Web is killing individuality : The promise of the Internet was to be what you are and shine through your individuality. individuality. However more and more we all end up watching the same viral videos, the same famous tweets, and same news on multiple platforms. Everyone is becoming like everyone else and that's killing everyone's personality. The best solution is to break away from the Internet and when you are using the Internet be cognizant of the fact that algorithms are pushing you to be just like the next person down the road.

Speech by Mukesh Ambani in 1998 : 25 years ago Mukesh Ambani spoke about how India will evolve in the coming years. 25 years later India has changed quite a bit and of course, Mukesh Ambani is the 10th richest man in the world. 

Barnes & Nobles is making a comeback : This is a comeback story. Over the years Barnes & Noble has been losing ground to Amazon. Over the years I've seen many Barnes & Noble stores getting closed.

I like visiting Barnes & Noble and holding the physical books in my hand. I'm really happy about this turnaround. This is also the story about giving power back to the people who matter.

Barnes & Noble is in the business of selling books. Book lovers should have a say in the matter, not the corporations peddling their books.

Big data is changing cricket : This is the age of data and ML. Now that we have software that can crunch a large amount of data, it was only a matter of time before we had something like this. A model that will predict how the game is going.

A straight line is not necessarily the fastest route : Seems pretty counterintuitive to me.

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by Chris Miller

I started the year with this book and it turned out to be a scintillating book packed with tons of stories. The book is about the origin of the transistor and chronicles the life of the advancement of chip technology.

I was expecting the book to be dull with the history of how it all worked out and transformed human life. On the contrary, I found this book too hard to put down. This book answers many questions. I'm listing some of them in no particular order.

* How come Japan came to dominate the electronics industry all over the world?

* Why Europe in spite of being a close ally of the USA didn't play any significant role in the advancement of the chip technology.

* What kind of role Intel played in the chip economy?

* What kind of role US federal government played in advancing chips? The short answer is huge.

* In the early days of the chips economy who was the biggest user of chip technology and where it was used? The short answer is the USA for war.

* Why TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited) is probably the most important company in the whole world.

* Why the most important company is based out of Taiwan and not in the USA, Russia, or Japan?

* In the early years of the Internet why the cluster of technology companies were based out of San Francisco.

* How Japan was beating the USA in the chips technology.

* How Intel missed the whole mobile revolution.

* Russia, the long adversary of the USA, tried to steal chip technology but couldn't produce anything of significance in spite of large-scale espionage. Japan decided not to steal technology and use the technology. In the process, Japan's economy grew manyfold. What exactly Japanese government and what lessons it has for other companies to grow?

* Now we know that AI is going to be the dominant technology of the next 50 years what lessons governments all around can learn to get ahead of the game?

* How to write a book on a boring topic and still hold the interest of the audience.

I thought I knew so much about the technology space. Reading the book made me realize so much I don't know. I think this book is a must-read for anyone who wants to know anything about the single most important technology that has changed human life in the most significant way.

This book is an enthralling read. Don't miss it.

The Perils of Prudence

Race for the South Pole will continue to be one of my favorite books. The book describes in great detail how meticulous planning by Amundsen helped his team not only conquer the South Pole but in the process his team members gained weight. On the other hand Scott’s team had more resources but they died of hunger.

The author postulates that the key to victory for Amundsen was “speed”. The less time he spends on the treacherous conditions the better it is. The author applies the same analogy to startups. The startups need to have “speed” so that they can get out of the “danger zone”. The author took a year to write this article and it’s well worth a read.

Goodhart's Law Isn't as Useful as You Might Think

Setting up incentives is a tricky thing for businesses and government alike. Long time ago I was working for Bearing Point and a new manager started rewarding QA folks on the weekly meetings based on the number of defects a QA person has created. Soon afterwards we started getting a sea of defects. Most of them would be very minor things like “a period is missing”, “confirmation message is shown” and things like that. Previously QA folks would create one issue to have multiple defects of similar type but now they started creating multiple issues for each defect to increase the number of defects.

