Archive of posts with tag 'History'

This post appeared in issue #36 of my newsletter, Res Extensa, where I write about the intersection of product design, bottoms-up systems, innovation, and what we can learn from the history of technology. I’d love it if you subscribed.

💡 Good Decision, Bad Decision, Indecision, and Fake Decision

The older I get, the more I appreciate two fundamental skills in every line of work:

1. A respect for and ability to assess trade-offs, and
2. Knowing how and when to make decisions

Notice it doesn’t say what decision to make. Effective decision-making means knowing which resources to bring to bear, who to involve, and how to zoom out on the upsides and downsides (number 1). And just as critically, it’s knowing when a decision is necessary. On most things, the faster decision is better. Whether we acknowledge it or not, most decisions are two-way doors: we can recover from the downsides. But surprisingly often it’s about knowing when we don’t really need a decision right now. Not deciding is itself a decision.

Austin Yang says it this way:

What most people aren’t aware of is that indecision in itself is a decision. You are essentially choosing to stick with the status quo for the time being.

A key factor to how we think about a decision is what action follows. “Indecision” only feels bad if we keep harping on the subject, if we continue deliberating even after we decided to stick with the status quo.

He raises another all-too-common problem where the follow-on action makes the decision problematic: the “fake decision”:

There is one type of decision that doesn’t get talked about enough. These are decisions that get made, but never acted on. I call them “fake decisions.” Technically speaking, they cannot be called decisions at all. They are simply feel-good exercises to fool yourself into thinking that something has changed.

🐄 Age of Invention: Cash Cows

Economic historian Anton Howes writes a newsletter devoted to the topic: what gave rise to the “improving mentality”? For some reason — a combination of timing, the weird semi-isolated, evolved culture of England, access to natural resources, political freedom — the British Isles was a petri dish of innovation in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Anton tells the story of Robert Bakewell, a cattle farmer that set out, through experimentation, trial and error, to improve his cattle herd.

Bakewell’s story could have been an unremarkable one. He was born, farmed, and died at Dishley, much like his father before him. But Bakewell, unlike most people, caught the improving mentality, or attitude — the one thing all inventors, both then and now, have in common — which had him viewing everything around him in terms of its capacity for betterment. The improving mentality was a reframing the status quo as a problem to solve. A habit of optimisation. A compulsion to perfect.

Through dozens of adjustments and a constant drive to improve, his cows were special. But it took active effort, experimentation, and drive to improve. He selectively bred his cattle to have larger backs, with the more expensive sirloin and filets, and smaller mid and lower sections, with their cheaper cuts.

Bakewell’s cows and sheep became extraordinarily valuable when sold for meat, though he soon discovered he could make even more money by leasing out the young males of his breeds to other farmers so that they could improve their own — “but never as good as that of Mr Bakewell who has both the male and the female”. Recognising how essential it was that he not lose his competitive advantage, he even set up his own abattoir and sold only dead meat, for fear that an unscrupulous butcher might be tempted to breed from the live animals sent to slaughter.

Progress shouldn’t be taken for granted! It takes optimism and effort to make it happen.

📚 Andy Matuschak — Self-Teaching, Spaced Repetition, Why Books Don’t Work

From Dwarkesh Patel’s excellent podcast, this is a masterclass in how learning works. I love how Andy is always essentially thinking out loud, as he’s in conversation, about the topic. Even a guy with his pedigree realizes that a subject like this is a confoundingly complex, with no “best” way of understanding it.

One of the biggest learnings from Andy is how to be purposeful when you read. You should ask questions of the text! I know this technique and still too often I read something knowing — sometimes consciously, usually subconciously — that I don’t truly understand what I just read. Just take a look at this session where Andy reads and makes notes on a paper in real-time, and you’ll see this in action.

🏃‍♂️ Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems

From James Somers:

The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more.

The converse is true, too. If every time you write a blog post it takes you six months, and you’re sitting around your apartment on a Sunday afternoon thinking of stuff to do, you’re probably not going to think of starting a blog post, because it’ll feel too expensive.

Also at work, the better you get, the better you better get:

It is a truism, too, in workplaces, that faster employees get assigned more work. Of course they do. Humans are lazy. They want to preserve calories. And it’s exhausting merely thinking about giving work to someone slow. When you’re thinking about giving work to someone slow, you run through the likely quagmire in your head; you visualize days of halting progress. You imagine a resource—this slow person—tied up for awhile. It’s wearisome, even in the thinking. Whereas the fast teammate—well, their time feels cheap, in the sense that you can give them something and know they’ll be available again soon. You aren’t “using them up” by giving them work. So you route as much as you can through the fast people. It’s ironic: your company’s most valuable resources—because they finish things quickly—are the easiest to consume.

Feedback loops, both positive and negative, are a helluva thing.

🧱 The Pattern Language of Project Xanadu

Architect Christopher Alexander articulated the notion of “pattern languages” in his 1977 book of the same name. You devise a library of rules of thumb for designing (in his case, living spaces — neighborhoods, buildings, rooms) that work well together. Rather than rigid top-down design with hard specs, a well-thought-out pattern language gives the designer room to be creative while still working from thoughtful, functional constraints. An effective pattern language is a hierarchical scheme of composable building blocks: in Alexander’s original language, “Cozy Half-Enclosed Corner” works well with “Light on Two Sides”, or with “Seat Spots in Light and Dark”.

Pattern languages are meant to be sets of general principles. No neighborhood conforms to “The Pattern Language” as a standard.

In the world of software, Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu is both an epic failure and wild success. It started as a proposal in 1960, and still doesn’t exist.

But as Maggie Appleton points out here, many of the project’s proposed “patterns” have been embraced and implemented in the distributed ecosystem of Internet specifications and software features over the past few decades:

People are building Xanadu without knowing what Xanadu is. Which is the essence of a good pattern language; true patterns evolve naturally within systems, and are found rather than crafted.

We should think of Xanadu as a successful pattern language, rather than a failed software project.

🛕 Anachronistic History

The past couple weeks I’ve been experimenting tons with ChatGPT and Midjourney, figuring out how to make practical use of this new wave of products.

Tinkering around, I asked ChatGPT:

Write about some creative anachronistic historical events.

And here’s a brief sampling of what I got:

Aztec Airborne Armada (1400s): The Aztecs develop an array of helium-filled airships, forming an airborne armada to defend their empire and launch surprise attacks on neighboring civilizations.

Socrates’ Philosophical Podcast (399 BCE): Instead of written dialogues, Socrates engages in thought-provoking discussions through an ancient form of podcasting, spreading his philosophical ideas through the airwaves of Athens.

Marco Polo’s Transcontinental Railroad (1271-1295): Marco Polo’s extensive travels result in a collaborative effort among the nations he encountered to construct a massive transcontinental railroad network connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa centuries ahead of its time.

See the full post for more.

🥪 Nibble and Your Appetite Will Grow

From Stephen Ango:

There’s a French expression I like:

L’appétit vient en mangeant

Appetite comes when you eat. Nibble and your appetite will grow.

Appetite can be the hunger for any kind of thing, not just food. Some days I wish I had the appetite to write, to read, to exercise, or even go outside.

Procrastination is the state of waiting for motivation to come. Paradoxically, the most reliable way to create motivation is to start doing the thing.

I asked ChatGPT:

Write about some creative anachronistic historical events.

The results don’t disappoint. Every single one is gold, big-budget film caliber material we got here. Scroll down and enjoy…

Leonardo’s Electric Canvas (1492): Leonardo da Vinci, known for his ingenious inventions, unveils the world’s first electrically powered canvas projector, allowing him to showcase his artwork in vibrant colors and dynamic animations, centuries ahead of its time.

Napoleon’s Moon Landing (1801): In a bid to establish a new world order, Napoleon Bonaparte orchestrates a daring expedition to the Moon using steam-powered spacecraft, setting the stage for lunar colonization and a galactic French empire.

Medieval Internet Symposium (1220): Scholars from across the medieval world gather for an “Internet Symposium,” where they discuss ideas through telepathic communication devices, resembling a rudimentary version of the internet.

Genghis Khan’s Airship Campaigns (1206-1227): Genghis Khan’s vast empire extends beyond land as his horde launches airborne campaigns using intricately designed airships, enabling swift conquests across continents with unprecedented speed.

Renaissance Era Robotics (1565): As a culmination of Renaissance curiosity, artisans and scientists collaborate to create a series of clockwork automatons that exhibit human-like intelligence and serve as precursors to modern robotics.

Cleopatra’s Underwater Expedition (50 BCE): Cleopatra, fascinated by the sea, leads a team of engineers and divers on an underwater archaeological expedition to explore the sunken city of Atlantis, unraveling ancient mysteries beneath the waves.

World War I: Age of Steampunk (1914-1918): The First World War takes on a different tone with both sides utilizing advanced steam-powered machinery, elaborate mechanical exosuits, and ornate weaponry, in a steampunk-inspired alternate history.

Marco Polo’s Transcontinental Railroad (1271-1295): Marco Polo’s extensive travels result in a collaborative effort among the nations he encountered to construct a massive transcontinental railroad network connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa centuries ahead of its time.

