good decisions also requires knowing the rest of the world. No matter how much you know yourself, there will be unknown unknowns about the people and things you interact with. Computers might be able to help us there.</br>A specific case I’ve thought deeply about is “choosing what content to consume,” which applies to books, articles, podcasts, MOOCs, etc. Objectively, there is some optimal solution to this question, and Harari’s Dataism probably has a better answer than humanism, regardless of how uncomfortable that thought makes you feel.</br>The idea is powerful, and we can similarly extrapolate to other questions.

• In Search of Ragu
  Roads & Kingdoms
  

  A cuisine’s history, and its people’s sentiments about it, can tell us a lot about culture and how it is formed over time. There is a lot of value when food becomes more than sustenance.

• How artificial intelligence and machine learning work at Apple
  Steven Levy - Backchannel
  

  Another one that I can’t comment much on, but want to share.

• I Got Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup
  Penny Kim - Startup Grind
  

  Lately I have been bringing up Maslow’s hierarchy over and over. I am one of the few lucky people in the world who (like you, probably, since you’re reading this) get to only worry about the very top of this pyramid. Food, shelter, health - all these are non-thoughts for me. My concerns are much less important. In the context of this article, I have been spending many hours considering how to be happier at work, and spend my time to maximize my learning and my future opportunities. Even in the tech bubble that I live in, things can be much worse, and it is sobering to remember that.

• Building Better Algorithms Requires Human Judgment
  Albert Wenger - Continuations
  

  The filter bubble, v2.

• Hunting for great names in programming
  David Heinemeier Hansson - Signal v. Noise
  

  Naming things is much harder than it seems, and its implications much more widespread than one would expect. Spend more time thinking about names.

• Types
  Gary Bernhardt
  

  Different languages have different ways of constraining and enabling programmers. Any language provides us with trade-offs. For a long time, I have thought of types as an added layer of complexity, which makes them unappealing. However, unit tests and documentation are also extra complexity, and I am more than happy to pay the cost for those. Perhaps its time to make the jump and get into static typing.

• 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.