The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
āAlain de Botton
š§š»āāļø This editionās going to be a bit lighter. I spent the weekend at my parentsā place, in the middle of the woods, near a beautiful lake (the one on the photo on the about page).
Update: Well, Iāll leave the above as is because it tells you something about me. I wrote it on Friday morning, thinking that because Iād be out all weekend, I wouldnāt have time to write much.
Then I proceeded to be really productive the rest of Friday, and this edition is about as long as usual... ĀÆ\_(ć)_/ĀÆ
Update 2: Posted a few pics of the weekend in this thread. My fave is this shot of a hummingbird that I was able to snap with my iPhone after some patience:
If you look closely, the wings look kind of ghostly because the cameraās shutter couldnāt quite freeze them.
Some trivia: the Bluethroated Hummingbirdās heart was measured beating 1,260 beats per minute, and the wings of the Amethyst Woodstar Hummingbird have been recorded at 80 beats per second, while the average is closer to 50x per second.
What a marvel of engineering these things are.
At one point, I saw two at the feeder, and a third one flew by like a bullet, buzzing the others. Then they chased each other like tiny sci-fi drones šø that can stop and start mid-air like itās nothing.
š Leather is a little creepy when you really think about it. You wear the skin of an animal, chemically treated so it doesnāt rot off your back.
If it wasn't so ancient and had just been invented, the marketing folks of Madison Avenue would've had some challenges with it.
š£ Iām sure thereās plugins to do that in Chrome, but lately Iāve been using the built-in āread out loudā feature in Edgeās reader mode. It works surprisingly well, and you can adjust the speed so itās not glacial.
So once in a while, Iāll have my browser read an article to me while I do some bodyweight exercises in the office (Iām still working on that āget to 10 full pull-upsā challenge). Itās a good way to move a little while working.
Iām also still planning on getting a motorized standing desk, which should also help with that (probably an Uplift V2).
šš„ Asking for your support is not the easiest thing for me.
It would be simpler with a paywall, because I wouldnāt have to ask, youād just hit the wall and couldnāt read unless you paid. But I like writing for everyone and not just a much smaller group of paid subsā¦
When I think things through, I know I canāt justify spending as much time as Iām spending on this project if it doesnāt help pay some bills, and I want to keep doing this project because itās fun and Iām learning a lot.
Ergo, I gotta keep asking for your support, and I hope youāll help keep this paddleboat going (it takes just a few seconds to sign up ā just make sure youāre logged in Substack in your web browser, thereās a login link in top-right corner):
Investing & Business
š š Ideas/Medium Velocity-Match, Ben Thompson & Morgan Housel Edition
Hereās an idea I was thinking about while talking with reader and supporter (šš„) MI Capital last weekā¦ Itās more the beginning of an idea than a fully-formed thing.
We were talking about something that Ben Thompson (š) said at some point, about how thereās no point in him writing a book because the newsletter model is better in pretty much every way for him: More lucrative, can get ideas out faster, reaches the people he needs to reach, etc.
In the same conversation, we were talking about Morgan Houselās āThe Psychology of Moneyā, and how it was both a good intro to multiple important concepts for newbies *and* a valuable memory-refresher even for crusty old investors.
This got me thinking about how the most important thing for creators/writers is to match the medium they use to the inherent velocity of the medium they use. Kind of like how a capsule going up to the space station needs to match velocity with it to dock properly and deliver its payload.
I donāt feel like Housel wouldāve had quite the same impact if he hadnāt written a book, in the same way that a book probably wouldnāt work for Thompson (feels weird calling him by his last name, but āBenā also feels a little weird since I didnāt call Morgan by his first name ā oops I just did ĀÆ\_(ć)_/ĀÆ ).
Or at least, it wouldnāt work for what Ben (screw it) is writing now. He probably could write a great book, but it couldnāt just be what he writes in his newsletter re-packaged.
This is because his NL content is well-matched to the velocity of the almost-daily cadence.
He can react to news and inject himself in ongoing wider conversations. Itās similar with his podcasting, which has a different heartbeat, but isnāt as far from a NL as a book.
On the other hand, Morganās book contains āslowerā content that works perfectly as a book. Heās doing great with his blog and Twitter, but I feel like the book is elevating his message in part because of the attributes of the format itself.
And I donāt even mean just number of readers here. Thereās probably a more precise formula that is more like:
Number of readers x intensity of reachSome blog post may make it to the frontpage of Reddit and get a zillion views, but itās probably really low intensity, while a really good book may change a larger number of peopleās lives.
And at the extreme of ālow # readers but high-intensityā is probably the book equivalent of the Velvet Undergroud ā a band said to have had few fans, but most of their fans were highly influenced by them and started their own bands.
So if youāre trying to get a message out, think about the interaction with the container, and try to match to the right medium.