Industrial Revolution of Magic (1700s): The Industrial Revolution ushers in a new era of magic, where steam-driven wands power factories and alchemical engines replace conventional machines, driving technological progress through mystical means.

Joan of Arc’s Space Exploration (1429): Inspired by visions of the cosmos, Joan of Arc leads a celestial expedition using a fantastical flying fortress, journeying through the stars to bring harmony to distant planets.

Da Vinci’s Cyberspace Designs (1500): Leonardo da Vinci sketches out intricate plans for a virtual reality world using a combination of mirrors, lenses, and mechanical devices, offering a glimpse into a digital realm centuries ahead of its time.

Socrates’ Philosophical Podcast (399 BCE): Instead of written dialogues, Socrates engages in thought-provoking discussions through an ancient form of podcasting, spreading his philosophical ideas through the airwaves of Athens.

Ancient Egyptian Steam-Powered Pyramids (2500 BCE): The ancient Egyptians harness steam power to build their pyramids, using massive steam engines to lift and transport colossal stone blocks with astonishing precision.

Shakespearean Space Odyssey (1601): William Shakespeare’s play “Space Odyssey” tells the story of intrepid explorers venturing beyond Earth, grappling with cosmic conflicts and celestial dramas in a performance that takes theater to the stars.

Gutenberg’s Digital Printing Press (1450): Johannes Gutenberg invents a digital version of the printing press, allowing for instant creation and dissemination of books and manuscripts, revolutionizing information distribution long before the digital age.

Aztec Airborne Armada (1400s): The Aztecs develop an array of helium-filled airships, forming an airborne armada to defend their empire and launch surprise attacks on neighboring civilizations.

Ancient Greek Teleportation Symposium (300 BCE): Greek philosophers convene a “Teleportation Symposium,” discussing the ethics and implications of instantaneous travel across vast distances, shaping the course of human exploration.

Einstein’s Quantum Social Media Theory (1915): Albert Einstein introduces a theory of “Quantum Social Media,” predicting that interconnected networks of thoughts and ideas will shape the fabric of reality, long before the development of modern social platforms.

Viking Age Space Telescopes (800): Vikings construct massive, ornate space telescopes atop their ships, enabling them to explore distant planets and navigate the cosmos with extraordinary accuracy during their seafaring expeditions.

Caveman’s Cave-Painted Animation (10,000 BCE): Prehistoric artists create animated sequences on cave walls, employing ingenious mechanisms to bring their paintings to life and share stories through early forms of motion pictures.

Recently I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Tom Holland’s Dominion, his epic history of Christianity and its influence on western culture. It’s one of the most interesting (and well-written) works of history I’ve read in some time. Holland approaches the subject from a historical and classicist perspective, versus a religious or theological one, which is unique for many religious histories. And he does so very respectfully of the faith itself, not with a cold, matter-of-fact historian’s eye.

Because it’s been great so far, Holland has a few other books I’ve added to the reading backlog, including works on the Persians and the fall of the Roman Empire.

Through reading more about him I also discovered his podcast The Rest Is History, hosted by him and Dominic Sandbrook, another historian mostly focused on modern history. Their show is excellent, and every episode so far has been a pleasure. My binging streak started from the early episodes, but I’ve jumped around a good bit to different topics I’m more curious about.

Here few of my favorites:

• Watergate (2 part series)
• The Second Reich — From the Prussian victory over France to the First World War, a time period I knew little about.
• The Mystery of the Cathars
• The Hundred Years’ War
• Thermopylae & Salamis — This 2-parter is Tom in his element.
• Ronald Reagan and the American Dream

This just showed up in my Readwise highlights today, from Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies:

It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes; and as the book tries to show, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason.

Popper opposes the historicist Great man theory, where we attribute outsized impact on the world to singular people. Here he reminds us that deference to great men encourages hubris and overconfidence. We should remember that some of the worst assaults on the freedom and open societies are also the doings of these “great men”.

Historian David McCullough died last week at age 89. If you’ve never read his work, it’s some of the best, most readable and engaging history you can find. I’ve read a few of his books over the years, like The Great Bridge (about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge), 1776 (the Revolutionary War), and his biography John Adams. Looking back on his bibliography, all of his others are on my reading list.

It’s always unfortunate to lose such a critical voice in American culture, but at least his books will stand the test of time and be read by generations.

Here’s a quote from John Adams, pulled from McCullough’s biography, with which he clearly resonated:

“The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know. Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough.”

I just finished Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, a book about all things “underworld” — catacombs, cave exploration, underground rivers, tree root networks, and geologic time. He ties these stories together with historical backgrounds of each place, globetrotting from the Slovenian Dolomites to Greenland to Norwegian ocean caves. It’s an excellent read. Highly recommended if you like nature writing and narrative nonfiction!

In the final chapter he visits the west coast of Finland, specifically the Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository, a 500m deep network of man-made caves designed to house up to 6,500 tons of spent nuclear fuel rods for 100,000 years. Here and at other locations like Yucca Mountain, mankind is inserting its own strata into the geologic record. The author describes the lengths the architects go to to protect future generations from the lethal material buried within. To reach the deadly uranium cache, you’d bore through layers and layers — granite, gneiss, bentonite, copper, iron, zirconium. Layers of protective housings to keep in the radioactive waste.

But the strangest aspect of the story involves a collection of Finnish folklore called the Kalevala:

The Kalevala is a long poem of many voices and many stories which — like the Iliad and the Odyssey — grows out of diverse and deep-rooted traditions, from Baltic song to Russian storytelling. It existed chiefly as a mutable oral text for more than a thousand years, until in the nineteenth century the Kalevala was collected, edited and published by the Finnish scholar Elias Lönnrot, giving us the mostly fixed version we now have.

There’s a story in the Kalevala about a hero called Väinämöinen, who has an underground encounter eerily related to what’s happening today at Onkalo:

Partway through the poem, Väinämöinen is given the task of descending to the underland. Hidden in the Finnish forests, he is told, is the entrance to a tunnel that leads to a cavern far underground. In that cavern are stored materials of huge energy: spells and enchantments which, when spoken, will release great power. To approach this subterranean space safely Väinämöinen must protect himself with shoes of copper and a shirt of iron, lest he be damaged by what it contains. Ilmarinen forges them for him. Clad in these insulating metals Väinämöinen approaches the tunnel mouth, which is disguised by aspens, alders, willows and spruce. He cuts down the trees to reveal the entrance. He enters the tunnel and finds himself in a deep ‘grave’, a ‘demon lair’. He has stepped, he realizes, into the throat of a buried giant called Vipunen whose body is the land itself.

Vipunen warns Väinämöinen not to bring to the surface what is buried in his caverns. He speaks of the ‘grievous pain’ of excavation. Why have you entered ‘my guiltless heart, my blameless belly’, Vipunen asks, ‘to eat and to gnaw / to bite, to devour’? He warns Väinämöinen that he will end up visiting terrible violence upon humans if he continues on his course, that he will become ‘a windborne disease / wind-borne, water driven / shared out by the gale / carried by chill air’. He threatens to imprison Väinämöinen by means of a containment spell so powerful that it is unlikely ever to be broken.

How does a centuries-old Finnish myth sound like it presages something dangerous buried underground in the 21st century? There’s even reference to copper as protection, and carrying a “windborne disease.” Ancient myths contain more practical knowledge than we think. It’s no wonder theories abound about aliens visiting earth in the past, or about advanced civilizations being around 50,000 years ago.

📑 Chief Notion Officer

Julian Lehr is onto something here. All modern organizations are plagued with a problem of managing internal documentations. We have ample tools and keep squishing the problem from one place to another: wikis, search, tasks — it’s a game of whack-a-mole to find the right version of a document. He ponders at what size it makes sense to invest in a “digital librarian”:

A friend at Stripe recently suggested – half-jokingly – that we should hire a librarian to organize all our internal data and documentation. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea. Perhaps every company should hire a Chief Notion Officer once it hits 100 employees??

🌳 The Tree of Up

Up created a tech tree representation of their product and roadmap. Genius.

🌍 Intriguing Maps That Reveal Alternate Histories

Speculative maps of alternate historical timelines.

In Erik Larson’s book The Splendid and the Vile, he tells the story of Britain during the Blitz of 1940-41.

In May of 1940, a strategic lapse by the Germans allowed the British to evacuate 330,000 Allied soldiers from the French coast in the famous Dunkirk evacuation. An assemblage of 800 mostly-ragtag vessels were able to slip those hundreds of thousands through air and u-boat attack to safety across the Channel.

There’s an anecdote in the book that I’d never thought about before, with respect to Britain’s response as they prepared for what they thought would be an inevitable amphibious invasion.

Here’s Larson:

One thing Churchill did not address in his speech was an underappreciated element of the Dunkirk evacuation. To those who cared to look, the fact that more than three hundred thousand men had managed to cross the channel in the face of concerted aerial and ground attack carried a darker lesson. It suggested that deterring a massive German invasion force might be more difficult than British commanders had assumed, especially if that force, like the evacuation fleet at Dunkirk, was composed of many hundreds of small ships, barges, and speedboats.

