• Roy G. Biv by Jude Stewart. A collection of anecdotes and facts about color, not as deep as I would like, but interesting and amusing.
• Secrecy by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Relevant when he wrote it, relevant in the Iraq WMD era, relevant now. Secrecy supports a lot of bad behaviors, whether in a government or an organization.
• How to Make the World Add Up by Tim Harford. Very good coverage of how to think about statistics, how to debug them, how to understand them. The closing summary chapter was particularly valuable – much of our current polarization is very emotion driven, and no amount of statistics and facts will change anyone’s mind. But sometimes, asking people to really explain their own view in detail, and asking a lot of genuine questions about it, may cause them to reflect and reconsider, and you may learn something yourself. Genuine curiosity about details is a powerful force.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing turns 15 today — 15 years ago AWS S3 was launched.  I certainly didn’t realize the full impact of this launch at the time. In my last few years at Microsoft (1998, 1999), we were talking about related ideas internally (often under the name “megaserver”), and I admit I wasn’t the most enthusiastic about.  A learning for me.

Development Tools, IoT

I’ve been messing around with development tools and toolchains, partly for IoT experiments.  Adam pushed me to look at repl.it, which is a very compelling proposition.  It is such a PITA to install and maintain dev environments for the various toolchains and target environments, and if you are working in multiple problem domains, you risk creating a real hash on your dev machine.  In the past, teams I’ve been part of have mostly used VMs or containers to manage this complexity and to make it easy for new team members to spin up a standard environment.  repl.it is a very interesting alternative, just spin up the environment instances in the cloud.  I don’t really understand yet how you create fully customized environments.  

The IoT world needs a revolution in development tools and toolchains.  I’ve been breaking my pick (again) working with RPIs and Arduinos, the tools are so flakey, libraries are bad, getting the entire chain of hardware and software working to debug a SFF device is just awful.  I have wasted a week doing stupid shit.  I am rethinking whether I want to screw around with IoT devices.  There is so much of the world that is not digital yet, I keep getting drawn back to IoT, but then the tools wear me out.  Contrast with mobile development — XCode is excellent, well maintained, has a great emulator available, development just goes so much faster.  Not suprisingly, there are billions of mobile apps and very few IoT apps.

Writing

I write for myself — to clarify my thinking and cement my learning.  David Perell offers some excellent guidance on writing, a couple of these points really stick with me:

1. Improving your writing is as simple as packing more useful information into fewer words.

2. Writing is the best way to realize that half the ideas you’re 100% certain about actually make no sense once you put them on paper.

This second point is much the same as rubber duck debugging — if you can’t explain clearly your thinking in verbal or written form, you probably aren’t thinking clearly about.  

Strategic Thinking

I am drawn to thinking about what is important and valuable to work on, and how should one apply oneself to these tasks.

I saw this note early in the week about building an audience — the guidance that it takes years of development and creation for something to take off.  This goes beyond just building an audience — anything I have worked on of note took years to come to fruition (and usually took many people pitching in).  Strategies are built one brick at a time.

This interview with Patrick Collison of Stripe is all over the web and for good reason.  A broad and foundational thinker.  A very inspiring read, there is a ton to follow up on here. 

One of these starting points led me to OODA loops, which I had never been formally introduced to, but which have certainly been crucial tools throughout my career.  And resonates well with my electrical engineering background, where I had years of control theory and feedback loops hammered into me.

An unrelated investigation took me to the idea of a 50 year newspaper.  So much of what counts as “news” is just noise.  I am trying to disconnect from the noise and focus back on the long term trends.

Finally, I appreciate Rand’s point of view on venture capital.  I am a reformed venture capitalist and a former investment in Rand’s companies.  Much of what he observes is true – VC money is expensive, sometimes too expensive, and founders would do well to decide if it is really needed.

Random

I took a course in comparative religion a million years ago, but largely i remain ignorant of the structure of the world religions.  I didn’t realize/remember there are 3+ schools of Buddhism.

The Cochrane Library seems like a valuable resource for sifting thru all the myriad of medical info out there.