Some things belong to instant message, some email, etc. I bet you even āfeelā how different messaging services have different levels of urgency and seriousness implied (iMessage vs FB Messenger vs Twitter DM).
Itās why my newsletter is so different from my Twitter feed. The medium is shaping what I create a lot more than even I wouldāve expected going in, and I expected it to be pretty different.
Win11: Microsoft Flexing Distribution Muscles šŖ for Teams
With Windows 11, weāre excited to introduce Chat from Microsoft Teams integrated in the taskbar. Now you can instantly connect through text, chat, voice or video with all of your personal contacts, anywhere, no matter the platform or device theyāre on, across Windows, Android or iOS. If the person youāre connecting to on the other end hasnāt downloaded the Teams app, you can still connect with them via two-way SMS. (Source)
MS Teams hit 145 million daily active users in April 2021. Itāll be interesting to see how it does in the post-pandemic world, but this integration is sure to help, since defaults and low-friction are so powerful.
Thereās of course the cynical view of this, but also the less cynical one: This probably makes the experience better for millions of users.
This type of integration is always more nuanced than it may seem (especially if youāre a competitor), because, how far do you push it in either direction?
Should operating systems come with web browsers? Email clients? Video codecs? Image viewers? Text editors?
Each software vertical has would-be third-party competitors that would love to not compete against the platform owner and find it unfairā¦ But lots of users would have a much worse experience if they got a car without a steering wheels, doors, and windshield, and they then had to manually piece it together themselves.
Iām not even saying Iām on one side or the other; just that itās a more complex question than it may seem at first glance.
Update: On the topic of Teams, āversion 2.0ā will make some big changes under the hood that should make for a better experience.
The biggest is that Microsoft is dumping Electron (which is basically built on Chromium, Chromeās rendering engine) and switching to its own Edge Webview2. Itās claimed that this should reduce RAM usage by about half, and improve overall performance.
Weāll have to wait and see if it works out that way in the real-world.
h/t Friend-of-the-show and supporter (šš„) Rishi Gosalia (š š)
Nvidia + ARM Deal Gets Support from Broadcom, MediaTek and Marvell
Three of the worldās largest chip companies have broken ranks to give their blessing to Nvidiaās $40 billion swoop on UK semiconductor group ARM, in a big boost for the US giantās controversial takeover. (Source)
Matt Levine on the Federal Reserveās Cryptocurrency
the Federal Reserve absolutely does issue its own digital currency, which is called āthe U.S. dollarā and which consists of entries on computer ledgers. And consumers absolutely do get the benefits of a stablecoin without the risk of a crypto exchange losing all of their money: They can keep digital U.S. dollars in an online bank account, and pay for goods and services electronically with credit cards or ACH transfers or Venmo, and the dollars in the bank account are always worth a dollar and are insured by the FDIC. Also you can actually use them to pay for goods and services, which is a lot more than you can say for Tether. (Source)
Conversation: Alex Danco & Jim OāShaughnessy, Redux
One of my favorite duos is back:
Thereās a transcript of the first half, but reading rather than listening probably removes about 37% of the fun of the conversation.
Their discussion of āEternal Septemberā brings back memories, and the riff about how people who were online in the 90s were lucky to get a head-start on what the online world would be for everyone else is spot on.
I feel very lucky that I became obsessed with computers from a young age and discovered the online world first with BBSes that you dialed into (you re-dialed a million times because the 1-2 lines they had were always busy) and then via a friendās internet access.
We didnāt even understand English, and I donāt know that there couldāve been much for us to do online, but you have to understand that when you come from zero expectations, anything at all feels mind-blowing.
Just loading a new webpage that you had never seen before felt like an adventure!
Jim & Alex touch on many cool concepts, including āAge of Scarcity vs. Abundanceā, which is something Iāve been thinking about a lot for many yearsā¦
Itās also partly why I feel like thereās increasing value in curation. Thereās just too much interesting stuff out there, and the challenge is just finding it and filtering out the junk and boring stuff.
The second half is mostly about his recent post āThe Michael Scott Theory of Social Classā, and itās great (and I now get more of it since Iāve recently started watching The Office for the first time).
Science & Technology
ā5,000 burgers a day: Worldās first cultured meat-production plant opens in Israelā
āThis facility opening marks a huge step in Future Meat Technologiesā path to market, serving as a critical enabler to bring our products to shelves by 2022,ā said Rom Kshuk, CEO of Future Meat Technologies. āHaving a running industrial line accelerates key processes such as regulation and product development.ā
Currently, the facility can produce cultured chicken, pork and lamb, without the use of animal serum or genetic modification, with the production of beef coming soon. The company claims its unique platform enables fast production cyclesāabout 20 times faster than traditional animal agriculture. [...]