Wrote General Edmund Ironside, commander of Britain’s Home Forces, “It brings me to the fact that the Bosches may equally well be able to land men in England despite [RAF] bombing.”

He feared, in effect, a reverse Dunkirk.

With how successful the British were with a haphazard troop movement with mostly civilian boats, imagine what Germany could’ve accomplished moving a powerful (and much larger) invasion force in a dispersed fashion along the Kent coast? Moving inland through rural areas to regroup and move on London? If Germany knew in the summer of ‘40 how ineffective the Blitz air raids would be, maybe it would’ve happened?

👨‍💻 The Rise of the Non-Expert Expert

Vicki Boykis on the impossibility of true breadth and depth of technical expertise:

What used to distinguish senior people from junior people was the depth of knowledge they had about any given programming language and operating system.

What distinguishes them now is breadth and, I think, the ability to discern patterns and carry them across multiple parts of a stack, multiple stacks, and multiple jobs working in multiple industries. We are all junior, now, in some part of the software stack. The real trick is knowing which part that is.

⚗️ Innovation is Not Linear

I’ve written lately about the nature of innovation, and this is a good addition from Works in Progress. The mixture of basic scientific research and the tinkering of inventors is not a mechanical, proportional relationship. Impactful innovative results from foundational discoveries could happen immediately, or could be separated by decades. And often we create new inventions without even understanding how they work:

The impact of science on invention is long-term and often impossible to foresee. There are some times, certainly, when scientific pursuits have obvious applications: when Robert Koch identified the bacteria responsible for tuberculosis, he must have known that this would someday help us prevent or cure the disease. But when Bohr peered into the structure of the atom, or when Rutherford and Curie investigated the nature of radiation, it is doubtful that they expected their work to lead to nuclear power or MRI scans.

Investments in science, then, if motivated by long-term progress, cannot be prioritized by immediate practical impact. It requires, in Bush’s words, “the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.”

🏗 We Were Builders Once, And Strong

Back in the summer, Tanner Greer wrote an excellent post on our current cultural stagnation and inability to get things done. “On Cultures That Build” (my thoughts) made the case that, rather than pulling ourselves together and getting to work to invent, create, and solve problems, the standard approach is the “appeal to management” (one of my favorite aphorisms of 2020). He follows it up here with a look at Battle Cry of Freedom, a civil war history.

With the election of Abraham Lincoln they could point to one who had risen from a log cabin to the White House. “I am not ashamed to confess that twenty five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat—just what might happen to any poor man’s son!” Lincoln told an audience at New Haven in 1860. But in the free states a man knows that “he can better his condition . . . there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer.”

📉 Summary of The Rise and Fall of American Growth

Concise summary of Robert Gordon’s book on Roots of Progress.

👨🏻‍🏫 Guide to Jobs to be Done Interviews

A solid comprehensive, step-by-step overview of how to conduct JTBD interviews.

🛸 Dissolving The Fermi Paradox

A pointer somewhere on Twitter led to this post from the Slate Star Codex archives, discussing a paper that supposedly debunks the Fermi paradox:

Imagine we knew God flipped a coin. If it came up heads, He made 10 billion alien civilization. If it came up tails, He made none besides Earth. Using our one parameter Drake Equation, we determine that on average there should be 5 billion alien civilizations. Since we see zero, that’s quite the paradox, isn’t it?

No. In this case the mean is meaningless. It’s not at all surprising that we see zero alien civilizations, it just means the coin must have landed tails.

One of the key insights coming out of the progress studies movement seems like a simple idea on the surface, but it’s an important core thesis: that progress is not an inevitability. We don’t see new inventions, innovations, and improvements to quality of life by accident. It’s the result of deliberate effort by people in searching for new life improvements. Using names like “Moore’s Law” perhaps makes it sound like computer chip improvements “just happen,” but researchers at Intel or TSMC would beg to differ on how automatic those developments were.

For at least the last 150 years, steady, expansive progress has been the default. Since the Industrial Revolution, scientific discovery has marched forward, and since the days of the Enlightenment, science and progress have been generally accepted as net benefits to humanity¹.

I think what we see today isn’t so much a reversal on this position, but perhaps a sense of passivity and taking progress for granted. That scientific advancement just happens to us without deliberate effort.

Jason Crawford had some interesting thoughts on this subject on Roots of Progress, first posing a question on where progress comes from:

Do you think the last 200+ years of technological/industrial progress were…

… a trend with substantive causes, that we can expect to continue?

… a fluke, a stroke of luck, not to be repeated?

And why?

(Not a poll because I'm more interested in your reasons than your votes)

— Jason Crawford (@jasoncrawford) September 10, 2020

Most of the arguments in response supporting the second case fell into two categories:

• Failure of imagination — ”I can’t imagine any big breakthroughs, so they must be flukes or strokes of luck” or
• Materialism — ”Progress happens through exploitation of resources, so will peter out as we run out of physical materiel”

Exploring innovation’s inner workings is helpful in understanding the issues with these two arguments.

In his phenomenal book How Innovation Works, Matt Ridley describes innovation as a gradual, bottom-up, evolutionary process of thousands of small steps forward. We tend to look back on the history of progress and point to pillar breakthroughs like Orville and Wilbur at Kitty Hawk, Edison’s lightbulb, Marconi’s radio, or Pasteur’s vaccines, treating each as a Big Bang moment of inspiration that happened in one fell swoop. Ridley tells us this is a flaw in human reasoning; we love narratives and stories, so we spice up the reality of how these inventions came to be. The truth on the ground was much more gradual and dispersed in each of these cases. Hundreds of precursor steps had to happen, proffered by hundreds of different individuals dispersed around the globe. The Big Bang invention story takes as given the source branches lower on the tree that sprouted these successor innovations.

It’s not as if innovators aren’t actively pursuing discovery, that solutions just fell in their lap while sitting in their living rooms. The Wright Brothers knew that they were trying to get a flying machine off the ground. What they didn’t predict, though, was the impact that flight would have on global economics, war, trade, recreation, and every other dimension of modern life. The same is typically true of other instances of progress. From our position in the 21st century, it seems obvious that flight would have massive ramifications for the global order. But this is easy too see in hindsight. As Ridley puts it:

Technology is absurdly predictable in retrospect, wholly unpredictable in prospect.

I think Jason raises a good point on why we have trouble imagining where the next breakthrough will come from:

The historical reason is that the big breakthroughs of the past were not easy to imagine or predict before they happened. In a different context, Eliezer Yudkowsky points out that even the creators of inventions such as the airplane or the nuclear reactor felt that their breakthroughs were fifty years out, or even impossible, shortly before they happened. Now is no different.

One of the biggest factors to this trick of hindsight is that innovation in situ is a gradual phenomenon. Only in hindsight do we look back on it as a “eureka” process of going from 0 to 1 in a flash of inspiration. I think if you reframe your understanding of progress and innovation around a steady, gradual march of deliberate advances, you begin to see why waiting around for it to happen in big bursts is an incorrect model.

Another insight from Ridley is that innovation is rooted in trial and error. In a world where we’ve become hyper-concerned with risk and protecting against downsides (just look at our expanding regulatory complex — only growing, never shrinking), we slow ourselves down from making the errors necessary for progress. Edison, a man that turned innovation into a product in itself, had this to say on his process, acknowledging error as a baked-in prerequisite for discovery:

I’ve not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways it won’t work.

Regarding the point on material constraints, it’s worth reading into the concept of dematerialization. The best work on the topic I know of is Andrew McAfee’s More From Less, which dives deep on this topic of how much modern progress is able to not only continue but in most cases accelerate, all while using fewer resources than once required. Take the simple aluminum can: the first ones weighed 85 grams. Modern refinement and manufacturing processes have reduced that to 11. The book is filled with cases like this of dematerialization outpacing our increase in consumption. It’s not a universal law of innovation, but rather a pattern that we see with continued progress².

Getting back to Jason’s original question — I believe that progress does have substantive causes. But between innovation’s gradual nature and the sea of trial and error, it’s hard to notice it while it’s happening. While you’re sitting in the present without the clarity of hindsight, it can feel like progress comes from flukes and strokes of luck³. But the deliberate effort and small victories add up (and compound) over time to enormous progress.

One of the goals of the progress studies movement is to expose what the sources of innovation are, to teach people how innovations came to be. And it’s important to recognize that innovation is intentional. It happens because we choose to work on making our lives better.

A final quote from the beginning of How Innovation Works (emphasis mine):

Innovation, like evolution, is a process of constantly discovering ways of rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance – and that happen to be useful.

💼 Birth of the Business Corporation

Anton Howes looks back to the 1500s and connects Sebastian Cabot’s planned search for a Northeast Passage to China to the birth of the first joint-stock corporation.

🔮 Palantir: On Business, Cults, and Politics

Sharp analysis of Palantir from Byrne Hobart as it seeks a public offering. What an odd company.

🔌 Eagerly Discerning, Discerningly Eager

Comparing what “eager” and “discerning” developers are looking for in an API.