• The Price of Peace by Zachary Carter. I never realized what a fascinating, rich life Keynes led. And I never understand the moral basis for Keynes’ views (at least as expressed in this book), and how far the US strayed from Keynes’ views. Makes me want to read more.
• The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison. I gave up on this one, it was vague to start and heading towards more vagueness.
• The Voyage of the Short Serpent by Bernard du Boucheron. Humans are terrible to each other and self-righteous humans can be some of the worst.

OK this is maybe 2 weeks of things, I am a little behind.

Edge hardware and software

I installed EEROs this week after a horrible install experience with Netgear ORBIs. The EEROs just work. EEROs had a great experience before acquisition by Amazon and it still seems to be great — and it is all about the software. Amazon is a software-first org and it shows, Netgear is not.

Another very intriguing network product — https://blues.io. A super simple iot network solution, from Ray Ozzie. It solves a real problem and has a great simple developer experience — I love this. I ordered my first device and received yesterday — looking forward to tinkering with.

Developer Experience

The Blues Wireless team clearly has focused on the developer experience — their documentation is great. I bet they have a great developer experience internally as well — which is critical to unlocking innovation as Nick Tune details. I wish I could have been as articulate about this in my past jobs as Nick is. A great developer experience makes everyone more productive, helps with retention, and unlocks innovation. And really it is not just about developers, everyone in the company should be treated the same way — we want everyone to be more productive and more innovative, and that means making their jobs easier and more satisfying.

Refactoring of restaurants, other consumer goods

This is an interesting article about ghost franchises — the restaurant delivery industry continues to evolve and mutate, driven in part by COVID.

This creates a consumer problem — an explosion of choices, ratings that are frequently gamed, no retail sites to sample at, and marketplaces that are complicit in the creation and gaming of the system. How do you reliably choose from the 14 places that say they will deliver the best burger to you?

This is not limited to restaurants. I’ve been looking for a toaster, here are some of the brands that Amazon and the web pitch to me as having a great compact toaster — IKICH, Dear Morning, BonsenKitchen, iSiLER, Cuisinart, iFedio, Hamilton Beach, BLACK+DECKER, Amazon Basics, Barsetto, Oster, LOFTer, Twinzee, Dash, KEEMO, SACVON, Keenstone, whall, KitchenBro, HadinEEon, KitchenAid, REDMOND, Elite Gourmet, Breville, Zwilling, Smeg, Krups, Revolution Coooking, Schloß. All of these have great ratings, many claim to be award winning (tho I suspect some of the rewards were created just for this brand), all have professional looking brand landing pages. I can’t really trust ratings, Amazon placement, Google placement.

There is a missing layer of authentic customer recommendations from trusted sources. Which is a difficult layer to create and maintain — many many startups have tried, and most end up getting sucked into the morass. I have no answer, but I have renewed my membership to Consumer Reports which is a great resource, but very limited in its category coverage.

Auto chip shortage

Automotive grade chips different than the high volume mobile phone and consumer electronics chips. Automotive use cases require automotive grade electronics, which can operate over a much greater temperature range than consumer electronics. My limited understanding of the technical issues: all chips suffer from thermal degradation, and I have read it is due largely to metal migration at the connectors. Automotive grade chips have some special designs at connection points to accommodate this. Another difference is that automotive electronics are expected to last a long time in the field — 10 years or so. No one has this expectation of phones.

These are reasonable requirements for the automobiles, but they keep the auto industry off in a sequestered submarket for chips, which are generally several generations behind consumer electronics chips, and are subject to unique supply constraints. This situation is not going to get better, as the shift to EVs/autonomy drives more chip content into the car. Chip dependence is going to grow for automakers, but their relative volumes and buying power versus the mobile industry or other consumer electronics players is much less and not going to improve.

What is an automaker to do? They are going to have to manage their chip commitments more directly. They may have to step in and more directly invest in chip or fab capacity and chip supply chain management. They may have to overcommit early to chip volumes. These seem to be the strategies that have worked so far for Hyundai and Toyota. These all mean money and time. And managing the chip supply chain is not really a strength of automakers — they are great at supply management and manufacturing in their historical domains, but they are sub scale in the chip industry.

I wonder if there is an alternative. I will hand wave about design issues here, and with the caveat that the last time I designed and populated a board was 1983 while in grad school. So take it for what it is worth.