The author heavily borrows from his experience at Amazon to outline how to measure things properly or when not to measure.

Tyler Cowen on AI and China

Tyler Cowen is one of the most celebrate economist of our time. Marginal Revolution is a very popular blog and he is the person running it. This podcast is less about China and more about general economics. I like the questions that were asked to Tyler by the host and I paused the podtcast to think what would my answer be before listening to what Tyler had to say.

How To Handle Failure

Things don’t always go as per the plan. We need to have a plan to handle the times when the plan will go belly up. I enjoy the writing style of Jared a lot. I hope you like it too.

For humans, expensive hats, expensive cars, and expensive watches and wines are signals to indicate that they have economic success. Animals do that physically - peacock’s good-looking tail. Rich used to use a lot of spices. Then common folks started using spices and the Rich had to move on to something else.

The nuclear family was a mistake

Earlier families used to stick together and extended family was part of your family. In the new world, family means spouses and kids. This decentralization of the family is harming our society.

The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.

The Future of Substack

Both substack and Medium are trying to be aggregators. However the path chosen by each is quite different and it has huge implications for the authors. It seems that substack is winning with its strategy. Personally I could never use medium because if I send my readers to medium then medium is showing them content from other authors. I can accept that youtube does similar to medium but then rendering videos with precision is still a hard and costly problem. Secondly youtube has way more users.

The Case for Higher Rates

When the interest rate goes lower it unleashes some assets in a narrow band. However, this strategy starts becoming less effective as we lower the interest rate further and further.

This results in the misallocation of capital, an increase in money supply, and debt load, without a corresponding level of productivity to show for it, ultimately zombifying the economy.

I ordered robot takeout on two campuses with wildly different results

It’s interesting to see how mini robots are slowly becoming useful. As the author mentions there is a tension. If the robots can do more then they need to be on the road competing with cars, people and they can do harm if they are moving at a high speed.

It has been noted that some scientists are super productive in some years. Einstein, Newton, Darwin and others were a lot more productive certain years than others. Ken Thompson built the basic chassis of UNIX in a week when his wife went on vacation and he had a lot of time on his hand. I don’t think we have fully understood the miracle years.

Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think

We are built to care about what others think because our survival depends on it in earlier times. Now we need to be more careful about how much we should pay attention to what others think of us. I still think it’s a useful tool if used in moderation.

We Aren't Raising Adults. We Are Breeding Very Excellent Sheep

Getting into elite colleges is getting harder and harder. What kind of students get in. The kind of students we admit has an impact on what our elite colleges are becoming.

Let Us Now Praise Courageous Men and Women

Large corporations do not want unions and they go to a great extent to ensure that unions are not formed. The lack of unions has resulted in the working class not being able to participate in the growing economy and has further added to income inequality.

Where are all the kids in America

I can relate to the sentiments expressed by DHH. It’s not that kids don’t play here. It’s just that kids play a lot less on the street. Partially that’s because the parents are ultra-careful. Partially because a park is nearby, if there is no nearby park then kids would be forced to play on the street. If more kids play on the streets then drivers would know the social norm and they would be careful.

Since not many kids play on the street most of the time most of the drivers assume that the street is for the car first and the kids playing there need to watch out for the incoming cars. This leads parents to be extra careful and that results in a lesser and lesser number of kids playing on the streets.

Playing at a park requires some planning and collaboration. One can’t just walk to a park. One needs friends to play with. When one plays on a street then other kids in the neighborhood can hear the sound of basketball or the kids talking and that’s a clue for other kids to come out of the house and play.

In the USA the houses are larger which also doesn’t help. Because of the large size of the house, the probability of having x number of kids per street is low compared to kids not in the USA.

It's good that women have risen through the society. However it seems like a zero sum game. The trouble with men is at all the levels - social(less number of friends and dates), economic (earning less), educational(less enrollment in colleges). The consequences of "not engaged men" means trouble for the society.

Similar views are expressed by Graham in his review of the book "The Way of Men".

