Archive of posts with tag 'Video'

I just watched this excellent interview with Michael Dean on the How I Write podcast.

Michael is an architect and writer, and his writing project is fascinating.

He’s built a framework for thinking about writing that adapts Christopher Alexander’s concept of pattern languages to writing.

If you’re unfamiliar, Alexander created a way of thinking about design and functionality that gave us a modular, nested framework for how to build spaces — from whole cities down to features within rooms. A “pattern” is a loose and modifiable guideline for how a component of a system should work. More defined than a rule-of-thumb, but less rigid than a rule. So patterns can be refined and adjusted to adapt to different settings.

Thinking about writing this way is interesting. Language has similarities to other complex systems: letters, words, sentences, phrases, paragraphs, stories, narratives. It’s made of modular components that nest together in a hierarchy, where ideas (“wholes”) emerge from the interactions between parts, even at different levels in the hierarchy.

Michael’s system gets more abstract than the simple physical form of the words and sentences, into things like voice and tone, cohesion, motifs, stakes, rhythm, and repetition.

Need to spend some more time with these ideas.

This is a phenomenal extended (3 hour!) interview with Dana Gioia on his background, poetry, his writing process, and the habits he’s curated that make him into a prolific and interesting writer.

Jason Carman’s S3 project has been relaunched (no pun intended) as The Story Company, continuing his incredible work on documenting the hard tech scene.

At the start of the year they published their first feature documentary, New Space. A story about the current state of the space industry, and what’s different this time in the marriage between government-backed and private spaceflight.

I found and watched this this morning. Phenomenal documentary on the life and ideas of Rene Girard.

A lot of direct interviews with Girard himself, as well as many of his colleagues, collaborators, and those influenced by his ideas.

I’m in the process of building some cabinets, and yesterday I was working on the drawers. I decided to use shellac as the finish for the drawer interiors. Never used it before, but heard that it applies easy, cures fast, and is generally more pleasant to work with than harsh chemical urethanes. It has the consistency and properties of other synthetic resins, but is totally organic — actually secreted naturally by the lac bug.

How it’s made is a marvel of human discovery, tinkering, and problem-solving, and also nature’s incredibly weird ability to produce naturally things we couldn’t reliably make synthetically:

Shellac, like silk, honey, and beeswax, is made by bugs, not of bugs. Laccifer lacca, a small insect about the size and color of an apple seed, swarms on certain trees in India and Thailand. Like most bugs, it eats during its larval stage, then settles down and creates a sort of cocoon in which to mature. In this case, the bugs create a huge, hard, waterproof, communal protective shell on the branches of the trees they live on. Soon, the adult males emerge from the shell and fly away. The females do not fly; they attach permanently to the tree and stay there.

Once the males have gone, natives collect the branches and scrape off the hard crust. This gets crumbled into what we call “seedlac.” Seedlac is filtered to remove any random bits of bark and bug legs to make shellac.

Here’s a great video that follows the entire production chain from a lac farm in India all the way to its final uses:

It’s interesting to imagine watching this procedure from start to finish as an alien observer, with no idea what’s being done — totally weird-looking and unexplainable steps like drying insect goop in the sun into crystals, putting it in a 30 foot-long sock to melt it and filter impurities, making huge sheets with a palm leaf. The whole process is an awesome example of human ingenuity to experiment with any methods that work to ultimately solve our problems.

And shellac solves many of them. The same insect resin gets used for making beads, coatings on medicines, hard candy, fruit preservatives, and, of course, wood finishes.

Brandon from Digging the Greats breaks down Madlib and MF DOOM’s epic collaboration:

I remember in this extended interview with MF DOOM him talking about the lackadaisical approach to making the record. Madlib would make a beat upstairs, give it to DOOM, and he’d spend time separately writing and recording vocals. Slowly and gradually building up a catalog of ridiculously inventive music.

The novelty, design, craftsmanship, execution, cinematography, all unmatched. Absolutely incredible work.

He took a centuries-old, classic bench design and added function to support his specific workflow needs.

I have incredible respect for populating your workspace with beautiful, functional things. If it makes you enjoy the work, you’re more likely to do it, and more likely to push yourself to higher standards.

This is a phenomenal interview with Richard Rhodes, author of the legendary The Making of the Atomic Bomb, an expansive history of the Manhattan Project and the development of nuclear weapons technology.

Dwarkesh Shah’s show The Lunar Society is generally excellent and highly recommended. Just listen to how long he lets Rhodes answer and expound on questions without interruption. These are my favorite types of long-form interviews.

An interesting discussion between Patrick Collison and OpenAI founder Sam Altman on a predictably fascinating assortment of subjects. AI developments, stagnation, long-term bets, and what’s preventing us from having more founders.

This is a fascinating video on the Wallace Line, which separates to biogeographic regions:

The wildlife on each side differ tremendously from one another, even the line cuts through straits that aren’t wide at all.

Naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (a contemporary of Darwin), noticed the distinction and defined the line. But what we now know is that he discovered the effects of plate tectonics decades before the theory was formalized.

So it’s not that different species mysteriously won’t cross the line — it’s that the separated landmasses with their own distinct biological lineages are now closer than they’ve been for millions of years.

It’s amazing we get to watch these on livestreams. SpaceX willing to expose its R&D process and high-risk work to the world in real-time. The world definitely needs more companies taking big risks and pushing forward.

Beautiful and inspiring stuff from SpaceX:

A convincing case for Elon to put his focus all-in on SpaceX, and not 6 other ventures at once.

This is an interesting look into how an effective team works through the weeds of a product design review. I love how it shows the warts and complexities of even seemingly-simple flow of sending a batch email in an email client. So many little forking paths and specific details need direct thinking to shape a product that works well.

Argentina has become infamous for its decades-long struggles with inflation and economic instability. For an otherwise fairly well-off nation, it’s surprising to outsiders how deep the problem on this has been.

In this episode of EconTalk, Devon Zuegel talks about an article she wrote on this topic, after spending time there and investigating the problems for herself. What’s most surprising about all this is how pervasive a problem it is. Inflation touches everyone; everyone is hyper-aware of money issues and constantly thinking about techniques to avoid inflation’s negative impacts.

The spread of written language around the world, from Egyptian hieroglyphics to today.

Reading Ryan Singer’s Shape Up a few years ago was formative (or re-formative, or something) in my thinking on how product development can and should work. After that it was a rabbit hole on jobs-to-be-done, Bob Moesta’s Demand-Side Sales, demand thinking, and more.

Since he wrote the book in 2019, he talks about 2 new concepts that extend Shape Up a little further: the role of the “technical shaper” and the stage of “framing” that happens prior to shaping.

Framing is a particularly useful device to add meat onto the bone of working through defining the problem you’re trying to solve. Shaping as the first step doesn’t leave enough space for the team to really articulate the dimensions of the problem it’s attempting to solve. Shaping is looking for the contours of a particular solution, setting the desired appetite for a solution (“we’re okay spending 6 weeks worth of time on this problem”), and laying out the boundaries around the scope for the team to work within.

I know in our team, the worst project execution happens when the problem is poorly-defined before we get started, or when we don’t get down into enough specificity to set proper scopes. I love these additions to the framework.

