Hello, hope you have an amazing week!
Articles to Read.
There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized yet.
The same is true for investors. It's not enough for a public market investor to predict correctly how a company will do. If a lot of other people make the same prediction, the stock price will already reflect it, and there's no room to make money. The only valuable insights are the ones most other investors don't share.
You see this pattern with startup founders too. You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it. You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know isn't — like writing software for a tiny computer used by a few thousand hobbyists, or starting a site to let people rent airbeds on strangers' floors.
But this pattern isn't universal. In fact, it doesn't hold for most kinds of work. In most kinds of work — to be an administrator, for example — all you need is the first half. All you need is to be right. It's not essential that everyone else be wrong.
There's room for a little novelty in most kinds of work, but in practice there's a fairly sharp distinction between the kinds of work where it's essential to be independent-minded, and the kinds where it's not.
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The book The Effective Manager says you only need 5 to 15 seconds to deliver effective feedback. Here are the 4 steps:
Ask (“Can I give you some feedback?”)
State the behavior (“When you X…”)
State the impact (“…the result is Y.”)
Encourage effective future behavior (“Keep it up!” for positive feedback or “Can you change that?” for negative feedback)
Those steps should be followed whether you’re giving positive or negative feedback.
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In Imagine a world without apps Shira Ovide asks “a wild question: What if we played games, shopped, watched Netflix and read news on our smartphones — without using apps? Our smartphones, like our computers, would instead mostly be gateways to go online through a web browser.”
This question can be extrapolated into a larger question: “What do we want from our technology?”
The power of control by Big-Tech in the app store is but a small example of exploitation of our digital lives. If you don’t control the software, the companies who wrote that software control you. You become a digital prisoner.
What people desire from technology is well documented and can be summed up with a series of buzzwords. The difficulty isn’t knowing what society wants, it is knowing the path to get there.
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How the Self-Esteem Craze Took Over America And why the hype was irresistible.
In 1991, a children’s book called The Lovables in the Kingdom of Self-Esteem was published. Written by Diane Loomans and illustrated by Kim Howard, The Lovables imparts a simple, nurturing message: You, the tiny child reading this book or having this book read to you, are very special.
It seems mawkish now, even by the standards of children’s books, but The Lovables was published as a runaway cultural trend was cresting across North America: the self-esteem craze. If you grew up, or raised a child, during the 1980s or 1990s, you almost certainly remember this sort of material, as well as goofy classroom exercises focusing on how special each individual child was. A certain ethos took hold during this time: It was the job of schools to educate, yes, but also to instill in children a sense of their own specialness and potential.
It wasn’t just schoolkids. During this span, just about everyone, from CEOs to welfare recipients, was told — often by psychologists with serious credentials — that improving their self-esteem could, as The Lovables put it, unlock the gates to more happiness, better performance, and every kind of success imaginable. This was both a personal argument and a political one: The movement, which had its epicenter in California, argued that increasing people’s self-esteem could reduce crime, teen pregnancy, and a host of other social ills — even pollution.
It would be hard to overstate the long-term impact of these claims. The self-esteem craze changed how countless organizations were run, how an entire generation — millenials — was educated, and how that generation went on to perceive itself (quite favorably). As it turned out, the central claim underlying the trend, that there’s a causal relationship between self-esteem and various positive outcomes, was almost certainly inaccurate. But that didn’t matter: For millions of people, this was just too good and satisfying a story to check, and that’s part of the reason the national focus on self-esteem never fully abated. Many people still believe that fostering a sense of self-esteem is just about the most important thing one can do, mental health–wise.
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The Tech Monopolies Go Vertical
Everyone loves to talk about tech monopolies. Their acquisition spree and obvious market power in a world with no distribution cost is likely better discussed in the DOJ recommendation or at the venerable Ben Thompson’s Stratechery. Instead, I want to talk about some good ole fashioned monopolizing. And that’s vertical integration via going down the technology stack into hardware. I want to discuss why now, why does it matter, and how is each of the large platforms positioned.
Moore’s Void
The phrase “Owe the bank 500 dollars, that is your problem. Owe the bank 500 million – that is the bank’s problem.” is something that comes to mind for some of the tech monopolies right now. There is a shifting relationship between the largest software companies in the world and their suppliers, and as the leading software companies have become ever-larger portions of the compute pie, it’s kind of become the problem of the tech companies, and not the semiconductor companies that service them to push forward the natural limits of hardware. Software ate the world so completely that now the large tech companies have to deal with the actual hardware that underlies their stack. Especially as some companies like Intel have fallen behind.
At this point in time, no other companies have ever had such a concentrated share of absolute compute and sells it as a service. Even IBM in its zenith sold PCs and Mainframes (and they still ran a tightly integrated stack!), not units of compute disaggregated like the infrastructure as a service provider. As Moore’s law has broken down and AI compute demand has skyrocketed, this has kind of become a problem at the companies and they are aware. This great video about opensource EDA and tooling problems (if you’re a nerd you’ll enjoy) started with some interesting caveats.
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When Rubber Hits the Road—and Washes Away
A stealthy source of pollution leaves the highway in astonishing amounts and heads to sea, toxic chemicals and all.
Later, the team discovered a shocking amount of rubbery black fragments in their samples. Over three years, as they tested water at 12 stormwater outlets and sediment at 20 sites around the bay, they found much the same. Some 7.2 trillion synthetic particles are washing into San Francisco Bay each year, says Rebecca Sutton, a senior scientist at SFEI and the study lead. “Almost half those stormwater particles, so a really high percentage, were rubbery particles that we think are mostly coming from tires.”
In California, where most commuters cling to their cars, conversations about the environmental impact of automobiles usually involve what spews from tailpipes. Electric vehicles are sold as the solution for car emissions. But SFEI’s work has expanded the debate about the environmental impacts of cars to include tires shedding particles near the sea.
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More to Check Out:
- Extreme summarization of scientific research
- Notation as a Tool of Thought
- A Survival Guide to Medieval Fairy Tales
- Bring back the ease of 90s computing
- Rebuilding Myspace
My Update:
Spent last week in Arizona. Was good to be back for the first time in ~ year.
Running!
Work is really ramping up. We’re hiring across the board. If you’re looking for an engineering or operations position, please reach out. At minimum, would love to help you find the right fit (either with us or elsewhere). Please refer your friends!