What Harvard Is Really Like

Very few institutions command the kind of admire and respect that Harvard commands. Reading this article makes me feel like Harvard is like any other college which is exactly how it should be.

Softbank: Twilight of an Empire

In general I'm very skeptical of having too of anything to anyone or any company. If you have too much then there is a higher chance that a good percentage of that extra resource would not be properly utilized. Same is the case here with Softbank. Too much money too fast made them invest in companies without due diligence.

The Noonday Demon—Our Metaphysical Laziness

Social media is not making us stupid. It's making us lazy. It's leaving us with less passion and more bored while providing a solution to boredom by providing more empty calories. I love the following quote in the article.

Twitter is not, as some of have liked to called it, a ‘public square.’ It is a public pile of leaves blowing in the wind that we’re all just playing in.

Bird Founder’s Stake Now Worth Less Than His Miami Mansion

Fortune changes fast. Be humble and be prepared for the fortune to change fast.

One of the co-founders of Monzo has written about how Monzo, a bank, grew in the early stage. It’s striking to note that even without no prior knowledge of marketing they were able to quickly sense that marketing would be key to their success. They were able to amass huge waiting lists and turned the media to their advantage. As the author noted at that time banks were old stodgy and not technologically progressive. Here he was pitching to folks a new modern friendly bank. The storytelling worked. He also played “scarcity” tacit to his advantage.

Eliud Kipchoge: Inside the camp, and the mind, of the greatest marathon runner of all time

It’s interesting to note the rituals and the mental model of the greatest marathon runner. He doesn’t look at social media to get the dopamine effect. He doesn’t drink alcohol and lives quite a spartan life while training. Almost as if he is afraid of all the success will get to his head. 

Precedented Times

The pandemic makes us feel that we are living in an unprecedented time. The reality is that life has never been this good. The reality is that human beings have a very short memory span and that’s why knowing history is important. History is humbling. Human beings have survived a lot of hardships in the past and it has lessons for how to deal with such events in the future.

Why Winners Keep Winning

Winners keep winning because winning gets you some legitimacy and a headstart. Once you have an advantage after that one doesn’t need to do better but merely doing average will still make you a winner.

When we find something inconvenient then it’s pretty easy to rant about why X is not like Y. In reality we live in a complicated world. For the folks working in X they need to juggle with other constraints. And that’s why we have guidelines from FDA and warnings from webMD which are too broad and too generic to be useful. The experts are not wrong most of the time. They seem to us wrong or not useful to us because we don’t have a full understanding of the limitations they are working with. The clincher is that “Dr. Anthony Fauci is the WebMD of people.”.

To Do the Right Thing, You Might Have to Die

What does it mean to be men and women in uniform? When we respect folks in uniform what are we respecting them for? This post got more than 800 comments and some of the comments are quite illuminating.

The myth of the myth of the well read person

If you can’t remember what was in a book a week after having a read a book is there a point in reading that book. Well it depends on what you are reading the book for. If you are reading the book for understanding something on a broad level then it’s terribly difficult to understand a subject after reading some materials on that. If the goal is to be an expert in a field then it’s a different matter all together.

But reading is hard. That’s why not many folks read or continue to read for a really long time. It reminds me of an interview I had listened of David McCullough. The interview was about his book The Wright Brothers. The author had mentioned that the Wright Brothers didn’t have running water in their house but their house was filled with books.

Writers at 55 are not better writers than writers of age 35. Doctors under 40 have a better cure rate than doctors above 40.

The Decay Hypothesis postulates that doctors are seeing only X variations of the patients. By 40 they have seen it all. Adding more years is not helping them gain more knowledge.

As per the Interference Hypothesis, people have trouble remembering stuff that is very similar to each other.

3D Careers

The digital age presents a challenge of which career path to choose. There are so many paths to achieving Maslow's hierarchy.

Previously you need credentials to be a professor. Now anyone can teach via Teachable, YouTube, TikTok, Masterclass, or other mediums. Previously you needed to work with a media company to get your voice out. Now anyone can blog. Same with the musicians. Some did MBA for networking. Now one can build a network by being useful online.

