Archive of posts with tag 'Weekend Reading'

📚 The Next Chapter of Readwise: Our Own Reading App

Great to see this evolution of Readwise to enter the “read-later” app space. None of the options out there seem to be thriving anymore (Pocket, Instapaper, etc.), but some of us still rely on them as essential parts of our reading experience.

The Readwise team has been moving fast the last couple years with excellent additions to the product, and I can’t believe they were also working on this for most of 2021 along with the other regular updates. Impressive.

🪧 Book Review: The Revolt of the Public

Scott Alexander reviews Martin Gurri:

People could have lowered their expectations, but in the real world that wasn’t how things went. Instead of losing faith in the power of government to work miracles, people believed that government could and should be working miracles, but that the specific people in power at the time were too corrupt and stupid to press the “CAUSE MIRACLE” button which they definitely had and which definitely would have worked. And so the outrage, the protests - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!

Revolt of the Public was published in 2014, a time when most of his diagnosis of political discontent was prescient. But as SA points out, most of the subject matter is received wisdom in 2021.

I still highly recommend Gurri as a writer, and RotP for its analysis of root causes more than its predictions of things to come. More on Gurri here and here, and give a watch to his Revolt of the Public in 10 Minutes talk to get the precis on his work if you’re unfamiliar.

🏛 The Helicopter State

Jonah’s G-File is one of the rare read-every-issue newsletters, and this one is one of my recent favorites:

The government can’t love you, and when it works from the premise that it can, folly or tyranny follow. We need people in our lives, not programs. Because people give us the very real sense that we are part of something, that we’re needed and valued. Programs treat us like we’re metrics in some PowerPoint slide.

Helicopter parenting has a negative perception, as it should, but it’s still done all the time. Helicopter governing should be treated the same, but is also promoted and defended far too often.

🧱 Where Are the Robotic Bricklayers?

Brian Potter wonders why work as taxing and seemingly-mechanically simple as brick masonry is difficult to automate:

Masonry seemed like the perfect candidate for mechanization, but a hundred years of limited success suggests there’s some aspect to it that prevents a machine from easily doing it. This makes it an interesting case study, as it helps define exactly where mechanization becomes difficult - what makes laying a brick so different than, say, hammering a nail, such that the latter is almost completely mechanized and the former is almost completely manual?

Even with the number of problems we’ve solved with machines and AI, something as basic as handling mortar still requires the finesse of human hands, a task which, while actually very hard to learn (it’s why masons are still skilled artisans millennia after its invention), can be taught and repeated on autopilot by masons. It turns out non-Newtonian materials are hard for machines:

There seems to be a few factors at work. One is the fact that a brick or block isn’t simply set down on a solid surface, but is set on top of a thin layer of mortar, which is a mixture of water, sand, and cementitious material. Mortar has sort of complex physical properties - it’s a non-newtonian fluid, and it’s viscosity increases when it’s moved or shaken. This makes it difficult to apply in a purely mechanical, deterministic way (and also probably makes it difficult for masons to explain what they’re doing - watching them place it you can see lots of complex little motions, and the mortar behaving in sort of strange not-quite-liquid but not-quite-solid ways). And since mortar is a jobsite-mixed material, there will be variation in it’s properties from batch to batch.

💶 On Medici and Thiel

Rohit Krishnan makes the case for more Genius Grant-style programs.

📊 Airtable: The $7.7B Roblox of the Enterprise

Will Airtable become the “Metaverse for the Enterprise”? In this detailed analysis, Jan-Erik Asplund dives into the bear and bull cases for what could become of the unicorn spreadsheet successor.

The world Airtable is imagining is a world where knowledge workers no longer have to assess different vendors’ offerings when they want to build a new functionality or experiment with some new type of workflow. Instead, Airtable argues, workers should be able to spin up their own tools using building blocks as simple, but capable of as much complexity, as a set of legos.

📈 How Are DeFi Yields So High?

This is a great primer on yield farming in DeFi from Nat Eliason. Seeing the insane 1000% APYs on some DeFi products, you have to wonder if it’s a Ponzi scheme (hint: sometimes it probably is). But there are plenty of legitimate and relatively reliable projects growing right now that look fascinating for the movement.

☁️ Cloudflare’s Intelligent Design

Cloudflare has such an interesting approach to building the “pipes and wires” of the internet, a business most people wouldn’t think of as glamorous (even though it’s technically extremely complex). The only other companies out there building and shipping products as quickly are Stripe and Amazon, one that Byrne Hobart calls out the reference to:

Their “workers” product lets customers write code and then deploy it to the edge around the world; they can be location-agnostic, both in the technical sense that packets won’t take a needlessly roundabout path to users and in the legal sense that if they run something in a country that requires data to be stored locally, it will be stored locally. They originally built this as an internal tool for deploying their own code, then started letting customers use it. And then they turned that decision into an abstraction: “And so we implemented what we internally and somewhat cheekily called the Bezos Rule. And what the Bezos Rule is, is the exact same rule that Amazon put in place when they were developing AWS, which is, any API or any development tool that we build for ourselves and for our own team, we also are then going to make available to our customers.” Cloudflare built an uptime factory, then workers became an uptime factory factory, and with the Bezos rule they’ve codified the production of such things: an uptime factory factory factory. They are no doubt adding new layers of recursion even now.

🚢 Ever Given, Supply Chains, and the Physical World

A great overview of the state of logistics from Flexport founder Ryan Peterson.

With demand for goods rising around the world, our shipping infrastructure is hitting scaling limits and bottlenecks that will be hard problems in the coming years. Petersen considers inconsistent standards and fragmentation to be major challenges to surmount:

Our computers, laptops, tablets, phones, and more can all connect quickly to the information we seek thanks to standardization. And while today’s global trade network is kind of like an internet of physical goods, it’s missing a standard like HTTP. The same way data passes between devices via the internet, goods pass between ocean ports, airports, warehouses, and other entities to reach their final destination. Without a logistics standard to act as a request-response protocol, all the players — suppliers, drayage, ports, warehouses, buyers — have to stitch their networks together manually.

Information gets lost; layers of redundancy, designed as backups given low visibility, slow the exchange: connections end up being very brittle. Let’s say there’s a shipment scheduled to arrive in Long Beach on Tuesday. But which terminal exactly and what pier number? What time is pickup? How long before late charges are incurred? Finding these answers is labor-intensive and imprecise. Logistics managers end up consulting different sources on websites, via email, or in person.

The dirty secret of the industry is that no one really knows where their stuff is. But if global trade were like the network of information as it is on the internet, we could simply type or speak into a search bar to ask and answer these questions, precisely.

This is not about the desired features of such a system, but rather about the need for standardization, the need for a universal language for global trade. Once this exists, the physical world, like software, becomes searchable, programmable, accessible — connecting a patchwork of country-specific regulations and more.

Interface points between ships, terminals, carriers, and suppliers should follow standars, like APIs for the physical world. But standards are one of the hardest coordination problems to solve. The most powerful and versatile standards are adopted organically. How can you get thousands of freight forwarders speaking the same language?

🏦 Understanding Financial Institutions

Arnold Kling has an interesting point this week in reference to decentralized finance. He argues that for DeFi to work, we need folks that understand the moving parts on two complex fronts: crypto and the financial system. Many folks on each side don’t deeply understand the other:

Marvin Ammori understands more than I ever will about decentralized finance (DeFi). Indeed, there are thousands of young techies who understand DeFi better than I do.

But I bet that in order for DeFi to work, you need an understanding of financial institutions in addition to an understanding of blockchain and the layers that have been added to it. I don’t think that young techies understand financial institutions as well as I do. And I think I have a better chance of explaining my knowledge of financial institutions to young techies than they have of explaining DeFi technology to me.

He includes a great reading list at the end, as well.

The web3 side of DeFi needs crypto/finance-bilingual product people that can bring some much-needed usability on-ramps into the system. What DeFi offers in theoretical accessibility to an open financial system is opposed by its practical inaccessibility. The process of getting familiar with wallets, Ethereum addresses, and passphrases is pretty impenetrable, even to the tech-savvy. This is an area where decentralization makes this a hard problem to improve. The best user experiences are on the centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Binance, but those don’t give you the access to the open market liquidity providers or DEXes like Curve or Uniswap.

🌍 Worldbuilding and Antifragility

Alex Danco builds on his excellent post on world-building, this time layering in why antifragility is important when rallying a community:

Here’s the thing, though: your world doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s subject to the volatility and unpredictability of the outside world. If you’re trying to create or accomplish anything complex and valuable, you know this lesson all too well: once you set off on a mission to get something done, there is no way you can predict what kind of plot twists or stressors you’ll encounter along the way. Your world is going to face shocks and surprises you can’t foresee.

🏋🏽 Harder Than It Looks, Not as Fun as It Seems

When you find yourself looking at what others are doing too enviously, it’s good to remember that things aren’t what they seem from the outside. Great piece from Morgan Housel last week:

But it’s always hard to know where anyone sits on that spectrum when they’ve carefully crafted an image of who they are. “The grass is always greener on the side that’s fertilized with bullshit,” the saying goes.

🗯 Well-Behaved Bubbles Often Make History

Byrne Hobart wrote this piece in the inaugural edition of a16z’s new publication, Future. On bubbles and their downstream effects:

Bubbles can be directly beneficial, or at least lead to positive spillover effects: The telecom bubble in the ’90s created cheap fiber, and when the world was ready for YouTube, that fiber made it more viable. Even the housing bubble had some upside: It created more housing inventory, and since the new houses were quite standardized, that made it great training data for “iBuying” algorithms — the rare case where the bubble is low-tech but the consequences are higher-tech. But, even so, there’s always the question of price: how can you tell when it’s worth the hype?

💡 A Project of One’s Own

There’s something special that happens when you allow your kids to treat hobbies like serious endeavors instead of playtime or games. Paul Graham’s latest:

Instead of telling kids that their treehouses could be on the path to the work they do as adults, we tell them the path goes through school. And unfortunately schoolwork tends be very different from working on projects of one’s own. It’s usually neither a project, nor one’s own. So as school gets more serious, working on projects of one’s own is something that survives, if at all, as a thin thread off to the side.

It’s a bit sad to think of all the high school kids turning their backs on building treehouses and sitting in class dutifully learning about Darwin or Newton to pass some exam, when the work that made Darwin and Newton famous was actually closer in spirit to building treehouses than studying for exams.

My interests in history and tech trace straight back to my time in high school building computers to play Civilization II. Personal projects have long term benefit if nurtured.

✅ The Most Important Scarce Resource Is Legitimacy

On the heels of finishing Schelling’s collection of essays on game theory, I read this piece from Vitalik Buterin on legitimacy, a force that underpins any successful coordination game, of which the world of cryptocurrencies and DAOs are prime examples.

In almost any environment with coordination games that exists for long enough, there inevitably emerge some mechanisms that can choose which decision to take. These mechanisms are powered by an established culture that everyone pays attention to these mechanisms and (usually) does what they say. Each person reasons that because everyone else follows these mechanisms, if they do something different they will only create conflict and suffer, or at least be left in a lonely forked ecosystem all by themselves. If a mechanism successfully has the ability to make these choices, then that mechanism has legitimacy.

👨‍🎓 The American-Dream-as-a-Service

Antonio Garcia-Martinez interviews Austen Allred, founder of Lambda School. Lambda charges no tuition and builds its program on the ISA (income sharing agreement), in which you only pay when you get a salaried position in your field of study.

The cool thing about the incentive alignment is that we’re not going to train you to be a sociologist, because it just doesn’t work. A common critique of the ISA model is: oh, now people aren’t going to study poetry anymore. And my response to that is: yeah, we’re not a university, we’re a trade school. The university has 18 million things that it does for you, and we cut cut off a tiny sliver of that, which is: we’re going to help you get a better job, we’re going to help you improve your state in life. That’s all we do.

There are actually more high-paying jobs available than there are people to fill those roles. And that’s true all over the place. I think about it as an optimization problem. You’ve got all this latent human potential, and it’s just kind of bouncing around. Sometimes it goes to school, and it picks stuff at random to study, and you know what you know because of who you’re surrounded by.

📝 Content-Driven Growth

Lenny Rachitsky gets into different types of content marketing by startup, plotted on two dimensions: user-generated to editorial, and vitality-driven to SEO-driven. Useful structure here for thinking about where you want to be and what types of content and tactics fit.

🌍 Earth at a Cute Angle

Some great examples of oblique satellite imagery. Love the shots of the Tour’s mountain passes — Col du Galibier and Tourmalet.

📖 Fifth Column Podcast Reading List

Someone in the Fifth Column podcast community put together an archive of all the books mentioned on the show over the years. This’ll greatly extend the reading list, nice mix of classics and modern stuff.

💻 Microsoft Power Fx

Microsoft has open-sourced its simplistic formula language based on Excel.

🧠 In Defense of Being Offensive

Jonathan Rauch on pluralism and the necessity of disagreement in the search for truth.

His book Kindly Inquisitors was first published in 1993, but is as relevant today as ever. The book is a defense of what he calls “liberal science”, our decentralized process for knowledge discovery that relies on relentless-but-gradual error correction:

Liberal science, by its very nature, has little tolerance for fundamentalism; conversely fundamentalism is a threat to liberal science. Fundamentalism, defined by Rauch as the “search for certainty rather than for errors,” is the antithesis of scientific inquiry. Fundamentalism seeks a monopoly on knowledge from which it can deny the beliefs put forth by all others. Rauch even notes that there are fundamentalist free-marketeers—those who refuse to accept the possibility that cherished economic axioms may be flawed, or at least in need of revision—and he challenges them to enhance their intellectual rigor. If classical liberals are willing to accept the self-correcting actions of the marketplace to properly allocate valued resources, they should also allow the self-correcting mechanisms of liberal science to separate knowledge from supposition.

Due to its nature as a decentralized system, liberal science frees knowledge from authoritarian control by self-appointed commissars of truth. “In an imperfect world, the best insurance we have against truth’s being politicized is to put no one in particular in charge of it,” notes Rauch. Liberal science achieves this end. It avoids despotism in the intellectual realm as it does in those of politics and economics.

⌨️ Become a Keyboard Pro with Roam42

A great guide here from Ramses at RoamStack

I set up RoamHacker’s Roam42 suite for SmartBlocks a few weeks back, and it’s game-changing. I’m still a novice with it and have only used a few of its tools, but this sort of extensibility and programmability is what’s making Roam the most interesting text platform.

👨‍💻 How to Write Jobs to Be Done Example Statements

This is a solid, brief guide on how to frame Jobs to Be Done statements.

“Help me brush my teeth in the morning” is not a great example of a Job to Be Done statement.

“Help me brush my teeth in the morning” is joined at the hip to an existing solution (a toothbrush) and there’s only so far you’ll be able to expand your thinking within that bubble.

A way to describe the Job to Be Done when a person is brushing their teeth that could lead to more innovative product design is:

“Keep my teeth healthy.”

📑 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.

👨‍💻 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.

🏀 What I Learned Inside the NBA Bubble

A good piece giving an inside look of what life is like for a journalist inside the bubble.

I’ve missed most of the playoffs this year during this strange time for sports. It’s been impressive that the NBA could pull this off and still put together a compelling end to the season when everyone assumed that it’d be an asterisk-ridden result with players and teams lost to COVID. It’s turned out to be incredibly well executed. The finals have nearly the same energy that I remember from recent seasons. As of writing, the Heat have pulled back to 2 games to 3 against the Lakers.

🌾 Homesteading the Twittersphere

Alex Danco on scarcity and gift culture:

Status is clearly scarce, and in a gift culture like the free software community – or on Finance Twitter – the way you earn status is by putting in real effort, and then giving away the fruits of that effort.

Of course, the effort you put in has to actually be valuable, and recognized as such by your peer group. So the optimal thing for you to do, whether you’re an open source software developer or a Twitter armchair analyst, is to figure out your specialty zone that’s simultaneously useful, but unique – and then homestead it. Establish and cultivate it, like a garden or a plot of land, that you’re tending for the communal benefit of everyone. People come to associate that little plot of land with you specifically, and think of you whenever they go near it.

🏆 The Difference Between Amateurs and Professionals

A solid list from Farnam Street:

• Amateurs think they are good at everything. Professionals understand their circles of competence.
• Amateurs see feedback and coaching as someone criticizing them as a person. Professionals know they have weak spots and seek out thoughtful criticism.
• Amateurs focus on being right. Professionals focus on getting the best outcome.
• Amateurs make decisions in committees so there is no one person responsible if things go wrong. Professionals make decisions as individuals and accept responsibility.