🐇 Looking-Glass Politics

On private emotions being thrown into the public sphere:

People escape the Dunbar world for obvious reasons: life there appears prosaic and uninspiring. They find a digital interface and, like Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, enter a new realm that glitters with infinite possibilities. Suddenly, you can flicker like a spark between the digital and the real. The exhilarating sensation is that you have been taken to a high place and shown all the kingdoms of the world: “These can be yours, if. . . .” If your video goes viral. If you gain millions of followers. If you compose that devastating tweet that will drive Donald Trump from the White House. There is, however, an entrance fee. Personal identity must be discarded.

🏭 The Great Enrichment

Deirdre McCloskey on the boom of progress over the past 200 years:

The Great Enrichment came from human ingenuity emancipated. Ordinary people, emboldened by liberalism, ventured on extraordinary projects—the marine chronometer, the selective breeding of cotton seed, the band saw, a new chemistry—or merely ventured boldly to a new job, the New World, or going west, young man. And, crucially, the bold adventurers, in parallel with liberations in science, music, and geographical exploration, came to be tolerated and even commended by the rest of society, first in Holland in the 17th century and then in Britain in the 18th.

🗺 OSM-ready Data Sets

A partnership between Esri, Facebook, and the OpenStreetMap community to polish up and release datasets readily compatible with OSM (tagging and licensing).

I linked a couple weeks ago to Stephen Kotkin’s discussion with Lex Fridman. That was so interesting to me I went out looking for other interviews and lectures of his on YouTube and found this great one from Dartmouth in 2017, the centennial of of the Russian Revolution.

Excellent top comment on YouTube:

The Joe Pesci of historians!

⚖️ The Trouble with Optionality

A 2017 commencement address from Mihir Desai, critiquing the phenomenon of infinite optionality and lack of commitment pushed by modern universities:

I’ve lost count of the number of students who, when describing their career goals, talk about their desire to “maximize optionality.” They’re referring to financial instruments known as options that confer the right to do something rather than an obligation to do something. For this reason, options have a “Heads I win, tails I don’t lose” character—what those in finance lovingly describe as a “nonlinear payoff structure.” When you hold an option and the world moves with you, you enjoy the benefits; when the world moves against you, you are shielded from the bad outcome since you are not obligated to do anything. Optionality is the state of enjoying possibilities without being on the hook to do anything.

🗺 Pangaea with Modern Day Borders

Nice paleocartography here. India abuts Antarctica, South Africa up against Argentina, and Iran was a peninsula.

🏭 World’s Largest Producer of Rubbing Alcohol Can’t Manufacturer Hand Sanitizer

This is the only image that comes to mind.

In this piece from a few years ago, historian Anton Howes wrote about about what drives innovation. Is it part of human nature to pursue innovation? Or is it not a naturally occurring phenomenon? He makes the case that innovation is not inevitable:

The more I study the lives of British innovators, the more convinced I am that innovation is not in human nature, but is instead received. People innovate because they are inspired to do so — it is an idea that is transmitted. And when people do not innovate, it is often simply because it never occurs to them to do so. Incentives matter too, of course. But a person needs to at least have the idea of innovation — an improving mentality — before they can choose to innovate, before they can even take the costs and benefits of innovation into account.

Since I’ve been recently reading René Girard’s work on mimetic theory, I wonder if there isn’t a layer here that’s related to mimicry and how humans are driven to copy one another. Does “innovation culture” rather have little to do with what is or isn’t in our nature? The question is: what makes people explore and seek out new ways of doing things, versus accepting their lot, content with the status quo of life as it is?

Of course incentives can drive inventive behavior; if a person perceives a payoff for thinking up a new way to move goods, smelt copper, or build tools, they’ll be driven to tread onto new ground and look for different ways to do things. They’ll experiment, they’ll try, they’ll fail, and they’ll sometimes succeed, having all their losses earned back and then some.

Is there a way to look at this through a Girardian lens? Incentives have been around forever, since humans could watch, absorb their surroundings, and see what is and isn’t working for members of their immediate families, tribes, and communities. But then why was there so little technological innovation until the last 500 years? And most of that since the Industrial Revolution?

Maybe localized incentive wasn’t enough. Maybe the town blacksmith coming up with a slightly different tool or technique was not enough evidence for his compatriots to adopt his improvements. At small scales without the reach to a wider network, resistance to change could be harder to overcome. Maybe there had to be enough critical mass of incentive as evidence of how to improve tools, processes, and systems? Perhaps with innovation being rewarded at large enough scale, combined with wider knowledge through new communication channels (printing press, the telegraph) is what triggered the industrial age.

We’ve clearly shifted to a culture (today it’s now global) where innovation is known, highly valued, promoted, and encouraged.

Part of me believes that Howes is right, that the status quo-as-equilibrium norm is the default state of the world. But that still doesn’t explain the massive phase shift at around 1700. If acceptance of normalcy is human nature, what made us suddenly break out on a hockey-stick run of innovative change for the last 300 years?

I wonder if it wasn’t a function of critical mass — an aggregation of enough successful innovation happening over short spans of time, in a few select geographies, combined with communication tools to spread the word, and enhanced by the human tendency to mimic others. The viral spread of knowledge and our mimetic desires suddenly broke us out of stasis into a new world where invention is now all around us, encouraged and rewarded much more than it was for the previous 20,000 years.

I ran across this interview with physicist David Deutsch, with his thoughts on Brexit. A lot of great stuff here on resilience, error correction, individualism vs. collectivism, Karl Popper, and Britain’s first-past-the-post system.

Physicians hang diplomas in their waiting rooms. Some fishermen mount their biggest catch. Downstairs in Westborough, it was pictures of computers.

Over the course of a few decades dating beginning in the mid-40s, computing moved from room-sized mainframes with teletype interfaces to connected panes of glass in our pockets. At breakneck speed, we went from the computer being a massively expensive, extremely specialized tool to a ubiquitous part of daily life.

During the 1950s — the days of Claude Shannon, John von Neumann, and MIT’s Lincoln Lab — a “computer” was a batch processing system. Models like the EDVAC were really just massive calculators. It would be another decade before the computer would be thought of as an “interactive” tool, and even longer before that idea became mainstream.

The 60s saw the rise of IBM its mainframe systems. Moving from paper tape time clocks to tabulating machines, IBM pushed their massive resources into the mainframe computer market. S/360 dominated the computer industry until the 70s (and further on with S/370), when the minicomputer emerged as an interim phase between mainframes and what many computer makers were pursuing: a personal, low-cost computer.

The emergence of the minicomputer should be considered the beginning of the personal computer revolution. Before that, computers were only touched by trained operators — they were too complex and expensive for students, secretaries, or hobbyists to use directly. Minis promised something different, a machine that a programmer could use interactively. In 1964, DEC shipped the first successful mini, the PDP-8. From then on, computer upstarts were sprouting up all over the country getting into the computer business.

One of those companies was Data General, a firm founded in 1968 and the subject Tracy Kidder’s book, The Soul of a New Machine. A group of disaffected DEC engineers, impatient with the company’s strategy, left to form Data General to attack the minicomputer market. Founder Edson de Castro, formerly the lead engineer on the PDP-8, thought there was opportunity that DEC was too slow to capitalize on with their minis. So DG designed and brought to market their first offering, the Nova. It was an affordable, 16-bit machine designed for general computing applications, and made DG massively successful in the growing competitive landscape. The Nova and its successor sold like gangbusters into the mid-70s, when DEC brought the legendary VAX “supermini” to market.

DEC’s announcement of the VAX and Data General’s flagging performance in the middle of that decade provide the backdrop for the book. Kidder’s narrative takes you inside the company as it battles for a foothold in the mini market not only against DEC and the rest of the computer industry, but also with itself.

The VAX was set to be the first 32-bit minicomputer, an enormous upgrade from the prior generation of 16-bit machines. In 1976, Data General spun up a project codenamed “Fountainhead,” their big bet to develop a VAX killer, which would be headquartered in a newly-built facility in North Carolina. But back at their New England headquarters, engineer Tom West was already at work leading the Eclipse team in building a successor. So the company ended up with two competing efforts to create a next-generation 32-bit machine.

The book is the story of West’s team as they toil with limited company resources against the clock to get to market with the “Eagle” (as it was then codenamed) before the competition, and before Fountainhead could ship. As the most important new product for the company, Fountainhead had drawn away many of the best engineers who wanted to be working on the company’s flagship product. But the engineers that had stayed behind weren’t content to iterate on old products, they wanted to build something new:

Some of the engineers who had chosen New England over FHP fell under West’s command, more or less. And the leader of the FHP project suggested that those staying behind make a small machine that would solve the 32-bit, logical-address problem and would at the same time exhibit a trait called “software compatibility.”

Some of those who stayed behind felt determined to build something elegant. They designed a computer equipped with something called a mode bit. They planned to build, in essence, two different machines in one box. One would be a regular old 16-bit Eclipse, but flip the switch, so to speak, and the machine would turn into its alter ego, into a hot rod—a fast, good-looking 32-bit computer. West felt that the designers were out to “kill North Carolina,” and there wasn’t much question but that he was right, at least in some cases. Those who worked on the design called this new machine EGO. The individual initials respectively stood one step back in the alphabet from the initials FHP, just as in the movie 2001 the name of the computer that goes berserk—HAL—plays against the initials IBM. The name, EGO, also meant what it said.