A lot of Steve Jobs content is hagiography at this point, but this clip is fantastic:

There’s an enormous delta between idea and execution. Someone can take a great idea and squander it. Or conversely, someone could take a middling and obvious idea and execute so well they build a billion dollar business. From the first part of the clip:

One of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that disease, I’ve seen other people get it, too, it’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 percent of the work, and that if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea” then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there’s a just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in-between a great idea and a great product, and as you evolve that great idea it changes and grows it never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there’s tremendous trade-offs that you have to make. There are there are just certain things you can’t make electrons do, there are certain things you can’t make plastic do or glass do or factories do or robots do. And as you get into all these things, designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your brain, these concepts, and fitting them all together and kind of continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want and every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. It’s that process that is the magic.

The idea of “making to know”, or of starting the work in order to figure out the specific contours of the work, these are fascinating concepts to me. So many of the great innovations of our time are the function of the college dropout, or the less-educated craftsperson, experimenting through years of trial and error to make something happen. Often the only way to know the true bottlenecks, challenges, and chokepoints of bringing an idea to consumers (buyers, audiences, customers) is to get started. Make the map of the territory along the way.

The latest episode of Notion’s Tools & Craft podcast features the excellent Andy Matuschak, talking about his research, productivity practices, and more.

Also check out Andy’s work on smoothly-ratcheting goal tracking and mastery learning.

This is a new genre for me, but one I’ve gone deep on in the past week: Japanese jazz and soul. Like always with YouTube, the rabbit hole is deep (and rewarding!).

This guy is a YouTube DJ that picks a genre and a geography, and digs crates., or does so virtually. He has a video on his process.

I’m a sucker for a How It’s Made episode, and this tour of the Lodge factory combines that with my Food YouTube-watching obsession.

What’s amazing here is to see the reuse at work, and how few inputs are required to go from raw materials to kitchen cookware. Scrap metal, pig iron, sand, and heat come together to make products that can last generations if cared for properly. Some of the most useful tools out there are some of the simplest. In an age when we have infinite gadgets to do every specialized thing, it’s cool to see Lodge’s business booming for the most basic and versatile of cooking tools.

One side observation on systems:

When I watch episodes of How It’s Made, I try and visualize the system diagram of inputs, outputs, and operations (like what you’d find in Donella Meadows’s excellent Thinking in Systems — I know, I must be fun to watch TV with). The most interesting production lines are those that reduce and reuse throughout the process, and maximize what can be done per unit of area. Lodge’s facility is about as reductionist as you can get while maintaining the throughput they do.

Jonathan Rauch’s latest book The Constitution of Knowledge just dropped, which sounds sort of like a sequel, or at least a redux of his classic Kindly Inquisitors.

Brookings held a panel on his book’s release with historian Anne Applebaum and novelist Neal Stephenson (yes, that Neal Stephenson). In Constitution he follows up his ideas on liberal science and free speech with further work on institutional decay, social coercion, and disinformation.

I wrote about Kindly Inquisitors and Rauch’s liberal science concept in Res Extensa #9. His work covers critical first principles that we’re gradually navigating away from.

I’ve gone over off the deep end the last couple weeks trying to wrap my head around DeFi. To date I’ve only dabbled in crypto, being lucky enough to ride some small waves, though nothing life-changing.

DeFi (decentralized finance) is fascinating for its disruption potential (and Ethereum platform on which it’s all built). A basic understanding of the conceptual possibilities shows this stuff is here to stay, even if not in the same form or as loud as meme-ish as it’s been over the past year.

Through Twitter I discovered a channel called Finematics that has a ton of great explainer videos walking through topics like smart contracts, the history of DeFi, NFTs, yield farming, and dozens of others on the esoteric crypto world.

Check out the full channel for the archive.

Here’s Rich Hickey (creator of Clojure) on the benefits of stepping away from the computer, in his talk on “hammock-driven development”:

He differentiates what the “waking” mind and “background” mind are good at, which I’d interchangeably refer to as the “at the desk” mind and the “away from the computer” mind:

• Waking mind:
  • Good at critical thinking; analysis, tactics
  • Prone to finding local maxima
  • Can feed work to the background mind
• Background mind:
  • Good at making connections
  • Synthesis; strategy; abstractions and analogies
  • You can only feed it, not direct it

For anyone in a critical thinking-based market, I’m sure this rings accurate. Think about how we refer to eureka moments popping into our heads — ”shower thoughts”. This idea that we can “only feed it, not direct it” does feel true. For me the most interesting ideas don’t result from me saying “okay, it’s time to think about things” and writing down the result.

When I’m working on something, it’s challenging to get “unstuck” while sitting at my desk. Some days I can get in the zone, but most of the time the zone eludes me. It’s not even the active distractions of Slacks, meetings, and email (though those are never-ending), but temptation from the no-kidding thousands of individual little shiny threads to follow.

But then when I’m out for a walk, a run, or driving somewhere, thoughts and ideas abound. And of course I’m never in a good position to take notes or jump right into writing or doing anything about them at the time. My post from last year on Downtime Thinking looked at my experience with this phenomenon. I’ve experimented with techniques for bringing these modes closer together. Too many interesting ideas are lost in the transition between waking and background brain modes.

Hammock-driven creativity helps the mind jar loose from its normal working context. Environment is a strong contributor to controlling your behavior. For myself, my “normal” work environment — sitting at my desk, keyboard and mouse in hand, multiple monitors available — is associated in my brain with dozens of activities other than creative or critical thinking. I’ve experimented lately with “morning pages” as a mechanism working on the writing habit. Start a timer and do nothing but write free-form for 25 minutes. I’m having mixed success with it much of the time, but occasional sessions lead to solid ideas, and I’ll blow past my time commitment promise.

If I can combine the intentionality of morning pages with a minor change of scenery, the forces could combine into a productive combo.

In a recent interview, Jerry Seinfeld described his writing sessions, a brilliantly simple practice:

I still have a writing session every day. It’s another thing that organizes your mind. The coffee goes here. The pad goes here. The notes go here. My writing technique is just: You can’t do anything else. You don’t have to write, but you can’t do anything else. The writing is such an ordeal.

I love that: “You can’t do anything else. You don’t have to write, but you can’t do anything else.”

Setting the table for the writing session triggers the Pavlovian mode: “this is writing time.” Then you’ve got the intention, that you can’t do anything else. And I love how he gives himself the leeway to not even write! But in exchange for the freedom for work-avoidance, your only other option is staring at the wall.

The resemblance between Martian and Terran topography is amazing. Mars has volcanism, plains, valleys, and hard evidence of water formerly everywhere.

Great shots here with renderings of Martian topography.

There’s a YouTube channel I linked a couple months back called “Modern Self Reliance” where a group of guys built an off-grid cabin. In a new series, they’re adding a neighboring cabin in the form of an 8’x8’x8’ cube, for others to hang out on the property. It’s an excellent series so far. I love how they harvest materials from the property itself (like the cabin’s cedar posts) or salvage things from past projects to do the builds. Looks like a ton of fun.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Reason Magazine has put together a 4-part documentary series on the cypherpunk movement, the early-90s collective of hobbyist computer enthusiasts that believed in an open and free internet. Their philosophies influenced cryptography, bitcoin, and BitTorrent.

This is part 1, a well-produced piece on an important phase of internet history.