Cloud Services have learned to deal with unreliable electronics — not by fighting failure, but by engineering for it. Data centers tolerate constant failure of underlying electronics, using replication and hot swap designs. While there is cost to have replicated hardware, it is dramatically cheaper than trying to harden individual hardware instances.

Could automotive ECUs be redesigned to support low cost replacement? Could some degree of replication be built in, allowing ECUs to be built on much cheaper (and more available) consumer electronics grade chips? Could ECUs be designed to have easy replaceability and a much shorter expected life, permitting low cost refreshes on a regular basis? Do ECUs even need “auto grade” chips — there are many stories about some new automakers simply using non-auto grade chips with some success. Can EVs use some of their battery power to maintain temps in the car to allow use of non-auto-grade chips?

There are certainly some challenging design issues here. But consider the cost and problems to secure chip capacity for future cars — it is worth exploring the use of commodity chips, and then innovating in the packaging and environmental support for them.

Random

The market for Icelandic horses is booming.

We may all be wearing wood some day — greener than cotton.

Vlad introduced me to beautiful AI generated dynamic patterns and beautiful AI generated imagery. I could look at these all day long.

Or maybe this should be titled “Rabbitholes I Went Down This Week.”

Basic Research

I’m reading the The Price of Peace right now – the life and legacy of Keynes.  He led a far richer more fascinating life than I had realized, and the story is very topical as we spend our way thru COVID and reconsider what is an appropriate amount of national debt.  It is hard to not be enthusiastic about even more debt after reading this.

We should probably be funding a lot more basic research.  Ashoka Rajendra provides a nice explanation of how the biopharma industry developed COVID vaccines so quickly, how vital the whole chain of basic research and development was, and how vital the public/private partnership was.  Public-supported basic research is a hard thing to sell, but it is probably one of the most leveraged things we can do.  

Our space programs are amazing, inspiring.  Huge thanks to everyone involved for lifting us above our every day existences.  The scope at which space programs operate is hard to fathom — a signal to the New Horizons craft has to travel 50.25 AU and is 7.5M km wide by the time it arrives, and NASA is pushing software updates over that link!  I can’t even get the Netgear ORBI router next to me to upgrade firmware correctly.  

IoT

The Netgear ORBI install has been beyond frustrating. I would have preferred to get EEROs but they were backordered on Amazon (update: getting from BestBuy this week).  The ORBIs require a multistep pairing process with phone and router and satellites, and then they did a firmware upgrade, and then everything was broken.  iOS said it was on the ORBI wifi, but the ORBI iOS app claimed it was not.  No amount of reboots of modems or ORBIs or phones could fix this.  I also tried to factory reset the ORBIs but that solved nothing.  My ISP is Spectrum, I am wondering if Spectrum does some mac-address validation as I was replacing a Spectrum-supplied wifi router.  But Netgear should handle this or at least point me in the right direction.  The ORBIs are in the garage in their box now, I am going to gift them to someone I hate.  

IoT device software is hard — routers, consumer devices, cars, factory devices, all of these are hard devices to provision, to manage, to access.  The industry has made some progress – it is way easier to install and provision a new device now than it was 3 years ago! – but many problems seem still largely in front of us:

• Secure registration of devices.  The ORBI experience is not atypical sadly.  I did recently install some Logitech cameras just using Apple’s Homekit app and that seemed to go much better.
• Dynamically pushing software to the edge.  Updates are too clumsy, too heavyweight, too error prone.  There is no simple way to do app upgrades on edge devices.
• Privacy of user data.  Many solutions just throw data up to the cloud, and thus the horse is out of the barn.  We need to figure out how to push code easily to the edge so that data stays in place. 
• Reasoning across incomplete, inconsistent, sampled data.  IoT devices are not always connected, do not provide uniform data sets, have continually varying schemas.  Most analytic solutions want a much cleaner data set that is never going to exist.

Development and Thinking Tools

I am getting my feet wet as a developer again.  Python, and learning a little bit of Rust and Cargo — wow I love and hate modern package management.  I wanted to read a CSV file, so I imported the Rust CSV library, and ~15 libraries came whizzing in with it.  It is awesome that I can tap into the ecosystem this easily.  But where did all these come from, who wrote them, who maintains them?