Future Meatās cruelty-free production process is expected to generate 80 percent less greenhouse emissions, and use 99 percent less land and 96 percent less freshwater than traditional meat production. (Source)
ARMās Confidential Compute Architecture (ARMv9)
(yeah, I know the official way to write it is āArmā and not āARMā, I donāt care, I still think it looks kinda stupid that way. The original name comes from āAcorn RISC Machineā, which was then changed to āAdvanced RISC Machinesā because Apple didnāt want to have a competitorās name in there.. so the argument to be made for it being an acronym is strong. BTW, did you know that Apple was one of the original founders ARM, in a joint venture with Acorn and VSLI?)
When ARMĀ announced their v9 architectureĀ earlier this year, the specs showed the introduction of confidential compute, but without too much details. Well:
Today Arm is introducing the new architecture. The Arm Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA) is an isolation technology that builds on Armās existing TrustZone technology as its foundation. [...]
application data is designed to be protected while in use. This includes the prevention of access to private data even from privileged software such as the hypervisor or the operating system. [...]
it will be an optional feature of the Armv9.2 and will likely eventually become a required extension in a future specification. [...]
the new confidential compute architecture is designed to suit all markets from cloud to mobile, automotive, and to IoT.
This stuff will be especially important as ARM chips keep making inroads in the data-center, where multiple tenants can use the same CPU, and you want to make sure that malicious actors canāt get out of their sandbox and go snoop around other peopleās bits.
the CCA provides support for strong protection between mutually distrusting workloads, strong protection against compromised rich operating systems (e.g., Linux, Windows), strong protection against compromised hypervisors, and new protection from applications running within the secure world. In other words, a Realm need not trust anyone. [...]
Realms can be created and destroyed dynamically on-demand. In striking contrast to TrustZone, resources dedicated to realms such as memory can also be adjusted on-demand (i.e., memory size can be increased or decreased as needed on-demand). The idea here is that by moving large software workloads into their own private realms, applications can have much greater confidence that the data they process and algorithms used cannot be used by other software and services running on the same hardware. (Source)
All sounds very good, but above my pay grade to know how effective itāll be or how easy itāll be for platform owners and devs to use it well. But sounds like a move in the right direction.
Long-Lived Animals & What We Can Learn from Them
Sarah Constantin has a good thread. Some highlights:
Whales are one of the few organisms that live longer than humans and we donāt know nearly enough about how.
Other organisms that need more aging biologists to go to the zoo and ask for samples:
1. Tortoises. They can live hundreds of years and their genome wasnāt even sequenced till 2019!
2. Bats. Theyāre mammals and theyāre notably long-lived for their size and their telomeres donāt shorten. A bit better studied, but I donāt think thereās a bat biobank yet. Longitudinal transcriptomics is happening though!
3. Rockfish. Several species can live for centuries and their genomes were only sequenced in 2020
4. Cockatoos and ravens. They can live to be over 60. Interestingly, parrots and corvids are also the smartest birds, and you can keep parrots in captivity. But nobodyās done longitudinal transcriptomics on them yet!
5. Big-wingspan birds like albatrosses and condors. Thereās no albatross genome!
6. Hummingbirds. They have the highest lifespan/body mass ratio other than bats. They have genomes but thereās no research on hummingbird aging to my knowledge. [...]
The thread has more links on each of the animals mentioned, if you want more.
Original iPhone vs iPhone 12 Speed Test
I was recently writing about how, in my lifetime, I went from going on BBSes on my fatherās 386 DX 25mhz on a 2400bauds modem to the Star Trek shit we have today.
A good example of progress is looking at the iPhoneās evolution from 2007 to 2020 (yes, thatās just 13 years):
And this test doesnāt even really tell you that much about the difference, because the apps that the 12 is loading arenāt the same as the apps that the original iPhone is loading. These new apps are much heavier in every way (higher resolution graphic assets, larger files because of more capabilities and use of more sophisticated OS APIs, etc).
So the 12 is smoking the original while doing a lot more work. If you could somehow install the original version of iPhone OS (it wasnāt called iOS back then) on the 12, youād probably need a faster robot arm to do the test. š¦¾
The Arts & History
New Modest Mouse Album
I love this band. But they take so long between albums, the previous one was in 2015 and before that 2007ā¦
Itās too early to tell if this new one is any good, Iāll need to listen a bunch of times to see how it grows on me, but just the fact that it exists is enough to make me want to mention it.
Making plans in the sands as the tides roll inBut if youāve never heard them, I think the āEssentials by..ā playlists on Spotify or Apple Music would be a good place to start.
And if youāre an OG fan, hereās something you may like. Itās a short documentary about their album āThe Lonesome Crowded Westā (1997). Iāve watched it multiple times over the years.
The "Matt Levine on the Federal Reserveās Cryptocurrency" was thought provoking. It made me stop and reconsider the larger topic of cryptocurrency. Reality can be made confusing with hype and jargon.