While remote work is obviously better for reducing exposure to COVID-19 than going to the office, the rapid increase in Omicron cases shows that remote work has little impact on reducing Omicron case counts. Anecdotally, several people I’ve worked with over the last two weeks have gotten it—all vaccinated and working from home.

Of the people that work from home, exposure outside of work is leading to infection. How should remote-first companies keep their workers safe when the risk comes from outside of work?

See also:

• Current vaccines are 33 percent effective against Omicron (more if you get a booster)
• I doubt that “getting sick less often” is top of the reasons for wanting to work remotely e.g. not having to commute for five hours is equivalent to a 10 percent raise and life balance

A popular view of the environment, “Spaceship Earth”, is that the planet provides just the right biosphere to support human life. That is misleading because humans are actually ill suited to living in most places. Take for example living in New York—you would freeze to death come winter if not for shelter, clothing, access to clean water, and food. This is technology that humans created to transform inhospitable environments into systems that support human life.

Because humans can use explanatory knowledge and conjecture to create new and better explanations, humans are the only species that is not bound to a range of environments. We can even live in the harshest environments like the vacuum of space which has no air, is astoundingly cold, and devoid of life.

See also:

• The Beginning of Infinity

From 2017 to 2021 the median size of Series A funding rounds grew from $7MM to $13MM. In the last year, round size increased by 30% ($10MM to $13MM). Other round sizes are increasing too—most notably the median Series D round increased 92% year over year ($52MM to $100MM).

Read Startup Round Inflation Skyrocketed In 2021.

If you sell to startups you should expect churn (they go out of business) and if you happen to catch the next big startup, you’re business model needs to be uncapped to grow along with it. For example, Stripe worked with Shopify when they were a small nascent startup, Checkr worked with Uber, and so on. They were able to grow their business because they grew with the volume of transactions.

From a conversation with Jonathan Ehrlich, Partner at Foundation Capital.

Every financial transaction, no matter how simple or fast, has non-monetary transaction costs. For example, the mental overhead of making a decision “is it worth it?”, even for tiny amounts, adds up. In a world that is fully monetized and filled with micro transactions, the non-monetary transaction costs would be stifling.

Having services available to everyone, paid for by tax dollars, decreases these costs. No one needs to weigh the cost of going for a walk in the park or whether or not they want to flush their toilet.

Read Web3 had better not be Transaction Cost Hell from Noah Smith.

See also:

• Web3 and the tokenization of everything has the potential to greatly increase non-monetary transaction costs
• Would a libertarian corporate charter city have this problem imminently?
• Decision fatigue leads to bad decision making

Richard Feynman said about science that, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

There are a plethora of ways in which one can fool themselves and strong discipline is required to understand how we know what we know.

A parochial error happens when you falsely believe that something in your narrow view of the world applies more broadly than it does. For example, thinking the seasons everywhere around the earth in the same way as your home town because that’s what you personally experience.

Pursuing good explanations would help correct parochial errors because good explanations are hard to vary. You could refute the explanation that the seasons are the same everywhere right away after meeting someone from Australia and then search for a better explanation to correct the error.

See also:

• The easiest person to fool is yourself and parochial errors are a good way of doing that
• The Beginning of Infinity
• Epistemology

The original idea of the web was that everyone would be both a producer and a consumer. They would run their own server and connect to the servers of others.

It’s difficult to run your own server. You need to figure out how to get it working. You need networking knowledge to connect it. You need to keep it up to date with new versions of software and security updates. You might even need to scale it which requires even more expertise.

What we learned from Web2 is that no one wants to run their own server—even those with the technical skills to do so. We would rather have someone else figure out how to keep it running all the time and pay them to host our website or content.

Read Web3 First Impressions by Moxie Marlinspike.

See also:

• This is a reason why centralized platforms are popular—convenience is king
• Large centralized platforms have outsized power which raises demand for decentralized systems
• Web3 suffers from the same problem, no one hosts their own blockchain and so you end up with centralized platforms all over again

Blockchains are a server technology. They don’t live on the client and things like a web frontend to a dApp can’t perform CRUD operations without a server. While it’s possible to host your own node, in reality nobody wants to run their own server, not even the ones with the technical skills to do it.

Web3 developers building a frontend to their dApps end up using a platform like Infura to provide web APIs that proxy operations to the underlying blockchain. This contradicts the whole point of a being trustless because there’s now a few centralized platforms (private companies) that need to be trusted and relied on.

Read Web3 First Impressions by Moxie Marlinspike.

