Month: January 2021

Categories
Discovery and Curation

A short thread on an alternative to big tech’s control over online conversation

Categories
The Next Computer

Mid-2012 unibody Macbook Pro SSD, the three-year update

In the middle of 2017, I replaced the spinning hard disk drive in a relative’s unibody pre-retina Macbook Pro with a 250GB SSD. It gave the machine a new lease of life. The machine had a 2.5GHz i5 processor and 8 GB RAM, plenty for back then – the drive was the bottleneck.

HDD to SSD: new lease of life for 2012 Macbook Pro

As luck would have it, I inherited this machine a couple of years ago and replaced the battery. It’s still plenty fast, and I hook it up to a 2560x1440px 25″ monitor and use it as my main Mac.

I decided to upgrade the 250 GB SSD when I began to run out of space – I store all my documents, email and music locally even if they are synced online. So I bought a 1TB Crucial SSD that came highly recommended. I followed my own guide from 2017; it only took a couple of hours because I had Time Machine backups handy. I also spent ten minutes of that time gently cleaning away accumulated dust from the internal fan.

In parallel, I bought a case for the old 250GB SSD, which I now use as a USB 3.0 external disk both with this Mac and my iPad Pro. It’s super-light and has no moving parts and I have no concerns tossing it into a bag.

Now I’m considering doubling the RAM. The model officially supports the current installed 8GB, but it’s been commonly upgraded to 16GB.

“How to Install 16GB RAM Upgrade for MacBook Pro 2012“

This sort of upgradability is remarkable because you can no longer do this with newer Macbooks or most laptops. Since upgradability and repairability are two sides of the same coin, it’s also a question of how effectively affordable your machine is.

Categories
Audience as Capital Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation The Dark Forest of the Internet

Where will the Trump community congregate after the Twitter and Facebook ban?

From the viewpoint of Twitter, Facebook, Shopify and potential other social media/commerce services, banning and suspending Trump’s account makes sense. It is pretty straightforward for these services to make the case that his posts/tweets violate their terms of service [1].

I’m stuck by how quickly and totally Trump’s influence has been curtailed. His options are now
(a) White House press releases, which he has until the week after next
(b) the group chat app Parler that is popular with the fringe right, but which was also banned by Google Play and has been given notice by Apple’s App Store,
(c) various subreddits, but Reddit has already suspended most of the popular ones
(d) other potential social networks (including, say, the group messaging app Telegram)
(e) his email lists
(f) his own website

Only with his email lists and his own website is Trump fully in control. [2] Perhaps he could set up his own Twitter-like social network on his site with Mastodon. He could set up discussion forums on his site with Vanilla Forums or Discourse. All of this over and above built-in comments on his blog. It is likely that sooner or later Trump or an organisation linked closely to him will set up this sort of infrastructure.

But what he gets back in terms of control he loses in terms of distribution. Anyone who engages with Trump and his community on this website and forums is someone who has joined for that specific reason. No one other than news reporters covering Trump and his network will join.

With an account on broad-based social networks like Twitter, your ‘viral’ messages find their way into the feeds of people who have nothing to do with you. In this way, at least, Twitter works for you, distributing your message in a way that optimises for discovery of your account. You don’t need to pull people in; the platform pushes them to you.

This optimisation is one the most common criticisms of social networks – with an algorithmically picked feed, at its best, you discover new interests, make new friends, understand things better. But at its worst, your feed makes you more anxious, causes more outrage, causes you to be more polarised than you otherwise would be. This is how polemical figures like Trump gain both followers and detractors.

What’s important is that both sides are equally important to his popularity. And there’s an inherent danger in having only supporters on a platform.

On Twitter (and Reddit/Facebook), there have probably been hundreds of thousands of online fights between supporters and detractors of Trump. However ugly they may have been, they have served as an outlet for rage and hatred, a valve for emotional steam stirred up by Trump and TV channels.

For a while, I imagine these online squabbles will continue. But if and when Trump or an entity aligned with him sets up their own online infra like we discussed above, it’s going to be an echo chamber that surpasses subreddits like /r/the_donald or on the chat app Parler. Some of the frenzy may be let out on social media, but the risk is that the majority will play out in the real world.

This is the main second-order risk I see with a ban on Trump’s social media presence. I’m not sure we’ve understood this, leave alone acknowledged it.

[1] Whether it was too late, or whether they enforce these rules arbitrarily or selectively is another debate, and not this site’s focus.

[2] That is, as long as he uses his own infrastructure for them, as opposed to something like Substack for email and a wordpress.com site, which could both be turned off.

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Nareeta Martin/Unsplash)

Categories
Life Design Personal Finance

Five steps to building a positive investing habit – the video

Back in August 2020 I described “five steps to building a positive investing habit” that described how to efficiently set up and automate monthly investments for yourself. Recently, in December 2020, I spoke about it in a thirty minute talk.

Categories
Discovery and Curation Startups

Time, not capital, is an early stage company’s most valuable resource

This somewhat short post lists the software that a small three-member startup says that it happily pays for. There are eight services that total up to USD 171 a month, or a little over two thousand dollars a year.

