- my wife

- au pair

- 3 kids (all under 5)

- dog

I thought that was plenty of human interaction (I'm somewhat extroverted) until we had a friend come over and chat with us outside on the porch.

I couldn't believe how, for lack of a better word, "refreshing" it felt. It was an excellent reminder that we are largely social creatures who also need some variety in the social circles we interact with.

- I signed my offer letter to work at Knight Capital on July 27th, 2012

- I resigned July 30th

- Knight Capital had their $400 million outage August 1st

- I went to work there anyway

- Pager Duty app was not really a thing back then so Knight instituted a SMS based notifier

- iOS rolled out the weather and amber alert notifications around this time

- one of the above goes off while everyone is at work

- someone yells: "OH GOD, NOT AGAIN!!!"

"My dad would leave the house at 6am everyday to catch the train to New York and we wouldn't see him till 7-7:30pm. He did this 5 days a week for 40 years."

In my case, my dad once spent 180 days in one year for work (he worked as a trainer for financial sales people). I probably saw my kids more during COVID lockdown than my parent's generation saw their kids in 5 years.

I worked for a company that had a gui that ran on customers' desktops aka not our hardware. We were discussing a new feature but we weren't sure how many people used the particular module in the GUI that the feature would impact. There was a discussion about how we could find out which users had that module in their layout and one of the devs says "Let's ask Tom. He's the product manager and he talks to the clients. He'll know!"

I then asked: "If you don't mind my asking, where are the individual GUI layouts saved?". I asked this b/c at a previous job I also worked with a desktop GUI but the layouts were stored on the user's desktop which made it tough to access.

The dev replies to me "On a server", I respond: "On a server we own and have access to?", dev: "yes"

To which I replied: "Why don't we go look at the gui layouts on the server instead of talking to Tom?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc

In the book Range by David Epstein [0], he mentions that research has shown that groups of people with very mixed backgrounds leads to much faster rates of problem solving and innovation. The reasoning is that someone will have an experience or piece of knowledge that directly applies to the problem.

As an example, two different groups were given the same problem to solve. One was a homogeneous group of academics. The other had a mixture of academics and non-academics. Both had to solve a problem that involved flowing liquid. The mixed group solved it faster due to one of them having had a father who was a plumber.

0 - https://amzn.to/4wWd50y

There is a great episode of Inside the Actor's Studio where there is a Q&A with Mike Myers.

He was asked if going to college/getting more education was helpful to being a comedian.

He responded:

"Many times in writing comedy, you are on an 'island' and you are trying to figure out how to get to the next 'island'. Having more education and knowing more about the world can definitely help you do that"

I like the above quote because to me intelligence is a combination of remembering useful information but also being able to "connect the dots" between those facts and apply to them to the current situation.

As another example, I was watching a documentary about LIGO. One of the engineers had memorized the entire system in his head. The other engineers would come to him and ask "Will this change to component A affect anything else?". He would pause and think and then say "Yes, component F touches that so it will be affected." The other engineers mentioned how useful it was to haves someone who had the entire system in "one brain".

I've seen this in finance technology too where someone, usually a woman, has large parts of the system memorized and performs a similar function.

e.g. have the LLM generate multiple lists of characters, themes etc and then have a script hooked up to a RNG pick from the lists to create more "creative" ideas.

- 30+ committers on <5K LOC

- software is robust/rock solid but the code is essentially unreadable

- changes take a long time b/c there are no tests

Whenever folks mention that LLMs write buggy code I think of the above.

Co-worker of mine who was excellent at both system design AND coding and I were chatting about LLMS:

Him: "I guess coding will just be a hobby now"

Me: "Coding def feels that way but software engineering as a profession is still alive and well."

One of the best indicators that something was not spam was the unsubscribe button.

For example, we have a Vornado fan in my house that is probably from the early 2000s. It still works perfectly even though we've left it running 24/7 for weeks in humid or dusty environments (e.g. to help air dry a wet basement). In terms of money paid/hours used, we got an amazing deal on the purchase.