Miekii is a bike messenger but he has over 50K twitch followers. Hikaru plays chess but he has 1.5 million twitch followers. He and others have transformed their mundane job into something of value.

Fate Loves Irony

The author gives many examples of fate-loving irony. Here is mine. During the pandemic stock market went higher, more startups were funded, and people had more wealth by saving and assistance from the govt. Once the pandemic ended and the fed started raising the interest rate then layoffs started. Shouldn’t the end of the pandemic be a joyous occasion?

The Rich And The Wealthy

Are you rich or are you wealthy? Is it true that the richer one becomes the harder it gets to live within the means? Is it true that abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity?

This is an eternal question. Are we born to strive for happiness or are we born to do good to others or are we need to make a dent in the universe and make a name for ourselves so that we are remembered long after we are gone?

Happiness is a complicated thing. Different people get happiness from different things. Things that give happiness today might not bring the same level of joy tomorrow then what are we supposed to do? It means we are wired to keep looking for new things that will give us that “high”. In a day-to-day conversation with friends and family one constantly has to choose between “being right” and “being social” - the choices we make depend on what brings us happiness.

Trying too hard

Henry ford banned listing the ideas that did not work so that others can try those ideas again. Many tech businesses failed because they were a bit too early. Trying again at a different time with a different mindset yielded a different result.

To Reap and Sow

During the pandemic, the fed increased the money in circulation, providing fiscal stimulus, and it lowered the interest rate. We created a condition that would give rise to inflation and now we are reaping what we sowed.

A huge part of the problem is that digital spaces generally have no equivalent of a disapproving glare. When the conversations are in-person then there are so many social clues that are vital to providing feedback if the person has crossed a line or not. In the digital world, that feedback is lacking.

The GOAT of GOATS

Serena Williams has won 23 major titles. Tom Brady has won 7. So how is better? GOAT stands for “Greatest Of All Time”. Serena Williams's retirement announcement in vogue is a great read.

How Paul Giamatti broke the California wine industry

Unless you see the data it’s hard to believe that one innocuous scene in a movie would rattle the whole wine industry in terms of the production of merlot wine.

Prior to the movie’s release in 2005 Pinot noir and Merlot were on similar growth trajectories. But by 2010 Merlot’s growth trend had fully reversed, while Pinot Noir plantings accelerated.

If you are looking for an explanation for this change then there is none. Sometimes consumers are irrational and that’s that.

Field notes: Miami

I tend to agree with whatever is mentioned here. Would mention two negative things which are not covered here. There are not many jobs here. I’ve seen my friends move to Atlanta way too many times. The weather could be too hot for some folks.

How do you go about building an institution that becomes the workplace for luminaries like Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, Kurt Gödel, and Robert Oppenheimer? And what kind of salary you would offer them? While reading this article for the first time I realized that someone must had to decide Einstein’s salary.

The pics shown in the article are a joy to look at. I wonder what it must be like working there knowing that you are surrounded by the smartest people in the world.

Why do big businesses seemingly suck at innovation?

In the early 1980s, McKinsey gave advice to AT&T that in the year 2000 mobile phone industry would have a market of 0.9m devices. Turned out it was closer to 100m. McKinsey missed the target by miles. Then why McKinsey is a thriving business today. There are many reasons. Primarily being that most of the time they get most of the operational stuff right. Predicting the future is a hard business and we can’t blame solely McKinsey for having missed this one. McKinsey is good at incrementalism and that’s a skill.

Under the regime of Tim Cook Apple has grown from a $365 Billion company to a $2.7 Trillion company. In other words, Tim Cook has added 7 more “Steve Jobs’s” Apple in his 11 years as the head of Apple. I’m not sure if it is a fair comparison but after the innovative work of Jobs, Apple needed someone like Tim Cook to make money off of that business. Don’t look at McKinsey for true innovation but they might be able to help get the “buy-in” to do the thing a company anyway wants to do but needs external validations for a variety of reasons including placating unions and investors.