A Slack chat this morning led to a discussion of Funky Drummer and how often its been sampled. I ran across this good clip of the player himself, drummer Clyde Stubblefield, who played with James Brown’s band during the late-60s. He improvised the famous break that’s been used in dozens of popular tracks in hip-hop history.

Microsoft’s Project Natick is exploring the feasibility of underwater datacenters. They sunk a container with 864 servers off the coast of the Orkney Islands.

So far they’ve seen reliability numbers that best the same configuration of servers on land in a standard datacenter, which is amazing for an airtight chamber untouched physically for months.

You don’t have to be an avid cycling fan to be impressed with Tadej Pogačar’s incredible time trial on stage 20 of this year’s Tour de France. He bested the 2nd and 3rd place riders by a full minute, 1:21 better than 150 other riders. Absolutely unbelievable.

His countryman Primož Roglič (a heavy favorite for the overall weeks before the Tour) had nearly a minute on him in the yellow jersey, going into a long TT ending with a climbing finish on La Planche de Belles Filles.

I just wonder how much different the Tour results would look if this TT was stage 3 instead of 20.

I fell into a rabbit hole of videos from these guys and their off-grid cabin in the woods. This one gives you a time-lapse of the project from start to finish, with no narration.

In COVID times, there’s something very appealing about having an escape like this, and a piece of land to roam around on.

Tiago Forte and Conor White-Sullivan call a truce in the Twitter knowledge management feud.

One of my favorite evening activities is watching talks, interviews, and presentations on YouTube. I often take notes on these for myself, so this is an experiment in brushing up those notes and sharing them publicly.

In this 2016 talk, Joel Spolsky presented this talk called “The History of Management” as an internal training session at StackOverflow. Corporate structure dynamics are fascinating. Groups of people have developed new and more effective ways of cooperating throughout history. We started out organizing ourselves in kinship-based tribal groups with spiritual myth-making to rationalize decisions, and have evolved into the likes of Amazon’s expansive 100,000 person decentralized model or Apple’s global functional org chart.

I like that I this talk Spolsky goes back to the beginnings of group organizing models. He covers this evolution in 6 broad phases:

• Archaic
• Magic
• Impulsive
• Conformist
• Achievement
• Pluralistic

Methods of organization and cooperation are technologies; once we discovered learning through trial and error (particularly through application of scientific methods), we’ve continued adapting and modify them over time.

Most of the substance covers the last 3 stages, each of which you’ll still find in operation today. Here’s the talk, followed by my notes below.

Notes

Just as with technological advancement, governance, and many other things, we’ve moved through each new stage faster than its predecessor. Let’s go through each stage and describe its time period and relevant details about what made it unique.

• Archaic (100,000 — 50,000 BC)
  • From an age before people could classify things
  • No specialization or division of labor
  • No hierarchy, elders, or chiefs
  • Bands capped out at a few dozen people
• Magic (15,000 — 0 BC)
  • People had no understanding of death
  • No ability to form abstract concepts
  • Still no specialization
  • Cause and effect was poorly understood — wherever there was any attempt to understand, spirits and magic were attributed as causes
  • Tribes could grow up to several hundred
• Impulsive (8,000 BC — 1900 AD)
  • Might makes right — power and control is derived from physical strength and dominance
  • The weak have to submit to authority
  • Leaders have a lack of awareness and empathy
    • No value placed on the individual or individualism
  • Black and white worldviews were dominant
  • Rewards and punishments well understood, but violence was commonplace (it was the primary means for asserting and proving your authority)
  • Ego and role differentiation — meant we could differentiate roles and responsibilities, leads to some specialization
  • High levels of instability
  • The chief must:
    • Continually demonstrate power
    • Spread myths about absolute power
    • Surround self with family to insulate from challenges to power and control
    • Buy loyalty
    • Only keep incompetent aids and advisors — if advisors are too capable, they could challenge authority
  • Examples
    • Failed states, places with no rule of law
    • Gangs
    • Mafia
    • TV and movie plotlines

The first three are obsolete — you only really see them appear in movies, fiction, or history books. The final three are still in common existence today.

• Conformist (4,000 BC — present)
  • Huge advancement over “Impulsive (8,000 BC — 1900 AD)” systems
  • Examples: US Army, MTA, Catholic Church, East India Company
  • Defined by rigid, unchanging bureaucracy
    • Understand time as finite and linear
      • Cause and effect
      • Farming (plant now, eat later)
      • Caloric surplus
      • Surplus energy means we can do “extra stuff” — administrators, craftsmen
  • Understanding other people’s points of view
    • People will seek approval, leaders want approval from followers
    • Adopting group norms and conformism (us vs. them)
    • Fitting in requires self-discipline, can’t be all impulse
  • We develop moral codes assumed to be universal and immutable
    • Do right ⭢ earn rewards; do wrong ⭢ get punished
  • Creates structures — bureaucracies, hierarchies, castes, strict roles, institutions
    • Compared to earlier models, Conformism offers comparative stability and security
    • Arbitrarily scalable, templates can be cloned
      • There is One Right Way
    • End up with a rigid hierarchy of titles, org charts, ranks, uniforms
    • Unfortunately Conformist models lead to exclusion of non-conformists or outsiders, highly stratified (to a fault)
  • Long-term perspective is possible
    • Can build things over centuries
    • Global trading networks
  • But because of the rigidity and fixed nature of the structure, Conformist orgs often fail to adapt to a changing world
  • “Compliance”-focused organizations
    • Thinking is at the top, doing is at the bottom
    • Decisions are “handed down”
    • People “report up”
    • Rulers are assumed to be smart
    • Default assumption is that workers are lazy, and need supervision
  • You don’t have to fight for power or watch your back (it’s all in the system)
  • Mores and norms
    • Us vs. them
    • Loyalty for life
    • Leaving or being fired is terrible
• Achievement (1945 — present)
  • Examples: Walmart, Coca Cola, Nike, Microsoft, GE, modern multinationals
  • Made possible through science, the scientific method, and imagining other worlds to pursue
  • Fundamental assumption is the world is changeable: we can study it and figure out
  • No absolute right or wrong
    • Pragmatism — decisions made based on right and wrong, what works and what doesn’t
    • “Best practices”
    • Use science, do experiments
    • Innovation
  • It’s possible to imagine alternate worlds
    • Skepticism is valued; we should question our current assumptions
    • We can question authority
  • Led to unprecedented prosperity in last century
    • Massive human liberation
    • But side effects like corporate greed and environmental problems
  • Innovation is a core pursuit
    • Constant improvement
    • Change around us is an opportunity to differentiate ourselves
    • We do projects with objectives, not just carrying out pre-determined processes (uses a goal-oriented approach, often driven by a metric)
  • Accountability is paramount
    • People are brains, not just labor; have to trust employees to deliver
    • Management by objectives becomes central, companies work toward goals (OKRs)
      • Management sets goals, people figure out how
      • Creation of performance reviews, bonuses, rewards to align people with objectives
      • But egos can prevent proper delegation (manager doesn’t really stay hands-off the “how”)
      • Budgets cause sandbagging
      • Hard to manage what you can’t measure (a creeping focus on legibility over impact can result)
        • People find shortcuts and game the system to show progress on those metrics
  • Meritocracy advances from the Conformist model
    • Anyone can become a CEO
    • Symbols of hierarchy are shunned (or at least less important)
  • We still talk of a “corporate ladder” to move up — vestiges of Conformism
    • Still org charts and hierarchies
    • But lots of cross-talk and cross-team projects
    • Communication doesn’t need to go through chain of command, often encouraged to go point-to-point
  • Downsides with “Achievement (1945 * present)”
    • End up pursuing growth for growth’s sake (is there a higher purposes than profits and size?)
    • Create customer needs that aren’t real; even more pervasive when chasing legibility and measurable metrics
    • No meaning to it all
• Pluralistic (1980 — present)
  • Modern, purpose-driven organizations; built on top of Achievement organizations
  • Examples: StackOverflow, Patagonia, Etsy, Atlassian, most startups
  • Empowerment as a core virtue
    • Decision-making is pushed down to the lowest level it can be done
      • Person with the most information makes the decision
      • Intel in the 1980s under Andy Grove pioneered this approach, at least openly
    • Pluralism prizes autonomy and individual agency
    • This means managers have to give up control
    • Organization becomes closer to a network than a hierarchy
    • Servant leadership; leadership should function as inspiration, support, assistive enablers
      • Listen to, empower, develop, and motivate subordinates
    • 360 feedback valued — feedback loops up, down, and across, a means of error correction within the organization
    • Managers chosen by and from rank and file
    • Requires management training and development, it’s most effective to breed leaders from within
  • Multiple stakeholders now
    • Not just shareholders
    • Employees, community, customers, suppliers, society, environment
      • Values improving conditions within their suppliers
      • Eliminating wasteful packaging
      • Extraordinary working conditions provided for team and selves
  • Pluralism is not anarchy
    • Discarding hierarchy completely doesn’t work for any meaningful amount of time, or with large groups
      • Is there a relationship here with [[Dunbar number]] and how many people can collaborate in a group successfully?
      • Decentralization is a tactic deployed as much as possible to empower those local to a problem or project to identify those issues and formulate solutions
  • New technologies enable pluralistic management styles