💼 Collaborative Enterprise

Elad Gil describes the trend of continuing consumerization of enterprise software.

🤖 Seeing Like an Algorithm

Part 2 in Eugene Wei’s series on TikTok. See part 1.

🏫 Fifth Generation Management

Venkatesh Rao’s Breaking Smart podcast is always a must-listen.

📕 Stripe’s Guide to SaaS

Stripe Atlas has a great batch of guides on various parts of company-building.

📜 A Few Rules

Some great random clippings from Morgan Housel. I’m currently reading his latest, The Psychology of Money, which is great so far.

📈 The 10x Advantage of Starting a Company Now

In many markets during COVID, startups have a host of advantages over their incumbent competitors:

Consequently, growth and innovation efforts are quickly deprioritized or even fully abandoned. Incumbents place their primary focus on stopping the decline of existing revenue streams rather than creating new ones. This mindset slows them down even more during crises and tethers them to mature and declining business models.

That’s why right now, startups have even more room to maneuver in and around (and even beyond) their bigger competitors than in “good” times. Startups can try more things without attracting a response or even being noticed. It also gives Founders time to iterate and test more, granting more runway for one of the holy grails of startups: product-market fit.

👨‍💻 We Need More Software Builders, Not Just Users

On the announcement of Airtable’s latest round and $2.5b valuation (!), founder Howie Liu puts out a great piece on the latest round of changes in pursuit of their vision.

No matter how much technology has shaped our lives, the skills it takes to build software are still only available to a tiny fraction of people. When most of us face a problem that software can answer, we have to work around someone else’s idea of what the solution is. Imagine if more people had the tools to be software builders, not just software users.

📭 Scarcity as an API

Artificial scarcity has been an effective tactic for certain categories of physical products for years. In the world of atoms, at least scarcity can be somewhat believable if demand outstrips supply — perhaps a supply chain was underfilled to meet the demands of lines around the block. Only recently are we seeing digital goods distributed in similar ways, where the scarcity is truly 100% forced, where the scarcity is a line of code that makes it so. Apps like Superhuman or Clubhouse generate a large part of their prestige status from this approach.

Dopamine Labs, later called Boundless, provided a behavioral change API. The promise was that almost any app could benefit from gamification and the introduction of variable reward schedules. The goal of the company was to make apps more addictive and hook users. Like Dopamine Labs, a Scarcity API would likely be net-evil. But it could be a big business. What if a new software company could programmatically “drop” new features only to users with sufficient engagement, or online at the time of an event? What if unique styles could be purchased only in a specific window of time?

🥇 The Glory of Achievement

Antonio Garcia-Martinez’s review of Nadia Eghbal’s book on open source, Working in Public.

It’s really about how a virtualized, digital world decoupled from the physical constraints of manufacturing and meatspace politics manages to both pay for and govern itself despite no official legal frameworks nor institutional enforcement mechanisms. Every class of open source project in Eghbal’s typology can be extended to just about every digital community you interact with, across the Internet.

🛣 Options, Not Roadmaps

An option is something you can do but don’t have to do. All our product ideas are exactly that: options we may exercise in some future cycle—or never.

Without a roadmap, without a stated plan, we can completely change course without paying a penalty. We don’t set any expectations internally or externally that these things are actually going to happen.

I know Basecamp is always the industry outlier with these things, but the thoughts on roadmaps are probably more true for many companies in reality than we’d all like to admit. We tend to look at things in a sort of hybrid way — not a fully baked roadmap with timelines, but a general list of roughly-sorted candidates that gain more and more momentum as we shape them out and prioritize. Every product team has a list of ideas 10x+ longer than anything they can build, so optionality is required to make the right decisions.

🚁 Anduril Ghost 4

Defense tech startup Anduril’s latest hardware, the Ghost UAV system. A pretty impressive and unique modular design for an unmanned platform.

🗂 Guide to Roam’s Spaced Repetition

Roam launched an interesting new feature (Δ) for setting up spaced repetition flows in your graph.

📝 A Meta-Layer for Notes

Julian Lehr raises an interesting idea on taking notes: the importance of spatial context.

💬 PR Interviews Paul Graham

Antonio Garcia-Martinez’s newsletter kicks off with an interview with Paul Graham.

🏛 The Trump Era Sucks and Needs to Be Over

Matt Taibbi is always good for cutting to the chase.

Donald Trump is so unlike most people, and so especially unlike anyone raised under a conventional moral framework, that he’s perpetually misdiagnosed. The words we see slapped on him most often, like “fascist” and “authoritarian,” nowhere near describe what he really is, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. It’s been proven across four years that Trump lacks the attention span or ambition required to implement a true dictatorial regime. He might not have a moral problem with the idea, but two minutes into the plan he’d leave the room, phone in hand, to throw on a robe and watch himself on Fox and Friends over a cheeseburger.

💼 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.

🔗 A Clean Start for the Web

Tom MacWright with some ideas for cleaning up ever-creeping morass of web technology:

I think this combination would bring speed back, in a huge way. You could get a page on the screen in a fraction of the time of the web. The memory consumption could be tiny. It would be incredibly accessible, by default. You could make great-looking default stylesheets and share alternative user stylesheets. With dramatically limited scope, you could port it to all kinds of devices.

And, maybe most importantly, what would website editing tools look like? They could be way simpler.

🎓 Michael Munger on the Future of Higher Education

Great discussion on this episode of EconTalk with Michael Munger about the possibilities post-COVID of “unbundling” the university a decentralized set of separate services that could combine to give serve the same needs that traditional universities do.

🚗 Ford 021C Concept Car

I saw this through a tweet somewhere, but what a great work of design. Very George Jetson.

🧰 There Are More Uses For A Screwdriver Than You Can Calculate

Biologist Stuart Kauffman on biological functions and the “adjacent possible”:

The unexpected uses of features of organisms, or technologies, are precisely what happens in the evolution of the biosphere and econosphere, and the analog happens in cultural evolution with the uses of mores, cultural forms, regulations, traditions, in novel ways. In general, these possibles are novel functionalities, in an unbounded space of functionalities, and so are not mathematizable and derivable from a finite set of axioms.

🏃🏻‍♂️ Fire and Motion

A Joel Spolsky classic from 2002. Take advantage of the time you have when you’re independent, small, and lean. Don’t get hung up on grand strategic chess-piece moving, sitting still while you plan your Big Moves. A reminder to just keep pushing forward every day:

Fire and Motion, for small companies like mine, means two things. You have to have time on your side, and you have to move forward every day. Sooner or later you will win. All I managed to do yesterday is improve the color scheme in FogBugz just a little bit. That’s OK. It’s getting better all the time. Every day our software is better and better and we have more and more customers and that’s all that matters. Until we’re a company the size of Oracle, we don’t have to think about grand strategies. We just have to come in every morning and somehow, launch the editor.

💵 Raise Less Money

There was a Twitter discussion going on this week around this piece, wherein Aaron Harris makes the case for seed stage companies to raise just enough money to find product-market fit, and not be tempted to greatly extend runway for experimentation:

I realized that the conversation about raising always anchors back to the idea of adding “months of runway.” That always seemed appropriate to me because it was a measure of the amount of time a company had to stay alive. Staying alive seemed good since it increased the time a company had to find product market fit and to grow.

But I now realize that this is the wrong framing because simply staying alive is an inadequate goal for a company.  Founders start companies to find product market fit and grow. Venture capital is designed to speed growth, not to extend runway.

🌏 The Commercial Satellite Imagery Business Model is Broken

My friend Joe Morrison’s latest is an extended rant on the commercial satellite imagery market, and a plea to that industry to rethink how they might improve their go-to-market approaches for selling to commercial businesses.

I can vouch for his account of what it’s like to work with a commercial provider first-hand. Their business models make it challenging to go direct-to-customer, even at fairly high price tags. Until they can lower the barrier to entry into the two- or three-figure territory for acquiring any imagery, I don’t see the market widening very much farther beyond the use cases commonly addressed today. It’s not just pricing, though; they need self-service, automated delivery mechanisms to get the scale economics working.

It’s still too niche of a business, to me, to be truly realized at SMB/mass market level. Perhaps the continued convergence of gaming tech, mapping, and imagery data will create new use cases and customers to ramp demand high enough to motivate some of what Joe is asking for.

📑 Proof of X

Julian Lehr’s latest essay addresses proof mechanisms in internet services. How proof points relate to signaling. When new social networks emerge they have to introduce new proof mechanisms to differentiate themselves from existing incumbents. These can either be novel proof-of-creative-work hurdles or completely new proof-of-x mechanisms.

Also check out his previous related article on Signaling as a Service.

🎥 Cinematic Universes Aren’t New; They’re the Oldest Stories on Earth

The entertainment industry’s fascination with fantasy, science fiction, and superhero properties is giving people what they’ve wanted for thousands of years: epic, interconnected stories like those of Greek, Norse, and eastern mythologies:

At the core of our current fascination with the MCU or the Star Wars Galaxy is a fascinating fact: they resemble the epic stories that dominated human culture for thousands of years. They tell stories that feature countless characters, each one serving a role as part of an vast story, authored by scores of unknown writers and slowly shaped by audiences, each of whom could explain - if not detail - the particulars of these universes.

I’m currently making my way through Stephen Fry’s Mythos, his retelling of Greek mythology. The parallels between ancient myth and modern fictional universes like Marvel and Star Wars are striking, especially when you get to read them in a contemporary style from an author like Fry.

🕰 Timeful Texts

A new piece from Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen (beautifully illustrated by Maggie Appleton). Can we make reading a more engaging and interactive learning experience? This builds on previous ideas from the authors on spaced repetition.

🤼‍♂️ Software, Full-Stack, and Sumo Startups

Interesting take from one of Byrne Hobart’s recent newsletters. Contrasting a typical “full-stack” model of company-building and VC funding to a “sumo” model:

The amount of VC funding has been rising steadily, and returns are skewed by a few positive outliers, so any fund that doesn’t have a specific size mandate is actively looking for companies that can absorb a lot of capital as they grow. The best way to get more capital is to move from a capital-efficient business to a capital-inefficient one, so there’s a strong incentive to pivot in this direction.

The incentive is sometimes too strong. Some companies go beyond the “full-stack” model to what I think of as the “sumo” model: raising an intimidating amount of money just to scare off everyone else. The sumo model does prevent one failure mode for startups: the situation where every time Company A raises a round, it validates the model and lets Company B raise more, which forces Company A to burn through their marketing budget faster and raise an even bigger round, and so on until the entire space is over-capitalized and everyone’s assumptions about long-term unit economics are implausibly optimistic. It’s an easier strategy to try when capital is abundant, but it’s a harder strategy to pull off; the bar for “an absurd amount to invest in a company that just does X” keeps going up.

🔗 The Canva Backlink Empire

In the arena of geeky digital marketing, this is a great deconstruction of organic optimization tactics in play at Canva, one of the best out there at enabling discovery through search and backlink traffic. I love how thoughtful and intentional their page architecture is; it enables so much adaptive targeting to sweep up long-tail keyword spaces.

📨 Disintermediating the media with… Substack?

Jerry Brito writes about the growth of independent writing on Substack, prompted by a Mike Solana tweet:

From a technical perspective, Substack does not belong on Solana’s list next to Bitcoin and Signal. Signal is a company, but they have almost no information about their users—no names, no messages. Bitcoin is not a company, but instead a permissionless decentralized network, and “it” can’t decide who can use it or for what. Substack, on the other hand, is a centralized service that permissions who’s allowed on and what they can do, and it is subject to official and market pressures.

Comparisons to YouTube or Twitter are closer than to BTC or Signal, for sure. But even with Substack being a centralized platform, the risks are lower in the text or email medium; there’s high portability to move to other platforms at will. If you can move your content and your subscriber list, you can bring your audience. The primary advantages Substack has are that are hard to replicate (today) on your own hosted system are the publishing tools and monetization layer (though not impossible). Trying to disintermediate YouTube yourself would be hard, and transporting your Twitter network isn’t possible. SMTP, hypertext, and DNS are still open.

👨🏽‍💻 Choose Boring Technology

I love everything about this perspective:

The problem with “best tool for the job” thinking is that it takes a myopic view of the words “best” and “job.” Your job is keeping the company in business, god damn it. And the “best” tool is the one that occupies the “least worst” position for as many of your problems as possible.

It is basically always the case that the long-term costs of keeping a system working reliably vastly exceed any inconveniences you encounter while building it. Mature and productive developers understand this.

💡 Building DIY LED strips for fun

Matt Haughey went nuts on a custom lighting setup for his home office. I ran across this searching for some wirelessly controllable LEDs for my office bookshelf. Mine won’t be this crazy, but I wish I had the patience to do something like this.

🐇 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).

🛠 Attitudes, Aptitudes, and Progress

Joel Mokyr’s talk on the most recent session of The Torch of Progress series.

🧠 How to Be a Neo-Cartesian Cyborg

A recent talk from Maggie Appleton on the “building a second brain” concept.

👋🏼 Take a Tour of HEY

Great example of how to do a product demo. Informal style, clearly prepared but not “scripted,” and deep care and attention to the product.

🍯 Amazon Honeycode

AWS is making its entrance into the low-code app platform space.

🌲 Using satellite imagery to prioritize vegetation management for utilities

Geoff Zeiss on combining satellite imagery and spatial analysis to identify tree encroachment in utilities:

Transmission line inspections are essential in ensuring grid reliability and resilience. They are generally performed by manned helicopters often together with a ground crew. There are serious safety issues when inspections are conducted by helicopter. Data may be collected with cameras and analyzed to detect a variety of conditions including corrosion, evidence of flash over, cracks in cross arms, and right-of-way issues such as vegetation encroachment. in North America annual inspections are mandated by NERC and are not optional. With over 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of distribution lines in the United States, improving the efficiency and reducing the risk of inspections would have a major impact on the reliability of the power grid.

🔌 Connected Sheets

Google Sheets now supports using BigQuery data inside of Google Sheets features like pivot tables and formulas, which means orders-of-magnitude increase in data limits.

📽 How Children of Men Became a Dystopian Masterpiece

I didn’t realize until reading this piece that this movie was a commercial flop. $70m gross on a $76m budget. I remember seeing this several times in theaters, and many times after. This retrospective (from 2016) brought the film back to mind and makes me want to rewatch.

🌍 15 Years of Google Earth and the Lessons That Went Unlearned

Brian Timoney:

Google Earth led us to vastly overestimate the average user’s willingness to figure out our map interfaces. The user experience was so novel and absorbing that people invested time into learning the interface: semi-complex navigation, toggling layers on and off, managing their own content, etc. Unfortunately, our stuff isn’t so novel and absorbing and we’ve learned the hard way that even those forced to use our interfaces for work seem very uninterested in even the most basic interactions.

It’s great to see Brian blogging again!

📄 Doxxing Scott Alexander is Profoundly Illiberal

What’s happening between the New York Times and psychiatrist-rationalist-blogger Scott Alexander is incredibly disappointing to see. In writing a story including him, they want to use his real name (which they found out somehow, S.A. is a pseudonym), which seems completely unnecessary and absurd to the point of disbelief — given the Times’ behavior and policies of late, there should be little benefit of the doubt given here. As a result of this, Scott has deleted his blog, one of the treasures of the internet.

💬 The Hour of the State or Explosion From Below?

Martin Gurri is one of the best minds we have for the current moment. Make sure to subscribe to his essays on the Mercatus Center’s “The Bridge.”

The American people appear to be caught in the grip of a psychotic episode. Most of us are still sheltering in place, obsessed with the risk of viral infection, primly waiting for someone to give us permission to shake hands with our friends again. Meanwhile, online and on television, we watch, as in a dream, crowds of our fellow citizens thronging into the streets of our cities, raging at the police and the established order generally, with some engaged in arson, looting, and violence.

On one side, a reflexive obedience to authority. On the other, a near-absolute repudiation of the rules of the system—for some, of any restraint whatever. The future will be determined by the uncertain relationship between these two extremes.

🤖 DataRobot Location AI

My friend and former colleague Kevin Stofan wrote the launch post for DataRobot’s latest product additions for spatial AI. Pretty amazing additions to their platform.

🗺 Mapillary Joins Facebook

Good to see the Mapillary team add their computer vision tech and work with OpenStreetMap to Facebook. Big congrats to the team!