What proceeded was a team engaged in long hours, nights and weekends, and hard iteration on a new product to race to market before their larger, much better funded compatriots down south. As West described it to his team, it was all about getting their hands dirty and working with what they had at hand — the definition of the scrappy upstart:

West told his group that from now on they would not be engaged in anything like research and development but in work that was 1 percent R and 99 percent D.

The pace and intensity of technology companies became culturally iconic during the 1990s with the tech and internet boom in that decade. The garage startup living in a house together working around the clock to build their products, a signature of the Silicon Valley lifestyle. But the seeds of those trends were planted back in the 70s and 80s, and on display with the Westborough team and the Eagle (which eventually went to market as the Eclipse MV/8000¹). Kidder spent time with the team on-site as they were working on the Eagle project, providing an insider’s perspective of life in the trenches with the “Hardy Boys” (who made hardware) and “Microkids” (who wrote software). He observes the team’s engineers as they horse-trade for resources. This was a great anecdote, a testament to the autonomy the young engineers had to get the job done however they could manage:

A Microkid wants the hardware to perform a certain function. A Hardy Boy tells him, “No way—I already did my design for microcode to do that.” They make a deal: “I’ll encode this for you, if you’ll do this other function in hardware.” “All right.”

If you’ve ever seen the TV series Halt and Catch Fire, this book seems like a direct inspiration for the Cardiff Electric team in that show trying to break into the PC business. The Eagle team could represent any of the scrappy startups from the 2000s.

It’s a surprisingly approachable read given its heavy focus on engineers and the technical nature of their work in designing hardware and software. The book won the Pulitzer in 1982, and has become a standard on the shelves of both managers and engineers. The Soul of a New Machine sparked a deeper interest for me in the history of computers, which has led to a wave of new reads I’m just getting started on.

Today on the nerdy computer history feed, we’ve got a 1982 video from Bell Labs: The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive.

Most of the video has Brian Kernighan explaining the structure of UNIX and why it’s different from its contemporary operating systems. I should do more work with the keyboard in my lap and my feet on the desk.

Navigating a Linux shell looks almost identical to this today, 50 years later.

I liked this quote John Mashey, a computer scientist who worked on UNIX at Bell:

Software is different from hardware. When you build hardware and send it out, you may have to fix it because it breaks, but you don’t demand, for example, that your radio suddenly turn into a television. And you don’t demand that a piece of hardware suddenly do a completely different function, but people do that with software all of the time. There’s a continual demand for changes, enhancements, new features that people find necessary once they get used to a system.

⌨️ I Pressed ⌘B, You Wouldn’t Believe What Happened Next

An entertaining talk about the complexity of typography, from Marcin Wichary at Figma’s recent Config conference.

🖥 Restoring Y Combinator’s Xerox Alto

An technical piece on restoring Alan Kay’s Xerox Alto he donated to Y Combinator. Amazing piece of technology history, and inspired so many future developments in computing — graphical user interfaces, WYSIWIG text editing, bitmapped graphics, the mouse, and Ethernet for connectivity.

Xerox built about 2000 Altos for use in Xerox, universities and research labs, but the Alto was never sold as a product. Xerox used the ideas from the Alto in the Xerox Star, which was expensive and only moderately successful. The biggest impact of the Alto was in 1979 when Steve Jobs famously toured Xerox and saw the Alto and other machines. When Jobs saw the advanced graphics of the Alto, he was inspired to base the user interfaces of the Lisa and Macintosh systems on Xerox’s ideas, making the GUI available to the mass market.

🦠 Map and Timeline of CoVID-19 Outbreak

A timeline showing the spread of the coronavirus, with an accompanying map interface.

The specification for Ethernet was proposed in 1973 by Bob Metcalfe as a medium to connect the expanding network of computers at Xerox PARC. This was a schematic he drew as part of the memo proposing the technology to connect the machines together:

From this Wired article:

PARC was installing its own Xerox Alto, the first personal computer, and EARS, the first laser printer. It needed a system that would allow additional PCs and printers to be added without having to reconfigure or shut down the network. It was the first time that computers were small enough for hundreds to be in the same building, and the network had to be fast to drive the printer.

Metcalfe circulated his plan in a memo titled “Alto Ethernet.” It contained a rough schematic drawing and suggested using coaxial cable for the connections and using data packets like Hawaii’s AlohaNet or the Defense Department’s Arpanet. The system was up and running Nov. 11, 1973.

It’s amazing how simple many foundational technologies start out: a simple comms medium meant to connect their computers to a shared printer. Now the same tech is the backbone of almost every local network.

As I’ve been reading more into the history of technology¹, specifically computers and the Internet, I’ll go on side trails through Wikipedia or the wider ‘net back to many of the source papers that were the seeds of certain innovations.

I’ve read about the IBM 700 series of mainframes, Vannevar Bush’s seminal piece on a “memex” device (precursor idea to hypertext), and Claude Shannon’s original work on information theory.

The latest gold mine I’ve found is on YouTube. I created a “Tech History” playlist where I’ve been logging clips and documentaries on various bits of computer history. Click the icon top-right to see all the videos in the list.

🥩 The Internet of Beefs

Venkatesh Rao has assembled a most compelling explanation for how the internet polarization machine works:

The semantic structure of the Internet of Beefs is shaped by high-profile beefs between charismatic celebrity knights loosely affiliated with various citadel-like strongholds peopled by opt-in armies of mooks. The vast majority of the energy of the conflict lies in interchangeable mooks facing off against each other, loosely along lines indicated by the knights they follow, in innumerable battles that play out every minute across the IoB.

Almost none of these battles matter individually. Most mook-on-mook contests are witnessed, for the most part, only by a few friends and algorithms, and merit no overt notice in either Vox or Quillette. Beyond a local uptick in cortisol levels, individual episodes of mook-on-mook violence are of no consequence.

🎭 The Curse of Culture

I have a working draft post on this topic for sometime in the future. This is one of my favorites from the Stratechery archives — on corporate cultures and how they impact company strategy:

As with most such things, culture is one of a company’s most powerful assets right until it isn’t: the same underlying assumptions that permit an organization to scale massively constrain the ability of that same organization to change direction. More distressingly, culture prevents organizations from even knowing they need to do so.

📚 Book Review: Secular Cycles

The Slate Star Codex review of Turchin and Nefedov’s Secular Cycles, which seeks to understand patterns in technological and social development, and underlying causes for expansion and stagnation periods.

I’m currently reading the fantastic book The Dream Machine, a history of the creation of personal computers, and a biography of this man, JCR Licklider. This is a talk from an ACM conference in 1986 where he discusses his work on interactive computing. A wonderful little bit of history here.

This is a neat clip from Walt Disney’s Disneyland TV series. Wernher von Braun explains the future technology that’ll take us to the Moon, in 1955, several years before the Mercury program even began.

🎮 How Do Bullets Work in Video Games?

A cool analysis of methods for rendering bullet physics in games.

🏟 Notes on “The Lessons of History”

Maksim Stepanenko’s notes on Will and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of History. I’ve got this one on the shelf, and these nuggets make me want to pick it up now to read.

🧱 BrickLink

While working on some Lego sets with the kids, I wanted to know if some extra parts we had were from the sets they got, since everything had gotten mixed up. Since it’d been years since I had any Legos, I thought there might be databases out there to lookup parts by number. Lo-and-behold I found this one where you can input an individual part ID, and also find out what other sets contain the same part. A tool that I would’ve eaten up as a kid cataloging our Legos and searching for “custom” parts.

🌋 Why 536 Was the Worst Year To Be Alive

You may have thought the entire 14th century was pretty bad, or maybe 1918 with its flu pandemic and millions of war casualties, but how about the 6th:

A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.

That sort of worldwide famine caused by devastating volcanic eruptions would’ve been impossible to deal with. And the Plague of Justinian was no small thing either, thought to have killed up to 25% of the global population.

Life is good these days.

👽 How Chinese Sci-Fi Conquered America

The Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy (translated by Ken Liu and featured here) is one of the best sci-fi works there is, regardless of origin or era. I also read and enjoyed Liu’s Paper Menagerie collection of short stories. I didn’t realize how involved he was personally in bringing so much new material here, and introducing so many Chinese authors to wider audiences:

He has found sci-fi stories in unusual corners of the internet, including a forum for alumni of Tsinghua University. Chinese friends send him screenshots of stories published on apps that are hard to access outside of China. As an emissary for some of China’s most provocative and boundary-breaking writers, Liu has become much more than a scout and a translator. He’s now a fixer, an editor and a curator — a savvy interpreter who has done more than anyone to bridge the imagination gap between the world’s current, fading superpower and its ascendant one.