YouTube creator Ali Abdaal put together a great extended overview video on Roam. Good examples of the core features of the product, and interesting techniques for how to organize notes.

With this year’s Tour de France delayed (as of now, til late August), the guys from The Move have been going over some of the best stages from the US Postal years. It’s a cool format, sort of like a commentary track over the exciting parts of the climbs and pursuits.

I especially enjoy the commentary from Johan Bruyneel, who was the team director at the time. The insider commentary on strategy is neat — hard to appreciate as a TV viewer of cycling.

🛠 Attitudes, Aptitudes, and Progress

Joel Mokyr’s talk on the most recent session of The Torch of Progress series.

🧠 How to Be a Neo-Cartesian Cyborg

A recent talk from Maggie Appleton on the “building a second brain” concept.

👋🏼 Take a Tour of HEY

Great example of how to do a product demo. Informal style, clearly prepared but not “scripted,” and deep care and attention to the product.

I’m a sucker for YouTube content of makers and craftsmen at work. I’ve posted before about channels like Black Beard Projects restoring old shop tools, and recently Kenji Lopez-Alt’s first-person cooking show.

I grew up doing watching my grandfather’s carpentry in his wood shop, and did many projects over the years tinkering around with my dad and brothers at home. It’s been something I’ve always had ideas about doing again, whenever I can create the space for small projects.

But during quarantine times, Marc Spagnuolo’s Wood Whisperer channel is a great option to watch someone at work on impressive projects.

Other excellent furniture videos:

• Shop Cabinets
• Trestle Table: Part 1, Part 2
• Big Green Egg Table

This is the second episode of the “Torch of Progress” series that the Progress Studies for Young Scholars program is putting on, hosted by Jason Crawford. Tyler Cowen is unbelievably prolific in projects he’s got going on, so it’s great to see him making the time for things like this.

Read more here from last year on the progress studies movement.

I linked a couple weeks ago to Stephen Kotkin’s discussion with Lex Fridman. That was so interesting to me I went out looking for other interviews and lectures of his on YouTube and found this great one from Dartmouth in 2017, the centennial of of the Russian Revolution.

Excellent top comment on YouTube:

The Joe Pesci of historians!

The new medium in COVID times for musicians is the live session on Zoom. This is a fun one from Seatbelts, playing their theme song from the 90s anime Cowboy Bebop.

Stephen Kotkin is a historian that has studied and written mostly about Soviet history and Josef Stalin. This was an excellent interview with him by Lex Fridman — Lex asks simple, broad questions and let’s Kotkin go deep.

Kotkin is incredibly articulate here. I would love to get to a depth of knowledge on a subject to be able to speak uninterrupted about it for an hour and a half.

Author Martin Gurri posted this quick 10 minute summary of his book The Revolt of the Public. It was one of my favorite recent reads, and in this video he does an excellent job summarizing his key diagnosis of what’s behind the degradation of authority from institutions and dissolution of public trust in them.

His insights connect information dissemination, institutions, and authority — the public expects unrealistic levels of service and expertise from institutions, while institutions also promise far more than they’re capable of delivering. This divide, happening in a world with instantaneous (over)communication gets us to where we are today.

Previous posts related to Gurri or TROTP:

• Arnold Kling and Martin Gurri discuss the loss of institutional legitimacy
• The Great Reset

A couple of years back, Jason Fried recorded this video of his writing process for drafting an article:

I like seeing the behind-the-scenes of how others work.

I’m currently reading his book How to Take Smart Notes, which is based on, and talks a lot about sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten system.

A neat concept demo from Dhrumil Shah showing possible enhancements for Roam Research. He calls them “Roam-I” and “Roam-E”:

• Roam-I — for reusing old knowledge
• Roam-E — collaboration

Most of this is user interface on top of the core technology that underpins how Roam works, but it’s great to see people so passionate about this that they’ll spend this much time prototyping ideas on products they use.

In this talk, Balaji Srinivasan lays out a number of places where pseudonymity is decentralizing identity on the internet. Pseudonymity is distinguished from anonymity through maintenance of a sense of accountability and reputation associated with the entity.

I ran across this interview with physicist David Deutsch, with his thoughts on Brexit. A lot of great stuff here on resilience, error correction, individualism vs. collectivism, Karl Popper, and Britain’s first-past-the-post system.

A solid interview with Bill Gates with his thoughts on the COVID response. There aren’t many folks outside of the medical field more versed in this topic based on empirical experience than Gates. Interesting to hear his take.

Rare footage of the Funky 4 + 1 from a 1980 show. Great quality for something of that era, particularly a live show.

Today on the nerdy computer history feed, we’ve got a 1982 video from Bell Labs: The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive.

Most of the video has Brian Kernighan explaining the structure of UNIX and why it’s different from its contemporary operating systems. I should do more work with the keyboard in my lap and my feet on the desk.

Navigating a Linux shell looks almost identical to this today, 50 years later.

I liked this quote John Mashey, a computer scientist who worked on UNIX at Bell:

Software is different from hardware. When you build hardware and send it out, you may have to fix it because it breaks, but you don’t demand, for example, that your radio suddenly turn into a television. And you don’t demand that a piece of hardware suddenly do a completely different function, but people do that with software all of the time. There’s a continual demand for changes, enhancements, new features that people find necessary once they get used to a system.

