Month: March 2020

From this short blog post that made it to Hacker News:

And I do all those things pretty poorly, if you compare the result of each individual thing I might do with the outcome of a specialist.

But as a generalist I have an advantage over a specialist: I will never say “this is not something I do”.

– On Being a Generalist

I’m reminded of Jacob Lund Fisker’s Early Retirement Extreme, which is destined to be a classic for the ages. It describes the Renaissance Man, who has adequate levels of competence across a wide range of everyday skills, and therefore needs to call upon a specialist only in rare, edge-of-probability-curve cases, even though he or she may not be the best in a particular specialisation. He describes it with these elegant charts

From AdGuard, a brief history of ad-blocking. In the article:

A little story to illustrate how powerful and influential a filter maintainer can be. In one of the countries there’s a filter list that’s clearly far more popular than any other local filter. And the maintainer of this filter list has a very peculiar way to deal with websites that show what this developer considers to be bad, shady or malicious ads. Instead of blocking such ads, the developer simply blocks the entire website. And then they send an email to the website owner with an ultimatum: “I blocked your website. You better take down these and these ads if you want to be unblocked”. 

– Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

Extortion for good.

I would love for this to be a whole series of articles, or a well-made documentary. I would pay well to read/see it.

Also: When on the go, I run a DNS sink based adblocker on the iPhone and iPad, which created a VPN for device-wide blocking. I explain this to people who ask me about the VPN icon in the status bar of my screenshots. To which some have commented that they actually like the ads they see, and wish there were more aggressive data collection for better personalisation. It is more than just the odd person who feels this.

The hedge fund billionaire D E Shaw has “applied his fund’s risk-averse, quantitative approach to nearly every aspect of his life”, including his children’s college admissions, deploying “a remarkably elaborate and expensive pattern of philanthropy to seven of the most renowned universities in the country.”

… the Shaw Family Endowment Fund donated $1 million annually to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford and at least $500,000 each to Columbia and Brown. The pattern persisted through 2017, the most recent year for which public filings are available, with a bump in giving to Columbia to $1 million a year in 2016 and 2017. The foundation, which lists Kobliner as president and Shaw as treasurer and secretary, has also contributed $200,000 annually to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2013.

… investing in multiple colleges is a classic asymmetric bet — one with minimal risk and massive potential upside.

– The Wall Street Billionaire and the Ultimate College Hedge

The article as a whole is a look into Shaw’s family staff’s hiring and working, and worth a one-time read. 

Ps: both of Shaw’s college-going kids got into Yale, one of the colleges in the donations list. 

On US political campaigns using text message spam to influence voters:

P2P texting has become much more integrated with other communications channels like direct mail and online promotions, increasing its reach and effectiveness. For instance, I recently responded to a Trump Facebook ad, then filled out a short survey at a Trump site. The next day, I got a text from the campaign asking for a donation. Even though I’m neither a Republican nor a Trump supporter, the campaign had my cell number and was able to match my online identity and/or my email address to it.

A campaign typically starts with a list of cellphone numbers taken from a voter file it leases from the party. The voter file contains voter-provided phone numbers, email addresses, and demographic information on everybody with a recent voting history. My cell number wasn’t likely in the GOP voter file, but the Trump campaign gets millions of additional phone numbers by purchasing them from commercial data vendors like Axciom or i360. Whatever their source, the cell numbers can be queued up and placed into text messages in the P2P texting app, along with some boilerplate text that the sender can customize with their own words. Then they just hit Send and move on to the next phone number.

– Inside the 2020 campaign messaging war that’s pelting our phones with texts

Phone text messaging, unlike email, has had little to no innovation in terms of the user experience. Apple’s, Google’s and major phone manufacturers’ ‘SMS’ apps are rudimentary at best. There is zero spam protection. Android at least lets you change your default messaging, and there exist alternatives that support spam filtering and block lists. iOS doesn’t even let you do that. There is no spam filtering, and blocking only works for regular phone numbers – it doesn’t work at all for the most common spam: from SMS shortcodes. You can uninstall email On your phone but you can’t turn off SMS.

From this short USA Today obituary on Trader Joe’s eponymous founder:

The stores were unique in other ways. His mother-in-law and father-in-law had been academics who enjoyed dining on fresh seafood and quality, yet affordable wines. Trader Joe’s would cater to those with similar, sophisticated tastes who were also on a budget… Trader Joe’s became known for a selective array of premium foods available at low prices. 

– Trader Joe’s founder Joe Coulombe, who started one of America’s favorite grocery stores, dies at 89

The book Class by Paul Fussell, which I finished (re)reading a few days ago, makes the point right up front that good taste has little to do with wealth, and while they may be correlated, they are definitely not causal.

The common misconception means quality is almost always sharply correlated with price, with good quality often out of the reach of most, regardless of what it acutally costs to produce and distribute.