🎖️ Commandos, Infantry, and Police

Jeff Atwood on Robert X. Cringely’s descriptions of three groups of people you need to “attack a market”:

Whether invading countries or markets, the first wave of troops to see battle are the commandos. Woz and Jobs were the commandos of the Apple II. Don Estridge and his twelve disciples were the commandos of the IBM PC. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston were the commandos of VisiCalc.

Grouping offshore as the commandos do their work is the second wave of soldiers, the infantry. These are the people who hit the beach en masse and slog out the early victory, building on the start given them by the commandos. The second-wave troops take the prototype, test it, refine it, make it manufacturable, write the manuals, market it, and ideally produce a profit.

What happens then is that the commandos and the infantry head off in the direction of Berlin or Baghdad, advancing into new territories, performing their same jobs again and again, though each time in a slightly different way. But there is still a need for a military presence in the territory they leave behind, which they have liberated. These third-wave troops hate change. They aren’t troops at all but police.

😴 Why Sleep Deprivation Kills

Behind all this is the astonishing, baffling breadth of what sleep does for the body. The fact that learning, metabolism, memory, and myriad other functions and systems are affected makes an alteration as basic as the presence of ROS quite interesting. But even if ROS is behind the lethality of sleep loss, there is no evidence yet that sleep’s cognitive effects, for instance, come from the same source. And even if antioxidants prevent premature death in flies, they may not affect sleep’s other functions, or if they do, it may be for different reasons.

📥 The Observer Effect: Marc Andreessen

A new interview series from Sriram Krishnan:

The Observer Effect studies interesting people and institutions and tries to understand how they work.

He kicks it off big with an interview with Marc Andreessen.

🐉 Hic Sunt Dracones

Adam Elkus with a great essay on the current moment:

“Is this as bad as 1968?” is an utterly meaningless question precisely for this underlying reason. People do not invoke 1968 because of the objective similarities between 2020 and 1968. They do so because we have crossed a threshold at which basic foundations of social organization we take for granted now seem up for grabs. This is an inherently subjective determination, based on the circumstances of our present much as people in 1968 similarly judged the state of their worlds to be in flux. 1968 is an arbitrary signpost on an unfamiliar road we are driving down at breakneck speeds. You can blast “Gimme Shelter” on the car stereo for the aesthetic, but it’s not worth much more than that.

📆 Contemplating Calendars

Devon Zuegel with ideas on how to better utilize your calendar for things beyond appointments and meetings. A few ideas I’d like to commit to doing, especially with using the calendar as a recall tool for memory.

🔬 Science 2.0

Robin Hanson on experts, prestige, skepticism:

Just as our distant ancestors were too gullible (factually, if not strategically) about their sources of knowledge on the physical world around them, we today are too gullible on how much we can trust the many experts on which we rely. Oh we are quite capable of skepticism about our rivals, such as rival governments and their laws and officials. Or rival professions and their experts. Or rival suppliers within our profession. But without such rivalry, we revert to gullibility, at least regarding “our” prestigious experts who follow proper procedures.

⚖️ The Way Out of Post-truth

Another razor sharp analysis from Gurri:

The collapse of trust in our leading institutions has exiled the 21st century to the Siberia of post-truth. I want to be clear about what this means. Reality has not changed. It’s still unyielding. Facts today are partial and contradictory—but that’s always been the case. Post-truth, as I define it, signifies a moment of sharply divergent perspectives on every subject or event, without a trusted authority in the room to settle the matter. A telling symptom is that we no longer care to persuade. We aim to impose our facts and annihilate theirs, a process closer to intellectual holy war than to critical thinking.

🧠 A Simplified “Pretence of Knowledge”

A good summary of Hayek’s famous 1974 address, “A Pretence of Knowledge.” Thinking you can “figure everything out” with expertise is dangerous.

If we truly wish to improve society, we must be humble and realize the bounds of what is possible with social science. Rather than attempting to shape society directly like a sculptor shapes a statue, we must seek instead to understand and to create the right environment for progress, like a gardener in a garden. Overconfidence in the use of science to control society will make a man a tyrant, and will lead to the destruction of a civilization which no brain has designed, but which has instead grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.

🕹 GTA V Graphics Study

An interesting dive into the crazy amount of technique that goes into modern video game graphics.

🏛️ A Tale of Two Elites

Martin Gurri on the growing similarities between west and east coast elites:

The effect, I suspect, will be the exact opposite of the reactionary dream. In wild and seedy digital gathering-places, far from any pretense of idealism, political discussion will inevitably grow more unfettered, more divisive, more violent. The attempt to impose Victorian standards of propriety on the information sphere will end by converting it into a vicious and unending saloon brawl. No matter how revolting the web appears at present – it can always get worse.

💾 VR-DOS

This is hilarious. Move through your virtual bedroom and sit down at your desk. Your DOS PC is waiting.

Reminds me of the “Virtual Reading” sketch from SNL many years ago¹.

✍🏼 Brainstorming with Myself: Systemic Creativity in Roam

Robert Haisfield walks through some methods he uses in Roam to make sense of the decentralized, scattered information web to get creative work done. I use some similar methods to collect the distributed notes that have collected about a single topic, but queries would allow taking it to the next level.

⚖️ 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.

🏭️ Why America Can Make Semiconductors But Not Swabs

Dan Wang on American industrial production:

Learning to build again will take more than a resurgence of will, as Andreessen would have it. And the U.S. should think of bolder proposals than sensible but long-proposed tweaks to R&D policies, re-training programs and STEM education.

What the U.S. really needs to do is reconstitute its communities of engineering practice. That will require treating manufacturing work, even in low-margin goods, as fundamentally valuable. Technological sophisticates in Silicon Valley would be wise to drop their dismissive attitude towards manufacturing as a “commoditized” activity and treat it as being as valuable as R&D work. And corporate America should start viewing workers not purely as costs to be slashed, but as practitioners keeping alive knowledge essential to the production process.

🚲️ Why We Focus on Trivial Things: The Bikeshed Effect

“Bikeshedding” is a common term in tech circles. When starting on a big new software project, start by asking a design team for opinions on which programming language to use and you’ll get to see it in action. It applies all over; humans love an opportunity to look like they’re contributing meaningfully, especially when they perceive that they should know something about the subject:

Bike-shedding happens because the simpler a topic is, the more people will have an opinion on it and thus more to say about it. When something is outside of our circle of competence, like a nuclear power plant, we don’t even try to articulate an opinion.

But when something is just about comprehensible to us, even if we don’t have anything of genuine value to add, we feel compelled to say something, lest we look stupid. What idiot doesn’t have anything to say about a bike shed? Everyone wants to show that they know about the topic at hand and have something to contribute.

⌘ Glyphfinder

Hat-tip to Julian Lehr’s recent post for the referral to this one. It’s a simple menubar app that gives you a search interface to unicode symbol sets. The speed here is phenomenal; so much faster than the built-in emoji keyboard (plus it has a much larger library).

🎥 Beastie Boys Story

We watched this a couple nights ago. It’s hard to tell how objectively good it was, but I loved the heck out of it as a decades-long fan.

🔗 Linkrot

I’ll have to try out this tool that Tom built for checking links. When I’ve run those SEM tools that check old links, I get sad seeing how many are redirected, 404’d, or dead.

📹 Screencasting Technical Guide

This is an excellent walkthrough on how to make screencasts. I’ve done my own tinkering around with ScreenFlow to make a few things for Fulcrum. It’s something I want to do more of eventually. A good resource for gear + tools, preparation, and editing.

⚗️ COVID and Forced Experiments

Benedict Evans looks at what could return to normal after coronavirus, and what else might have accelerated change that was already happening.

“Every time we get a new kind of tool, we start by making the new thing fit the existing ways that we work, but then, over time, we change the work to fit the new tool. You’re used to making your metrics dashboard in PowerPoint, and then the cloud comes along and you can make it in Google Docs and everyone always has the latest version. But one day, you realise that the dashboard could be generated automatically and be a live webpage, and no-one needs to make those slides at all. Today, sometimes doing the meeting as a video call is a poor substitute for human interaction, but sometimes it’s like putting the slides in the cloud.”

📈 COVID-19: What’s wrong with the models?

One of the things continually aggravating about all of the data, models, projections, and analyses about COVID-19 is how little anyone cares to retroactively analyze prior predictions. Over the last two months the predictions have been all over the map, and as time marches on and many are wrong, some are right, there’s no analysis of what assumptions were made that turned out not to be true causing the wide divergence between projection and reality.

Peter Attia calls out here something rarely acknowledged about why projections are wicked:

“Projections only matter if you can hold conditions constant from the moment of your prediction, and even then, it’s not clear if projections and models matter much at all if they are not based on actual, real-world data. In the case of this pandemic, conditions have changed dramatically (e.g., aggressive social distancing), while our data inputs remain guesswork at best.”

💉 The Pandemic Isn’t a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System

Nassim Taleb, making his way into the New Yorker.

🏛 The Individual, the State, and the Virus

I agree with most of Kling’s takes here on the role the state should play in the coronavirus crisis.

👩🏽‍💻 Mapping the Future of Work

A nice comprehensive list of SaaS products for the workplace, across a ton of different categories. Great work by Pietro Invernizzi putting this database together.

⌨️ Stephen Wolfram’s Personal Infrastructure

Mathematician and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram wrote this epic essay on his personal productivity infrastructure.

🧪 Virtual Oncology

A discussion among physicians on how oncology is changing and will likely continue to evolve in the wake of the coronavirus. Testing, chemo, and other treatment steps currently considered to be standards of care will change, and things like telemedicine will change what options doctors have in working with patients.

I’ve got a set of scans and a follow up this week, so will see how Mayo Clinic has adapted their approach in response to this crisis.

🚙 Using automated data augmentation to advance our Waymo Driver

Neat technical paper showing how Waymo and the Google Brain team are using data augmentation to expand training data volume.

🔮 The Future of Programming

From 2013, a typically genius talk from Bret Victor. Everyone should aspire to giving “evergreen” talks like this.

📖 Readwise2Roam

I’m liking so far the process of manually typing notes in Roam from highlights in my books. Something about it feels more efficient and leaves me with more meaningful, succinct notes. This could come in handy, though, if I want to pull all highlights directly from Readwise (which I’m still loving, use it every day).

⛴ How computational power—or its absence—shaped World War naval battles

How the battlecruiser in the early 20th century gave the British a birds-eye view of their fleet before the days of aerial photography, radar, or satellites:

To achieve his vision of a centrally controlled battlecruiser force, Fisher needed a clear picture of the threats. So he set up a top-secret room in the Admiralty building where intelligence reports and shipping news from all over the world were aggregated onto large maps that showed the positions of every friendly and known enemy ship.

This was known as the Admiralty plot. Unlike the displays you might see in a modern military headquarters (which may be updated every few minutes or seconds), these paper maps had a “refresh rate” of hours or even days. But they were nonetheless revolutionary, because for the first time in history a centralized commander could look at a representation of the world naval situation, with every friendly force and known enemy force tracked all around the world in nearly real time. The British leadership could then issue commands accordingly.

📲 Interaction Density

This is one of the best arguments to describe why “pro” users on multitouch devices have so much frustration trying to achieve the same levels of productivity they can on a desktop. Even with quality applications, for certain types of work, an iPad can feel like you’re handcuffed.

☁️ Value of Cloud Based Services in Times of Crisis

Bryan wrote this post about how Fulcrum is supporting the COVID response efforts.

🏙 Cities After Coronavirus

I speculated a bit about this sort of thing earlier this week. How might urban design change?

One of the most pressing questions that urban planners will face is the apparent tension between densification – the push towards cities becoming more concentrated, which is seen as essential to improving environmental sustainability – and disaggregation, the separating out of populations, which is one of the key tools currently being used to hold back infection transmission.

🗺 COVID Care Map

Some colleagues in the geo community are working on this project to map health care resources by region and facility. All of the code and work is in the open on GitHub.

♟ Chess

Tom MacWright on chess. Reduce distraction, increase concentration

Once you have concentration, you realize that there’s another layer: rigor. It’s checking the timer, checking for threats, checking for any of a litany of potential mistakes you might be about to make, a smorgasbord of straightforward opportunities you might miss. Simple rules are easy to forget when you’re feeling the rush of an advantage. But they never become less important.

Might start giving chess a try just to see how I do. Haven’t played in years, but I’m curious.

🧪 The COVID Tracking Project

The best resource I’ve run across for aggregated data on COVID cases. Pulled from state-level public health authorities; this project just provides a cleaned-up version of the data. There’s even an API to pull data.

✍🏼 Taxonomy of Note Types

Andy Matuschak’s notes on taking notes. This is from his public notebook, like reading someone thinking out loud (or on a screen at least).

📱 Project LightSpeed: Rewriting the Messenger Codebase

A technical piece describing the goals for Facebook’s rewrite of the Messenger app. Interesting to see them avoiding their own React Native for this, and doing things in native iOS/Android.

🔩 “Let’s Use Kubernetes!” Now You Have 8 Problems

A humorous post, but has a point. There’s pressure to add new tools that don’t do much but add moving parts and complexity. There’s nothing wrong with Kubernetes, but there’s a place for it (and your small team probably doesn’t need it).

The more you buy in to Kubernetes, the harder it is to do normal development: you need all the different concepts (Pod, Deployment, Service, etc.) to run your code. So you need to spin up a complete K8s system just to test anything, via a VM or nested Docker containers.

And since your application is much harder to run locally, development is harder, leading to a variety of solutions, from staging environments, to proxying a local process into the cluster (I wrote a tool for this a few years ago), to proxying a remote process onto your local machine…

🚲 How the Car-Free Policy Impacted Market Street Traffic

Mapbox digs into the impacts of San Francisco’s Market Street going pedestrians and bikes only.

🗺 turf-tagger

Bryan put together this neat little utility for merging point data with containing polygon attributes with spatial join queries. It uses Turf.js to do the geoprocess in the browser.

🚀 Mars Curiosity High-Res Panorama

Amazing photography of the Mars surface:

NASA’s Curiosity rover has captured its highest-resolution panorama yet of the Martian surface. Composed of more than 1,000 images taken during the 2019 Thanksgiving holiday and carefully assembled over the ensuing months, the composite contains 1.8 billion pixels of Martian landscape. The rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, used its telephoto lens to produce the panorama; meanwhile, it relied on its medium-angle lens to produce a lower-resolution, nearly 650-million-pixel panorama that includes the rover’s deck and robotic arm.

⚒ Different Kinds of Easy

1. “Easy” because there’s a delay between benefit and cost.

The cost of exercising is immediate. Exercise hurts while you’re doing it, and the harder the exercise the more the hurt. Investing is different. It has a cost, just like exercising. But its costs can be delayed by years.

Whenever there’s a delay between benefit and cost, the benefits always seem easier than they are. And whenever the benefits seem easier than they are, people take risks they shouldn’t. It’s why there are investing bubbles, but not exercise bubbles.

⌨️ 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.

🏘 Landgrid

This is a product from Loveland Technologies, with a cohesive dataset of parcel boundaries provided as an API for application builders.

More on their parcel data and how they do it here.

🤳🏽 My Quantified Self Setup

My goal tracking efforts pale in comparison to what Julian Lehr is doing. I might give a try to Airtable for mine, also. I’ve been in Google Sheets since mine’s pretty basic, but AT might make it more mobile-friendly for editing.

🚗 Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

What stands out most is Tesla’s integrated central control unit, or “full self-driving computer.” Also known as Hardware 3, this little piece of tech is the company’s biggest weapon in the burgeoning EV market. It could end the auto industry supply chain as we know it.

One stunned engineer from a major Japanese automaker examined the computer and declared, “We cannot do it.”

🌌 Universe Sandbox

This is a physics simulator that replicates the physics of interstellar objects. You can simulate massive planetary collisions or supernovae in the Earth’s solar system, in case you want to see what would happen.

🧮 The Map of Mathematics

A neat catalog “map” of mathematics, with visualizations of things like prime numbers, symmetry, calculus, and more. Quanta Magazine does fantastic work.

🇯🇵 Why So Many of the World’s Oldest Companies are in Japan

In 2019, there were over 33,000 businesses in Japan over a century old, according to research firm Teikoku Data Bank. The oldest hotel in the world has been open since 705 in Yamanashi and confectioner Ichimonjiya Wasuke has been selling sweet treats in Kyoto since 1000. Osaka-based construction giant Takenaka was founded in 1610, while even some global Japanese brands like Suntory and Nintendo have unexpectedly long histories stretching back to the 1800s.

