There is not a great way to dynamically fill the vertical space in a parent element in CSS without setting a fixed height. To do this in React using flexbox, you need to get a reference to the parent element and calculate the height using a callback hook.

For example:

const [interiorHeight, setInteriorHeight] = useState<number>(0);
const measuredRef = useCallback((node) => {
  // Before the component mounts the node ref will be null
  if (node !== null) {
    setInteriorHeight(
      node.current.getBoundingClientRect().height
    );
  }
}, []);

return (
  <div ref={measuredRef} className="p-6 pt-10">
    <div className="flex items-center" style={{height: `${interiorHeight}px`}}>
      I'm {interiorHeight} pixels tall!
    </div>
  </div>
)

The March WFH Research survey results show that 54% of unemployed respondents are either exclusively looking for jobs that allow them to work from home or prefer jobs that allow them to work from home.

This presents a large opportunity for employers who are hiring remotely to attract more talent.

See also:

• Half of Millennials and Gen Z would consider quitting if employers don’t allow remote work
• 4.3 million people quit their job in August 2021

The way I write more is by doing it every day. I write first thing in the morning (journaling and note taking) and publishing my notes (like this one). For work, I write product briefs to clarify the situation, my interpretation of the facts, and what we should do about it. I write memos for the team for anything important. I write investor updates. I do it without thinking—even when drafting a tricky email I’ll write it out to understand what I’m trying to do.

Taking an interest in good writing helps. Being curious about what makes for good communication, reading about writing, and trying out new things to try and communicate more clearly. To cultivate that, I recommend The Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto which is the best business writing book and reading about knowledge creation with The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.

Using tools you enjoy gives something to look forward to while building up a writing habit. For example, a fountain pen, a nice notebook, a mechanical keyboard, beautifying your favorite text editor, or generally improving the ‘hand feel’.

See also:

• Atomic Habits is a useful book to read when starting new habits including writing more
• Building a note-taking habit

When it comes to raising money, being a solo founder goes against the grain. Many investors figure it’s safer to invest in founders that come in pairs. (Possibly because of this essay from Paul Graham)

It makes some sense if you think about it. Founder drama happens and if there are multiple co-founders the company goes on, if it’s a solo-founder and they leave—game over.

The good news is that fundraising as a solo founder stops being a problem after raising the seed round. The bad news is that you have to be able to raise the seed round in the first place.

Fundraising is always hard despite what people might tell you. Ignore anyone who hasn’t recently raised money for their own startup.

The way to mitigate the challenges of raising solo is to 1) have all of the skills needed to lead the company (if you’re building a software product that means being an engineer and/or product leader) 2) have unique knowledge about the market problem you are going to solve (maybe by having built something related before) 3) increase the positive signal around you (e.g. coming out of a high-profile company, exited a previous startup, have a large following) and 4) already have the relationships with investors so they know you before you raise money.

See also:

• It’s not all disadvantages, companies started by solo founders survive longer and generate more revenue

One of the reasons making broad, sweeping predictions about the future tend to be wrong is that it does not account for the creation of new knowledge. Trends are not explanations and without an explanatory model of how knowledge will change (i.e. creativity) predictions such as the end of the world are just another example of a Malthusian catastrophe.

That doesn’t mean they are not useful. In the case of climate change, we should not assume success is guaranteed simply and predictions based on current trends is useful if only to lay out the possible scenarios. However, trying to know the unknowable leads to pessimism in policy (e.g. consumption reduction) rather than optimism (e.g. investing in renewable energy research).

See also:

• David Deutsch touches on this in The Beginning of Infinity

According to Betteridge’s Law pretty much any headline that is posed as a question is usually going to be answered with a ‘no’ in the body. I’ve found this to be pretty much always the case to the point where it’s funny that it’s even used in news writing.

Three things lead me to believe that websites will soon become an heirloom passed down generation to generation: 1) the ubiquity of the web generally (which is still only 59% of the world’s population) 2) the scarcity of web domains 3) the value of search engine ranking.

Similar to passing down a piece of jewelry that has both sentimental value and actual wealth attached to it, an old domain that is well established in existing search indices would increase in value over time. The next generation would see the previous generation’s toil and old technology as something to be restored and preserved while adding to it.