His job as a translator, given the sensitivities of the material and the players involved, is a complex one:

“It’s a very tricky dance of trying to get the message that they’re trying to convey out, without painting the writers as dissidents,” Liu told me over coffee one day, as we sat in the kitchen of his home in Massachusetts. “A lot of Chinese writers are very skilled at writing something ambiguously, such that there are multiple meanings in the text. I have to ask them, how explicit do you want me to be in terms of making a certain point here, because in the original it’s very constrained, so how much do you want me to tease out the implications you’re making? And sometimes we have a discussion about exactly what that means and how they want it to be done.”

💬 Why Shared Channels Are So Cool

We’ve not scratched the surface much on Slack’s Shared Channels feature, but where we have it definitely makes staying plugged in with important tangential networks (like customers and partners) dead simple and much more engaging.

This network analysis uses some interesting visualizations to show the topology of the network, with its subnetworks creating a connection graph of communication pipes.

Also on an hourly basis, these mini-networks from the outer ring get sucked into the internal mega-network, as connections are formed between organizations on the inside and the outside. The overall result is a roiling sea of proto-networks surrounding an ever-expanding network of super-connected teams.

One of the great things about YouTube is being able to find gems of history like Doug Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos” presentation from 1968. How amazing it must’ve been to see something like this live, 50 years ago:

The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work). Engelbart’s presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s.

⚾️ How Many Outs? Baseball Graphics Compared

Some top-notch baseball geekery, with Jason Snell comparing the graphics overlays from Fox, MLB Network, and ESPN’s telecasts. I’ve thought about this, too, but have to give it to the ESPN one, with Fox right up there.

🧘🏽‍♀️ Book Review: The Mind Illuminated

Scott Alexander’s review is an excellent in-depth look at this book on meditation. I’m still making my way through it, but it’s definitely a fantastic soup-to-nuts guide so far.

🇬🇧 The Crucial Century

From an objective observer in the 16th century, what site would have been the best bet to predict the flowering of the Industrial Revolution, based on contemporaneous evidence?

In fact, England in 1550 was not even close to being Europe’s preeminent naval power. It was Hispania, not Britannia, who ruled the waves. Even on maps made in England and for the use of the English government, the ocean off the west coast of England and to the south of Ireland was labelled The Spanish Sea. The foreign maps agreed. The North Sea, too, was the Oceanus Germanicus, or German Sea. It gives an idea of who controlled what. And England of course came close to catastrophe in 1588, when the Spanish decided to launch an invasion – it was largely only stopped by the weather. Despite having always been on an island, English policymakers only seriously began to appreciate Britain’s geographical potential for both defence and commerce in the late sixteenth century.

It took until the mid-17th century for promise to start taking hold in England. By then it’s growth and expansion had begun overtaking its neighbors.

Since I’ve been following the progress studies movement and Jason Crawford’s Roots of Progress blog, it was cool to see video of his talk on the history of steel from a San Francisco meetup a few weeks ago.

I saw this Nightline interview clip with Steve Jobs from a recent Steven Sinofsky post.

In this clip is his famous “bicycle for the mind” quote about the personal computer.

This is a 21st century bicycle that amplifies a certain intellectual ability that man has. And I think that after this process has come to maturity, the effects that it’s going to have on society are going to far outstrip even those of the petrochemical revolution has had.

Hard to believe Jobs was this prescient at age 26, when computers were still considered to be hobbyist toys.

🏃🏻‍♂️ Everything You Need to Know About Rhythmic Breathing

I tried this out the other night on a run. The technique makes some intiutive sense that it’d reduce impact (or level it out side to side anyway). Surely to notice any result you’d have to do it over distance consistently. But I’ve had some right knee soreness that I don’t totally know the origin of, so thought I’d start trying this out. I found it takes a lot of concentration to keep it up consistently. I’ll keep testing it out.

🏞 Terrestrial Warfare, Drowned Lands

A neat historical, geographical story from BLDGBLOG:

Briefly, anyone interested in liminal landscapes should find Snell’s description of the Drowned Lands, prior to their drainage, fascinating. The Wallkill itself had no real path or bed, Snell explains, the meadows it flowed through were naturally dammed at one end by glacial boulders from the Ice Age, the whole place was clogged with “rank vegetation,” malarial pestilence, and tens of thousands of eels, and, what’s more, during flood season “the entire valley from Denton to Hamburg became a lake from eight to twenty feet deep.”

Turns out there was local disagreement on flood control:

A half-century of “war” broke out among local supporters of the dams and their foes: “The dam-builders were called the ‘beavers’; the dam destroyers were known as ‘muskrats.’ The muskrat and beaver war was carried on for years,” with skirmishes always breaking out over new attempts to dam the floods.

Here’s one example, like a scene written by Victor Hugo transplanted to New York State: “A hundred farmers, on the 20th of August, 1869, marched upon the dam to destroy it. A large force of armed men guarded the dam. The farmers routed them and began the work of destruction. The ‘beavers’ then had recourse to the law; warrants were issued for the arrest of the farmers. A number of their leaders were arrested, but not before the offending dam had been demolished. The owner of the dam began to rebuild it; the farmers applied for an injunction. Judge Barnard granted it, and cited the owner of the dam to appear and show cause why the injunction should not be made perpetual. Pending a final hearing, high water came and carried away all vestige of the dam.”

🔐 Fulcrum SAML SSO with Azure and Okta

This is something we launched a few months back. There’s nothing terribly exciting about building SSO features in a SaaS product — it’s table stakes to move up in the world with customers. But for me personally it’s a signal of success. Back in 2011, imagining that we’d ever have customers large enough to need SAML seemed so far in the future. Now we’re there and rolling it out for enterprise customers.

We took the kids over to Kennedy Space Center on Saturday on the way up to Jacksonville. A quick stopover in Titusville Friday night then morning over at the Cape.

I always loved visiting KSC when I was younger. We had the opportunity to go and see multiple launches over the years, including a couple of Space Shuttle launches. Visiting again brought back memories since they’ve got several things there that haven’t changed much over the years. On the way in you get to walk through the Rocket Garden, which showcases some of the rockets of NASA’s past programs including the Redstone and Atlas rockets from Mercury, the Titan from Gemini, and the Saturn 1B from early Apollo lying prone in the back. Of course the kids loved the chance to sit inside the Mercury capsule.

There’s a new (since my last visit) exhibit called “Journey to Mars” where they’ve got a nice presentation on the past and future of Mars exploration missions. The highlights here were the replicas of Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity. It’s amazing in that display to see the increasing size and complexity of robotics we’ve been able to successfully land and use on Mars. Makes you wonder what we’ll do next.

One of the other classics from when we used to visit as kids is the astronaut memorial. There’s nothing terribly spectacular about it, but it’s an important reminder of the sacrifices made throughout the nation’s research, experimentation, and launch attempts to explore space. We had to go check this out for nostalgia’s sake. I still find it impressive and it reminds me of the times when our manned space program was active and astronauts were like mini celebrities.

The last part we checked out was the new Space Shuttle exhibit with the old Atlantis orbiter on display. It reminded me of how advanced the shuttle really was for its time, as a technology of the early 80s, and also how large the orbiters were. In hindsight the whole thing seemed pretty impractical, but the set of dozens of exhibits serve as a reminder of all the amazing things that were enabled by routine trips to orbit by the Space Shuttle. It was cool to get to stand up close to something that went into space 33 times.

For our next visit I’d love to go out to the Saturn V exhibit, to which you have to take a bus tour. Maybe it’d be a better time then for the kids to get out on the deeper tour that takes you to the VAB and the launch pads. I always loved getting to see that stuff.

This post is part 3 in a series about my history in product development. Check out the intro in part 1 and all about our first product, Geodexy, in part 2.

Back in 2010 we decide to halt our development of Geodexy and regroup to focus on a narrower segment of the marketplace. With what we’d learned in our go-to-market attempt on Geodexy, we wanted to isolate a specific industry we could focus our technology around. Our tech platform was strong, we were confident in that. But at the peak of our efforts with taking Geodexy to market, we were never able to reach a state of maturity to create traction and growth in any of the markets we were targeting. Actually targeting is the wrong word — truthfully that was the issue: we weren’t “targeting” anything because we had too many targets to shoot at.

We needed to take our learnings, regroup on what was working and what wasn’t, and create a single focal point we could center all of our effort around, not just the core technology, but also our go-to-market approach, marketing strategy, sales, and customer development.

I don’t remember the specific genesis of the idea (I think it was part internal idea generation, part serendipity), but we connected on the notion of field data collection for the property inspection market. So we launched allinspections.

That industry had the hallmarks of one ripe for us to show up with disruptive technology:

• Low current investment in technology — Most folks were doing things on paper with lots of transcribing and printing.
• Lots of regulatory basis in the workflow — Many inspections are done as a requirement by a regulatory body. This meant consistent, widespread needs that crossed geographic boundaries, and an “always-on” use case for a technology solution.
• Phased workflow with repetitive process and “decision tree” problems — a perfect candidate for digitizing the process.
• Very few incumbent technologies to replace — if there were competitors at all, they were Excel and Acrobat.
• Smartphones ready to amplify a mobile-heavy workflow — Inspections of all sorts happen in-situ somewhere in the field.

