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.

This year I read or attempted to read 75 books.  There were some dogs but also some great ones.  I tried to come up with the “best book of the year” but that is pointless, they are all so different.  So I will highlight a number of different books that excelled in different ways. 

Best Mystery:  The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley.  A solid hard-bitten detective tale, everything you want in a private eye.  

Best Adventure: The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch.  If you like more fantastical adventures, this is a great tale and really ought to be a movie or TV series.

Best Historical Novel:  Washington Black by Esi Edugyan.  If you like your adventures a little more grounded in historical reality, this is for you.  Would also be fantastic on screen.

Best History: Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio by Derf Backderf.  If you like actual history, this is a great telling of the events at Kent State, and exposes the dangers of involving armed military in civil protests.  Almost chose this for best graphic novel, but for…

Best Graphic Novel: Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh.  Irreverent, at times hilarious, at times moving.  Well done.  

Best Irreverent: Lamb, The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christoper Moore. Irreverent, some may even view as offensive, but I found it respectful and uplifting in a humanist way.

Best Current Events:  Getting back to our current situation and lives, there are 3 books that I enjoyed and gave me some insight on myself or the world.  

• One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias.  You might object to his solution but this book clearly focuses on a challenge we face, and it is hard to imagine solutions that don’t involve growth.  
• The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics by Eric Beinhocker.  A worthy effort to reexamine economics from first principles.
• Caste: The Origins of our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson.  There are many books you can read on discrimination and racism in our society, this was the best for me.

Best Math/Science.  Digging a little deeper, these were the math/science books that I enjoyed the most this year.  

• Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder.  A criticism of current thinking in physics.  I don’t follow physics closely enough to know if this is all warranted.
• Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner.  We all forecast in our lives, and we are probably all not that great at it, as this book will make you realize.
• But What If We’re Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman.  Challenges your thinking about what you know and believe, which is always good.  

Would love to hear your thoughts on books you read this year.

• Slow Horses by Mick Herron. Great tale of intrigue inside MI5. Started a little choppy but then the story took off and the characters rose to the fore.
• Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel Dennett. I really thought I would like this, but too much “angels on the head of a pin” for me.
• The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. What an awesome tale of a gang of thieves ensnared in conspiracy on top of conspiracy. Really fun read.
• Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh. At times funny, at times deeply sad, always very human. Some of the insights into dogs and pet owners are hilarious.

• The Dragon Factory by Jonathan Maberry. Would have been a good graphic novel – evil albino twins, gene-engineered monsters (scorpion-dogs!), Nazis, a plot to end the world. Just a so-so book.
• Salvation of a Saint by Keigo Higashino. Agatha Christie style story, fun, I would happily read more of these.
• The North Water by Ian McGuire. Baffin Island always sounded cool as a kid. This book puts the kibosh on that, it is a murderous place. Good tale.
• Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil. When the author sticks to anecdotes and data, and allows the reader to form their own opinions, this book works. But the author spends too much time telling the reader how to think, versus leading the reader.

• Collapse of an Empire by Yegor Gaidar. Good look at the unraveling of the USSR, it’s inherent fragility, and the human costs of the unraveling. Recommended by my Russian friends.
• The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alex Harrow. Love stories wrapped up in a tale of many worlds. More touching than expected.
• The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday. Might have been more meaningful earlier in life. At my advanced age, you’ve probably learned most of these lessons.