The secret shock study

Milgram’s experiment is widely cited as humans are inherently power seekers and evil. The author takes a different take on this matter. We are hard-wired to do a good job. We really hate failing at our job and if the job is to hurt someone then we will do that too. Now that we know this we can bring out the best in people by raising the bar because we know that people will do their best not to fail and will try their hardest to meet the bar.

People like to blend in. We are hard-wired to belong to the tribe. We don’t want to fall too far from the tribe but at the same time, we don’t want to be too ahead of the tribe to be noticed a lot. We just want to fit in. W will try to meet the baseline set by the tribe.

How People Think

A mixture of small tales helps us see the world in a different way. People have nuances. Life has nuances. Happiness is not linear and what makes us happy today might not bring happiness tomorrow. So how do we live our life? Is it more important to tell a better story or is it more fulfilling to a great work for which the story wasn’t that compelling? Is maximizing productivity the goal? If not then how productive one should be?

Book Review by Scott Alexander: The Cult Of Smart

This is one of the best book reviews I’ve read. 

Education is hard. There are so many variables to manage. This review is quite detailed and Scott takes many positions which are at odds with the author of the book. All positions taken by Scott are well researched and well presented. For example, Scott took the author to task for not researching enough on “Success Academy”. I have watched a few documentaries on how “Success Academy” works and calling them “cooking the books” is not fair. As Scott mentioned “success academy” has proved an amazing result at a fraction of the cost. There is something to learn there and not just pooh-pooh them.

Why we stopped making Einsteins

Now we have the Internet. We have the full knowledge of humanity in our pockets. However society, it seems, is unable to produce geniuses like Einstein, Beethoven, Maxwell, Nietzsche, etc. Is this the cause of our education system? The author makes a connection that 1:1 tutoring is missing in the modern world and maybe, just maybe, we don’t make Einsteins anymore because we don’t make Max Talmuds anymore.

Luxury Beliefs are Like Possession

Now that more and more folks have access to items that previously only rich people had access to, the rich have moved to have luxury beliefs.

People adopt certain beliefs because it gives them a feeling of belonging, and does not impose any serious costs. You can scream “defund the police” all day with the knowledge that you will not be personally responsible for whatever happens with policing policies. But by displaying that belief, you can elevate your social status among the people whose opinions you care about at no instrumental cost to yourself.

Rich people have certain beliefs that will put them at odds with middle-class people. Rich people can go for “defund the police” because they have private security. An anti-police stand makes them feel rich just like owning a Rolex watch.

The Intellectual Obesity Crisis

We are making our brains consume a lot of empty calories and it’s making all of us obese and unhealthy.

Put simply, the brain treats information as a reward in itself; it doesn't matter whether the info is accurate or useful, the brain will still crave it and feel satisfied after consuming it.

But despite being "empty calories," junk info still tastes delicious. Since your dopamine pathways can't distinguish between useful and useless info, consuming junk info gives you the satisfaction of feeling like you're learning.

And when you notice the myriad holes that all this junk has left in your memory, then it’ll finally be clear that you weren’t consuming it as much as it was consuming you.

It won’t be easy to get rid of this obesity but the first step is to recognize that we have a crisis on our hands.

How This All Happened

This is a short story about what happened to the U.S. economy since the end of World War II. After the end of the war, a large number of soldiers came home. In the meantime, women were forced to work to produce ammunition, etc and now these women didn’t want to go back and stay home all the time. So the government printed oodles of money and made money cheap. Richart Nixon severed the U.S. dollar’s ties to gold and that made it easier to print even more money.

Later the economy became more productive but also more unequal.

Founding Uber SRE

Will started the SRE team at Uber. This is his story of how it all came about. He describes the period when Uber was growing really fast and just keeping the server functioning was not trivial.

There is definitely something personally satisfying about working on a hard problem when there is so much at stake. The downside is that if one is not careful then this might exact a toll on your personal life. As Will admitted he couldn’t do much writing while working at Uber.