This talk from Jonathan Lim gives a good overview of how the newest treatments for cancer work — radiation/chemo, targeted therapies, immunotherapy, and ecDNA.

I wrote about my experience with immunotherapy and how it’s different in The Infinity Machine a couple months ago, but this video gives a good animated visual example of how it works.

⌨️ I Pressed ⌘B, You Wouldn’t Believe What Happened Next

An entertaining talk about the complexity of typography, from Marcin Wichary at Figma’s recent Config conference.

🖥 Restoring Y Combinator’s Xerox Alto

An technical piece on restoring Alan Kay’s Xerox Alto he donated to Y Combinator. Amazing piece of technology history, and inspired so many future developments in computing — graphical user interfaces, WYSIWIG text editing, bitmapped graphics, the mouse, and Ethernet for connectivity.

Xerox built about 2000 Altos for use in Xerox, universities and research labs, but the Alto was never sold as a product. Xerox used the ideas from the Alto in the Xerox Star, which was expensive and only moderately successful. The biggest impact of the Alto was in 1979 when Steve Jobs famously toured Xerox and saw the Alto and other machines. When Jobs saw the advanced graphics of the Alto, he was inspired to base the user interfaces of the Lisa and Macintosh systems on Xerox’s ideas, making the GUI available to the mass market.

🦠 Map and Timeline of CoVID-19 Outbreak

A timeline showing the spread of the coronavirus, with an accompanying map interface.

I refreshed myself this evening on Bret Victor’s amazing talk from 2012, “Inventing on Principle.”

He’s been working on and promoting his ideas on interactive, responsive tools for creativity are still ahead of their time. We’re gradually getting major improvements with products like Observable, but there still aren’t that many out there. Check out his current work at Dynamicland, a research group working on new interactive tools.

I was looking around for a summary of Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma and ran across this neat YouTube channel that does book summaries in visual form, with drawings representing the concepts in the book.

It’s a cool way of getting a different presentation of subject matter, especially of nonfiction and business books.

As I’ve been reading more into the history of technology¹, specifically computers and the Internet, I’ll go on side trails through Wikipedia or the wider ‘net back to many of the source papers that were the seeds of certain innovations.

I’ve read about the IBM 700 series of mainframes, Vannevar Bush’s seminal piece on a “memex” device (precursor idea to hypertext), and Claude Shannon’s original work on information theory.

The latest gold mine I’ve found is on YouTube. I created a “Tech History” playlist where I’ve been logging clips and documentaries on various bits of computer history. Click the icon top-right to see all the videos in the list.

Last night we watched Sam Mendes’s 1917, his latest, a war film set during that year during the First World War. The entire thing is shot to look like a single take following two soldiers attempting to deliver a message to another battalion across no man’s land. It’s the most gripping film I’ve seen since Dunkirk (one of my all-time favorites).

This mini-documentary shows some behind the scenes of how they shot the long takes that they stitched together for the final result.

What a cool idea for a new type of “photography”, if you could call it that.

This combines 3D photos, photogrammetry, point clouds, and Unity rendering to fly through the streets of Hanoi.

I don’t know what Lex Fridman is doing to recruit the guests he gets on his show (The Artificial Intelligence Podcast), but it’s one of the best technical podcasts out there.

This one is a good introduction to the work of legendary psychologist Daniel Kahneman (of Thinking, Fast and Slow fame).

I’m currently reading the fantastic book The Dream Machine, a history of the creation of personal computers, and a biography of this man, JCR Licklider. This is a talk from an ACM conference in 1986 where he discusses his work on interactive computing. A wonderful little bit of history here.

This is a neat clip from Walt Disney’s Disneyland TV series. Wernher von Braun explains the future technology that’ll take us to the Moon, in 1955, several years before the Mercury program even began.

This footage really makes Hong Kong feel like it’s from the future:

Bloomberg has been publishing this video series on future technologies called “Giant Leap.” It’s well-done and a nice use of YouTube as a medium.

This one explores a number of new companies doing R&D in microgravity manufacturing — from biological organ “printing” to creation of high-quality fiber optic materials. There are still some challenges ahead to unlock growth of space as a manufacturing environment, but it feels like we’re on the cusp of a new platform for industrial growth in the near future.

One of the great things about YouTube is being able to find gems of history like Doug Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos” presentation from 1968. How amazing it must’ve been to see something like this live, 50 years ago:

The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work). Engelbart’s presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s.

A beautiful visualization project from Nature converts 150 years of scientific papers into a 3-dimensional network diagram, making concrete the network of citations and references linking together the history of discoveries.

I’ve been home the past couple days to attend to some projects — getting an aluminum patio cover installed and having shutters put in on most of the windows. My time’s been occupied by holiday season preparation, general housecleaning, and shuttling the kids to their activities. In the downtime I’ve dropped back into a few of my favorite tool restoration YouTube channels to see what’s new.

I watched this great new one from Black Beard Projects where he restores a 1950s-era bench grinder. Degreaser, paint stripper, electrolysis, and a load of elbow grease convert this thing back into a fully functional grinder you could put right back to regular use. I love the new tool he’s got for corrosion removal from small parts: an ultrasonic cleaner:

This one from the LADB channel was great: an antique corn sheller that goes from having spent a number of decades exposed to the elements back to its original yellow glory:

It’s hard to watch that beautiful, deep metallic oiled steel get covered up with paint. But I suppose if it’s about restoring a 100 year-old tool to be alive for another century, I guess I see the point.

And one close to my personal interests: the My Mechanics channel restoring an old coffee grinder. I’ve watched a ton of these videos and I’m surprised that this one’s the first where I’ve seen a sandblaster for cleaning parts. Maybe since most of these folks are doing this in their garages that’s too specialized of a tool, but it seriously reduces the labor required in cleaning many smaller parts. This restore is pretty extreme; he even machines his own screws with a CNC lathe.

I’d love to try my hand at some simple stuff restoring small hand tools and see what I could do.

Mesmerizing shots of Mount Rainier. The timelapses with the night-time starfield are gorgeous.

Since I’ve been following the progress studies movement and Jason Crawford’s Roots of Progress blog, it was cool to see video of his talk on the history of steel from a San Francisco meetup a few weeks ago.

Dialect expert Erik Singer is back with a short video on some fascinating features of language:

I find anything about language or linguistics immensely fascinating. It’s amazing the way humans so naturally develop the ability to convert random noise into patterns for communication by age 3.

In this video he talks about the Great Vowel Shift, a slow wandering of the pronunciation of English over the past few hundred years. Now stretch this back a thousand more years and think about how many different languages have derived and evolved from the same roots.

I’d like to lobby for Erik to get his own series on Netflix about language — perhaps a collaboration with John McWhorter? The Evolution of Language would be a perfect title. I’ll be here waiting for it.

This is a good interview with a great interviewer, Russ Roberts of EconTalk. His is probably my favorite podcast — if I only listen to 1 episode a week, it’s the latest EconTalk.

On Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the topics he covers on EconTalk, and economic concepts that are valuable to tech founders.

Another fun one from the Primitive Technology channel. I previously linked to his videos a few months back. This time he builds a stacked brick wall around a new thatched hut out of clay bricks. The patience and craftsmanship required to build the things he does is truly admirable.

