My dad used to tell me about an old car he used to have—the Chevrolet Chevette. It was an inexpensive compact car with rear-wheel drive from the late 70s. As he described it, “all the thrills of high-speed driving at low speeds.”

That’s how I feel about the JavaScript ecosystem sometimes. There are so many dependencies and libraries that dealing with breaking changes, performing security updates, and figuring out subtle bugs between versions is a high-scale activity. The problem is, you have all the thrills of high-scale software development even on small-scale projects.

(Although maybe it’s more of Pinto which had a habit of exploding into a fiery mess when rear-ended).

See also:

• Frontend JavaScript toolchains trade off ease of adding dependencies over bundle size
• TypeScript undermines the value of the JavaScript ecosystem and static typing

The founder of Startmate, who went on to found Australia’s best venture capital firm (Blackbird VC), always gave what he called “the Godzilla speech” to people when they joined. His whole idea was that you get one chance to try to put a dent in a path. People join a job, an organization, and they take a linear path. Through the Godzilla speech, he would say, “Look, all these fucking giant lizards were once tiny, and you might think you’re tiny, but you have to pretend to be giant.”

https://www.theobservereffect.org/mikecannonbrookes.html

See also:

• Status quo preserving behavior
• Startups value generalists early, specialists later

OSHA issued an emergency temporary standard (ETS) that requires large employers (100+ employees) to enforce COVID-19 vaccination and testing. This is a major step in mandating vaccination although it does leave open the possibility of getting a weekly negative COVID-19 test instead.

Interestingly, OSHA doesn’t have a way to enforce this thoroughly as there are not enough agents to check every large employer. That means they are probably prioritizing audits based on complaints made against a company.

Read the OSHA ETS summary.

Low retention products eventually die, even if they grow really fast to begin with. Spammy invite mechanisms no longer work (invite 100 people from your contacts).

Virality requires retention and engagement. A better model for today’s world is that a viral feature is used by a % of users, used multiple times, over the course of % of users that are retained. Without engagement, no one will use the viral feature. Without retention, the number of sessions where someone uses the viral feature doesn’t happen.

That’s why the highest retention products are also the most viral.

Read Why the best way to drive viral growth to increase retention and engagement from Andrew Chen.

Dictator Book Club: Orban from Astral Codex Ten describes the rise to power of Viktor Orban, dictator of Hungary.

Viktor started out as a leftist liberal, rebelling against the Soviet Union. After a brief stint as an MP (and with no experience or political skill), he lost his election.

He switched from a liberal democrat to a far-right nationalist. (Having power can easily override idealists, see Robert Moses and The Power Broker). Remade himself as a religious man with traditional family values—completely counter to his previous political identity.

He fostered nationalist appeal, drawing on a proud history of steppe nomads, how they were humiliated throughout history, and how they would rise. Orban briefly became Prime Minister and led the Socialist party until he lost control.

Orban found an opening by targeting the socialist party leader. With a leaked speech, he started rumors that socialists were liars. When they bit and denied it, he showed the leaked speech. He organized a massive protest during a Hungarian parade that injured hundreds and destroyed property. He and his party won a 2/3rds majority in 2010.

That’s where they tightened the noose. They changed the constitution to remove road blocks to power. They passed laws to nationalize schools. He made favorable deals to his cronies, rewarded loyalists, and stamped out dissent (he could fire any civil servant, most media outlets were owned by loyalists, etc.).

When the party was threatened due to a far-right platform that wanted to disallow refugees from the Syrian War, Orban co-opted it—keeping his party firmly in control and eliminating a rival party in one fell swoop.

Thus he became an American far-right hero by pulling off what Trump could not. Orban erected a border wall, stopped migrants, and instituted all manner of political maneuvering needed to stay in power. Republicans cozying up to Orban include Steve Bannon, Mike Pence, and Rod Dreher, envious of a unambiguously far-right dictator.

Sometimes there are topics that are triggering, even tweets from people you follow that you genuinely want to see. Heavy use of mute words significantly improves the day-to-day experience.

As of writing, it’s in Settings -> Privacy and safety -> Mute and block -> muted words.

This can be particularly useful if you enjoy following artists on Twitter, but don’t want to be bombarded by NFT spam.

Unfortunately, a hack to mute things like suggested content and topics no longer works.

See also:

• Living a rich digital life

An analysis by Fidelity found that women, on average, earn 0.4% more than men annually when investing. Women bought and sold half as much as male customers.

Fidelity’s analysis covered 5.2 million customer accounts (some people had more than one), from 2011 to 2020. It looked at individual retirement accounts, 529 plans and basic brokerage accounts that individuals (not financial advisers) controlled, but not workplace accounts like 401(k)s. No strategies were excluded: Those who traded individual stocks were tracked along with those who stuck to mutual funds.

Read Women May Be Better Investors Than Men. Let Me Mansplain Why.

An essay from Richard P. Gabriel that argues that worse tools and solutions can actually be better in some cases.

