I miss Eugene Wei’s epic tech analyses. His latest serves as a sort of eulogy for Twitter. He’s of the opinion that “peak Twitter” is in the rear view, and the platform seems to be on a continuous decline over the past year, for the reasons I’m sure you suspect even if you don’t agree.

He makes some interesting points on the failings of Elon and the directional changes in culture and resourcing. While the product was obviously stagnant and incredibly slow at innovation, there have been some, let’s say questionable major changes in the...

This is a wild story and an incredible piece of investigative journalism from the folks at BuzzFeed. The CCP reportedly operates hundreds of camps across the Xinjiang autonomous region for re-education of Uyghur muslims.

Starting with map tiles they’d noticed were blanked out on China’s Baidu Maps service, they enlisted new data resources, built analysis tools, and combed through map data manually to identify hundreds of these prisons (only several dozen are “officially” known):

We began to sort through the mask tile locations systematically using a custom web tool that we built to support our investigation and help manage...

Matthew Ball dives into Nintendo’s potential and what differentiates its culture from the rest of its media and gaming comparisons, like Disney.

The section on their mobile performance is particularly shocking. I knew Nintendo hadn’t been that engaged in trying to compete in mobile gaming (meaning iOS and Android), but it’s been a lot worse than I thought. Seems like it would be a dead-on win for them.

Obviously, Nintendo’s share of the economics declines across each group. This, itself, is not a problem. What’s a problem is that the greater Nintendo’s involvement, the less successful a mobile title...

The more I use Figma, the more convinced I become that their approach to design tooling is unique. The first impression I got slotted it mentally in with tools like Sketch, Moqups, and in some ways even Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. Academically I knew it was “different” than using a true power tool like Photoshop, but the first impression back in 2017 was a lot closer to that than where I’d place it after spending time with it.

In this piece, Kevin Kwok dives deep on Figma’s product and business dynamics, getting at...

A great post on various things coronavirus from Scott Alexander. The utility and tradeoffs of lockdowns, virus transmission, country by country differences, and more.

An interesting analysis from Kevin Kwok looking at how to think about marketplace business models, and retail versus professional supply.

“Tech domination”, monopolies, regulation — lots of concepts, fears, and proposed remedies are all getting confused these days in tech. Benedict Evans had this piece of sober analysis to peel apart the differences between companies being rich, dominant in their product space, or dominant in the wider industry.

The tech industry loves to talk about ‘moats’ around a business - some mechanic of the product or market that forms a fundamental structural barrier to competition, so that just having a better product isn‘t enough to break in. But there are several ways that a moat can stop working. Sometimes the...

Alex Tabarrok linked to this detailed deck from Alon Levy picking apart the possible reasoning for why NYC subway construction is so much more than other urban centers around the world.

Levy is to be lauded for his pioneering work on this issue yet isn’t it weird that a Patreon supported blogger has done the best work on comparative construction costs mostly using data from newspapers and trade publications? New York plans to spend billions on railway and subway expansion. If better research could cut construction costs by 1%, it would be worth spending tens of...

Patrick Collison poses and tracks possible responses to broad questions on his website. In one, he asks:

Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?

Spending on healthcare in the US is up 9X in real terms since 1960. K12 education spending in the US has increased by 2-3X per student per year since 1960. The cost of college in the US has more than doubled (again, in real terms) since 1984. Growth in everything from construction costs to childcare costs is significantly outpacing inflation. Lots more at SSC and from Tyler.

What’s going on? Why are...

Ben Thompson had an interesting piece recently thinking through what ingredients make up a “tech” company in today’s market. The term has been used for a long time somewhat interchangeably with “startup” since the 2000 tech boom era. The context of the article was to compare companies in the physical space like WeWork and Peloton to more traditional pure tech like Salesforce or Atlassian. He came up with this excellent list of descriptors to define what classifies a company as “tech”:

• Software creates ecosystems.
• Software has zero marginal costs.
• Software improves over time.
...

This is an interesting project on GitHub for syncing data from the Strava API for analysis from a local database. I’ve had my eye out for some way to do this cleanly — to use the Strava Activities API to sync each track and its metadata to a local Postgres database. My interest is in being able to put the tracks on a map (mostly), but some of the analysis shown here is pretty cool, too.

In this author’s case it’s about cycling data. I want to be able to run SQL on the...