🛠 Dependency Drift: A Metric for Software Aging

We’ve been doing some thinking on our team about how to systematically address (and repay) technical debt. With the web of interconnected dependencies and micro packages that exists now through tools like npm and yarn, no single person can track all the versions and relationships between modules. This post proposes a “Dependency Drift” metric to quantify how far out of date a codebase is on the latest updates to its dependencies:

• Create a numeric metric that incorporates the volume of dependencies and the recency of each of them.
• Devise a simple high level A-F grading system from that number to communicate how current a project is with it’s dependencies. We’ll call this a drift score.
• Regularly recalculate and publish for open source projects.
• Publish a command line tool to use in any continuous integration pipeline. In CI, policies can be set to fail CI if drift is too high. Your drift can be tracked and reported to help motivate the team and inform stakeholders.
• Use badges in source control README files to show drift, right alongside the projects’s Continuous Integration status.

💬 Towards a Conversational Agent that Can Chat About Anything

A technical write-up on a Google chatbot called “Meena,” which they propose has a much more realistic back-and-forth response technique:

Meena is an end-to-end, neural conversational model that learns to respond sensibly to a given conversational context. The training objective is to minimize perplexity, the uncertainty of predicting the next token (in this case, the next word in a conversation). At its heart lies the Evolved Transformer seq2seq architecture, a Transformer architecture discovered by evolutionary neural architecture search to improve perplexity.

Read more in their paper, “Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot”.

📱 The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

John Gruber uses the iPad’s recent 10th birthday to reflect missed opportunity and how much better a product it could be/could have been:

Ten years later, though, I don’t think the iPad has come close to living up to its potential. By the time the Mac turned 10, it had redefined multiple industries. In 1984 almost no graphic designers or illustrators were using computers for work. By 1994 almost all graphic designers and illustrators were using computers for work. The Mac was a revolution. The iPhone was a revolution. The iPad has been a spectacular success, and to tens of millions it is a beloved part of their daily lives, but it has, to date, fallen short of revolutionary.

I would agree with most of his criticisms, especially on the multitasking UI and the general impenetrability of the gesturing interfaces. As a very “pro iPad” user, I would love to see a movement toward the device coming into its own as a distinctly different platform than macOS and desktop computers. It has amazing promise even outside of creativity (music, art) and consumption. With the right focus on business model support, business productivity applications could be so much better.

📂 The Anti-Portfolio

Bessemer maintains this page of companies they passed investing on. I like the idea of publicly acknowledging your big misses or errors as an organizational accountability tool. Some big names here like eBay, Airbnb, Google, and FedEx.

🌏 Downlink 2.0

Almost a year ago I shared a link to the first version of Downlink. The main feature added here is you can create your own custom views by putting a bounding box around your area of interest. Then you’ll get a live look at the Earth as your desktop background.

🐦 nucoll

A collection tool for retrieving and analyzing Twitter data. I’ve seen some neat social network analyses shared from folks that have used this to map degree relationships between Twitter accounts.

✍🏼 The Enemies of Writing

A great piece from the Atlantic’s George Packer, a transcript of his acceptance speech for the Hitchens Prize.

At a moment when democracy is under siege around the world, these scenes from our literary life sound pretty trivial. But if writers are afraid of the sound of their own voice, then honest, clear, original work is not going to flourish, and without it, the politicians and tech moguls and TV demagogues have less to worry about. It doesn’t matter if you hold impeccable views, or which side of the political divide you’re on: Fear breeds self-censorship, and self-censorship is more insidious than the state-imposed kind, because it’s a surer way of killing the impulse to think, which requires an unfettered mind. A writer can still write while hiding from the thought police. But a writer who carries the thought police around in his head, who always feels compelled to ask: Can I say this? Do I have a right? Is my terminology correct? Will my allies get angry? Will it help my enemies? Could it get me ratioed on Twitter?—that writer’s words will soon become lifeless. A writer who’s afraid to tell people what they don’t want to hear has chosen the wrong trade.

💵 Wealth Is What You Don’t Spend

Morgan Housel:

It might seem obvious that savings is your ability to reject what you could spend. But the majority of financial goals are about earning more – better investment returns and a higher-paying career. There’s nothing wrong with that. Earning more is wonderful, just like exercise. We just shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that earning more will do little for building wealth if every extra dollar is offset by a dollar of new spending.

The world is filled with the financial equivalent of athletes who finish every workout with four Big Macs. Wealth, at every income level, has less to do with your gains and more to do with your ability to leave gains alone without cashing them in.

📨 Superhuman and the Productivity Meta-Layer

An interesting response argument to Kevin Kwok’s post from a while back called the Arc of Collaboration. The meat of the argument is that corralling notifications from the dozens of input streams we all have is challenging, and that a “command line”-style interface like Superhuman’s could function as a filter point to visualize the input stream, but also engage with items in real time. A compelling case with mockups of how it could work (if service providers wanted to plug into this sort of “notification nexus”).

🥩 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.

🇮🇷 The Shadow Commander

This 2013 piece from Dexter Filkins gives an excellent background on Qasem Soleimani, an important figure now well known after his killing a couple of weeks ago, but prior to that hardly known by anyone other than experts, even with his massive influence in the region.

🌌 Prosperous Universe

I’m always intrigued by complicated simulation games. I remember a few of these “real-time” MMO games being popular in the early days of online gaming. Glad to see the genre still kicking in an era of low-attention-span gaming largely taking over. From the Prosperous Universe website:

At the heart of our vision lies the concept of a closed economic loop. There have been thousands of browser-based sci-fi strategy games before that emphasize military conflict. By contrast, Prosperous Universe is all about the economy and complex player-driven supply chains in which every material has to be either produced or purchased from other player-run companies.

🔗 Roam Research

Roam is an interesting note-taking tool that’s like a hybrid graph database and wiki. I tinkered with it a little bit. Seems attractive as a way to take meeting notes to try it out.

🎮 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.

⚖️ Tradeoffs: The Currency of Decision Making

Farnam Street:

Time is our most fundamental constraint. If you use an hour for one thing, you can’t use it for anything else. Time passes, whatever we do with it. It seems beneficial then to figure out the means of using it with the lowest possible opportunity costs. One of the simplest ways to do this is to establish how you’d like to be using your time, then track how you’re using it for a week. Many people find a significant discrepancy. Once we see the gulf between the tradeoffs we’re making and the ones we’d rather be making, it’s easier to work on changing that.

The article reminds me of Sowell on economics. Take this and apply to any other life domain:

Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses.

💡 The Power of the Marginal

A timeless one from Paul Graham, 2006. On the advantages of outsiders:

Even in a field with honest tests, there are still advantages to being an outsider. The most obvious is that outsiders have nothing to lose. They can do risky things, and if they fail, so what? Few will even notice.

The eminent, on the other hand, are weighed down by their eminence. Eminence is like a suit: it impresses the wrong people, and it constrains the wearer.

Outsiders should realize the advantage they have here. Being able to take risks is hugely valuable. Everyone values safety too much, both the obscure and the eminent. No one wants to look like a fool. But it’s very useful to be able to. If most of your ideas aren’t stupid, you’re probably being too conservative. You’re not bracketing the problem.

📝 PR FAQs for Products

This is an extension of the Amazon mantra of forcing your team to “write the press release” for a product or feature before starting on it. The goal is to concretely visualize the end state as clearly as you can, and get on the same page strategically to outline the why of what you’re building. The PR FAQ is another assistive technique for setting and articulating the goal.

🧮 Neutrinos Lead to Unexpected Discovery in Basic Math

As long as you consider linear algebra and eigenvectors “basic math”:

They’d noticed that hard-to-compute terms called “eigenvectors,” describing, in this case, the ways that neutrinos propagate through matter, were equal to combinations of terms called “eigenvalues,” which are far easier to compute. Moreover, they realized that the relationship between eigenvectors and eigenvalues — ubiquitous objects in math, physics and engineering that have been studied since the 18th century — seemed to hold more generally.

🚙 Waymo celebrates first year of self-driving taxi service

Progress here seems positive:

The Google-backed service has delivered more than 100,000 trips to more than 1,500 monthly riders in the Phoenix area, according to a blog post. The number of weekly rides has tripled since its first full month of service in January 2019.

🆓 The Three Rules of Freemium

I’ve been reading more lately about freemium models in SaaS, where they work, where they don’t, risks vs. upsides. This is a good one from Christoph Janz on the basics.

Unlike most other enterprise software, which traditionally used to be chosen by the IT department, Dropbox is typically adopted by individual employees from various departments, who then lobby management into switching. As I noted in my piece, Dropbox was one of the early champions of the ‘consumerization of enterprise software’ movement, which was one of the strongest drivers of SaaS success in the last ten years.

But not every SaaS company can be a Dropbox or a Typeform. Done wrong, freemium can end up cannibalizing your paid user base while also draining your company’s precious engineering and customer support resources. So how do you know if launching a freemium product is the right move for your company?

IT consumerization is one of those secular shifts that’s changing many factors in the software space. The key to getting freemium right (assuming your product and market are conducive to it in the first place) seems to be a willingness to experiment with where the boundaries should be between what’s free and what isn’t.

🌋 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.

⚾ Mapping the New MiLB Landscape

Combining baseball and maps? Sign me up. The MLB has a plan to “improve” the MiLB system costs, standards, compensation, and other things through shuttering 42 ball clubs around the country. In this piece for FanGraphs, the authors use some GIS tactics to analyze how this shakes out for baseball fans falling within those markets:

So how many Americans would see their ability to watch affiliated baseball in person disappear under MLB’s proposal? And how many would see their primary point of access shift from the relatively affordable games of the minor leagues to major league ones? To work out how the closure of these minor league teams will affect access to baseball, we went to the map. More specifically, we took the geographical center of each ZCTA (a close relative of ZIP Codes used by the Census Bureau). We calculated the distance as the crow flies from each ZCTA to each ballpark in America, both in 2019 and in MLB’s proposed new landscape.

🚇 The ‘Namewashing’ of Public Transit

Seems like a strange move for transit agencies to sell the naming rights to entire stations to private entities. Would it really raise revenues enough to make a dent in paying for operations or improving systems? Seems like the downsides outweigh the upsides here. I’m all for experimentation in improving public services, but this seems like a lazy method for raising a few million bucks.

I did learn a new handy phrase here:

There’s a phrase that urban geographers use for this private rebranding of public space: “toponymic commodification.”

⚽ Characterizing Soccer Players’ Playing Styles

Another one for the sports fan, an analysis and comparison of different players.

🕹 How Figma’s Multiplayer Technology Works

An interesting technical breakdown on how Figma built their multiplayer tech (the collaboration capability where you can see other users’ mouse cursors and highlights in the same document, in real time).

🌾 Large-Scale Psychological Differences Within China Explained by Rice Versus Wheat Agriculture

A fascinating paper. This research suggests the possibility that group-conforming versus individualistic cultures may have roots in diet and agricultural practices. From the abstract:

Cross-cultural psychologists have mostly contrasted East Asia with the West. However, this study shows that there are major psychological differences within China. We propose that a history of farming rice makes cultures more interdependent, whereas farming wheat makes cultures more independent, and these agricultural legacies continue to affect people in the modern world. We tested 1162 Han Chinese participants in six sites and found that rice-growing southern China is more interdependent and holistic-thinking than the wheat-growing north. To control for confounds like climate, we tested people from neighboring counties along the rice-wheat border and found differences that were just as large. We also find that modernization and pathogen prevalence theories do not fit the data.

An interesting thread to follow, but worthy of skepticism given the challenge of aggregating enough concrete data to prove anything definitively. There’s some intuitively sensible argument here as to the fundamental differences with subsistence practices in wheat versus rice farming techniques:

The two biggest differences between farming rice and wheat are irrigation and labor. Because rice paddies need standing water, people in rice regions build elaborate irrigation systems that require farmers to cooperate. In irrigation networks, one family’s water use can affect their neighbors, so rice farmers have to coordinate their water use. Irrigation networks also require many hours each year to build, dredge, and drain—a burden that often falls on villages, not isolated individuals.

🦠 Cells That ‘Taste’ Danger Set Off Immune Responses

I’ve talked before about my astonishment with the immune system’s complexity and power. This piece talks about tuft cells and how they use their chemosensory powers to identify parasites and alert the immune system to respond:

Howitt’s findings were significant because they pointed to a possible role for tuft cells in the body’s defenses — one that would fill a conspicuous hole in immunologists’ understanding. Scientists understood quite a bit about how the immune system detects bacteria and viruses in tissues. But they knew far less about how the body recognizes invasive worms, parasitic protozoa and allergens, all of which trigger so-called type 2 immune responses. Howitt and Garett’s work suggested that tuft cells might act as sentinels, using their abundant chemosensory receptors to sniff out the presence of these intruders. If something seems wrong, the tuft cells could send signals to the immune system and other tissues to help coordinate a response.

Given the massive depth of knowledge about biological processes, anatomy, and medical research, it’s incredible how much we still don’t know about how organisms work. Evolution, selection, and time can create some truly complex systems.

🌶 Darwinian Gastronomy

Turns out cultures from warmer climates evolved a taste for spicy foods to combat the presence of more diverse bacteria:

Alas, nothing in nature turns out to be that simple. Researchers now suggest that a taste for spices served a vital evolutionary purpose: keeping our ancestors alive. Spices, it turns out, can kill poisonous bacteria and fungi that may contaminate our food. In other words, developing a taste for these spices could be good for our health. And since food spoils more quickly in hotter weather, it’s only natural that warmer climates have more bacteria-killing spices.

🌲 The Pioneering Maps of Alexander von Humboldt

The German scientist Alexander von Humboldt is one of the most important figures in conservation and geography. He was one of the first scientists to use maps as a critical tool for communicating his discoveries and ideas:

Another of Humboldt’s groundbreaking illustrations came out of his five-year voyage to Central and South America with the French botanist Aimé Bonpland. In 1802, Humboldt and Bonpland ascended Chimborazo, a volcano just below the equator that was believed at the time to be the highest mountain in the world (at 20,564 feet, it’s more than 8,000 feet shorter than Mount Everest). The pair documented the mountain’s plant life, from the tropical rainforest at its base to the lichen clinging to rocks above the treeline. The image below, which Humboldt called Tableau Physique in the French version of his original publication, organizes these observations in an intuitively visual way, showing Chimborazo in cross-section, with text indicating which species lived at different elevations on the mountain.

💰 Connecting Some Dots on Taxes

There was a roil over a Bill Gates interview from the recent DealBook conference, specifically around his comments on the upcoming election and his uncertainties around the Democratic candidates’ tax policies and consequences they might have. As is usual for Twitter, the rage machine was in full effect around Gates’s comments about “how much he’d have left” if Elizabeth Warren had her way.

The notion commonly tossed around with regard to billionaires is that there’s no way that level of wealth accumulation could happen through non-nefarious (or illegal) means. Kevin Williamson does a good job in this piece picking apart the logic here (or lack thereof) around “wealth transfer” — a disingenuous way to describe a phenomenon where there was no coercion involved.

The idea that there is some big national slop bucket marked “income” and that Gates et al. are grabbing up more than their fair share is breathtakingly primitive. A relatively small number of high-growth firms has accounted for a very large share of economic growth in the United States in the past several decades. That represents wealth creation, not a wealth transfer.

📝 Blot.im

Blot is a super-minimal open source blogging system based on plain text files in a folder. It supports markdown, Word docs, images, and HTML — just drag the files into the folder and it generates web pages. I love simple tools like this.

🖋 Handcrafted Visualization: Precision

An interesting post from Robert Simmon from Planet. These examples of visualizations and graphics of physical phenomena (maps, cloud diagrams, drawings of insects, planetary motion charts) were all hand-drawn, in an era where specialized photography and sensing weren’t always options.

A common thread between each of these visualizations is the sheer amount of work that went into each of them. The painstaking effort of transforming a dataset into a graphic by hand grants a perspective on the data that may be hindered by a computer intermediary. It’s not a guarantee of accurate interpretation (see Chapplesmith’s flawed conclusions), but it forces an intimate examination of the evidence. Something that’s worth remembering in this age of machine learning and button-press visualization.

I especially love that Apollo mission “lunar trajectory” map.

🔥 The Satellites Hunting for Megafires

Descartes Labs built a wildfire detection algorithm and tool that leans on NASA’s GOES weather satellite thermal spectrum data, in order to detect wildfires by temperature:

While the pair of GOES satellites provides us with a dependable source of imagery, we still needed to figure out how to identify and detect fires within the images themselves. We started simple: wildfires are hot. They are also hotter than anything around them, and hotter than at any point in the recent past. Crucially, we also know that wildfires start small and are pretty rare for a given location, so our strategy is to model what the earth looks like in the absence of a wildfire, and compare it to the situation that the pair GOES satellites presents to us. Put another way our wildfire detector is essentially looking for thermal anomalies.