The process of seeking out good explanations is error correcting. It is tolerant of dissent with a healthy dose of skepticism and distrust of authority. It means that explanations are rejected when they are contradicted by better explanations.

See also:

• Error correction in science can take some time as outdated scientific studies can perpetuate for years
• The Beginning of Infinity

The Emacs advice system lets you modify the code running Emacs in a simple way. For example, if you wanted to change one line in a package you use to do something different or fix a bug before the maintainers release a new version, you can “advise” code to do what you want.

Here’s a recent example from my init.el that wraps a function to fix a bug in my setup:

;; ox-hugo doesn't set the `relref` path correctly so we need to
;; tell it how to do it
(defun my/org-id-path-fix (strlist)
  (file-name-nondirectory strlist))

(advice-add 'org-export-resolve-id-link :filter-return #'my/org-id-path-fix)

See also:

• Another way that Emacs is the ultimate editor building material

A good explanation can not be modified or molded to fit when new information contradicts it. It predicts situations that are both known and unknown. The domain of its meaning and applicability is not yours to specify.

Contrast that to a bad explanation—like a myth of winter caused by Persophone visiting Hades—which can be altered to fit new observations while resulting in the same prediction. It has no error-correcting mechanisms and the myth can always be constrained or expanded to apply to any situation.

See also:

• The Beginning of Infinity shows why good explanations are important to progress and why their reach is limitless

One way to answer “how do we know…?” is to justify one’s belief by reference to an authoritative source or cornerstone of knowledge. This is, in effect, saying “by what authority do we claim…?” which seeks endorsement in order to have certainty. Justificationism as a theory of knowledge therefore resists change (or at least delays in a form of path dependence).

Accepting authority as a source of knowledge also means accepting any other theories that stem from said authority.

Few things—if any—that are true in the absolute sense and the success of science proves that. Simply look at all the things we knew to be true that ended up being incorrect or misunderstood. Then observe all the progress since the 17th century compared to prior human history.

See also:

• Authority of knowledge leads to status quo preserving behavior (someone loses if knowledge turns out to be incorrect) and loss aversion
• From the book The Beginning of Infinity

In 1984 it was discovered that the Soviet Union was spying on communications from US embassies. It was previously believed they only had audio bugs which could be swept for. However, the GUNMAN project revealed a remarkable new form of digital surveillance that used bugged typewriters to intercept plain text communications (typed on physical paper). They later found out this was in practice for the last 7 years.

The impact of the discovery was far reaching. The NSA became an important agency, developing anti-tamper devices. New groups formed to create offensive capabilities. Some would alter argue that this was the catalyst cyber-warfare and a digital arms race.

Read Learning from the Enemy by the NSA.

Extrapolating from past data points is not an explanation. Building your confidence that something that will happen—like Bayes Theorem—is useful for descrete, observable problems, but fails to reveal the truth. It’s the equivalent of saying “because it’s always been that way” which is a flawed way of reasoning about the world.

For example, let’s say you are trying to predict the temperature of a beaker water. You start to turn up the heat on a burner and, based on previous data points, you expect the temperature to rise. It correlates well—heat goes up, water temperature goes up. Until it hits the boiling point and the water temperature remains constant. Trends are not sufficient to explain what’s going on here because it doesn’t explain the idea what is truly happening.

Listen to The Beginning of Infinity part 1 on Naval Ravikant’s podcast.

See also:

• More specifically, updating your priors is not an epistemology. It’s useful, but there are downsides to inductive reasoning.
• Creativity is required to offer good explanations.
• The Beginning of Infinity

Written by David Deutsch.

See also:

• Epistemology

Using linters on a codebase is a way of automating quality control. It frees up time for engineers by shifting the meticulous checking for minor details to the linter instead of code reviewers. It also helps the engineer writing the code to get faster feedback directly in their text editor.

See also:

• Convenience is king—it’s easy to do the right thing if the right thing is encoded into linters.
• Closing the gap between previous technical decisions and the current quality bar is an essential part of engineering leadership and ratcheting linters to close the gaps is very effective.
• It seems possible to apply a similar strategy for improving organizational quality. Perhaps starting with improving quality of written communication.

According to GEM 2018 Adult Population Survey, 15.6% of US adults are an owner-manager of an early-stage business. This is among the highest rates of entrepreneurship in high-income economies.