When you’re an early-stage company, your biggest cost is your opportunity cost of time. Above all else. You can buy yourself that time quite profitably with well designed, highly available software.

I’ve seen – and experienced – a lot of startups that look to conserve money in their early days by either looking to build out software that they use internally, or by repurposing one tool for another use case, or by sticking with the limitations of a free version of an otherwise paid service that was designed to save time.

These companies typically think that their capital on hand is their most precious resource. In trying to be good stewards of that money, they end up working inefficiently with suboptimal tools, creating quite unnecessary overhead for themselves and in many cases incurring early technical debt.

When time is your most valuable resource, evaluate software carefully, then find a way to pay for it.

Categories
Investing Personal Finance

What explains the gap between the roaring US stock market and its indifferent economy?

US financial markets had a remarkable year even as the economy struggled with business shutdowns, layoffs and unprecedented jobless claims in the wake of the pandemic.

This screenshot is from the 4 January issue of the excellent Morning Brew newsletter:

The New York Times tried to explain this disparity by looking at income and spending:

The millions of people no longer working because of the pandemic were disproportionately in lower-paying service jobs. Higher-paying professional jobs were more likely to be unaffected, and a handful of other sectors have been booming, such as warehousing and grocery stores, leading to higher incomes for those workers.

and

The obvious part was a decline in spending on services: All those restaurant reservations never made, flights not taken, sports and concert tickets not bought added up to serious money. Services spending fell by $575 billion, or nearly 8 percent.

– “Why Markets Boomed in a Year of Human Misery”

However, to me this isn’t the full picture. The article makes little attempt to show that the net savings were invested:

… for those a little more comfortable with risk, there was investing in stocks, which helps explain the 16 percent rise in the S&P 500 for the year. For those comfortable with a lot of risk — and with taking advantage of the market’s momentum — there was buying a market darling stock like Tesla or trading options.

In any case, retail investors – people like you and me – make up a small part of the markets, according to this Bloomberg TV video quoted by Business Insider:

Retail investors now account for roughly 20% of stock-market activity on average and nearly one-quarter of trades on peak days, Joe Mecane, the head of execution services at Citadel Securities, said… Individual investors made up just 10% of the market’s trades in 2019. That share then crept to 15% as popular brokerages including E-Trade, TDAmeritrade, and Charles Schwab erased their commission fees…

80% of the investment in the financial markets is institutional money. Those sort of people didn’t have their lifestyles affected in the same way as retail investors did. Institutional investors may have been spooked by the pandemic, withdrawing money in February and March, but they dove right back.

So what drove the markets’ performance this year?

Tech did.

See this chart of the performance of the S&P 500 index with and without FANG: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google.

from Commonwealth Financial Network

This isn’t just a 2020 phenomenon. As the chart shows, a few tech stocks have both outperformed the rest of the market and have ballooned in market cap enough to have an outsize impact on the overall S&P 500 index performance.

This past decade is when tech giants overtook energy and manufacturing companies as the US’ largest corporations. A comparison of the world’s top ten largest companies by market cap in 2010 and 2020 makes this clear:

Of the 2010 top ten, five were in energy, two in finance, two in tech, and Nestle, the food/beverages multinational.

In 2020, nine out of ten were tech companies. One was the Berkshire Hathaway holding company. The only two tech companies in the 2010 list, Apple and Microsoft, are, in 2020, the world’s two largest companies.

The companies that have posted some of the highest gains in 2020 are all those tech companies that have directly or indirectly enabled our shelter-in-place pandemic-suffused lives – Zoom (up 425%), Peloton (439%), Shopify (166%), Spotify (111%), Twilio (220%), among others. And of course the FANG stocks above + Apple.

In 2021, as the US opens up after mass vaccinations, not everything will go back to how it was. There have been irrevocable lifestyle changes. There will be other, newer companies that capture the spends from these changes – Airbnb, perhaps, as the normalization of remote work means that people choose to work from, well, remote places a few weeks at a time. Potentially Zillow and Opendoor as property owners shift their holdings from large cities to smaller ones that are more likely to attract such short-term relocations.

End note: The stock market isn’t the economy and vice versa. Anyone who conflates them is uninformed at best and disingenuous at worst. However, it’s clearer than ever that the gap between the markets and the economy will likely remain: there are only a few companies that are likely to disproportionately shape our lives over the next few years. As these companies do well, their stock – having attracted ever more money – will do well too. And since these companies are also among the largest on the stock markets, the overall market will perform well too.

(I am not a registered investment advisor in the US. None of this constitutes investment advice. I own several of the stocks I’ve mentioned in this post.)

Categories
The Next Computer

iPhone home screen, January 2021 – widgets only

(Previously:August, September, October, November, December home screens)

In December, I described how I’d gotten rid of all home screens other than the one minimum that iOS requires – the new App Library and the Siri suggestions dropdown are all you need to locate your app quickly. I’d described it as a post-home-screen world

I found that this worked well for me so I doubled down on it. Here’s what my iPhone looks like today:

Since I don’t need any app icons on the lone home screen, I’ve decided to simply use it for widgets, new in iOS.