I think we’d all be mentally healthier if we spent more time disconnecting and creating things. If only I had the Queensland jungle in my backyard!

This year is the 60th anniversary of Miles Davis’s legendary Kind of Blue.

This video is a great explainer of the origins of Kind of Blue’s modal jazz style and the history behind how the group came together to make it happen.

I have no idea how many hundreds of times I’ve listened to this album over the years, but it’s still in the frequent rotation to put on whenever I can’t think of anything else. A default soundtrack for working or getting things done around the house.

I saw this Nightline interview clip with Steve Jobs from a recent Steven Sinofsky post.

In this clip is his famous “bicycle for the mind” quote about the personal computer.

This is a 21st century bicycle that amplifies a certain intellectual ability that man has. And I think that after this process has come to maturity, the effects that it’s going to have on society are going to far outstrip even those of the petrochemical revolution has had.

Hard to believe Jobs was this prescient at age 26, when computers were still considered to be hobbyist toys.

This talk from a16z’s Martin Casado covers how the market for B2B SaaS go-to-market is changing from sales-driven to a marketing-driven. We’ve been thinking a lot about this lately in the context of Fulcrum — how the “consumerization of IT” plays into how business users today are finding, evaluating, purchasing, and expanding their usage of software.

As he describes in the talk, consumer business tend toward a marketing-led GTM, and enterprise ones toward a sales-led GTM. A combined sales-plus-marketing approach to customer enablement and growth is super hard to execute on, and under the hood requires an excellent “adoptable” product at the center. You’ve got to enable the customer to try and implement your technical solution through a self-service and self-adoption model.

We’ve had this kind of land-and-expand phenomenon with Fulcrum since 2011 — wherein we attract early adopter types from within a company, get traction with smaller use cases, then watch as the company spreads the usage of Fulcrum horizontally to different teams and use cases. In the beginning we structured our GTM this way by necessity (a tiny team couldn’t do full stack marketing and enterprise sales), but have come to enjoy the fruits of this decision as we’ve scaled. I can sympathize with the challenges described here, though; building the right interplays and feedback loops between sales, marketing, and customer success is unnatural for a lot of people, and hard to execute on. The silver lining is that while you might have growing pains with process, at least you’ve got interest, usage, and revenue happening regardless. The magic is in the optimization of the cycle.

Endurance cyclist Mark Beaumont is best known for his “around the world in 80 days” ride starting in Paris and crossing 3 continents in 78 days, putting him in the Guinness Book for the accomplishment.

A few years back he did this ride from Cairo to Cape Town across Africa — 41 days, 6,762 miles, 190K feet of climbing, 160 miles per day. To me it’s as stunning in itself as the around the world ride. Some of the shots in this video of him traversing the Sahara through Sudan and the mountains of Ethiopia are incredible.

A French startup company called Glowee is working on being able to produce light using bioluminescence:

Glowee reinvents light production with technology nature has already created to make lighting more sustainable and healthier for both humans and the environment. Having identified the genetic coding that creates bioluminescence, Glowee inserts this code into common, non-toxic, and non-pathogenic bacteria to produce clean, safe, synthetic bioluminescence. Once engineered and grown, the bacteria are encapsulated into a transparent shell, alongside a medium composed of the nutrients they need to live and make light. This lighting solution can indefinitely and exponentially grow with little infrastructure needed and does not require any extraction of natural resources.

Because of the relatively low output of these biological sources of light, they want to focus first on nighttime lighting for things like street furniture and nighttime street lighting. But it’s a clever idea to how we could engineer energy sources with alternative fueling methods than electricity.

Imagine having to “feed” the lights in your house instead of simply paying a generation facility for watts delivered through wires.

Yesterday was Neuralink’s unveiling of what they’ve been working on. Their team of engineers, neurosurgeons, and computer science experts are working on a “neural lace” brain-computer interface.

Elon Musk announced the launch of a company to work on this problem back in 2016. Seeing this amount of progress, it’s clear now that the science fiction story of a cybernetic implant looks like a possible near future reality. The idea itself conjures images of Neuromancer’s console cowboys and Effinger’s “moddies”, neural augmentations that enable things like plugging into the matrix and personality modification.

The near-term intent that Neuralink is after is to use the lace as an assistive technology for those with motor impairments and other medical conditions. But there are moonshot goals to “increase the bandwidth” between computers and the human mind.

The whole idea gives new meaning to the famous Steve Jobs quote:

What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

If Neuralink is successful, instead of being limited by the bandwidth of the inputs — keyboard, mouse, touchscreen — and outputs — pixels and sound waves — we’ll have a two-way massive digital pipeline in between. A supersonic jet for the mind.

Neuroscientist Karl Friston is the world’s leading authority on brain imaging science and on the forefront of our understanding of how brains actually work. He’s the creator of the free energy principle, an idea that attempts to unify an organizing framework for what drives all life: minimizing free energy.

See also this excellent profile of Friston in Wired from late last year.

Naval’s thoughtful, measured perspective on most issues I find insightful and novel in a sea of people with hot takes and commentary around political issues in the zeitgeist. He’s got an interesting “long view” on a range of things from automation to economics to thinking and more.

There is a cult of personality around him, especially on Twitter, that seems to think he’s a “philosopher king” of the internet. While that position is wildly overblown, he does have unique and unconventional point of view that’s refreshing. Worth a listen.

I just ran across this YouTube channel called Primitive Technology, created by an Australian from the North Queensland bush country who attempts to recreate building things with Stone Age technology. He makes his own charcoal, fires clay hardware, makes tools, and supplies himself with mud, clay, wood, and everything else right out of the local environment.

Each one is silent with the work speaking for itself. Turn on captions to see embedded explainers talking about what he’s doing. An easy YouTube rabbit hole.

I didn’t get to watch the match live yesterday, but Liverpool’s 4-0 trouncing of Barcelona at Anfield in the second leg of the Champions League semi might be the biggest (most improbable) win I’ve seen. Goals from Origi at 7’ and 79’, Wijnaldum at 54’ and 56’, and a nerve-rattling final 10 minutes put the Reds over the top:

Coincidentally I ran across this piece from Ryan O’Hanlon earlier in the day that broke down Liverpool’s odds of a win thusly:

Liverpool, almost definitely, will not be playing in the Champions League final. Sure, they might beat Barcelona today. In fact, they probably will. FiveThirtyEight gives them a 49-percent chance of winning, while the implied betting odds on a win for the Reds are 41 percent. Liverpool are one of the best teams in the world, they’re playing at home, and so they’re favorites – even with Lionel Messi on the other side.

Messi’s, of course, the reason why a Liverpool win will get washed away by the aggregate scoreline. After Barcelona’s 3-0 win in Spain last week, Liverpool’s odds of advancing are five percent by the models and eight percent by the betting markets. The former is not even taking into account the fact Liverpool will be without Naby Keita, Roberto Firmino, and Mohamed Salah against Barca. They need to score at least three goals to have a chance of advancing … and they’ll be without two of their top three attackers and their most proficient midfielder on the attacking end. Oh, and they have to score all of those goals without conceding any. One Barcelona goal, and they’ll need five; two, and they’ll need six.