⚾️ How the Nationals Fixed Stephen Strasburg and Saved Their Season

Strasburg tipping his pitches almost ended the Nats’ run:

He remembered the game Strasburg pitched in Arizona on August 3. The Diamondbacks pounded Strasburg for nine runs in less than five innings. The D-Backs knew what was coming. The Nationals broke down the tape and discovered Strasburg was tipping his pitches by the way he reached into his glove to grip the baseball near his waist, just before he raised his hands to the set position.

🗺 Mapping Remote Roads with OpenStreetMap, RapiD, and QGIS

An annotated version of Mike Migurski’s workshop on RapiD and Disaster Maps from the NetHope Summit. Facebook’s work on this stuff looks primed to change the way everyone is doing OpenStreetMap contribution.

📱 U.S. opens national security investigation into TikTok

I’ve never used TikTok, but it’s been a fascination tech story to follow its insane growth over the last 8-12 months. With the current geopolitical climate and the fact that it’s owned by Chinese owner ByteDance, it seemed like this CFIUS investigation was inevitable.

📜 Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy

A project from DeepMind designed to fill in missing text from ancient inscriptions:

Pythia takes a sequence of damaged text as input, and is trained to predict character sequences comprising hypothesised restorations of ancient Greek inscriptions (texts written in the Greek alphabet dating between the seventh century BCE and the fifth century CE). The architecture works at both the character- and word-level, thereby effectively handling long-term context information, and dealing efficiently with incomplete word representations (Figure 2). This makes it applicable to all disciplines dealing with ancient texts (philology, papyrology, codicology) and applies to any language (ancient or modern).

🛰 SpaceX submits paperwork for 30,000 more Starlink satellites

They’ve only launched 60 so far, but it looks like SpaceX has big plans for their future broadband satellite constellation.

🇨🇳 The People’s Republic of China Was Born in Chains

I haven’t read much Chinese history, but its origins and the Mao years were one of the greatest tragedies. And it’s frightening how much of that attitude is still there under the facade:

China today, for any visitor who remembers the country from 20 or 30 years ago, seems hardly recognizable. One of the government’s greatest accomplishments is to have distanced itself so successfully from the Mao era that it seems almost erased. Instead of collective poverty and marching Red Guards, there are skyscrapers, new airports, highways, railway stations, and bullet trains. Yet scratch the glimmering surface and the iron underpinnings of the one-party state become apparent. They have barely changed since 1949, despite all the talk about “reform and opening up.” The legacy of liberation is a country still in chains.

⚾️ 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.

🏃🏾‍♂️ Eliud Kipchoge Breaks 2-Hour Marathon Barrier

An amazing feat:

On a misty Saturday morning in Vienna, on a course specially chosen for speed, in an athletic spectacle of historic proportions, Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya ran 26.2 miles in a once-inconceivable time of 1 hour 59 minutes 40 seconds.

⚾️ What the Future American Ballpark Should Look Like

An architect’s manifesto on how teams can rethink the design of baseball stadiums:

Fans want to feel that the club has bought into them, and a bolder model of fan engagement could give them a real stake in the club’s success. One of the most promising recent trends in North American sports is the way soccer clubs are emulating their European counterparts by developing dedicated supporters’ groups. These independent organizations drive enthusiasm and energy in the ballpark, and make sure seats stay filled.

Instead of just acknowledging and tolerating the supporter group model, we’re going to encourage and codify it in the park’s architecture by giving over control of entire sections of the ballpark to fans. Rather than design the seating sections and concourse as a finished product, we’ll offer it up as a framework for fan-driven organizations to introduce their own visions.

📰 Does the News Reflect What We Die From?

Analysis of how media over-represents rare causes, and represents almost not at all the most common causes of death.

🧠 To Pay Attention, the Brain Uses Filters, Not a Spotlight

For a long time, because attention seemed so intricately tied up with consciousness and other complex functions, scientists assumed that it was first and foremost a cortical phenomenon. A major departure from that line of thinking came in 1984, when Francis Crick, known for his work on the structure of DNA, proposed that the attentional searchlight was controlled by a region deep in the brain called the thalamus, parts of which receive input from sensory domains and feed information to the cortex. He developed a theory in which the sensory thalamus acted not just as a relay station, but also as a gatekeeper — not just a bridge, but a sieve — staunching some of the flow of data to establish a certain level of focus.

⛰ Climbing the Wrong Hill

Using the hill climbing problem as an analogy for challenging yourself and achieving long-term goals.

👨🏽‍💼 What Do Executives Do, Anyway?

The key takeaway of High Output Management:

To paraphrase the book, the job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions.

That’s all.

Not to decide. Not to break ties. Not to set strategy. Not to be the expert on every, or any topic. Just to sit in the room while the right people make good decisions in alignment with their values. And if they do, to endorse it. And if they don’t, to send them back to try again.

👏🏼 Applause Lights

This is from 2007, but is still a very astute observation in how politicians and activists use rhetoric to signal rather than recommend a real, actionable way forward on issues:

The substance of a democracy is the specific mechanism that resolves policy conflicts. If all groups had the same preferred policies, there would be no need for democracy—we would automatically cooperate. The resolution process can be a direct majority vote, or an elected legislature, or even a voter-sensitive behavior of an artificial intelligence, but it has to be something. What does it mean to call for a “democratic” solution if you don’t have a conflict-resolution mechanism in mind?

I think it means that you have said the word “democracy,” so the audience is supposed to cheer. It’s not so much a propositional statement or belief, as the equivalent of the “Applause” light that tells a studio audience when to clap.

📥 Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity

We’ve all seen this in the workplace — when email, chat, meetings, et cetera transform into signaling channels for looking busy. Cal Newport’s Deep Work (quoted in this post) has a fantastic section on this:

If you send and answer e-mails at all hours, if you schedule and attend meetings constantly, if you weigh in on instant message systems… all of these behaviors make you seem busy in a public manner. If you’re using busyness as a proxy for productivity, then these behaviors can seem crucial for convincing yourself and others that you’re doing your job well.

Knowledge work is not an assembly line, and extracting value from information is an activity that’s often at odds with busyness, not supported by it.

🖋 Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical User Interface

One of those fantastic online papers from Bret Victor.

✍🏼 Ted Chiang Uses Science to Illuminate the Human Condition

I enjoyed this interview with author Ted Chiang. It covers his recent short story collection Exhalation: Stories with nice context and background on the ideas behind each one. I just finished the book last week, and would have to say that The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling was my favorite. A story about the fallibility of memory and what it would be like if our memories were recorded with perfect accuracy.

💡 Can Renewable Energy Power the World?

Analysis from Bloomberg on the state of renewables versus fossil fuels, with nice map graphics demonstrating the distribution of energy facilities by type in the US. The trends look positive in the United States, but the outlook in developing markets is still challenging, as one would expect:

In developing parts of the world, coal still dominates. China is home to the largest capacity of hydro, wind and solar power—and it remains the world’s biggest consumer of coal. Pakistan’s dream of generating 60% of its power from clean energy sources is still decades away. In Indonesia, coal plants are so cheap to run that the Southeast Asian nation is projected to nearly double its coal generation in the next 25 years.

The growing divide underscores a global dilemma: Wealthy nations can afford to turn their backs on coal, but it remains an easy fallback in countries where electricity is scarce, unreliable, or unaffordable.

🎨 ColorBox

A tool from the Lyft design team for creating color ramps and gradients. Check out the blog post.

⚖️ The Use of Knowledge in Society

I’ve been reading some of Hayek’s famous articles this week. This one is all about what he probably considered one of the most important concepts, since these basic ideas form a central thesis for most of his works. His argument was for bottoms-up, decentralized systems of decision-making instead of centralized, top-down systems:

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources—if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.

🇮🇸 Islandia

This short film of drone footage showcases the amazing, almost-alien, landscapes of Iceland. This guy’s channel has a lot of interesting quick films like this.

🔎 fzf

A fuzzy finder for the command line. Just install it from Homebrew with brew install fzf and improve your file searching on the shell. No more having to remember find command syntax.

This week’s links are all interactive notebooks on Observable. Their Explore section always highlights interesting things people are creating. A great learning tool for playing with data and code to see how it works.

⌨️ The Enigma Machine

Easily the most impressive interactive notebook I’ve ever seen. This one from Tom shows the electromechanical pathways of the German Enigma machine at work — enter a character and see how the rotors and circuits encrypt text.

🚲 A Bicycle Drivetrain Analyzer

Another great example of the power of interactive programs. This one lets you compute bicycle chainring gear ratios by speed setting. You can add multiple cassettes and chainrings to compare:

🌍 Mapping the Mediterranean

Have to include a map example. Here the author brings in DEM data then styles and generates it all in code with GDAL for data manipulation and D3 for graphics.

🛤 Missing the Light at the End of the Tunnel

Honest postmortems are insightful to get the inside backstory on what happened behind the scenes with a company. In this one, Jason Crawford goes into what went wrong with Fieldbook before they shut it down and were acquired by Flexport a couple years ago:

Now, with a year to digest, I think this is true and was a core mistake. I vastly underestimated the resources it was going to take—in time, effort and money—to build a launchable product in the space.

In the 8 years since we launched the first version of Fulcrum, we’ve had (fortunately) smaller versions of this experience over and over. Each new major overhaul, large feature, or product business model change we’ve undertaken has probably cost us twice the time we initially expected it to. Scoping is a science itself that everyone has to learn.

In Jeff Bezos’s 2018 letter to Amazon shareholders, he discusses the topic of high standards: how to have them and how to get your team to have them. (As a side note, if you don’t read Bezos’s shareholder letters, you’re missing out. Even if you’ve already read all the business and startup advice in the world, you will find new and keen insights there.)

Bezos makes a few interesting points, but I’ll focus on one: To have high standards in practice, you need realistic expectations about the scope of effort required.

As a simple example, he mentions learning to do a handstand. Some people think they should be able to learn a handstand in two weeks; in reality, it takes six months. If you go in thinking it will take two weeks, not only do you not learn it in two weeks, you also don’t learn it in six months—you learn it never, because you get discouraged and quit. Bezos says a similar thing applies to the famous six-page memos that substitute for slide decks at Amazon (the ones that are read silently in meetings). Some people expect they can write a good memo the night before the meeting; in reality, you have to start a week before, in order to allow time for drafting, feedback, and editing.

🏛 Ten Ways to Defuse Political Arrogance

David Blankenhorn calls for a return of intellectual humility in public discourse.

At the personal level, intellectual humility counterbalances narcissism, self-centeredness, pridefulness, and the need to dominate others. Conversely, intellectual humility seems to correlate positively with empathy, responsiveness to reasons, the ability to acknowledge what one owes (including intellectually) to others, and the moral capacity for equal regard of others. Arguably its ultimate fruit is a more accurate understanding of oneself and one’s capacities. Intellectual humility also appears frequently to correlate positively with successful leadership (due especially to the link between intellectual humility and trustworthiness) and with rightly earned self-confidence.

⌨️ The Machine Intelligence Behind Gboard

A fun technical overview of how the Google team is using predictive machine learning models to make typing on mobile devices more efficient.

🛰 tracejson

An extension to the GeoJSON format for storing GPS track data, including timestamps. GPX has been long in the tooth for a long time, but it works and is supported by everything. This approach could have some legs if application developers are interested in a new, more efficient, way of doing things. I know I’d like to explore it for Fulcrum’s GPS-based video capability. Right now we do GPX and our own basic JSON format for storing the geo and elapsed time data to match up video frames with location. This could be a better way.

🔷 Byrne’s Euclid

This is a gorgeous web recreation of Oliver Byrne’s take on Euclid’s Elements. A true work of art.

🎨 Design Tooling at Scale

This post from the Dropbox design team dives into how a large team with a complex product created a design system for a consistent language. It goes into how they organize the stack of design elements and structures using Figma for collaboration.

🏔 MARTINI: Real-Time RTIN Terrain Mesh

Some cool work from Vladimir Agafonkin on a library for RTIN mesh generation, with an interactive notebook to experiment with it on Observable:

An RTIN mesh consists of only right-angle triangles, which makes it less precise than Delaunay-based TIN meshes, requiring more triangles to approximate the same surface. But RTIN has two significant advantages:

1. The algorithm generates a hierarchy of all approximations of varying precisions — after running it once, you can quickly retrieve a mesh for any given level of detail.
2. It’s very fast, making it viable for client-side meshing from raster terrain tiles. Surprisingly, I haven’t found any prior attempts to do it in the browser.

👨🏽‍🎨 Design on a Deadline: How Notion Pulled Itself Back from the Brink of Failure

This is an interesting piece on the Figma blog about Notion and their design process in getting the v1 off the ground a few years ago. I’ve been using Notion for a while and can attest to the craftsmanship in design and user experience. All the effort put in and iterated on really shows in how fluid the whole app feels.

📚 Patrick Collison’s Bookshelf

I’m always a sucker for a curated list of reading recommendations. This one’s from Stripe founder Patrick Collison, who seems to share a lot my interests and curiosities.

📝 nvULTRA

This is a new notes app from Brett Terpstra (creator of nvALT) and Fletcher Penney (creator of MultiMarkdown). I used nvALT for years for note taking on my Mac. This new version looks like a slick reboot of that with some more power features. In private beta right now, but hopefully dropping soon.

⚗️ We Need a New Science of Progress

Progress itself is understudied. By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of “Progress Studies.”

Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen co-authored this piece for The Atlantic making the case for a new science to study how we create progress.

Looking backwards, it’s striking how unevenly distributed progress has been in the past. In antiquity, the ancient Greeks were discoverers of everything from the arch bridge to the spherical earth. By 1100, the successful pursuit of new knowledge was probably most concentrated in parts of China and the Middle East. Along the cultural dimension, the artists of Renaissance Florence enriched the heritage of all humankind, and in the process created the masterworks that are still the lifeblood of the local economy. The late 18th and early 19th century saw a burst of progress in Northern England, with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In each case, the discoveries that came to elevate standards of living for everyone arose in comparatively tiny geographic pockets of innovative effort. Present-day instances include places like Silicon Valley in software and Switzerland’s Basel region in life sciences.

🚙 George Hotz on the Artificial Intelligence Podcast

George Hotz is the founder of Comma.ai, a machine learning based vehicle automation company. He is an outspoken personality in the field of AI and technology in general. He first gained recognition for being the first person to carrier-unlock an iPhone, and since then has done quite a few interesting things at the intersection of hardware and software.

📚 Universal Laws of the World

A list of broad laws that apply to all fields. Thoughtful stuff as always from Morgan Housel:

6. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

In 1955 historian Cyril Parkinson wrote in The Economist:

IT is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and despatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.

His point was that resources can exceed needs without people noticing. The number of employees in an organization is not necessarily related to the amount of work that needs to be done in that organization. Workers will find something to do – or the appearance of doing something – regardless of what needs to be done.

💬 Tandem

This is a neat collaboration tool for distributed teams that just launched. It’s built on Slack and has integrations built for many of the common productivity tools that modern remote teams are familiar with. I’m keen to take a look at this for doing more real-time work with my remote co-workers.

👁 Computers That Can See

As computer vision continues its advance, machines are getting better and better at converting images and video into structured data. Computers have historically had sensor data feeds through text, binary data streams, and user inputs; eventually they’ll all have visual inputs, as well.

🧠 7 Tesla MRI of a Human Brain

This is one of the highest resolution scans ever performed on a human brain, at 100 micrometer resolution. Scroll down to see some awesome images.

👨🏻‍🏫 Anki

Anki is an open source framework for creating your own flash cards. A neat system for helping your kids with classwork, or even just testing yourself on topics.

Anyone who needs to remember things in their daily life can benefit from Anki. Since it is content-agnostic and supports images, audio, videos and scientific markup (via LaTeX), the possibilities are endless.

📽 Cinemaps

I got lost in these works by Andrew DeGraff. They’re super-detailed visualations of character movements and plot developments oriented spatially as the films move from beginning to end. My favorite is the multiple timeline architecture of Back to the Future.

🏃🏻‍♂️ 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.

🌕 The Atlas of Moons

This is an absolutely phenomenal project showcasing each of the major satellites in the Solar System. The full interactive maps of each one are incredible. It shows how much data we’ve gathered about all of these bodies with imagery on each one and thoroughly mapped with place and feature names.