Some of the widgets are from December: the excellent Fantastical full-width widget, the multi-city clock one, the weather widget. And I’ve now added widgets for shortcuts – the two that I use the most. They’re unnecessarily large tap targets, but faster than tapping Launch Center Pro (bottom right in the Dock) and then selecting the Shortcut, which is how I have invoked them for years.

I also like that the icons in the App Library adjust as you use them, both the ‘Suggested’ group at the top left and the category-wise ones. It’s intelligence at work, but silently.

The app icon grid has been an iOS staple since the original iPhone OS. That’s completely changed for me – let’s see how long I stick with this.

Categories
Audience as Capital The Dark Forest of the Internet

The hijacking of subcultures

A subculture at this stage is ripe for exploitation. The creators generate cultural capital, i.e. cool. The fanatics generate social capital: a network of relationships—strong ones among the geeks, and weaker but numerous ones with mops. The mops, when properly squeezed, produce liquid capital, i.e. money. None of those groups have any clue about how to extract and manipulate any of those forms of capital.

The sociopaths [when they show up in a subculture] quickly become best friends with selected creators. They dress just like the creators—only better. They talk just like the creators—only smoother. They may even do some creating—competently, if not creatively. Geeks may not be completely fooled, but they also are clueless about what the sociopaths are up to.

Mops [members of the public; passive consumers of a subculture] are fooled. They don’t care so much about details, and the sociopaths look to them like creators, only better. Sociopaths become the coolest kids in the room, demoting the creators. At this stage, they take their pick of the best-looking mops to sleep with. They’ve extracted the cultural capital.

The sociopaths also work out how to monetize mops—which the fanatics were never good at. With better publicity materials, the addition of a light show, and new, more crowd-friendly product, admission fees go up tenfold, and mops are willing to pay. Somehow, not much of the money goes to creators. However, more of them do get enough to go full-time, which means there’s more product to sell.

– Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution, Meaningness.com
Categories
Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity

Facebook as the only means of discovery for small businesses

A couple of weeks ago we explored a counterpoint to the narrative that Facebook is being disingenuous by protesting Apple’s increased privacy controls in iOS 14. In summary, that the internet has evolved to a point where Facebook ads are an important, affordable means of discovery for small businesses.

A few days ago one of the co-founders of the Morning Brew newsletter reiterated that:

Morning Brew is one of my favourite newsletters and one of most popular ones, with over two and a half million subscribers and having recently been sold to Business Insider for dozens of millions of dollars. If they owe their scale to Facebook ads, then they are the poster child for the success of this ad platform.

Now. This site’s spoken often of wresting back control from Facebook’s pervasive, opaque tracking; I also think Apple’s right in its endeavour to protect people from such tracking by default.

My position on this has little to do with Facebook’s pirported hypocrisy or culpability. I think it’s a collective failure that there are no scalable alternatives for discovery on the Internet other than Google and Facebook (and Instagram and maybe soon Whatsapp), both roughly twenty-year-old companies.

Categories
Privacy and Anonymity Wellness when Always-On

Privacy and agency

From the abstract of a paper from eight years ago:

Privacy shelters dynamic, emergent subjectivity from the efforts of commercial and government actors to render individuals and communities fixed, transparent, and predictable. It protects the situated practices of boundary management through which self-definition and the capacity for self-reflection develop… [a] society that values innovation ignores privacy at its peril, for privacy also shelters the processes of play and experimentation from which innovation emerges.

– What Privacy Is For, Harvard Law Review

The need for agency over one’s privacy is something we examine on a regular basis on this site. What about privacy from the state? This is less clear. For instance, avoiding being surveilled by pervasive security cameras in a city is a lot more difficult than being surveilled on the Internet. Covering one’s movements in the real world from a state that has access to your phone’s cell tower connections is less practical than covering one’s movements on the Internet from one’s ISP.

One of the books I read this year was Why Nations Fail. The authors describe how governments across the world and across time evolve either inclusive or extractive political – and economic – institutions, and that these are what determine whether a nation’s development is sustainable. States have a predilection to extractive institutions because the process of making them inclusive leads to what the authors call creative destruction – certainly not an original term – in which established powers lose influence at the expense of others. Surveillance, especially in this age of digital information flows, is uniquely extractive and uniquely consolidates powers in the hands of the entities doing the surveilling. Hence the extreme reaction to, say, the revelations by Snowden.

I bring this up to make the point that it is unrealistic in the short to intermediate term to expect any voluntary curtailment of surveillance by governments – neither the country nor the form of government matters. Governments inexorably find themselves controlling the “processes of play and experimentation from which innovation emerges” that the paper abstract refers to, and thereby controlling privacy. Similarly, they are incentivized not to roll back data collection by internet companies, but to regulate them in a way that gives the government access to collected data, usually ostensibly justified under national security or its synonyms.

I have no position personally on how much privacy is “good” – the implied absoluteness betrays its naivete. I do hold strongly that you should know and have control over how much privacy you give up. This knowledge is important because of what the paper says; the only safe way to explore boundaries internal and external to you is privately. This knowledge is necessary because privacy typically slips away slowly and, as we have reasoned above, is hard to win back.