On a somewhat related front, Vlad has introduced me to Nix which seems like an interesting way to manage development environments. It didn’t take me even a couple hours to be completely tangled up in Homebrew, Python, and VSCode. As Sam points out, Homebrew just leaks too much globally (and vice versa).

In response to my whining about how to manage my own IP and research, CharlesF suggested Roam research, and Prady pointed me towards NENO. Roam might be more my thing right now, tho neither does quite what I want.

Random

I did not know that snow-to-liquid ratios were a thing. Probably because I am not a skier these days.

Technology strategy

Steven Sinofsky is writing a great memoir of his Microsoft years, I’m avidly reading.  Chapter 3 links to the story of David Weiss and Murray Sargent figuring out how to get Windows to protect mode, which ended up being one of the pivotal points in the history of the PC industry.  I just love this story and it has informed every project I have ever worked on — innovation and strategy come from the front line of a company, not from some ivory tower staff off moving chess pieces around.  As a manager, you have to foster the environment and culture to allow this innovation to happen.  I have not always succeeded at doing this but it is an aspiration.

Metalenz is building lenses using a metamaterial design and standard silicon fabs.  Another technology falls to the grinding advance of semiconductors.

Software Tools

I am struggling with how to organize my thinking, my documents, sharing, etc.  When I had a real job, I had all kinds of tools for documenting and sharing – not all of them good! Now I am trying to figure out what the right tools are for personal use.  This blog is wholly inadequate — it really only has one view (timeline), it is not good for selective sharing, it doesn’t easily admit other kinds of content besides the written word.  I am not sure what I want.  Notion is nice looking.  Basecamp is probably overkill and too expensive for what I want.  Maybe I just want to use GitHub. I am all over the place, I need to take time to really outline what my needs are.

https://same.energy is a nice tool for finding imagery — I tried with a couple images this am and it was dead-on.

Society and Economics

The meme economy is making people rich. Meanwhile, “Society has conspired for decades, through low interest rates, tax policy, and most recently the stimulus, to transfer wealth from the young to the old — the opposite of a healthy society, in which the ballast is a thriving middle class and optimistic youth.”  And we put tremendous hurdles in the way of women, a powerful story here of the experience of a widow. And we make poor use of the human capital in large parts of our country — charities in Appalachia are dramatically underfunded. I’m not really sure what to think about all this, other than to observe that we are not getting the best out of ourselves, and we perhaps too focused on the ephemeral and not enough on fundamentals.

• Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker. Quite the story of a family plagued by schizophrenia, their attempts to survive, and the slow growth in understanding schizophrenia.
• A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet. A retelling of the apocalypse, or a forecast of how climate change will impact us and the generations after us.
• Snow by John Banville. Solid English countryside mystery, tho in this case the Irish countryside. I won’t remember much of it but it was entertaining.

CapEx

A meandering tour through capital expenditures.  First the semiconductor industry, where it is now estimated to cost almost $20B to create a state-of-the-art fab.  Fab is now primarily done in SK and Taiwan, which is geopolitically risky for the US.  And our politicians mutter about on-shoring and good manufacturing jobs – losing fab capability to offshore competitors seems like a horrible outcome both economically and geopolitically. Intel is facing this decision with a new CEO, I suspect the US government will find a way to help Intel keep fab capacity in the US.

Meanwhile, Amazon/Google/Microsoft spent $73.5B in CapEx in 2020.  Staggering numbers, particularly Amazon alone.  One has to be really brave to implement any on-prem computing in this market.  It is interesting that Google is falling off a little.

The auto industry knows they need to transform into software/chips/battery companies but they are facing a daunting task as CapEx and R&D from the tech world races past automotive CapEx and R&D.  

As software (and silicon) eats the world, the tech players have a distinct advantage.  I’m long Intel, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, NVidia, Tesla.

Attention and Intentionality

The attention economy is damaging us as producers and consumers.  We squander our time and attention across 1000s of sources, and we squander our productive energy seeking attention. It is the challenge of our time to find a way to fight through this. 