While the market for facility and property inspections is immense, we opted to start on the retail end of the space: home inspections for residential real estate. There was a lot to like about this strategy for a technology company looking to build something new. We could identify individual early adopters, gradually understand what made their business tick, and index on capability that empowered them. There was no need immediately to worry about selling to massive enterprise organizations, which would’ve put a heavy burden on us to build “box-checking” features like hosting customization, access controls, single sign-on, and the like. We used a freemium model which helped attract early usage, then shifted to a free trial one later on after some early traction.

Overall the biggest driver that attracted us to residential was the consistency of the work. While anyone who’s bought property is familiar with the process of getting a house inspected before closing. That sort of inspection is low volume compared to those associated with insurance underwriting. Our first mission was this: to build the industry-standard tool for performing these regulated inspections in Florida — wind mitigation, 4-point, and roof certification. These were (and still are) done by the thousands every day. They were perfect candidates for us for the reasons listed above: simple, standard, ubiquitous, and required¹. There was a built-in market for automating the workflow around them and improving the data collected, which we could use as a beachhead to get folks used to using an app to conduct their inspections.

Our hypothesis was that we could apply the technology for mobile data collection we’d built in Geodexy and “verticalize” it around the specialty of property inspection with features oriented around that problem set. Once we could spin up enough technology adoption for home inspection use cases at the individual level, we could then bridge into the franchise operations and institutions (even the insurance companies themselves) to standardize on allinspections for all of their work.

We had good traction in the early days with inspectors. It didn’t take us long before we connected with a half-dozen tech-savvy inspectors in the area to work with as guinea pigs to help us advance the technology. Using their domain expertise in exchange for usage of the product, we were able to fast-forward on our understanding of the inspection workflow — from original request handling and scheduling, to inspecting on-site, then report delivery to customer. Within a year we had a pretty slick solution and 100 or so customers that swore by the tool for getting their work done.

But it didn’t take us long to run into friction. Once we’d exhausted the low-hanging fruit of the early adopter community, it became harder and harder to find more of the tech savvy crowd willing to splash some money on something new and different. As you might expect, the community of inspectors we were targeting were not technologists. Many of these folks were perfectly content with their paperwork process and enjoyed working solo. Many had no interest in building a true business around their operation, not interested in growing into a company with multiple inspectors covering wider geographies. Others were general contractors doing inspections as a side gig, so it wasn’t even their core day to day job. With that kind of fragmentation, it was difficult to reach the economies of scale we were looking for to be able to sell something at the price point where we needed to be. We had some modest success pursuing the larger nationwide franchise organizations, but our sales and onboarding strategy wasn’t conducive to getting those deals beyond the small pilot stage. It was still too early for that. We wanted to get to B2B customer sizes and margins, but were ultimately still selling a B2C application. Yes, a home inspector has a business that we were selling to, but the fundamentals of the relationship share far more in common with a consumer product relationship than a corporate one.

By early 2012 we’d stalled out on growth at the individual level. A couple opportunities to partner with inspection companies on a comprehensive solution for carriers failed, partially for technical reasons, but also immaturity of our existing market. We didn’t have a reference base sizable enough to jump all the way up to selling 10,000 seats without enormous burden and too much overpromising on what we could do.

We shut down operations on allinspections in early 2012. We had suspected this would have to happen for a while, so it wasn’t a sudden decision. But it always hurts to have to walk away from something you poured so much time and energy into.

I think the biggest takeaway for me at the time, and in the early couple years of success on Fulcrum, was how relatively little the specifics of your technology matter if you mess up the product-market fit and go-to-market steps in the process. The silver lining in the whole affair was (like many things in product companies) that there was plenty to salvage and carry on to our next effort. We learned an enormous amount about what goes into building a SaaS offering and marketing it to customers. Coming from Geodexy where we never even reached the stage of having a real “customer success” process to deal with, allinspections gave us a jolt in appreciation for things like identifying the “aha moment” in the product, increasing usage of a product, tracking usage of features to diagnose engagement gaps, and ultimately, getting on the same page as the customer when it comes to the final deliverable. It takes working with customers and learning the deep corners of the workflow to identify where the pressure points are in the value chain, the things that keep the customer up at night when they don’t have a solution.

And naturally there was plenty of technology to bring forward with us to our next adventure. The launch of Fulcrum actually pre-dates the end of allinspections, which tells you something about how we were thinking at the time. At the time we weren’t thinking of Fulcrum as the “next evolution” of allinspections necessarily, but we were thinking about going bigger while fixing some of the mistakes made a year or two prior. While most of Fulcrum was built ground-up, we brought some code but a whole boatload of lessons learned on systems, methods, and architecture that helped us launch and grow Fulcrum as quickly as we did.

Retrospectives like this help me to think back on past decisions and process some of what we did right and wrong with some separation. That separation can be a blessing in being able to remove personal emotion or opinion from what happened and look at it objectively, so it can serve as a valuable learning experience. Sometime down the road I’ll write about this next evolution that led to where we are today.

One of my favorite tech figures, a16z’s Steven Sinofsky, gives a history of “Clippy”, the helpful anthropomorphic office supply from Microsoft Office. As the product leader of the Office group in the 90s, he gives some interesting background to how Clippy came to be. I found most fascinating the time machine look back at what personal computing was like back then — how different it was to develop a software product in a world of boxed software.

Everyone makes fun of it today, but Clippy did presage the world of AI-powered “assistant” technology that everyone is getting familiar with today.

See also this Twitter thread. Love this stuff.

I started with the first post in this series back in January, describing my own entrance into product development and management.

When I joined the company we were in the very early stages of building a data collection tool, primarily for internal use to improve speed and efficiency on data project work. That product was called Geodexy, and the model was similar to Fulcrum in concept, but in execution and tech stack, everything was completely different. A few years back, Tony wrote up a retrospective post detailing out the history of what led us down the path we took, and how Geodexy came to be:

After this experience, I realized there was a niche to carve out for Spatial Networks but I’d need to invest whatever meager profits the company made into a capability to allow us to provide high fidelity data from the field, with very high quality, extremely fast and at a very low cost (to the company). I needed to be able to scale up or down instantly, given the volatility in the project services space, and I needed to be able to deploy the tools globally, on-demand, on available mobile platforms, remotely and without traditional limitations of software CDs.

Tony’s post was an excellent look back at the business origin of the product — the “why” we decided to do it piece. What I wanted to cover here was more on the product technology end of things, and our go-to-market strategy (where you could call it that). Prior to my joining, the team had put together a rough go-to-market plan trying to guesstimate TAM, market fit, customer need, and price points. Of course without real market feedback (as in, will someone actually buy what you’ve built, versus say they would buy it one day), it’s hard to truly gauge the success potential.

Back then, modern web frameworks in use today were around, but there were very few and not yet mature, like Rails and it’s peers. It’s astonishing to think back on the tech stack we were using in the first iteration of Geodexy, circa 2008. That first version was built on a combination of Flex, Flash, MySQL, and Windows Mobile¹. It all worked, but was cumbersome to iterate on even back then. This was not even that long ago, and back then that was a reasonable suite of tooling; now it looks antiquated, and Flex was abandoned and donated to Apache Foundation a long time ago. We had success with that product version for our internal efforts; it powered dozens of data collection projects in 10+ countries around the world, allowing us to deliver higher-quality data than we could before. The mobile application (which was the key to the entire product achieving its goals) worked, but still lacked the native integration of richer data sources — primarily for photos and GPS data. The former could be done with some devices that had native cameras, but the built-in sensors were too low quality on most devices. The latter almost always required an external Bluetooth GPS device to integrate the location data. It was all still an upgrade from pen, paper, and data transcription, but not free from friction on the ground at the point of data collection. Being burdened by technology friction while roaming the countryside collecting data doesn’t make for the smoothest user experience or prevent problems. We still needed to come up with a better way to make it happen, for ourselves and absolutely before we went to market touting the workflow advantages to other customers.

In mid-2009 we spun up an effort to reset on more modern technology we could build from, learning from our first mistakes and able to short-circuit a lot of the prior experimentation. The new stack was Rails, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL, which looking back from 10 years on sounds like a logical stack to use even today, depending on the product needs. Much of what we used back then still sits at the core of Fulcrum today.

What we never got to with the ultimate version of Geodexy was a modern mobile client for the data collection piece. That was still the early days of the App Store, and I don’t recall how mature the Android Market (predecessor to Google Play) was back then, but we didn’t have the resources to start of with 2 mobile clients anyway. We actually had a functioning Blackberry app first, which tells you how different the mobile platform landscape looked a decade ago².

Geodexy’s mobile app for iOS was, on the other hand, an excellent window into the potential iOS development unlocked for us as a platform going forward. In a couple of months one of our developers that knew his way around C++ learned some Objective-C and put together a version that fully worked — offline support for data collection, automatic GPS integration, photos, the whole nine yards of the core toolset we always wanted. The new wave of platform with a REST API, online form designer, and iOS app allowed us to up our game on Foresight data collection efforts in a way that we knew would have legs if we could productize it right.