5% odds of advancing to the final, and they did it. All that would’ve had to happen was a single Messi or Suárez dagger in the final seconds to finish them, but they powered through.

Earlier this week I finished reading Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, his account of climbing Mount Everest and surviving the 1996 Everest disaster. The book reads like a thriller, giving the account of how an expedition team prepares for the climb, including the experience in country beforehand and acclimatization process for weeks leading up to the climb.

While reading it, I found myself wishing I had the visual aid of maps of the route, photos of the camps, and what certain of the landmarks (like the dangerous Khumbu Icefall) actually look like. This video gives a good sense of the monumental scale of the challenge of climbing the 29,000’ peak.

One of my favorite tech figures, a16z’s Steven Sinofsky, gives a history of “Clippy”, the helpful anthropomorphic office supply from Microsoft Office. As the product leader of the Office group in the 90s, he gives some interesting background to how Clippy came to be. I found most fascinating the time machine look back at what personal computing was like back then — how different it was to develop a software product in a world of boxed software.

Everyone makes fun of it today, but Clippy did presage the world of AI-powered “assistant” technology that everyone is getting familiar with today.

See also this Twitter thread. Love this stuff.

If you need your daily dose of palm sweating, check out this clip of a climber rappeling down nearly the entire height of El Capital in one motion. Free dangling by 1500’ of rope 50 feet from the wall is just terrifying. But man is that view of Yosemite Valley from that vantage point a thing of beauty.

I linked a couple weeks ago to a piece from Marty Cagan. That led me to this talk that covers a lot of his thoughts on approaching product issues. Wide ranging and thought provoking stuff for product managers.

I’m currently reading David Foster Wallace’s collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, so I went back to look at some interview clips with him on his nonfiction writing. This one with Charlie Rose was excellent — I could listen to his thoughts on any subject, for hours:

Clearly a tormented guy, but his brain was on another level separate from the rest of us.

The legendary psychologist Daniel Kahneman (author of Thinking, Fast and Slow in his wheelhouse, talking about human biases, decision making, and signal vs. noise.

A fantastic one-on-one conversation between NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and Bill Simmons from the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference:

Adam Silver is one of the most thoughtful, enthusiastic, and interesting guys in sports leadership. He clearly cares immensely about promoting the health of the league and players. This conversation ranges through mental health, NBA trade deadlines, G League, tampering, and more.

At least 3 or 4 times he references European soccer features as having potential in the NBA — relegation (a long shot), player academies, and my favorite idea, a mid-season tournament. The FA and League Cups in England are great models you could use. But it’d take time to build enough tradition to give weight to the tournament trophy itself.

I’ve been thinking and reading more about OKRs and how I might be able to implement them effectively — both professionally and personally. The idea of having clearly defined goals over bounded timelines is something we could all use to better manage time, especially in abstract “knowledge work” where it’s hard to see the actual work product of a day or a week’s activity.

This is an old workshop put on by GV’s Rick Klau. He does a good job giving a bird’s eye view of how to set OKRs and the importance of linking them through the organizational hierarchy:

He also has a good post on the subject from a few years later.

A good overview from YC’s Kevin Hale on how to break down startup ideas:

The “solution looking for a problem” trap is all too easy to fall into, and to justify your way out of even if you fall prey to it. I love the approach here of starting with the end goal ($100M ARR) and backing into what the market size and price point would need to be to hit that target. So simple, but most of us don’t approach the thought process from that end.

When I first heard about his company Opendoor (a real estate startup with the goal of creating faster liquidity for home sellers), I started following Keith Rabois. His Twitter account is a good follow.

This discussion covered topics as diverse as his political views, his original ideas for his companies, and investing principles.

This was a cool idea from cartographer Daniel Huffman. He live-streamed a walkthrough taking apart one of his map projects in Illustrator to see how he puts it all together.

I love this idea and am excited to see him do more like this down the road.

I’ve listened to a few of Peter Attia’s The Drive podcast episodes. This one was a stand-out conversation between him and Dr. Zubin Damania. It’s a wide-ranging discussion about the health care system, diet, creativity, and meditation (among other things).

I’ve spent a lot of time right in the thick of the health care system the last couple of years (thankfully with a good experience). Insightful thoughts on what’s wrong inside that ecosystem that ring true from first-hand exposure.

I’ve discovered a phenomenon on YouTube of these types of videos — long many-hour clips of calm scenery or environments for the purposes of relaxation or background ambience.

Like I said in a post about cycling a few posts ago, these aerial views are incredibly pleasing to watch and nerd out over the topography and landscapes they’re flying over. The clip above contains footage over Croatia, but isn’t specific about where. I did some searching around on the web and Google Earth and narrowed it down to Krka National Park (the first 45 minutes or so). Those waterfalls and river valleys are incredible.

I like to put these streams on full screen on the second display when I go into focus mode.

See also:

• Orbiting the Earth from the ISS
• Apple TV’s ‘Aerial’ with Music
• Flying Over Bermuda

Mesmerizing, hypnotic video shot in 8K pointed straight down from an airplane. It looks like these were originally shot for Apple to use as their “Aerial” screensaver seen on Apple TV.

I could leave this on a loop in my office all day.

Every year since the pre-Stone Age area, visualized as a time lapse on a map.

This is amazing and puts into context what was developing where over time. I know when I read the history of one culture, like Ancient Greece, it’s hard to keep in the mind what was happening elsewhere in the world during the same time period. This video could be a good reference point to pull up to get a sense of what happened during, before, and after any period in human history.

It’s also hard to believe that in 3000 BC the global population estimate was only 30 million people, or roughly the population of modern Nepal.

This guy has an interesting channel with metalwork, restoration, and blacksmithing. In a day I watched all of his tool restoration videos. This one is a massive 500lb vise he found, dating from the 18th century in an Italian foundry. The restorations use acids, elbow grease, electrolysis, custom iron or brass casting, and even 3D printing to fashion replacement parts. Mesmerizing stuff.

Here are a few other good restoration videos:

• A-Frame Fly Press
• Metal Shear
• Wood Router

One of my favorite science fiction authors, now a self-described “futurist”, Bruce Sterling, on how to think about the future.

This talk on “generative AI” was interesting. One bit stuck out to me as really thought-provoking:

Dutch designers have created a system to 3D print functional things in-place, like this bridge concept. Imagine that you can place a machine, give it a feed of raw material input and cut it loose to generate something in physical space. As the presenter mentions at the end of the talk, moving from things that are “constructed” to ones that are “grown”.

This is a 2005 commencement address delivered by the late David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College. Worth going back and listening to from time to time.

From one of my new favorite YouTube channels, The B1M, comes this list of the most remote buildings.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is straight out of science fiction.

I was curious, so I went and tracked down each one on Google Earth. And because I’m a nerd, here’s a geojson file with all of them so you can quickly find and marvel at their remoteness.

Part of Vox’s Borders video series. Hong Kong is such a fascinating and unique place, as is today’s China, though for massively different reasons. How China treats HK will be one of the indicators of the wider Chinese plan for free market economics and political openness.

A wide-ranging conversation on linguistics, human scientific advancement, and enlightenment thinking with Steven Pinker and John McWhorter.

Linguistics is endlessly fascinating.

