A smattering of opinions on technology, books, business, and culture. Now in its 4th technology iteration.
28 April 2021
Basecamp announced a policy change this week, limiting internal political discussion. It has not been received uniformly well on Twitter. I totally get it though. When I first joined Xevo, people were using internal tools for divisive and contentious discussions. Xevo provided software to some of the largest companies in the world, and we often had guests from our enterprise customers or from partners on our Slack channels, on our email system, in our git repos. I didn’t think our enterprise customers who were paying us millions of dollars would appreciate highly political rants on our systems, and so we shut down the use of internal systems for political discussions. At the same time though, we were clear that we encouraged people to be politically active, that we didn’t care what people did on their own social media accounts or in non-work settings, and we gave people whatever time off they wanted to participate in political activities. Basecamp seems like it is threading the needle well here.
This article on the different kinds of stupid is awesome. I have exhibited all of these. 60 years in, hopefully I stuck my fingers in the grinder often enough that I don’t exhibit these as frequently.
Even though I am out of the automotive software business now, I still end up reading a lot about it. And every week I read auto insiders or $TSLA shorts talking about how Tesla is going to crash and burn, how the traditional auto makers are going to surpass Tesla. One common theme is how crap the Tesla build quality is.
I remember when PCs were viewed as toys, and that they would never replace “real” computers like mainframes, minis, and workstations. And PCs were terrible — they were unreliable, they were cheaply made, I remember a capacitor bursting into flames on my Apple ][. But PC technology was dramatically ahead of other computer platforms on one critical dimension — personal use — and the industry iteration speed was way faster than that of the traditional computer industry.
I remember when web apps were primitive toys and would never replace “real” apps. And early web apps were crap — html layout was limited, scripting support was crap. But web apps had this magic attribute — install-free wide reach — and the industry iterated like crazy. And here we are.
I’m on my second Tesla and physical build quality is crap. Poor fit between elements, dust and moisture incursion, cheap feeling parts. But this is just a part of my car experience. Software build quality, charging experience quality, presale and sale experience, service experience — Tesla is well ahead of competitors and is iterating fast (and by the way, these experiences all have a huge software component).
Meanwhile the auto incumbents are lauding themselves for getting their first electric cars out and granting themselves awards for doing a great job. While Tesla just keeps hitting sales records.
Sixty week lead time for chips – ugh. And I hear that it is really worse, you can’t even get dates for some parts at all.
A tweet by Dave Winer reminded me of Byte Magazine. Man that was a great magazine, I miss it. And I miss the wild and wooly days of the early PC market.
Songwriting is a tough business, you better have sharp elbows.
Injection molded glass — very cool. Limited for now to decorative objects due to shrinkage, but still cool.
Outdoor art by PEJAC — I love how he plays with perception, and bravely does it out in the open world.
The latest DJI drone is awesome but I will probably pass. All my drones end up unused because the batteries suck, the firmware always needs an update, the controls suck. I need a couple generations of evolution of the tech before I will dive in again.