We didn’t get much further along with the Geodexy platform as it was before we refocused our SaaS efforts around a new product concept that’d tie all of the technology stack we’d built around a single, albeit large, market: the property inspection business. That’s what led us to launch allinspections, which I’ll continue the story on later.

In an odd way, it’s pleasing to think back on the challenges (or things we considered challenges) at the time and think about how they contrast with today. We focused so much attention on things that, in the long run, aren’t terribly important to the lifeblood of a business idea (tech stack and implementation), and not enough on the things worth thinking about early on (market analysis, pricing, early customer development). Part of that I think stems from our indexing on internal project support first, but also from inexperience with go-to-market in SaaS. The learnings ended up being invaluable for future product efforts, and still help to inform decision making today.

🛣 Creating Low-Cost LiDAR

This is a great breakdown of the different elements of LiDAR technology, looking at three broad areas: beam direction, distance measurement, and frequencies. They compare the tech of 10 different companies in the space to see how each is approaching the problem.

📚 An Algorithm to Auto-Generate Textbooks

Taking off of the Wikibooks project, this team is aiming to generate books from Wikipedia content using ML techniques.

Given the advances in artificial intelligence in recent years, is there a way to automatically edit Wikipedia content so as to create a coherent whole that is useful as a textbook? Enter Shahar Admati and colleagues at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. These guys have developed a way to automatically generate Wikibooks using machine learning. They call their machine the Wikibook-bot. “The novelty of our technique is that it is aimed at generating an entire Wikibook, without human involvement,” they say.

🌍 Paleogeographic History of Plate Tectonics

This simple app lets you slide from the Jurassic to the Holocene. A vivid demonstration of how long 200 million years really is.

Every year since the pre-Stone Age area, visualized as a time lapse on a map.

This is amazing and puts into context what was developing where over time. I know when I read the history of one culture, like Ancient Greece, it’s hard to keep in the mind what was happening elsewhere in the world during the same time period. This video could be a good reference point to pull up to get a sense of what happened during, before, and after any period in human history.

It’s also hard to believe that in 3000 BC the global population estimate was only 30 million people, or roughly the population of modern Nepal.

I’m making my way through The Federalist, which has been on my reading list forever, and for which I had my interest rekindled last year reading Alexander Hamilton.

For those that don’t know, it’s a collection of essays written by the trio of Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to convince the populace of the need to ratify the then-draft US Constitution.

Up to Federalist No. 25, the focus is on a) the utility and importance of the “union of states” as a concept worth pursuing and cementing and b) the insufficiency of the Articles of Confederation to do the job of maximizing the combined strength of the states (for various reasons outlined in the essays).

One of the biggest takeaways so far, somewhat unexpected to me, is the depth of research done by the authors to make their case. They draw on a rich historical record and present research to identify pros and cons of what’s been tried in past institutions, what’s worked, and what hasn’t. On the history of the Swiss Confederacy:

The connection among the Swiss cantons scarcely amounts to a confederacy; though it is sometimes cited as an instance of the stability of such institutions. They have no common treasury; no common troops even in war; no common coin; no common judicatory; nor any other common mark of sovereignty. They are kept together by the peculiarity of their topographical position; by their individual weakness and insignificancy; by the fear of powerful neighbors, to one of which they were formerly subject; by the few sources of contention among a people of such simple and homogeneous manners; by their joint interest in their dependent possessions; by the mutual aid they stand in need of, for suppressing insurrections and rebellions, an aid expressly stipulated and often required and afforded; and by the necessity of some regular and permanent provision for accommodating disputes among the cantons.

Looking to historical evidence to validate or reject aspects of governing models helped guide us to the right approach for our new government; the record of trial and error is immensely helpful if you respect and understand the context. The varied governance structures of history allowed the Federalists to make a strong case for centralization (but just the right amount of it). The Founders also sought to maximize freedom of individuals and the states they thought crucial to a stable system.

In Federalist No. 20, Madison even references this fact directly:

I make no apology for having dwelt so long on the contemplation of these federal precedents. Experience is the oracle of truth; and where its responses are unequivocal, they ought to be conclusive and sacred.

“Experience is the oracle of truth.” Model new systems around what has previously worked, make adjustments, and ensure the system is an “anti-fragile” one that responds and gets stronger over time.

I recently finished reading Spycraft, Robert Wallace and Keith Melton’s chronicle of the CIA’s spy tech divisions, specifically OTS (Office of Technical Services), the division responsible for creating technical espionage gear. Things like eavesdropping devices, dead drop containers, secret writing, disguises, and document forgery.

The story of OTS is fascinating and full of all sorts of straight-out-of-the-movies espionage games and tactics. The book is chock full of anecdotes of crazy operations from the group’s inception with OSS during World War II, through the years of the Cold War. For evidence, look no further than the Agency’s project codenamed “Acoustic Kitty”, a harebrained scheme to implant a listening device into a stray cat for listening in on meetings of an Asian statesman who had a penchant for cats that wandered in and out of the meeting areas.

The book tells stories of operations in Moscow involving several famous Soviet spies, and the field tradecraft and technical tools that CIA case officers used to communicate with their agents. With its focus on technical devices of the Cold War era, much of the book describes audio taps and clandestine audio recording.

Toward the end of the book, there’s an extensive section reviewing the principles of tradecraft — things like the use of disguises, assessment of recruitment targets, covert communications, and concealment devices — in the context of technology and devices involved.

The book does occasionally stray into the weeds a little, getting somewhat dry in parts, but it’s well worth the read for those interested in history and espionage.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about sociocultural geography — about how people interact with their environments and with one another across space and time. This topic is more relevant than ever with today’s borderless conflicts, asymmetric warfare, and technology behind the scenes leveling the playing field for groups at all levels. On a journey across the internet reading and watching various things about human geography, I stumbled upon this fantastic piece by Adam Curtis on his BBC blog.

It tells the story and background of counterinsurgency doctrine from its inception in revolutionary communist China and Indochina to implementation in modern-day Iraq and Afghanistan. Fascinating stuff.

The post begins with some background on David Galula, the French military theorist popularly credited as the father of counterinsurgency warfare. During his time as a military attaché in China during the 1940s, he observed the tactics of Mao’s communist guerrillas, taking to heart the tactics used by the communists against the Kuomintang — in short, they turned the population to their side.

The meat of the article’s background on the history of counterinsurgency is seen in several documentary clips about the actions of the French government during Algeria’s War of Independence in the late 50s and early 60s. Galula and the French instituted an experimental “village reeducation” program in the Aures Mountains region (a refuge for opposition forces), with French soldiers living and working with the locals. Questioning and interrogation of the now-moderately-friendly villagers rapidly devolved into torture and cruelty.

If you could persuade the local people to come over to your side - then that would leave the insurgents who lived among the people drastically weakened. And that meant you could destroy them.

But to do that you had to identify the insurgents - and that meant getting information from your new “friends” the local villagers. But sometimes they didn’t want to give that kind of information, possibly because they were frightened, or they might even be an insurgent themselves, just pretending to be a villager.

And that led to the French soldiers finding ways to persuade the villagers to tell them who was an insurgent. It was called torture.

The first true American experiment with counterinsurgency tactics happened in the midst of Vietnam. Galula’s theories along with the work of a couple of economists (including Samuel Popkin’s The Rational Peasant) produced a hybrid approach to fighting in the jungles of Vietnam that fused Galula’s traditional battle for “hearts and minds” with “selective incentives” (i.e. money for information from villagers). After a number of village “pacification” experiments, the CIA’s Phoenix Program was put into place to not only identify friend from foe, but to target and kill the enemy. And just as in Algeria, the plan mutated into what some former participants describe as a “full blown torture and assassination campaign”.

The article wraps up with a clip of Petraeus in Baqubah, Iraq during the 2007 surge, reviewing the fruits of our revival of the counterinsurgency. The net long-term effects of the modern COIN approach remain to be seen, but let’s hope it doesn’t metastasize into the horrific programs of previous conflicts.

I think we still have a long way to go perfecting the right balance of support, direct involvement, and advisement — and in the messy, protracted, and stateless conflicts of today, we certainly won’t get anywhere with a standoff approach. Getting down in the trenches is a requirement.

For further reading, take a look an original research work from David Galula published by the RAND Corporation (originally published in 1963), analyzing the pacification campaign in Algeria. A couple other works I’ll be checking out along these same lines are David Kilcullen’s Counterinsurgency, and also the film The Battle of Algiers, which I’ve always wanted to see, and Curtis mentions in his article.

Gentle reader, thou must learne the Alphabet, to wit, the order of the Letters as they stand, perfectly without booke, and where every Letter standeth: as b neere the beginning, n about the middest, and t toward the end. Nowe if the word, which thou art desirous to finde, begin with a then looke in the beginning of this Table, but if with v looke towards the end. Againe, if thy word beginne with ca looke in the beginning of the letter c but if with cu then looke toward the end of that letter. And so of all the rest. &c.

— Robert Cawdrey, explaining how to use his Table Alphabeticall, one of the first English dictionaries.

Visualizing Washington, DC — circa 1800.

An impressive use of historic maps and data to rebuild the look of the Capital during its early years.