🏠 Opendoor and Redfin Partner

A cool piece of news here. We bought our house with Redfin and had a great experience with it, after using the website heavily during the house search process. Opendoor is also in the real estate space, but their core business is around buying up properties themselves, offering easy liquidity to homeowners needing a rapid sale. I like that Redfin sees the potential there. Hopefully it’s a good fit for each business.

🚶🏻‍♂️ Study Finds Walking Improves Creativity

The study found that walking indoors or outdoors similarly boosted creative inspiration. The act of walking itself, and not the environment, was the main factor. Across the board, creativity levels were consistently and significantly higher for those walking compared to those sitting.

I definitely feel like many of my best ideas and possible problem solutions come to me while running. This research shows that the act of cardiovascular activity spurs something creatively that you don’t have while sitting.

📺 5 Learnings from Zoom

Zoom is one of those admirable SaaS companies built on solid product and amazing execution. I love this — not relying on anything sexy or super inventive, just solving a known problem better than everyone else. My favorite bit is their retention; it proves what can be done even in SMB with lock-tight product market fit:

Zoom has 140% net revenue retention. This is similar to RingCentral from our last analysis and other leaders. Zoom also shows that yes, this can be done with smaller customers too, not just enterprises.

☀️ Visualizing the Summer Solstice

This is a great quick animation showing the sun’s path across the globe during the summer solstice. It shows very clearly why, as you move toward northern latitudes in the summer you get such long days, with perpetual sunlight above the Arctic Circle.

🧭 Training the Next Generation of Mappers

The TeachOSM crew has been doing grest work training teachers how to use OpenStreetMap in their classrooms. Geographic education is critical, especially in primary education, to form a baseline understanding of the world. I got to help out at one of these workshops last year and the outcomes were truly impressive.

Since 2016, TeachOSM has trained ~350 teachers and vocational educators in open mapping techniques. So giving open mapping workshops for teachers has become a staple of our programming over the last few years. In this post, I briefly outline what we do in our workshops, why it is vital work, and how you can help us to make OSM available in geography classes everywhere.

🛰 How to Profit in Space: A Visual Guide

Fantastic visualizations from the WSJ team. Shows the history of satellite expansion divided by country, year, and orbits, both LEO and geosynchronous. A great use of maps for storytelling.

📚 The Antilibrary: Why Unread Books are the Most Important

This is a concept pulled from Taleb’s The Black Swan, which I recently enjoyed. As he notes, the antilibrary can function as a reminder of how much there is to know, and (as is a main point of The Black Swan, we tend to underestimate the value of what we don’t know).

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have. How many of these books have you read?” and the others—a very small minority—who get the point is that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendages but a research tool. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Definitely rings familiar, for me, as someone with a large collection of books I’m anxious to read, but may never get to.

⚖️ Libra

The Facebook-designed and sponsored Libra is a more interesting idea than the much-discussed “FacebookCoin” entrance into cryptocurrency that’s been rumored. The gist is that it’s somewhere between an open blockchain and a closed system, with a consortium of funders in place to share control and add stability in the currency. I’m interested to see where this goes given Facebook’s massive reach to expose it to regular people. See also Ben Thompson’s sharp analysis of Libra from earlier this week.

📑 Opening Up the Atlassian Term Sheet

This is great to see from a company like Atlassian with “openness” as one of their core values. Their take is that the standard M&A process affords too few protections for the company doing the selling and too many for the big buyer. Most importantly, to me, these M&A engagements are one-sided by nature: the buyer has likely done it before (often many times) and the seller it’s likely their first time around.

M&A is a key part of our strategy – over our history, we’ve acquired more than 20 companies for approximately $1 billion, including Trello, Opsgenie, and AgileCraft. And one thing has become very clear to us about the M&A process – it’s outdated, inefficient, and unnecessarily combative, with too much time and energy spent negotiating deal terms and not enough on what matters most: building great products together and delivering more customer value.

👨🏽‍💼 Why Customer-First Companies Ultimately Win

An interesting way to look at customer service along the dimensions of scale and loyalty.

Customer loyalty is the holy grail of business and the ultimate moat at scale. Brand deposits are made with every single positive customer interaction but the only way to scale these positive interactions is to build a culture that self-enforces a high standard of excellence and customer service.

⚖️ Discourses of Epictetus: Summary & Lessons

I got a copy of Discourses recently and looking forward to reading. This post gives a nice overview of the high level themes of his discourses and lectures.

🗺 (Who will be) America’s Next Big Mapping Company?

Paul Ramsey considers who might be in the best position to challenge Google as the next mapping company:

Someone is going to take another run at Google, they have to. My prediction is that it will be AWS, either through acquisition (Esri? Mapbox?) or just building from scratch. There is no doubt Amazon already has some spatial smarts, since they have to solve huge logistical problems in moving goods around for the retail side, problems that require spatial quality data to solve. And there is no doubt that they do not want to let Google continue to leverage Maps against them in Cloud sales. They need a “good enough” response to help keep AWS customers on the reservation.

Because of mapping’s criticality to so many other technologies, any player that is likely to compete with Google needs to be a platform — something that undergirds and powers technology as a business model. Apple is kinda like that, but nowhere near as similar to an electric utility as AWS is.

👨🏽‍💻 Apple is Listening

With the release of the amazing new Mac Pro and other things announced at WWDC, it’s clear that Apple recognizes its failings in delivering for their historically-important professional customers. Marco Arment addresses this well here across the Mac Pro, updates to macOS, iPadOS, and the changes that could be around the corner for the MacBook Pro.

📱 iPadOS: Initial Thoughts, Observations, and Ideas on the Future of Working on an iPad

I’m excited to get iPadOS installed and back to my iPad workflow. This is a good comprehensive overview from Shawn Blanc, someone who has done most of his work on an iPad for a long time.

📉 Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give Real-time Analytics

I thought this was a great post on how unnecessary “real-time” analytics can be when misused. As the author points out, it’s almost never necessary to have data that current. With current software it’s possible to have infinite analytics on everything, and as a result it’s irresistable to many people to think of those metrics as essential for decision making.

This line of thinking is a trap. It’s important to divorce the concepts of operational metrics and product analytics. Confusing how we do things with how we decide which things to do is a fatal mistake.

🗺 Georeferencing Vermont’s Historic Aerial Imagery in QGIS

This is a great step-by-step guide to how to georeference data. I spent time years ago figuring this out but still never was able to do it very well. This guide is all you need to be able to georeference old maps.

🔺 Fulcrum Code Editor

We rebuilt the code editing environment in the Fulcrum App Designer, which is part of both the Data Events and Calculation Expression editing views. The team (led by Emily) did some great work on this using TypeScript and Microsoft’s Monaco project, with IntelliSense code completion. It’s a great addition for our many power users to write better automations on top of Fulcrum.

🏰 The Empty Promise of Data Moats

In the era of every company trying to play in machine learning and AI technology, I thought this was a refreshing perspective on data as a defensible element of a competitive moat. There’s some good stuff here in clarifying the distinction between network effects and scale effects:

But for enterprise startups — which is where we focus — we now wonder if there’s practical evidence of data network effects at all. Moreover, we suspect that even the more straightforward data scale effect has limited value as a defensive strategy for many companies. This isn’t just an academic question: It has important implications for where founders invest their time and resources. If you’re a startup that assumes the data you’re collecting equals a durable moat, then you might underinvest in the other areas that actually do increase the defensibility of your business long term (verticalization, go-to-market dominance, post-sales account control, the winning brand, etc).

Companies should perhaps be less enamored of the “shiny object” of derivative data and AI, and instead invest in execution in areas challenging for all businesses.

🇨🇳 China, Leverage, and Values

An insightful piece this week from Ben Thompson on the current state of the trade standoff between the US and China, and the blocking of Chinese behemoths like Huawei and ZTE. The restrictions on Huawei will mean some major shifts in trade dynamics for advanced components, chip designs, and importantly, software like Android:

The reality is that China is still relatively far behind when it comes to the manufacture of most advanced components, and very far behind when it comes to both advanced processing chips and also the equipment that goes into designing and fabricating them. Yes, Huawei has its own system-on-a-chip, but it is a relatively bog-standard ARM design that even then relies heavily on U.S. software. China may very well be committed to becoming technologically independent, but that is an effort that will take years.

The piece references this article from Bloomberg, an excellent read on the state of affairs here.

⌨️ The Distributed Workplace

I continue to be interested in where the world is headed with remote work. Here InVision’s Mark Frein looks back at what traits make for effective distributed companies, starting with history of past experiences of remote collaboration from music production, to gaming, to startups. As he points out, you can have healthy or harmful cultures in both local and distributed companies:

Distributed workplaces will not be an “answer” to workplace woes. There will be dreary and sad distributed workplaces and engaged and alive ones, all due to the cultural experience of those virtual communities. The key to unlocking great distributed work is, quite simply, the key to unlocking great human relationships — struggling together in positive ways, learning together, playing together, experiencing together, creating together, being emotional together, and solving problems together. We’ve actually been experimenting with all these forms of life remote for at least 20 years at massive scales.

⚾️ The Rays are a Surrealist’s Delight

Love to see the Rays getting some deserved attention in the mainstream sports media. They’ve put together a great, diverse lineup of consistent hitters that have performed well all season:

The Rays emphasize power now, but in a different way: Through Monday, their hitters had the highest exit velocity in the majors, at 90.1 miles per hour, and their pitchers — who specialize in curveballs and high fastballs — allowed the lowest, at 86.3. Hard-contact rates enticed them to trade for Pham from St. Louis last July, and to land Yandy Diaz in an off-season deal with Cleveland. Pham was hitting .248 for the Cardinals, but the Rays assured him he had simply been unlucky; he hit .343 the rest of the season.

And I get to post this on the back of their 11th inning win over the Yankees this afternoon.

📱 The Pivot

Great quick read from Horace Dediu on Apple’s Services business. As he points out in the piece, Apple’s business model is continually oversimplified and/or misunderstood by many:

This disconnect between what people think Apple sells and what Apple builds is as perplexing as the cognitive disconnect between what companies sell and what customers buy.

Companies sell objects or activities that they can make or engage in but customers buy solutions to problems. It’s easy to be fooled that these are interchangeable.

Conversely Apple offers solutions to problems that are viewed, classified, weighed and measured as objects or activities by external observers. Again, it’s easy to be fooled that these are the same.

🧭 Mapping Gridded Data with a Voronoi Diagram

This post goes into how the author put together a visualization of tornado trend data for Axios. Observable notebooks are so great. The interactivity lets you not only see the code and data to create it all, but can be forked and edited right there.

🦸🏽‍♂️ How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit

As pointed out in this piece from Rahul Vohra, founder of Superhuman, most indicators around product-market fit are lagging indicators. With his company he was looking for leading indicators so they could more accurately predict adoption and retention after launch. His approach is simple: polling your early users with a single question — “How would you feel if you could no longer use Superhuman?”

Too many example methods in the literature on product development orient around asking for user feedback in a positive direction — things like “how much do you like the product?”, “would you recommend to a friend?” Coming at it from the counterpoint of “what if you couldn’t use it” reverses this. It makes the user think about their own experience with the product, versus a disembodied imaginary user that might use it. It brought to mind a piece of the Paul Graham essay “Startup Ideas”, if you go with the wrong measures of product-market fit:

The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your friends with pets, they don’t say “I would never use this.” They say “Yeah, maybe I could see using something like that.” Even when the startup launches, it will sound plausible to a lot of people. They don’t want to use it themselves, at least not right now, but they could imagine other people wanting it. Sum that reaction across the entire population, and you have zero users.

🛤 Stripe’s Fifth Engineering Hub is Remote

Remote work is creeping up in adoption as companies become more culturally okay with the model, and as enabling technology makes it more effective. In the tech scene it’s common for companies to hire remote, to a point (as Benedict Evans joked: “we’re hiring to build a communications platform that makes distance irrelevant. Must be willing to relocate to San Francisco.”) It’s important for the movement for large and influential companies like Stripe to take this on as a core component of their operation. Companies like Zapier and Buffer are famously “100% remote” — a new concept that, if executed well, gives companies an advantage against to compete in markets they might never be able to otherwise.

🛰 Downlink

A neat Mac app that puts real-time satellite imagery on your desktop background. Every 20 minutes you can have the latest picture of the Earth.

🏋🏽‍♀️ Finding the Point of Human Leverage

Automation is penetrating every industry, but still heavily reliant on human behavior and feedback to make it effective. In this piece, Benedict Evans talks about identifying the point in a workflow where the optimum point of leverage sits for human interaction:

This means that a lot of the system design is around finding the right points of leverage to apply people to an automated system. Do you capture activity that’s already happening? Google began by using the links that already existed. Do you have to stimulate activity in order to capture the value within it? Facebook had to create behaviors before it could use them. Can you apply your own people to some point of extreme leverage? This is Apple Music’s approach, with manually curated playlists matched automatically to tens of millions of users. Or do you have to pay people to do ‘all’ of it?

🎓 Lunch with Alan Kay: How to Become Educated Enough to Invent the Future

This is a great account of an extended conversation with computer scientist Alan Kay. It’s amazing how certain brains can be on such a higher level than the rest of us.

For the few computer idealists among us, we are so lucky to have the legacy left to us by Vannevar Bush, J.C.R. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Perlis, John McCarthy, Edsger Dijkstra, John Backus, Ivan Sutherland, and Alan Kay. And those are just some of the names I personally know – I am now ashamed I don’t know more of our history. It’s hard to imagine now because they were so effective, but so much of our world’s computing prosperity today is due to these people. They imagined the computer as a personal device, a communications device, a device to lift off the burden of tedious mental tabulations. Douglas Engelbart imagined a tool that would aid humanity in dealing with the increasingly-complex problems it faces around the world. We’ve only seem a glimpse of that vision, but we need it now more than ever.

So practically, what does this mean for me? Alan also said at lunch that one problem young people make is “having goals.” It’s too early to have goals that “consume one’s horizons,” because young people don’t even know what they don’t know. I think this kind of epistemic modesty is a great idea. I can probably benefit from shifting the focus from my overly-specific goals to “more meta” goals, such as becoming “educated” in a broader sense than I previously thought was possible. The more perspectives I can acquire, the better I’ll be at not fooling myself, and the more I’ll be able to appreciate the richness of the world.

🏀 Kirk Goldsberry and His NBA Maps

Kirk Goldsberry’s new book Sprawlball looks fascinating, covering his work on basketball analytics and his famous hexbinned shot charts showing how the game has changed in recent years. But most folks that have followed his ESPN career probably don’t know about his background in geography and mapmaking:

At its heart, “SprawlBall” is a book of maps. It’s a geography book.

During his junior year at Penn State, Goldsberry took an introduction to cartography class on little more than a whim. “I remember the census data and this software [Graphic Information Systems] that basically links databases to maps,” he said. It was this perfect balance of art and science, and I devoted the next 15 years of my life to it.”

He switched his major, got a cartography degree and then moved to Washington to make flood maps for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. After a stint working for a software mapping company in Maine, Goldsberry got his master’s and PhD at UC Santa Barbara, focused on the intersection of computer graphics data visualization and cartography.

📖 Gene Wolfe Turned Science Fiction Into High Art

Wolfe’s work, particularly his Book of the New Sun “tetralogy”, is some of my favorite fiction. He just passed away a couple weeks ago, and this is a great piece on his life leading up to becoming one of the most influential American writers. I recommend it to everyone I know interested in sci-fi. Even reading this made me want to dig up The Shadow of the Torturer and start reading it for a third time:

The language of the book is rich, strange, beautiful, and often literally incomprehensible. New Sun is presented as “posthistory”—a historical document from the future. It’s been translated, from a language that does not yet exist, by a scholar with the initials G.W., who writes a brief appendix at the end of each volume. Because so many of the concepts Severian writes about have no modern equivalents, G.W. says, he’s substituted “their closest twentieth-century equivalents” in English words. The book is thus full of fabulously esoteric and obscure words that few readers will recognize as English—fuligin, peltast, oubliette, chatelaine, cenobite. But these words are only approximations of other far-future words that even G.W. claims not to fully understand. “Metal,” he says, “is usually, but not always, employed to designate a substance of the sort the word suggests to contemporary minds.” Time travel, extreme ambiguity, and a kind of poststructuralist conception of language are thus all implied by the book’s very existence.

📺 Zoom, Zoom, Zoom! The Exclusive Inside Story Of The New Billionaire Behind Tech’s Hottest IPO

Zoom was in the news a lot lately, not only for its IPO, but also the impressive business they’ve put together since founding in 2011. It’s a great example of how you can build an extremely viable and healthy business in a crowded space with a focus on solid product execution and customer satisfaction. This profile of founder Eric Yuan goes into the core culture of the business and the grit that made the success possible.