This leaves a large market of exactly the sort Trader Joe’s – and Apple – have focused on.

From A New York Times article about the data company Clearview:

… his daughter, Andrea, walked in. She was on a date with a man Mr. Catsimatidis didn’t recognize… Mr. Catsimatidis then uploaded the picture to a facial recognition app, Clearview AI, on his phone. The start-up behind the app has a database of billions of photos, scraped from sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Within seconds, Mr. Catsimatidis was viewing a collection of photos of the mystery man, along with the web addresses where they appeared: His daughter’s date was a venture capitalist from San Francisco.

– Before Clearview Became a Police Tool, It Was a Secret Plaything of the Rich

In the Industrial Age, we had asymmetry of production as the divide between the haves and the haves-not. In the Financial Age, it was asymmetry of raw capital. In the Internet Age it’s going to be asymmetry of information. You can have little money, no physical assets. But you can punch way, way above your weight with access – legal or illegal – to the right data.

In an interview with the cofounder of the encrypted email service ProtonMail:

…because what is email fundamentally? Email, I would argue is actually the most meaningful passport of the 21st century. In the 20th century, your identity was tied with your passport. That was who you were. That was how you verified to the world who you were. That was how you accessed all the services that the world could offer you. Today, everything’s moving online, and every online service that you sign up for is actually linked to your email. It’s your online passport, and the idea of using your corporate email account doesn’t actually work because that would be like say, your employer is your identity. It’s not true. So that’s why for that reason, you know, that’s not really an option for most people… so Gmail isn’t just, let’s say controlling your data. They’re also controlling your identity in some ways. And you don’t realize that when you set up for it. But that’s what is happening. And that’s why we feel it’s very important to have an independent identity.

This is true even if you don’t actually use email to communicate much. All your friends might be on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or Reddit or even Facebook Messenger or iMessage or Slack – they are all tied to email-based identities.

PS: in countries like India, that passport is mostly your mobile number.

A recent Hacker News question was one I have thought about occasionally over the years: what are good ways to capture institutional knowledge?

The comments list several tools and practices, mostly for technical teams. But this one stood out:

I think the solution is more cultural than technical. When a company develops a culture that fosters the creation of technical documentation, and encourages employees to document absolutely everything (both the how and the why), then institutional knowledge is simply a byproduct. When a company focuses much more on shipping products and de-values everything from architecture documentation to API documentation, then institutional knowledge suffers.

This happens all too often in startups that are in go-go mode all the time. Documentation, knowledge capture, instituting processes are dismissed as over-intellectualising at the cost of execution speed. As throwaway work because ‘things change’.

But it is in fact startups that would most benefit from capturing knowledge because the costs of repeating mistakes, or reinventing the wheel as a result of forgotten knowledge are higher than in mature companies.

Neurosurgeon Dr. William Penfield, after a lifetime of mapping brains, posited that the mind is separate from the brain:

His third line of reasoning was the following: He would ask people to move their arm during the surgery. So he’d be playing around with their brain. And he’d say. “Whenever you want to, move your right arm.” The person would move their arm. 

And, once in a while, he’d stimulate the part of the brain that made the arm move. And they moved their arm also when he did that. And then he would ask them, “I want you to tell me when I’m making your arm move and when you’re moving your arm without me making you do it. Tell me if you can tell the difference.” And the patients could always tell the difference. 

The patients always knew that when he stimulated their arm, it was him doing it, not them. And when they stimulated their arm, they were doing it, not him. So Penfield said, he couldn’t stimulate the will. He could never trick the patients into thinking it was them doing it. He said, the patients always retained a correct sense of agency. They always know if they did it or if he did it. 

So he said the will was not something he could stimulate, meaning it was not material.

The MIT Technology Review discusses how our existing social networks aren’t exactly fostering conversations between our personal networks

“Social media treats everyone—a friend, a family member, an acquaintance—the same,” says Courtney Walsh, a lecturer in human development and family sciences at the University of Texas who consulted for Cocoon. “I would argue that what we are doing is impersonal on social media.”

– “Why private micro-networks could be the future of how we connect”

I wrote about this nine years ago when the late Google+ launched. That blog post posited that it was hard, if not impossible, to model your personal life into Google+ Circles.

And then it also strikes me. That I can only recollect a single group for each phase should tell me something – I really _belonged_ to only one group at a time. It tells me that groups like ‘work’ and ‘family’ and ‘cousins’ and daily commute gang’ and such are really just only contexts for interactions. You can force-create + circles for them, but they’re really freeform amoeba-like shapes, and will change. Not even snap, just thin out at points and separate into other blobs without much emotional ado. Attempts to share ‘stuff’ with them on services like + will peter out in weeks. Or days.

– Doing life in software is hard

Related reading: “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet”.