Hey John, why are you posting this, aren’t you guilty of fighting for attention like everyone else?  Hmm, you have a point.  To be clear, I mostly write these articles for myself — I find that I don’t really learn something unless I take the time to reflect and write about it.  But I could just as well stick this in a diary and not share it with the world. Hmm.

Bezos on high standards – powerful and simple.  And partly explains to me why I bother to publish these thoughts publicly.  If I am writing just for myself, I can be sloppy and imprecise.  Knowing that I am going to share these publicly forces me to be more thoughtful, more precise, more attentive, and I get some feedback on the quality of my thinking.

Charlie Kindel on how to be a change agent — this is a nice framework, I have often failed to segment and prioritize the stakeholders and have wasted time and energy on the opposed.  I have not been intentional enough about how to create change. Thank you Charlie.

The entire point of these postings may be – forcing myself to be more intentional about what I think on and what I learn.

Political Life

Ohio Governor DeWine wants $50M to market Ohio as a great progressive place to live.  And apparently the marketing spend is already happening. As many observers point out, this is not really a marketing problem.  If DeWine wants Ohio to be seen as a progressive destination for progressive industries and progressive people, DeWine and the Ohio government actually have to implement progressive policies — where does the state stand on healthcare access, on education funding, on minimum wage and income equality, on equal rights and voting rights?  And Ohio has to elect progressive leaders — Jim Jordan is the most visible political face in the state.  I have great affection for Ohio, and I know there are progressive people and progressive urban areas in the state, but overall the state has work to do.

Random

Pickleball is the fastest growing sport in America. Don’t forget ENIAC day is coming up. There is a website dedicated to reporting on Ponzi scheme activities – criminality and gullibility are evergreen.

My last day at Xevo is tomorrow. I’ve been reflecting this week on how fortunate I have been to work with so many great people.  I met some great people on the path thru Surround.io to Xevo to Lear, and I hope I get to work with some of them again.   I will not remember the details of various technical and business decisions, but I will remember the people and the great interactions.

Early treatments for schizophrenia included ingestion of cocaine, manganese, and castor oil; injections of animal blood and oil of turpentine; gassed with CO2 or O2; insulin-induced comas.  And of course lobotomy. We look back at that and shake our heads. What medical treatments or other practices are we doing now that we will look back on negatively? At every point in our history we have looked back and judged our former selves, this point in time is no different.

The highest ranking generals/admirals in the US Armed Forces make about $200K a year.  Those are huge, important, stressful jobs.  Makes one wonder about executive salaries.  

Scientists have found a sextuply eclipsing sextuple star system.  I just love that sentence.

Make boring plans, choose boring technology.  Of course these ideas have been around, as I reflect on my most recent startup journey, I certainly learned that you have to be very thoughtful and selective about risk, and on many fronts you should choose the boring path.

• Sharpe’s Rifles by Bernard Cornwell. Enjoyable historical novel set during the Napoleonic Wars, a part of a series detailing Sharpe’s rise. Good character, good pacing.
• Business Adventures by John Brooks. An insouciant (and I never get to use that word, so damn it, I am pulling it out of the vault when it fits) walk thru business stories of the 50s and 60s. Lyrical, notes of Faulkner, not your traditional business book. And the time machine back into business operations of 60 years ago is fascinating.
• The Aosawa Murders by Riku Onda. Eh, just couldn’t find a reason to continue.
• The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. This is the worst good book I have ever read. Too long. A mishmash of wholly different stories which doesn’t work. Too much yelling at the reader instead of delivering a message through story and character. And yet, I read the whole thing, No book has really illustrated how horrible climate change can become as does this book in a few places. I can’t recommend this book, but it may be worth reading.

We have been moving houses this week so not as much time as I would like to dig into some things but still a few nuggets.

The information passed between the retina and visual cortex is sparse. Most of what we think we are seeing is a construct in the brain.  Fascinating. I am sure this is common knowledge to a lot of people.

Lidar is getting ever cheaper and smaller — Moore’s law is cranking away.  When Lidar is basically free, what all will we do with, what apps will it enable?  I love how our Roborock vacuum uses lidar to create its map.  How else will we use in the home?  How will it affect home security apps?  What games will we create?