I might be an outlier, but I absolutely love YouTube as a medium for this kind of content. This sort of long form video is an example of a fantastic new thing that couldn’t exist or thrive prior to YouTube.

I loved this recent podcast with Dave Attell and Jeff Ross, promoting their new Netflix special Bumping Mics. This is a great freeform conversation (like most of Rogan’s shows) with three veteran comedians with a lot of banter about the industry, reminiscing about other comic legends. We watched their new special last night. Hilarious stuff.

Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order was one of the most interesting books I’ve read in the last 5 years. It traces the history of human social hierarchy and government from antiquity to the French Revolution. This talk is a great high-level overview of the ground covered in the book. Think of it as a preview and convincing teaser to the full work.

An excellent talk from a16z’s Benedict Evans on what’s next for tech and the internet.

Gil Scott-Heron is high on the list of live acts I wish I was around for in his prime.

Gary Neville’s thoughts on the rumors of a Jose Mourinho firing:

The Premier League’s fickleness with management is astonishing. It would be unbelievable to see the same level of volatility and shortsightedness in other professional sports that you have in European football clubs. A United legend calling out the leadership of the club directly is incredible, but unfortunately it probably won’t change anything. I’m not a United fan, but I would love to see the club stick it out with Mourinho and to stop perpetuating the impatient lack of logic that exists in the League.

This series with dialect coach Erik Singer is great, I could watch dozens of these. He critiques renditions of different accents, some of them specific regional dialects:

Maybe it’s related to my interest in geography, but I’m always curious to learn how to differentiate accents from different countries and localities.

During this TED talk from 2003, Jeff Bezos compares the Internet revolution to the early years of electrification. Even 15 years ago he was already describing the core philosophy behind his future products, like Amazon Web Services. AWS is like electricity for technology companies: paying the AWS bill is like paying your utility bill.

Learn the foundations of how an economy works, in only 30 minutes.

This piece from Ray Dalio (hedge fund manager and author of Principles and hedge fund manager) breaks down an entire Econ 101 class in a concise, graphical form. He’s actually an excellent narrator. And knows a thing or two about how markets work.

I’ve gotten interested recently in how people and businesses communicate ideas, in the contexts of work, project management, product marketing, education, et cetera. Late in 2012 I read a book called Made To Stick, a study on what constitutes sticky, viral ideas. While the book is about the communication of ideas in a marketing context, it struck a nerve and got me thinking about how we communicate in general, whether as individuals or companies.

The book postulates that “sticky” ideas have six core properties: they’re simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and they tell a story. There are dozens of great examples of ideas that have lasted for decades or centuries, things like urban legends, proverbs, and countless meme-like advertising campaigns. The book makes a very compelling case, replete with examples to demonstrate the point. But what I’m interested in more than viral nature of ideas is what makes some interpersonal communication so effective, and some so ineffective. Much of theory in the book is relevant to everyday communication, too, not just marketing. I think bad communicators struggle mostly with clarity and simplicity.

I recently watched a talk given by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at Harvard, and he nails what it means to communicate clearly, in his case when publishing opinions of the court (around 58:30).

The entire talk is fascinating, but this part stands out — on editing for clarity:

“The genius is not to write a five cent idea in a ten dollar sentence, it’s to put a ten dollar idea into a five cent sentence. That’s beauty, that’s editing, that’s writing. The editing we do is for clarity and simplicity, without losing meaning and content. And without adding things. You don’t see a lot of double entendres, you don’t see wordplays or cuteness in the opinions. We’re not there to win a literary award, we’re there to write opinions that some busy person, or someone at their kitchen table can read and say ‘I don’t agree with a word he said, but I understand what he said.’”

Care and attention like this is missing from a lot of communication. It’s sometimes difficult to understand who the audience is for a piece of information—employee, customer, boss, citizen, spouse—and to tailor the message so that it connects with them in a way that’s comprehensible. If the message we want to convey is important enough that we want it to sink in (when is it not?), it takes more care and mindfulness to hone it to its fundamentals.

One of the stories in Made to Stick involves the idea of the “Curse of Knowledge” as a contributor to these common disconnects between communicator and audience, meaning the conveyor of information (whether it’s your boss, your client, or the Supreme Court) holds a body of knowledge about a subject that the recipient does not. Think of times when company leaders talk about bottom lines, synergies, or corporate strategy—terms with completely ambiguous meanings to a regular employee. If we remove the layers of abstraction and insert common everyday language, it might not sound as pretty, but people certainly get the point.

Take the book’s example of JFK’s 1961 address to congress in which he made his famous call to put a man on the moon:

“But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? … We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Few words, but tons of concreteness. There’s no confusion about his intent. “We’re going to the moon, and here’s the deadline.” The author provides a contrasting example of how an American big business CEO would probably put it:

“Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry through maximum team-centered innovation and strategically targeted aerospace initiatives.”

That’s absolutely something you would see on a Fortune 500 company website. There’s far too much of this abstractness in the working environment today, and I think it hurts young people coming into the workforce. It creates poor writing and lures people into wordsmithing only to maximize the buzzword count.

A quality I admire in people is an ability to be articulate, to clearly express a point or intent in few words, and to get to the point quickly. It’s frustrating to have someone tell you something, or ask a question, to then find out they haven’t thought through the point. The burden is then on the audience to figure out the intent, and then to respond. The notion of Commander’s Intent can be helpful in understanding the value of clarity and articulation. In order for the listener to take your information and respond appropriately, goals, purpose, and a clear picture of what the successful “end state” looks like are critical to clear understanding.

I highly recommend Made to Stick to anyone interested in improving messaging, particularly in the context of products or business. It certainly helped me to get outside of my own head and think about copywriting and messaging around products with a more objective viewpoint.

If you enjoy hearing stories from visionaries, listen to this talk that Gabe Newell (founder of Valve) gave at UT Austin:

In it he discusses economies within Steam, where Steam is headed as a central core of APIs for game publishing, and a good bit about how the company operates.

“It seems fairly obvious that the Internet does a better job of organizing a bunch of individuals than General Motors or Sears does. Corporations [with hierarchies] tend to be pre-internet ways of organizing production.”

I love to hear stories about really smart people doing work and making things. Gabe definitely fits into that category: He left Microsoft in their crazy lucrative years during the mid-90s to found a video game company with his own money, with a flat structure, and no job titles that now generates hundreds of millions in revenue.

Jeff Lawson of Twilio gave this talk on SaaS pricing at the Business of Software conference last year:

Everyone in the SaaS product business should watch this. Great approach to thinking through putting prices on your SaaS service.

The key is to understand all the facets of your product and what things cost you as the creator, in addition to slicing and dicing options for your customers to buy what they need. Facets like:

• Quantities (How many gigabytes? What kind of bandwidth is allowed?)
• Features (Can I do push notifications and alerts? What about management dashboards?)
• Support (24 x 7 phone support?)

These things on their own are even sometimes difficult to figure out. What are all the variables you can tweak and change about your offerings? And those are thing that you can control, properties of your own product? I still maintain that the hardest part, bar none, of building pricing models (though it seems obvious) is understanding what your potential customers are willing to pay for your service, and then making sure you can serve them a product cheaper than that.

Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer have a conversation about adventure games.

This was just before Double Fine raised $2.2MM on Kickstarter to fund a new adventure game.