Month: July 2019

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Big tech and startup tech tackle sleep

Longform GQ article on “The Business of Sleep” has some perspective:

If you want to isolate a time when the idea of wellness began to dominate our culture, you could do worse than point to the 2008 financial crisis. In a few short months an entire generation felt their grip on the future slip. Jobs became scarce, before scarcely becoming jobs. Zero hours became the new nine to five. Suddenly, nearly everyone needed a side hustle and nearly everyone else needed to be told what one was. Property became a pipe dream. Social media showed them what they didn’t have. Generation Anxious was born.

and

One upshot of the 2008 financial crisis, he says, was that, in the following years, “It wasn’t cool to sleep four hours a night any more, you know? There used to be this whole banker culture, crushing it at work, 100-hour weeks, let’s brag about how little sleep we get. And we started to turn the curve on that. When we started in 2014, our goal was to think about people sleeping better. People resting more. We got people to start thinking about sleep.”

But then you have addictive design from social media and streaming video services, with quotes from Netflix’s CEO like

“When you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night. We’re competing with sleep.”

contrasted with Apple, which built the elegantly designed Bedtime night-and-morning alert feature into iOS, a feature I have used every day since it was released. This makes it

And so, when you are sitting there wondering if you should keep watching or scrolling or simply go to bed, chances are you’re making a choice between the largest companies on earth: Netflix (£127bn value), Amazon (£789bn), YouTube (owned by Google: £583bn), Facebook (£375bn) and Twitter (£21bn) on the one hand and Apple (£789bn) on the other.

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Thiel’s fresh look at nationalism

At the 2019 National Conservatism Conference:

The nationalist view, according to Thiel… asks a simple question: Is it good for America?

A nationalist, Thiel argued, simply asks what Silicon Valley has done to improve the lives of American citizens. Outside of the Bay Area, he said, the answer is not much. Social media may consume more of our lives, but it’s not clear it’s making those lives better.

[The Iraq War] would have sparked the cold calculation of weighing the value of the oil against the cost of the war — a calculation that would have made it clear from the start that the war wasn’t worth it.

But

The problem is that it is all diagnosis and no cure. Thiel challenged important preconceptions but failed to even gesture in the direction of answers.

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How to Build a Car by Adrian Newey

Finished “How To Build A Car: The Autobiography of the World’s Greatest Formula 1 Designer” by Adrian Newey.

The book is a whirlwind tour of an F1 designer’s career + how competitive the sport is, both for the constructors and the drivers. Ultimately, though the years blur into each other and it drags.

The problem is of balance; Newey spends too much time on the actual design and challenges compared to his experience as a senior member of an F1 team. Without curtailing descriptions of his design work, I’d have liked a book-length description of his years either just at Williams or McLaren or Red Bull (the last where he seemed/s happiest), than a tour of his entire career.

Nevertheless, a good one-time read.

Complement the book with this Aug 2018 WIRED longform article on the changes at F1 since the sale of the franchise to Liberty Media.

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Cars as private spaces

In Japan, a survey of people who rented cars revealed that

one out of every eight users rented automobiles for purposes other than transportation.

An overwhelmingly large number of respondents said they slept or rested in vehicles, followed by customers who said they used cars as spots to talk with friends, family and business clients on the phone.

People also rented vehicles to watch TV in, get dressed up for Halloween, practice singing, rapping and English conversation, and even do facial stretches said to reduce the size of their face, NTT found.

A car may be one of the last truly private spaces left.

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Using work apps for the home

A profile of families using email, Slack, Trello, Asana and even Jira the bug-tracking tool to coordinate housework has such examples as:

“We do family meetings every Sunday where we review goals for the week, our to-do list, and activities coming up,” she says. “I track notes for the meeting [in Trello]. I have different sections, goals for the week, a to-do list.” 

And

 it’s not uncommon for one of them to send an email recap, something along the lines of “As per our earlier conversation, we have decided that the children will be enrolled in tennis camp over the summer. Please let me know if you want to follow up on this.”

But also that such tools

might help even out the imbalances in household duties that often arise between partners—especially men and women—by making them more visible. “It tends to be that couples divide this work up in ways that aren’t exactly equitable, and that one person takes on more of that truly invisible work … Something like this might actually be a way for that person to say, ‘Look what I’m doing’

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The moment of creation of Zcash

“Last November, journalist Morgen Peck showed up at her friend Molly Webster’s apartment in Brooklyn, told her to take her battery out of her phone, and began to tell her about The Ceremony, a moment last fall when a group of, well, let’s just call them wizards, came together in an undisclosed location to launch a new currency.”

Among my favourite Radiolab podcast episodes is this one from two years ago about the planning leading up to, and moment of creation of the Zcash cryptocurrency. A complex topic narrated entertainingly. This is high-quality journalism.

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Individualism and Submission

What individualism has bought us is not the end of servitude, but merely the cloaking of masters.

It’s pretty perverse that our culture celebrates individualism and yet condones submission only to inhuman institutions like schools, companies, and governments. It’s a sort of inverse Confucianism – a system where authority can only be exercised by people who deliberately do not engage in one-on-one superior-inferior relationships.

From Servants Without Masters, Harold Lee.

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Apollo and Wonderment

As a child in the 80s, I used to stare at the moon and struggled to grasp the fact that people had landed and walked on it. That people had considered having a serious go at it, and had succeeded.

It is one of the few emotions that remain unchanged to this day, as a grown-ass adult.

In fact the wonder and thrill is greater still, with photos from the Mars rover Curiosity, and the Cassini and Juno and New Horizons missions, and learning about the planetary slingshots used by Voyager 1 and 2 (which sounded like straight-up science fiction).

It makes me believe humanity, even in its current stage of evolution, is capable of most endeavours it can imagine, through science, creativity and organisation, if only it can learn to unite.

This optimism is tempered by E O Wilson’s quote “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology”.

Today I’m spending the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing in conscious enthralment, glad that I can still experience the same feeling I did as a child.

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Autonomous F1 racing

I am reading the autobiography ‘How to build a car’ by the designer Adrian Newey. Quite absorbing and fast-paced, and mid-sized at about 400 pages.

Although it’s common knowledge, I’m only now really grasping how much of a role tech plays in today’s races, compared to the driver, who are the ones idolised.

It made me wonder if autonomous car racing is a thing yet. It’d be the ultimate engineering sport – the existing hardware and software of F1 with the new hardware of cameras/sensors and software of AI.

Turns out there is Roborace, which uses a standardised car and sensors across teams, and so the differentiator is only the algorithms. They’re organising races across Europe and the US this year. And there is F1Tenth, which uses scale cars, where both hardware and software differs between teams.

It’s going to be a while before they even get to Formala E levels of popularity, forget Formula 1, but it’s inevitable, and it’s going to be a lot of fun from an engineering standpoint.

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The East India Company business model

This article I came across on Reddit describes how colonial Britain subsidised its industrialisation:

 The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third)to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, “buying” from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them.

Some of the stolen goods were consumed in Britain, and the rest were re-exported elsewhere. The re-export system allowed Britain to finance a flow of imports from Europe, including strategic materials like iron, tar and timber, which were essential to Britain’s industrialisation. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution depended in large part on this systematic theft from India.

Ingenious. And devastating. The clear incentive was to invest Indian goods into Britain, not the colony. According to the study the article refers to, “Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938” – that is over 17 times the GDP of India and the UK today.