From the manufacturer's perspective, the life time value (LTV) of us as a customer was basically just one fan + the free marketing of folks like myself writing this kind of post. It reminds me of the joke "Did you hear about the company that made lightbulbs that lasted 30 years? They went out of business!"

It makes sense that manufacturers would start to lower quality at a slightly faster rate than they lower the price as this means that folks still feel happy with the purchase. Sure, the fan doesn't last as long due to what is essentially planned obsolescence but the company does get to stay in business.

Temu/Shein etc are just the logical endpoint of this line of reasoning. If you are going to wear a shirt for the one summer where it's in style, why would you spend a large amount of money on it? And in turn, why would the company selling it spend a lot of money making it?

(I should add, this is purely an economical argument and ignores the working conditions/health effects/etc)

Then the local power company realized that as well and started shifting to solar with the net result that it became cheaper to buy the power company supplied electricity than from your own solar.

We had a similar problem where you can literally millions of email that we were pretty sure came from only a limited set of bad actors.

We first started classifying emails into buckets by From, mailserver relay chains etc as that's all we had to to go on.

Over time, those buckets got linked to spammer signatures and then we narrowed down from there.

Fascinating to see this happening nowadays with LLMs.

This is my personal favorite story about bike shops (from circa 2008).

At the time, I both lived and worked in Manhattan. I was lucky that biking was an option for commuting but the only bike I had was a 20 year old Giant Acapulco (not a fancy bike at all).

I worked down in Tribeca and one day on the way to work my shifters just broke. Thankfully, there was a bike shop near work so I dropped of the bike in the morning and said I would be back that afternoon.

Fast forward to the afternoon and I come in to pick up my bike (as I assumed it was an easy fix and they would just charge me). The repair counter guy looks at my ticket, checks something and says he has to go get the manager. This is somewhat confusing as this was a simple fix or repair.

The manager comes out and several of the staff are arrayed behind him. Now I'm a mixture of concerned and fascinated as to what could possibly have happened to my bike given this deployment of bike shop personnel.

Manager: "Sir, the repair for your shifters is going to cost $40"

Me: "Ok, is there an issue with that?"

Manager: "Well, a quality used bike would cost you about $60 so we weren't sure how you would want us to proceed"

(I should add that the staff behind him all seemed as though they were holding their breath here).

Me: "That's cool. I'm good with the repair"

Everyone visibly relaxed, the manager turned around, pointed at one guy, then turned back to me and said "Your bike will be ready tomorrow."

My only thought on this level of nervousness is due to the shop being near a lot of investment bank offices that had a very type A guys who were also into bike racing. I myself dealt with a lot of those folks so it's not hard to imagine the shop staff assuming I would be that way too.

Even back then, some economists used the "hidden wallet auction" as an example of how this could happen.

To summarize:

- there is a wallet

- you don't know how much is in the wallet

- you bid on amount to buy the wallet

- if you get the highest bid you win

- crucially, if you lose then you still have to pay

This is often cited as a game that you do not want to play b/c it's a. hard to predict the upside, b. the downside is huge.

That being said, people still got into these auctions and because of sunk cost fallacy, decided to keep bidding even if they might lose.

The hyperscaler race feels a bit like the above but no one seems to ant to admit it.

e.g. AI + a good database of what your company does seems like an excellent combination.

MANY people have dealt with terrible project managers and therefore assume all project managers are bad. This is because great project managers are very rare.

The same is true about incentive schemes. Most of them are improperly designed and/or get hit by Goodheart's law. [0]

As a counter point, this article [1] about designing incentives for farm labor is excellent and shows that with careful thought, incentives can dramatically increase output.

I've also been reading Deming's last book [2] and he is VERY against sales commissions. Some of this is probably bad design (e.g. 100% of the commissions for a sale go to one person) but I do feel he makes a valid point that everyone at a firm should benefit from helping the customer. Highly recommend it as an alternative to the more mainstream business books.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

1 - https://archive.is/https://slate.com/culture/2008/08/an-amaz...

2 - https://amzn.to/4wfAAjU