Read the GEM report

See also:

• Emotional intelligence is more important for entreprenuerial success than general mental ability
• Gödel Incompleteness For Startups
• Moving from a big company to do a startup is like being a new grad

When things get challenging or stressful, we attempt to reduce our anxiety by doing things (sometimes anything). By doing things we feel like we are making progress. However, this doesn’t solve the problem at and can even make it worse.

This is an important habit to interrupt because it’s ineffective—the real problem still exists no matter how busy you are. For leaders, it’s important to be able to sit with this discomfort and find a solution rather than try to mitigate with activity if only to make yourself feel better.

See also:

• This is form of status quo preserving behavior because the flurry of activity is unlikely to address your problem and therefore preserve it

An annoying footgun with React hooks is using useState with an initial value from props. It might appear like useState will be called each render, but it doesn’t (the bad kind of magic). Instead, it will run once when the component is initially rendered and you will run into stale read bugs when you rely on props to re-render the component with updated data.

To workaround the issue, you need to use useEffect to update the stateful data.

function MyComponent(props) {
  const [user, setUser] = React.useState(props.user);

  // This is needed or you will get a stale read when props.user
  changes React.useEffect(() => {
    setUser(props.user);
  }, [props.user]);

  return (
    <h1>Ugh that's easy to forget {user.name}</h1>
  )
}

This is annoying because it breaks the mental model of React Hooks as “just functions”. Maybe that’s still true, but they’re more like “functions with a lifecycle and state that you can’t easily inspect”.

An alternative (found in this StackOverflow thread) is to wrap this behavior in a custom hook.

import {useEffect, useState} from 'react';

export function useStateWithDep(defaultValue: any) {
  const [value, setValue] = useState(defaultValue);

  useEffect(() => {
    setValue(defaultValue);
  }, [defaultValue]);

  return [value, setValue];
}

Then you could rewrite the original example like so:

function MyComponent(props) {
  const [user, setUser] = useStateWithDep(props.user);

  return (
    <h1>Yay no stale reads when props change {user.name}!</h1>
  )
}

Our attention is highly fractured and leads to a constant feeling of restlessness. To quote author Rebecca Solnit, “a sense that we should be doing something else, no matter what we are doing.”

Technology is high on the list of things to blame. The internet drastically increased the speed and access of information, hastening the news cycle. Social media means FOMO of your peers. Connectivity of devices like a cell phone, vie for attention with a drip feed of notifications.

See also:

• How do we live a rich digital life and minimize the restlessness?
• Depression is living in the past, anxiety is living in the future, the restlessness we feel feeds into both.
• Maybe the answer is not so much abstaining from technology, but a digital mindfulness so as not to be swept away when it doesn’t serve us.

Now in clinical trials, Walter Reed researchers have developed a vaccine that appears to be effective against all strains COVID-19. Since our primary defence against COVID has been vaccination, this is a huge boon with the rise of a highly contagious omicron variant with vaccine escape (Pfizer and Moderna).

It’s still months away (as of time of writing), but there is reason to be hopeful.

Although Robert Moses began his career as an idealistic reformer, he wrote a bill that gave himself far-reaching powers through the New York State Council of Parks and the Long Island Park Commission. A close confidant of Governor Al Smith, Robert Moses pushed his idea of a park system of an unprecedented scale and wrote the bill, essentially appointing himself as the chairmen and president.

By way of these two organizations, Robert Moses had the power to appropriate land (previously unheard of), the authority to decide on parkways (hence the “park” in the term “parkway”), and control over the budget for individual parks to consolidate control. What’s more, it would be incredibly difficult to remove him—the position was a 6 year term (the governorship is 2 years) and the process for removal was extensive.

In one fell swoop, Robert Moses consolidated real power to do what he wanted, how he wanted, with whom he wanted.

Continous organizations are touted as a way to run a company in a radically transparent way on a blockchain. It aims to balance the incentives of the company owners, investors, and employees. However, this is probably impossible to do for a high growth startup.

In order to set up the smart contract that establishes the continuous organization, one needs to set the parameters of the bonding curve up front. This is not possible to do accurately and valuations will be out of whack with the business unless the curve is based on an easily measurable and irrefutable metric (a metric that becomes a goal ceases to be a good goal, and so on). It also leaves a lot of money on the table—set the curve too low and the total value of the company suffers.

Perhaps if there was a way restating the bonding curve parameters without issuing a new token (the equivalent of say a 409a) would let the continuous organization update the curve fairly based on new information. That would provide some correction mechanism, but I haven’t seen this in any of the literature.

See also:

• Smart contracts are not legal contracts
• The Tyranny of Structurelessness
• Web3