See also:

• Heirlooms foster long term thinking—if your website is going to be passed down to the next generation, maybe you hold off on that hot take
• Most compounding interest benefits occur at the end—in 100 years does a websites intrinsic value compound?

The equivalence of mass and energy means that an object (having mass) can not reach the speed of light. As it approaches the speed of light, the mass of the object would become infinite thereby taking an infinite amount of energy. Therefore, only something without any intrinsic mass (like light or a wave) can go the speed of light.

See also:

• A Brief History of Time
• The universe expands faster than the speed of light, but doesn’t actually have a speed. The universe is not infinite.
• In omega point universes, perhaps you could have infinite energy

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In an infinite multiverse, where every possibility allowed by physics is certain, the argument goes that one could be absolutely sure of winning the lottery using the following hack. Buy a lottery ticket and set up a machine that will automatically kill you in your sleep if you lose. Supposing you don’t care about any history in which you are not a lottery winner, this is way of winning the lottery with certainty…at least in universes where you are a lottery winner.

See also:

• The Beginning of Infinity discusses this to show how anthropic arguments rely on probabilities of infinity which we don’t have a way of measuring so it’s likely the assumptions made are false

From the 2021 business update letter from Stripe, Atlas is now used by 1 in 10 new incorporations in Delaware.

This makes me extremely happy having built Atlas from 2016 to 2020 and experienced many of the “years of tireless iteration and improvement by the team” mentioned in the letter.

See also:

• This is a good example of using time horizons as a competitive advantage. In hindsight this feels like an obviously good idea, but it takes willingness to push out the payback period far enough to have a chance for it to work.

A universe that collapses to a single point due to baryon annihilation required to produce energy needed for colonization. The universe is not infinite and even though we observe the universe expansion accelerating, that doesn’t mean it will continue to accelerate forever. This is like the counterpoint of the Big Bang—the “Big Crunch”.

In The Beginning of Infinity, the author argues an omega-point universe is necessary for the energy required to achieve infinite knowledge creation. This can be thought of as a computation problem—how could there be infinite computation if there is not infinite time? Similar to the trick used to measure infinity, an advanced civilization would increase the computation speed (speeding up thought) as the universe collapses, harnessing the heat energy from the collapse to further accelerate computation, and approach infinite computation.

(This reminds me of one of my favorite books, Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami.)

Anthropologist studying non-industrial societies found that the most common activity was idling—not doing anything. This is surprising when contrasted to industrial societies which are constantly consuming (watching TV, social media, reading, hobbies) and boredom vilified.

This raises a number of questions about the changes in society and what, if any, are the benefits of idling. It’s important to keep in mind that just because it is a “natural” default state doesn’t mean that it’s better without an explanation for why that is so.

Read the Twitter thread from mnvrsngh and the accompanying data.

The Swiss Travel Pass is an all-in-one ticket offered by the SFF for most forms of transportation in Switzerland. It also comes in a flex pass (choose the days you travel) and a youth pass at a discount.

The pass can be purchased in 3, 4, 6, 8 or 15 consecutive days of travel. The flex pass be purchased for 3, 4, 6, 8, or 15 selectable days of travel and is slightly more expensive (675 vs 706 CHF for 15 days in 1st class).

There are two classes of tickets: first and second class. Second class train ticket for 8 days is $420 vs $666 for first class. First class has deck access on steamer boats, seats tend to be larger on trains and less crowded.

The pass includes discounts on museums and high mountain lifts, but discounts are only available on counted travel days for the given pass. For a flex pass that would include the days picked as part of the allotment of days.

The Swiss Travel Pass can be bought 30 days in advance.

Despite common ancestry between humans and apes, humans have the ability to grow collective knowledge through the replication of memes.

Memes are ideas paired with behaviors. Replicating a meme means you’ve internalized the idea and behaviors to transmit them to others.

You can teach apes to open a nut using a tool and a process, but they are not replicating memes they are emulating the motions. Humans don’t learn through emulation but through explanation.

Creativity is required to replicate memes. The same creativity needed to acquire existing knowledge is the same thing needed to create new knowledge.

This also explains how vast collective knowledge can start from a static society that tries its best to inhibit any change or new ideas. It takes creativity to perfectly replicate existing knowledge and ideas.