🗺 A Look Inside The GIS World With Anthony Quartararo, CEO Of Spatial Networks

The folks over at FullStackTalent just published this Q&A with Tony in a series on business leaders of the Tampa Bay area. It gives some good insight into how we work, where we’ve come from, and what we do every day. There’s even a piece about our internal “GeoTrivia”, where my brain full of useless geographical information can actually get used:

Matt: What’s your favorite geography fun fact?

Tony: Our VP of Product, Coleman McCormick, is the longest-reigning champion of GeoTrivia, a competition we do every Friday. We just all give up because he [laughter], you find some obscure thing, like what country has the longest coastline in Africa, and within seconds, he’s got the answer. He’s not cheating, he just knows his stuff! We made a trophy, and we called it the McCormick Cup.

All that time staring at maps is finally useful!

🏃🏻‍♂️ On the Go Map

Found via Tom MacWright, a slick and simple tool for doing run route planning built on modern web tech. It uses basic routing APIs and distance calculation to help plan out runs, which is especially cool in new places. I used it in San Diego this past week to estimate a couple distances I did. It also has a cool sharing feature to save and link to routes.

🔮 As We May Think

I mentioned scientist Vannevar Bush here a few days back. This is a piece he wrote for The Atlantic in 1945, looking forward at how machines and technology could become enhancers of human thinking. So many prescient segments foreshadowing current computer technology:

One can now picture a future investigator in his laboratory. His hands are free, and he is not anchored. As he moves about and observes, he photographs and comments. Time is automatically recorded to tie the two records together. If he goes into the field, he may be connected by radio to his recorder. As he ponders over his notes in the evening, he again talks his comments into the record. His typed record, as well as his photographs, may both be in miniature, so that he projects them for examination.

👨🏽‍💻 Best Practices for Managing Remote Teams

I thought this was an excellent rundown of remote work, who is suited for it, how to manage it, and the psychology of this new method of teamwork.

Let’s first cover values. Remote work is founded on specific core principles that govern this distinct way of operating which tend to be organization agnostic. They are the underlying foundation which enables us to believe that this approach is indeed better, more optimal, and thus the way we should live:

• Output > Input
• Autonomy > Administration
• Flexibility > Rigidity

These values do not just govern individuals, but also the way that companies operate and how processes are formed. And like almost anything in life, although they sound resoundingly positive, they have potential pitfalls if not administered with care.

I found nearly all of this very accurate to my perception of remote work, at least from the standpoint of someone who is not remote, but manages and works with many that are. I’m highly supportive of hiring remote. With our team, we’ve gotten better in many ways by becoming more remote. And another (perhaps counterintuitive) observation: the more remote people you hire, the better the whole company gets and managing it.

🧠 Your Brain Needs 1.5 MB of Storage to Master Your Native Language

“It may seem surprising but, in terms of digital media storage, our knowledge of language almost fits compactly on a floppy disk,” the authors wrote in the study. In this case, that would be a floppy disk that holds about 1.5 megabytes of information, or the equivalent of about a minute-long song as an Mp3 file. [3D Images: Exploring the Human Brain] The researchers estimate that in the best-case scenario, in a single day, an adult remembers 1,000 to 2,000 bits of their native language. In the worst-case scenario, we remember around 120 bits per day.

🗺 Yet Another Blender Hillshade Tutorial

My friend and co-worker Joe Larson has been doing some cool experiments with Blender for generating hillshades, jumping off of work from Andy Woodruff, Daniel Huffman, and Scott Reinhard. I’ve seen a few different hillshade / topo composites that look super cool.

📜 10 Principles to Live an Antifragile Life

Nassim Taleb’s concept of “antifragility is a fascinating philosophical framework; one which I’ve linked to and mentioned here before. This Farnam Street post summarizes 10 thinking concepts to help orient your own life and decision making toward antifragility:

In short, stop optimizing for today or tomorrow and start playing the long game. That means being less efficient in the short term but more effective in the long term. It’s easy to optimize for today, simply spend more money than you make or eat food that’s food designed in a lab to make you eat more and more. But if you play the long game you stop optimizing and start thinking ahead to the second order consequences of your decisions.

🦠 T is for T Cell

After reading The Breakthrough, I’ve been doing more reading on immunotherapy, how it works, and what the latest science looks like. Another book in my to-read list is An Elegant Defense, a deeper study of how the immune system works. The human defensive system of white blood cells is a truly incredible evolutionary machine — a beautiful and phenomenally complex version of antifragility.

🧬 Engineering Proteins in the Cloud with Python

This stuff is crazy. Using modern compute, data science, and gene sequencing, you can now design proteins from your laptop:

Amazingly, we’re pretty close to being able to create any protein we want from the comfort of our jupyter notebooks, thanks to developments in genomics, synthetic biology, and most recently, cloud labs. In this article I’ll develop Python code that will take me from an idea for a protein all the way to expression of the protein in a bacterial cell, all without touching a pipette or talking to a human. The total cost will only be a few hundred dollars! Using Vijay Pande from A16Z’s terminology, this is Bio 2.0.

👩🏽‍💻 Spatial Networks Named a “Top Place to Work in Tampa Bay”

This is a fun one. I’ve been at Spatial Networks almost 10 years now. When I joined we were maybe 10 or 12 people, now we’re about 60 and still going up. It’s exciting to see the hard work paying off and validated — but like I say to our team all the time: it feels like we’re just getting started.

⛈ Hurricane Season 2017: A Coordinated Reconnaissance Effort

The NSF StEER program has been using Fulcrum Community for a couple of years now, ever since Hurricane Harvey landed on the Texas coast, followed by Irma and Maria later that fall. They’ve built a neat program on top of our platform that lets them respond quickly with volunteers on the ground conducting structure assessments post-disaster:

The large, geographically distributed effort required the development of unified data standards and digital workflows to enable the swift collection and curation of perishable data in DesignSafe. Auburn’s David Roueche, the team’s Data Standards Lead, was especially enthusiastic about the team’s customized Fulcrum mobile smartphone applications to support standardized assessments of continental U.S. and Caribbean construction typologies, as well as observations of hazard intensity and geotechnical impacts.

It worked so well that the team transitioned their efforts into a pro-bono Fulcrum Community site that supports crowdsourced damage assessments from the public at large with web-based geospatial visualization in real time. This feature enabled coordination with teams from NIST, FEMA, and ASCE/SEI. Dedicated data librarians at each regional node executed a rigorous QA/QC process on the backside of the Fulcrum database, led by Roueche.

🧘🏻‍♂️ The Surprising Power of the Long Game

Ever since my health issues in 2017, the value of the little things has become much more apparent. I came out of that with a renewed interest in investing in mental and physical health for the future. Reading about, thinking about, and practicing meditation have really helped to put the things that matter in perspective when I consider consciously how I spend my time. This piece is a simple reminder of the comparative value of the “long game”.

🎧 AiriPods

In this piece analyst Horace Dediu calls AirPods Apple’s “new iPod”, drawing similarities to the cultural adoption patterns.

The Apple Watch is now bigger than the iPod ever was. As the most popular watch of all time, it’s clear that the watch is a new market success story. However it isn’t a cultural success. It has the ability to signal its presence and to give the wearer a degree of individuality through material and band choice but it is too discreet. It conforms to norms of watch wearing and it is too easy to miss under a sleeve or in a pocket.

Not so for AirPods. These things look extremely different. Always white, always in view, pointed and sharp. You can’t miss someone wearing AirPods. They practically scream their presence.

I still maintain this is their best product in years. I hope it becomes a new platform for voice interfaces, once they’re reliable enough.

👨🏽‍💻 Why Naval Ravikant Thinks Remote Work is the Future

Anyone that works in a successful company with a large distributed staff can attest to remote-first being the future for knowledge work organizations. The more we expand our remote team at our company, the better we all get at realizing all of its benefits. It seems like an inevitability to me that there’ll be a tipping point where all new tech companies begin as remote-centric groups. Naval, the founder of AngelList (which is a key player in recruiting and hiring infrastructure for startups):

“We’re going to see an era of everyone employing remote tech workers, and it’s not too far away. In fact, now’s the time to prepare for it. But I think in the meantime, the companies that are going to do the best job at it are the ones that are remote companies or that have divisions internally that are remote. It’s going to be done through lengthy trials. It’s going to be done through new forms of evaluating whether someone can work remotely effectively.”

🚙 Twelve Concepts in Autonomous Mobility

Jan Chipchase from Studio D posted these fun, creative, realistic, and sometimes scary speculations on what sorts of behavioral side effects could play out with the proliferation of autonomous vehicles. See also the follow on 15 more concepts.

The practice of what we currently call parking will obviously change when your vehicle is able to park and drive itself. Think of your vehicle autonomously cruising the neighbourhood to be washed, pick-up groceries and recharge its batteries whilst you’re off having lunch. What is the optimal elasticity of your autonomous vehicle to you? What are the kinds of neighbhourhoods it likes to drive around in when you’re not using it? This is an especially pertinent question, when a vehicle is considered a sensing platform — the technology to autonomously negotiate the city can collect rich data for other uses.

🎧 Apple Releasing New AirPods

While the batch of feature enhancements isn’t mind-blowing, I’m glad to see Apple continuing to evolve these. AirPods are the best product they’ve released since the iPhone. I use mine for hours every single day — far more than I ever used any previous headphones. I recently got one of these Qi wireless chargers for my office, so I’ll be glad to have the inductive charging for the AirPods, too. Of course the extra battery life will be a huge plus.

🧠 A Latticework of Mental Models

This is an excellent archive on Farnam Street with background on 109 different mental models — first principles, Occam’s Razor, probabalistic thinking, and many more. So much great reading material here to study different modes of thinking. Like writer Shane Parrish puts it, this latticework helps you “think better”:

The quality of our thinking is proportional to the models in our head and their usefulness in the situation at hand. The more models you have—the bigger your toolbox—the more likely you are to have the right models to see reality. It turns out that when it comes to improving your ability to make decisions. Variety matters.

Most of us, however, are specialists. Instead of a latticework of mental models, we have a few from our discipline. Each specialist sees something different. By default, a typical Engineer will think in systems. A psychologist will think in terms of incentives. A biologist will think in terms of evolution. By putting these disciplines together in our head, we can walk around a problem in a three dimensional way. If we’re only looking at the problem one way, we’ve got a blind spot. And blind spots can kill you.

💾 Git History

A neat tool for visually browsing git commit history. Scrolling through commits does a nice animation to show you graphically what’s changing from step to step. Here’s an example with browserify.

✏️ Notion Pages

Over the last week I’ve been messing around with Notion, a productivity app that seemingly can do everything — a combination personal database, word processor, spreadsheet, notes app, and todo list. I’m trying it out for note taking and writing (mostly), but it’s got some potential to be a personal wiki, an idea which has always intrigued me but never felt worthwhile to try to set up and maintain. This site has a bunch of templates for Notion to help get started for different use cases. Just browsing it shows the diversity of things you can use it for.

💻 Open Sourcing Windows Calculator

Seems silly, but this kind of thing is great for the open source movement. There’s still an enormous amount of tech out there built at big companies that creates little competitive or legal risk by being open. Non-core tools and libraries (meaning not core to the business differentiation) are perfect candidates to be open to the community. Check it on GitHub.

📊 The Metrics Every SaaS Company Should Be Tracking

An Inside Intercom interview with investor David Skok, the king of SaaS metric measurement. His blog has some of the best reference material for measuring your SaaS performance on the things that matter. This deck goes through many of the most important figures and techniques like CAC:LTV, negative churn, and cohort analysis.

🎮 Shockolate — System Shock Open Source

A cross-platform port of one of the all-time great PC games, System Shock¹. I don’t play many games anymore, but when I get the itch, I only seem to be attracted to the classics.

🖥 When to Build and When to Buy: The Lure of Building Software

This was one of my favorite reads this week, on the topic of “build vs. buy” in IT organizations. In SaaS, this is one of the most common conversations you run into, particularly with medium to large sized companies. With large enterprises the lure of building their “own IP” is so attractive so frequently (because they have some resources), yet most of the time they have no real clue what they’re convincing themselves to do. Building something great that truly solves a problem and gets better over time is enormously expensive and tiring. If you’re a services or consulting company focused on that type of revenue, trying to maintain the investment over the long term in your own software platforms is almost always a mistake. Even most companies who do nothing but make software fail.

Running the things you built is even more expensive than building them. You may understand the cost to build a product, but you almost certainly haven’t budgeted enough to support it in the future. Software products don’t keep running on their own and will need to be supported, improved, patched and ported to new technology in the future. If you really want to build, plan your ‘run’ costs carefully. Expect it to be at least twice the figure in your head, and add n (where n is a very large integer indeed).

👩🏽‍💻 7 Step Onboarding Process for New Employees

I thought this was a good list with helpful reminders on how to plan for new employee onboarding. Recruiting and hiring new people is so much work and so stressful that it’s easy to fall into the trap of considering it “done” once the offer letter is out and signed. The reality is you haven’t even started yet. I really liked the idea of helping your new hire get excited about the new gig through rallying the rest of the team:

I always ask my current team to each send a personal email and tell the new hire how excited each of them is to work with the new employee. Getting a rush of emails from your new team gives you a huge confidence and motivational boost. It’s also a quick way to build bonds between the team and the new employee. The stronger the bonds are and the more excitement there is about the new role, the more likely it is that the new hire joins your team.\

📈 re:Work OKRs

A nice overview guide on how to use OKRs (objectives and key results) for goal-setting.

🔌 Announcing 1.1.1.1: Privacy-First DNS

This is an old announcement, but new to me. CloudFlare now hosts privacy-centric DNS at 1.1.1.1, available to all:

We talked to the APNIC team about how we wanted to create a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system. They thought it was a laudable goal. We offered Cloudflare’s network to receive and study the garbage traffic in exchange for being able to offer a DNS resolver on the memorable IPs. And, with that, 1.1.1.1 was born.

🛰 Opportunity is No More

The Mars rover Opportunity is now out of commission. This Twitter thread from Jacob Margolis goes through a timeline of what happened to the rover. It first landed and began exploring the Martian surface in 2004. The system exceeeded its intended planned operational lifespan by “14 years and 46 days”. An incredible feat of engineering.

🏛 Millennial Socialism

I don’t post much about politics here, preferring to keep most of that to myself. I did find this piece an interesting perspective on the rise of a particular flavor of socialist-oriented ideology, and the too-common notion that so much should be guided, directed, or outright owned by government. On the risk of regulatory capture vs the value of the market:

Bureaucracy at any level provides opportunities for special interests to capture influence. The purest delegation of power is to individuals in a free market.

👨🏽‍💻 Okta Businesses @ Work 2019

Interesting data here in Okta’s annual report. It’s clear that the way customer’s buy SaaS is very different than the “single-vendor” purchasing preferences from years past. SaaS allows businesses to buy and integrate the best-fit tools for any jobs:

We also looked at whether companies who invest in the Office 365 suite — the top app in our network — end up committing to a Microsoft-only environment, and the answer was clearly “no.” We found that 76% of Okta’s Office 365 customers have one or more apps that are duplicative of apps offered by Microsoft. Over 28% are chatting on Slack. Nearly 24% are connecting with their colleagues on Zoom. And over 28% of Okta’s Office 365 customers are “double bundling” themselves, subscribing to G Suite as well.

28% of customers have both Office 365 and G Suite. That’s a high number for an area that many consider zero-sum competition.

⚾️ The Most Unhittable Arm in the Minors

The Rays picked up Colin Poche in the Steven Souza, Jr. trade with the Diamondbacks last season. Sounds like he’s making some waves in the farm system:

The most unhittable arm in the minors is Colin Poche. Last year, he led the minor leagues in strikeout rate. This year, he again leads the minor leagues in strikeout rate, having increased his own strikeout rate by a dozen points despite going up against much stiffer competition. When Poche pitched in High-A last year, he struck out 37% of the hitters. In Double-A this year, he struck out 60% of the hitters. In Triple-A this year, he’s struck out 50% of the hitters. All year long, over 41.1 innings, he’s allowed just three runs. He’s allowed an OBP of .185, and he’s allowed a slugging percentage of .184. Colin Poche is turning in one of the most unbelievable performances you might ever see.