Good news, the yellow mealworm is now approved for human consumption. Unless you have prawn or dust mite allergies. Purportedly clear economic and environmental benefits. What will we be commonly eating in 50 years that was previously unthinkable?

Rivers Cuomo is thinking about learning flutter/dart.  I wonder what programming environments the Beatles or Prince or other artists would have chosen.

Audio watermarks – I didn’t realize these existed in Zoom.  I expect there to be a tool in about 30 seconds to strip them or to modify them.

• Your strategy is what you ship.  I didn’t learn this so much as I relearned it.  The story of the Edsel in Business Adventures is instructive. The Ford team dreamed of an innovative, breakthrough vehicle that would wow customers and capture a new market segment.  But what they delivered was an undifferentiated high-priced low-quality car, and we all know the results.  35 years ago in my first real job, the late Tom Jones told me “Your strategy is what you ship” and I have learned this a dozen times in my career.
• I know nothing about the modern gaming economy.  I have not played video games actively for about 6 years as I’ve been busy with a day job, and I do not understand the modern gaming economy at all, but I am fascinated by — https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/11/22225416/thegrefg-record-fortnite-viewers-icon-skin-reveal-eu-heretics?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
• Videoscribe. We use powerpoint decks for live presentations and for leave-behind reading.  They kind of suck for leave-behind reading; I experimented with Videoscribe to make a more dynamic leave-behind that better captures the story, pacing, flow, etc.   I like it a lot and will keep exploring this.  
• Eleemosynary is the word of the week, totally new to me.  And on first look, I couldn’t even make a reasonable guess about meaning.  
• Best practices from around the world. Noah Smith makes a good point this week – “America needs to humble itself and start copying best practice from countries that have things figured out more than we do, instead of imagining that we can reinvent the wheel”. So true, and particularly so in healthcare, where we spend more money and achieve worse results than nearly every other modern democracy.

I aspire to be a lifelong learner. I do read a lot – books and online – and I find increasingly that if I don’t take a few moments to write down and reflect on what I learned, then I don’t really learn it. So am starting a new attempt to document interesting things I learned each week. Inspired in part by Tom Whitwell, referred to by Mark Frauenfelder.

• Warsaw uses clams to monitor its water supply. We would need a vast array of sensors and AI machinery to do the same with computers, and we probably don’t know what all things to sense or what models to build. Instead, we just rely on some clams to be clams. Fascinating collaboration with nature and thought-provoking, can we collaborate similarly in other areas?
• There are cultures that do not discriminate between the colors blue and green, including Japan historically. I’ve read other pieces on the history of color perception, very interesting that this is somewhat variable across human cultures, it seems so foundational. What else is not as foundational as we think?
• There is a large tuned mass damper inside the Taipei 101 building and other large skyscrapers. Which makes sense and at some level I probably knew this, but interesting to see in action.
• Sea urchins have 5-fold symmetry. I am still trying to parse the explanation for why this evolved, it doesn’t seem obvious.
• Lizards have 2 penises. I guess this is no more unnatural than having two arms, legs, eyes, ears, kidneys, etc. Bilateral symmetry is easier to understand in animals than 5-fold symmetry.

Oh, and how fragile our democracy is, and how inspiring it is to see a large cross section of our society rise and start to defend it.

• The End of Everything by Katie Mack. In the midst of all our current political and social turmoil, you can read this book and either a) have even more to worry about, because the Universe is going to end and it could be tomorrow, or b) have even less to worry about because the Universe is going to end and nothing we do now matters.
• The 99% Invisible City by Roman Mars, Kurt Kohlstedt. Shines a light on all those little design and structure features that most of us ignore every day. A good book to read a little bit out of every day.
• Born Standing Up by Steve Martin. Very introspective look at his career and how it developed. Great insights about being intentional and thoughtful about your life.

• The Adventure Zone by the McElroy family, Carey Pietsch illustrator. Gets great reviews but pretty thin gruel for me. I probably would have thought it hilarious when I was young. From a well regarded podcast tho I never listen to podcasts.
• Agent Sonya by Ben Macintyre. Good telling of the story of a female Soviet spy during WWII and the Cold War. Amazingly gutsy spy, hard to imagine living this kind of double life.

And those are the last of my 2020 reads.