The Beginning of Infinity

It seems that the best explanations are often the most elegant. Sometimes it’s in the simplicity, sometimes it’s in the obviousness. Looking at some of the biggest discoveries in math and science (e.g. relativity, DNA, calculus, evolution, computing) and thinking, “how could it not have been so?”

It happens so often that it might be a useful heuristic for finding objective truth. If explanations require major contortions and gymnastics, it’s probably a sign it’s not objectively true.

From The Beginning of Infinity.

According to recent studies in the UK, Israel, and US, those who are vaccinated have, on average, a 50% lower risk of developing long COVID.

All of the studies so far have looked at patients from a year ago or more so there are no studies that have looked at the effect of the omicron variant which infected many more people than all previous variants of COVID-19.

Read Evidence grows that vaccines lower the risk of getting long COVID from NPR.

Product development tends to overlook the importance of conjecture. Lean startup and similar ‘lean’ movements create a culture of empiricism—only that which can be measured must be true. This might make sense for optimizing mature products, but a culture of empiricism leads to an incremental approach to building new products and, at best, leads to finding a local optima.

Conjecture in product development is the stuff of legend. The Steve Jobs kind of genius and vision comes down conjecture and criticism. Conjecture is the leaps and bounds and criticism corrects errors over time. Both are essential for developing great products.

See also:

• Trying to know the unknowable leads to pessimism (anecdotally, practitioners of lean startup tend to be very pessimistic)
• Godel Incompleteness For Startups shows that conjecture is what leads to G-statements (unknowable yet true, also known as ‘big if true’)

There are several projects that are using WebAssembly to run python in the browser. So far, the most useful looks to be running jupyter in the browser which can be deployed as a static site. That means you get a full fledged notebook and a kernel that can run any PyPi package that is pure python.

As someone who used to use jupyter notebooks all the time, that’s pretty incredible! We’re getting closer to writing python web applications.

Other projects:

• Skulpt runs a python 2 shell in the browser

It’s a mistake when confusing an abstract process with a real-world process of the same name. An example from The Beginning of Infinity is the study of decision making. The assumptions that are built into their models are a simplified version of actual real-world decision making because there is not a good explanation of how it works in reality.

See also:

• Abstractions are real, but a Zeno’s mistake is substituting an explanation with an abstraction.
• Parochial errors happen when you have a narrow view

Quantum interference does not affect the behavior of larger more complex objects (like human beings) the way it does for individual elementary particles due to entanglement. That’s why you don’t observe the concepts/theories in quantum mechanics like superposition and the multiverse in everyday life. The Beginning of Infinity, however, describes some scenarios where it could.

Take for instance a neutron traveling across the universe. Due to interference it’s position and speed make it more like a cloud by the time it reaches Earth. It hits every point on the Earth and in our autonomous history it strikes a single cell of a person and damages their DNA causing cancer. This would clearly have an impact at a macro level and even world-altering consequences.

Conventional wisdom says you should do one thing and do it really well. Customers however, can only bear so many different tools before the fragmentation makes it harder to solve their problem.

An infinite butler would do everything really well, instantly available at one’s beck and call. Imagine a platform for running your business that just did everything from start to finish. Sounds great but it doesn’t exist. Why?

There’s a fundamental tension between the number of problems solved and the quality of the product. If the number of problems your product promises to solve outweighs the capacity to sufficiently solve them, you have a crappy infinite butler.

(I paraphrased this idea from a conversation I had with Jeff Weinstein who is just a fountain of wisdom for building products and startups)

See also:

• A crappy infinite butler can still win when worse is better
• Design is how it works and the complexity of solving an overly broad set of problems directly will mire design
• Another explanation for why we don’t see more attempts at an infinite butler is that it’s in opposition to having good taste

Building a big B2B business (valued in the billions of dollars) necessitates having customers paying you over $1MM per year for your product. If there is no path to getting to that amount for your largest customers, you probably aren’t building a big business.

Having a direct business with a good product and deep relationships with the customer is, on balance, more valuable than an API/channel-driven business. One does not preclude the other—if you build a good product, partnership opportunities will naturally come to you, but there are very few examples of companies starting as an API and building a direct platform (namely Stripe and Twilio).

Some markets are not large enough for a channel-only business. For example, you might run out of partnerships to make in the industry.

See also:

• Commoditization increases the importance of distribution