🌊 Florida State Parks After Hurricane Michael

The St. Joseph’s Peninsula is special to our family, having gone camping, sailing, and fishing their growing up. The hurricane storm surge cut right through the island north of the boat launch area. I remember walking from the campground down to the marina to go fishing. Now you’d have to swim to get between them.

🛣 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.

👨🏽‍🚒 Santa Barbara County Evac with Fulcrum Community

Our friends over at the Santa Barbara County Sheriff have been using a deployment of Fulcrum Community over the last month to log and track evacuations for flooding and debris flow risk throughout the county. They’ve deployed over 100 volunteers so far to go door-to-door and help residents evacuate safely. In their initial pilot they visited 1,500 residents. With this platform the County can monitor progress in real-time and maximize their resources to the areas that need the most attention.

“This app not only tremendously increase the accountability of our door-to-door notifications but also gave us a real time tracking on the progress of our teams. We believe it also reduced the time it has historically taken to complete such evacuation notices.”

This is exactly what we’re building Community to do: to help enable groups to collaborate and share field information rapidly for coordination, publish information to the public, and gather quantities of data through citizens and volunteers they couldn’t get on their own.

☁️ USGS 3DEP LiDAR Point Clouds Dataset

From Howard Butler is this amazing public dataset of LiDAR data from the USGS 3D Elevation Program. There’s an interactive version here where you can browse what’s available. Using this WebGL-based viewer you can even pan and zoom around in the point clouds. More info here in the open on GitHub.

🏢 US Building Footprints

Microsoft published this dataset of computer-generated building footprints, 125 million in all. Pretty incredible considering how much labor it’d take to produce with manual digitizing.

🇨🇳 195-Gigapixel Photo of Shanghai

Shot from the Oriental Pearl Tower, the picture shows enormous levels of detail composited from 8,700 source photos. Imagine this capability available commercially from microsatellite platforms. Seems like an inevitability.

🏕 How Basecamp Runs its Business

I, like many, have admired Basecamp for a long time in how they run things, particularly Ryan Singer’s work on product design. This talk largely talks about how they build product and work as an organized team.

📄 Docusaurus

This is an open source framework for building documentation sites, built with React. We’re currently looking at this for revamping some of our docs and it looks great. We’ll be able to build the docs locally and deploy with GitHub Pages like always, but it’ll replace the cumbersome stuff we’ve currently got in Jekyll (which is also great, but requires a lot of legwork for documentation sites).

📱 CES 2019: A Show Report

This year’s excellent report from the show floor from Steven Sinofsky. It’s extensive and covers the products a-to-z, breaking down the trends by category. I’d also recommend the companion podcast conversation between Sinofsky and Benedict Evans.

🗺 Satellite Image Guide for Journalists and Media

A helpful guide with tips and factoids on satellite imagery. Includes a primer on the various sensor platforms, differences in resolution, color correction, infrared, and more. There are also a ton of reference links for data and other things.

📌 MacStories Shortcuts Archive

MacStories’ Federico Viticci is the undisputed king of Shortcuts on iOS. As I’ve spent more time with the iPad as a primary computing device, Shortcuts has become an essential way to create the automations that make repeated tasks easier.

🛰 Buildings from Imagery with RoboSat

This excellent guide shows how to combine take imagery from OpenAerialMap and buildings from OpenStreetMap, and combine to train a model for automated feature extraction. It uses an open source tool from Mapbox called RoboSat combined to compare a GeoTIFF from OAM with a PBF extracts from OSM. Very cool to have a generalized tool for doing this with open data.

🔐 The State of Software Security in 2019

An excellent roundup (with tons of ancillary linked sources) on the state of various parts of computer security, from programming, to browsers, to social engineering.

🌍 The Equal Earth Map

From Tom Patterson, the Equal Earth map uses the equal earth projection to show countries with their true relative sizes. No more ginormous Russia or Africa-sized Greenland.

🗺 How We Get Data Collected in the Field Ready for Use

My colleagues Bill Dollins and Todd Pollard (the core of our data team), wrote this post detailing how we go from original ground-based data collection in Fulcrum through a data processing pipeline to deliver product to customers. A combination of PostGIS, Python tools, FME, Amazon RDS, and other custom QA tools get us from raw content to finished, analyst-ready GEOINT products.

🔥 Mapping the Camp Fire with Drones

The 518 coordinated flights operation, by 16 Northern California emergency responder agencies, is one of the biggest drone response to a disaster scene in the nation’s history. The 16 UAV teams were led by Alameda County Sheriff’s Office. Stockton Police, Contra Cost County Sheriff’s Office & Menlo Park Fire Protection District had the most team members present, with Union City Police, Hayward Police and Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Office providing units as well. San Francisco Police oversaw airspace mitigation. In addition to the mapping flights, over 160 full 360-degrees and interactive panoramas were created with the help of Hangar, as well as geo-referenced video was shot along major roads in Paradise through Survae.

An impressive effort by response agencies in California to respond to this tragic disaster and assess the damage.

🌏 Earth is Missing a Huge Part of its Crust

An article on the Great Unconformity in the geologic record and its potential cause:

The Grand Canyon is a gigantic geological library, with rocky layers that tell much of the story of Earth’s history. Curiously though, a sizeable layer representing anywhere from 250 million years to 1.2 billion years is missing.

The likely culprit was a theoretical planetwide glaciated period known as the “Snowball Earth”.

🎓 Mastery Learning and Creative Tasks

Khan Academy’s Andy Matuschak on tasks that require “depth of knowledge” versus those that have higher “transfer demand.” Both can be considered “difficult” in a sense, but teaching techniques to build knowledge need different approaches:

One big implication of mastery learning is that students should have as much opportunity to practice a skill as they’d like. Unlike a class that moves at a fixed pace, a struggling student should always be able to revisit prerequisites, read an alternative explanation, and try some new challenges. These systems usually consider a student to have finally “mastered” a skill when they can consistently answer related problems over an extended period of time.

🇧🇮 Burundi Moving its Capital

It’s not every day you see the map changing:

Burundi is moving its capital from the shores of Lake Tanganyika and deep into the nation’s central highlands.

Authorities announced they would change the political capital from Bujumbura to Gitega, which is located over 100 kilometers (62 miles) to the east.

🛰 SRTM Tile Grabber

This is an awesome tool from Derek Watkins. It makes downloading SRTM data dead simple.

This week is some reading, but some simple admiring. I wanted to highlight the work of two cartographers I follow that is fantastic. We live in a great world that people can still make a living producing such work.

🏝 Hundred Largest Islands

A beautiful, artistic work from David Garcia sorting each island’s landmass by area. My favorite map projects aren’t just eye candy, they also teach you something. I spent half an hour on Wikipedia reading about a few of these islands.

🛩 On Airline Mapping

This is a project from cartographer Daniel Huffman using a combination of open datasets, projection twisting, meticulous design, and Illustrator skills. The finished product is really amazing. The attention to detail is stunning. I love the detailed step-by-step walkthrough on how it came together.

🗺 Project Linework

A library of vector graphics for cartographic design. Each one has a unique style and could be used in other products, since it’s public domain (awesome). This is another cool thing from Daniel Huffman.

Both of these guys do amazing work. Find more on their websites:

• David Garcia — Website, Patreon
• Daniel Huffman — Website, Patreon

🎙 Computing is Everywhere

A great interview with Bret Victor on the Track Changes podcast. His work has always been an inspiration for how to think about both creating things and teaching people.

📊 Git Your SQL Together

This post from Caitlin Hudon is a great reminder for anyone that works with data. Combining git versioning with your SQL is super helpful for archiving and searching previous analysis queries.

1. You will always need that query again
2. Queries are living artifacts that change over time
3. If it’s useful to you, it’s useful to others (and vice versa)

🎮 The Brilliance of Video Game Maps

I love the map and exploration of Skyrim. As an artistic achievement, the map there isn’t as eye-catching as Grand Theft Auto, the Ultima games, or even previous Elder Scrolls games. But I love the unlabeled overhead picture of the world that forces you to get out and walk to find your way.

The absolute piece de resistance of a game world map has to be the continent of Tamriel for The Elder Scrolls. People have tried to wrangle Skyrim’s map into submission with mods and interactive versions of it, but it fundamentally is a map that doesn’t explain itself to you or aspire to be particularly helpful. The world is what it is - now you have to go and find your way across it.

🔩 The Next Feature Fallacy

The vast majority of features won’t bend the curve. These metrics are terrible, and the Next Feature Fallacy strikes because it’s easy to build new features that don’t target the important parts.

This certainly rings true for me from experience over the years. It turns out that a single feature itself is far from the main problem halting people part way into on-boarding with a product. This falls into the category of focusing on what we know how to do already, rather than what’s important to do. What’s important isn’t necessarily something you’ll know how to approach without hard research and effort.

🧘🏻‍♂️ Why I’m Into Meditation

I’ve been giving Headspace a try to get into a meditation routine over the last couple months. So many people I respect speak highly of building a meditation practice, and it’s pretty easy to do. Focusing for 10 minutes on a single mundane thing (your breathing) is shockingly hard to do. About 40 or 50 10-minute sessions in, I’m finally getting more comfortable with it. I always feel reenergized after.

🚂 Reagan Ray’s Railway Logos

These are all fantastic. I even see my favorite hat represented in there.

🇹🇿 Exploring Zanzibar with Mapillary

A fun travel post from the Mapillary team after FOSS4G in Dar es Salaam. A drive around Zanzibar collecting images for OpenStreetMap mapping. Also check out part 2 of the journey.

🇸🇬 City of the Future: Singapore

Singapore is an interesting experiment: a benevolent authoritarian government, small population, and limited geography to leverage and nurture. This documentary is a bit of a commercial for their plans for the future. Still some fun ideas that (if successful) other megacities could use to maintain quality of life with population growth.

🏀 How to Watch Basketball

This was a great explainer. I’ve only been seriously watching basketball a couple of years, and I was starting to figure out some of these techniques myself. It’s interesting to see how coaches and professional analysts approach watching a game.

📱iPad Diaries: Typing on the iPad Pro with the Smart Keyboard Folio

I swung through an Apple Store a couple of weeks ago to check out the new hardware. The Smart Keyboard Folio has been hard to imagine the experience with in reviews without handling one. Same with the Pencil. I was particularly impressed with the magnetic hold of the Pencil on the side of the device — it’s darn strong. The current Smart Keyboard has some deficiencies, as pointed out in this article. No instant access to Siri or at least Siri Dictation, no system shortcut keys for things like volume control and playback, and

⛈ In Defense of Climate Optimism

Quillette always has good stuff. I’m on the side of the author here in general with respect to climate change: it’s a problem to be understood and responded to, but the loudest of the proponents of doing something about it propose massive, sweeping, unrealistic changes “or else.” This author and Steven Pinker (quoted in the piece) have the right idea. Take a long, optimistic view and look to history for similar circumstances, and take measured action over time.

🗺 Places and Their Names: Observations from 11 Million Place Names

I love analyses like this. Take the open GeoNames database, load it into Postgres, ask questions on patterns using SQL, visualize the distributions.

I wanted to find patterns in the names, so I explored if they started or ended in a certain way or just contained a certain word. With SQL this means that I was using the % wildcard to find prefixes or suffixes. So for instance the following query would return return every word containing the word bad anywhere in the name:

SELECT * FROM geonames WHERE name ILIKE ‘%bad%’

This makes me want to revive my old gazetteer project and crawl around GeoNames again.

⚡️ The US Wind Turbine Database

Ben Hoen from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab gave a lightning talk at Geo2050 about this project, a map and database of the operational wind generation capacity in the US. The map currently reports the country producing around 90 gigawatts of wind power. They also publish the raw dataset for download.

🧬 Interview with Bruce Sterling

One of my favorite science fiction authors. Talks about his work, industrial design, speculative architecture, and risk models.

💵 The Clash of Economic Ideas

Russ Roberts (of EconTalk) and Lawrence White discuss economists of the last hundred years and the variances in their ideas.

🛒 What is Customer Acquisition Cost?

This is a great overview of the importance of CAC in a SaaS business.

One of the enjoyable things about SaaS is how much you can modify and optimize what you’re doing by measuring various parts of your process, especially in SMB-focused SaaS. Marketing, early-stage sales, late-stage sales, customer success — it’s like a machine with separate stages you can tweak separately to make incremental improvements.

📜 The Legacy of Alexander Hamilton

On the similarities between Hamilton and Edmund Burke:

“There are several significant points of contact between the two thinkers. Both Burke and Hamilton used historical experience as the standard for judging the validity of ideas and policies. They rejected appeals to ahistorical abstraction, disparaging metaphysical and theoretical speculation. Historical circumstances were paramount in their prudential judgment. Consequently, they avoided ideological rigidity in their thinking because they understood that a priori rationalism could not account for the particular circumstances in which statesmen had to navigate the ship of state.”

🚰 Microsoft Flow

I didn’t realize Microsoft had an automation service akin to Zapier or IFTTT. Will have to check this one out and see what it can do with Fulcrum.

🚙 How Self-Driving Cars Could Communicate with You

Interesting work by Ford’s self-driving team on how robotic vehicles could signal intent to pedestrians. You normally think Waymo, Tesla, and Uber with AV tech. But Ford’s investment in Argo and GM with Cruise demonstrates they’re serious.

📲 The iPad Pro is a Computer

Jason Snell’s thoughts on the new iPad Pro release last week:

I love the new design of the iPad Pro models. The flat back with the flat sides, which remind me of the original iPad design and the iPhone 4/5/SE, is a delight. But when you pick one up, the first thing you notice is that the bezels are even all the way around—and they’re almost, but not quite, gone entirely

An improved keyboard case, new revision to the Pencil, reduced bezel width, and Face ID support are all the right updates to make to get me closer to the goal of iPad Pro over laptop. The Folio idea for the case sounds fantastic, and with the Pencil, it’s amazing how innovative it can seem to add a small flat segment to keep it from rolling off the table.

💵 We Spent $3.3M Buying Out Investors

Buffer’s Joel Gascoigne with an in-depth overview of how they bought out their Series A investors to reset. Their Open blog series is worth a follow. They openly publish all sorts of insider details on running and growing a startup that are insightful for comparison.

🔮 Forecasting at Uber

The scale of the prediction problem Uber has is wild. This is an intro to a series on methods they use for forecasting demand for their marketplace.

🛰 raster-vision

A neat project from the Azavea team for computer vision applications with satellite imagery.

🎓 600 Free Online Courses

A great list from Quartz compiling a bottomless feed of content for self-teachers.

💻 Learning from Terminals to Design Future User Interfaces

Pieces like this often come off like geeks calling for a return to how it “used to be” — “HyperCard was the peak of dev tools”. But this author makes some excellent points about performance, responsiveness, and control. As a frequent terminal user, there’s a tactility to it that comes from its fast response to input, but it is true that consoles have lagged behind in other ways like media richness and user interface display.

🔐 Quantum Computers and Cryptography

Bruce Schneier:

Quantum computers promise to upend a lot of this. Because of the way they work, they excel at the sorts of computations necessary to reverse these one-way functions. For symmetric cryptography, this isn’t too bad. Grover’s algorithm shows that a quantum computer speeds up these attacks to effectively halve the key length. This would mean that a 256-bit key is as strong against a quantum computer as a 128-bit key is against a conventional computer; both are secure for the foreseeable future.

For public-key cryptography, the results are more dire. Shor’s algorithm can easily break all of the commonly used public-key algorithms based on both factoring and the discrete logarithm problem. Doubling the key length increases the difficulty to break by a factor of eight. That’s not enough of a sustainable edge.

🚦 Products Are Functions

Ryan Singer on the concept of products behaving like mathematical functions; they sit between an input and output, processing one into the other. Having known input and known desired output serves as a mental aid to “solve for” f(x) in the middle.

🎛 Geocomputation with R

I’ve had R on my list for a long time to dig deeper with. A while back I set myself up with RStudio and went through some DataCamp stuff. This online book seems like excellent material in how to apply R to geostatistics.

☎️ Listening to Customers At Scale

Given where we are with Fulcrum in the product lifecycle, this rang very familiar on the struggles with how to listen to customers effectively, who to listen to, and how to absorb or deflect ideas. Once you get past product-market fit, the same tight connection between your customers and product team becomes impossible. Glad to hear we aren’t alone in our struggles here.

📈 Linear Growth Companies

This piece from David Heinemeier Hansson is a good reminder that steady, linear growth is still great performance for a business. Every business puts itself in a different situation, and certainly many are in debt or investment positions that linear growth isn’t good enough for. Even so, consistent growth in the positive direction should always be commended.