Read The Rise of Worse is Better.

With remote teams, it’s not like you can look over someone’s shoulder or visibly see if they are struggling—the only observable information is the outputs. That’s why remote team management needs to be centered around saying what you’re going to do and then comparing that to the output.

This is difficult for most teams to do because estimation is hard and course corrections are required. Still, this must become a core skill for a remote team or you won’t make the right adjustments that are needed to become a high-performing team.

See also:

• Remote teams need to be more deliberate about everything
• Engineering management

A recent paper analyzed the causal effects of delays in updating unemployment insurance systems written in COBOL. States that used COBOL to process UI claims had a 4.4% decline in total card consumption compared to states that didn’t use COBOL. The author’s Fermi estimate is a $181B decline in real GDP due to COBOL.

Read COBOLing Together UI Benefits: How Delays in Fiscal Stabilizers Impact Aggregate Consumption.

See also:

• It’s rare to see tech debt quantified so directly (let a lone tech debt that impacts GDP!)
• The Lindy Effect can be extremely expensive

When everyone gets the same thing, the smallest differences become status symbols.

For example, on Twitter everyone gets the same platform, the same profile template, and so on. As a result, single word usernames and having a “blue check” are status symbols—they convey belonging to an exclusive group that is not accessible to others. People naturally try to raise their status.

See also:

• Value signaling and signaling as a service
• The internet has American values encoded, is status inadvertently one of them?
• Identity is a powerful motivator for behaviors

The Melanzana Micro Grid fleece is a casual and warm midlayer. As someone not wearing it for any serious hiking or physical activity, it’s appeal is being a cozy fleece for chilly SF mornings.

The sweet spot for the Melanzana as an outer layer is very narrow—temperatures in the low to mid-60’s when walking around the city. Anything colder and the lack of wind resistance makes it too chilly. Anything warmer and it’s easy to overheat after 10 minutes of walking uphill.

Unless I’m wearing it around the house, I much prefer using it as a mid-layer underneath an unzipped jacket in cooler temperatures (50’s). That way it’s comfortable, doesn’t overheat, and looks nice.

At 10-12oz it’s easy to throw it in a bag or pack it when traveling. It would also make a decent airplane hoodie.

With so much of our time spent with computers and the internet, we ought to think about the quality of our digital lives. What makes for a good digital life? How do you achieve it? What should we do to improve it?

Wealth is usually described as an abundance of tangible things. Fancy cars, a big house, a boat, and lots of money—that sort of thing. Wealth as it relates to our digital lives though is different.

Few limitations exist on the contents of our digital life. Information on pretty much anything is available instantly. Communication is possible with anyone, nearly anywhere, at any time. The internet is available to billions of people (and growing) and access to broadband connections is increasing. That’s not to say it’s equitable, but it’s not like there’s an internet only for Billionaires.

What does it mean to have a rich digital life when there is already abundance?

See also:

• Signaling as a service
• Digital status symbols arise from homogeneity
• Our digital lives are siloed
• The internet has American values encoded
• Black and Hispanic people have less access to broadband internet than White people
• The metaverse is the ultimate company town
• Stock and flow

A Voluntary Disclosure Agreement is a process in which a company comes clean about not collecting or paying taxes when they should have (usually sales tax and corporate income tax). This helps to minimize penalties and the look-back period for paying back taxes. Without it, the tax agency will come after the company for the full amount and penalties. In fact, many States will not accept a VDA if they notify you first (e.g. sending a tax questionnaire).

See also:

• The National Nexus Program standardizes Voluntary Disclosure Agreements in multiple states to make it easier.

Each State has a process administrating a Voluntary Disclosure Agreement to pay back taxes. The Multistate Tax Commission runs a program to standardize the VDAs and make it easier for companies to meet their tax obligations and pay back taxes.

Member States:

See also:

• Startups oscillate between operating ignorance and normalization

Current consensus is that Mark Zuckerberg is an evil billionaire. A contrarian view would be this: Zuckerberg is an anti-hero who, in an unprecedented position of power, advances technological progress and well-being.

Take the metaverse—a bundle of interesting ideas that are, more or less, already happening (VR, AR, crypto, NFTs, and so on). It’s easy to mock, but what if we’re wrong that it’s a dumb idea? What if it’s a useful abstraction that fosters a new kind of digital economy that creates opportunity for more people?

In What Is a Tech Company on Stratechery, a tech company is defined by the following characteristics.

Software has zero marginal costs Providing the product to subsequent customers costs nothing (or near nothing) once it’s created.

Software improves over time Updates to the product happen continuously which increases the value to the user after they buy it.

Software offers infinite leverage Software creates efficiency that opens up new levels of scale and markets (e.g. the whole world can be your customers).

Software creates ecosystems The software creates and ecosystem that wasn’t available before like connecting buyers and sellers or third-party software vendors on a platform.

Software enables zero transaction costs Self-serve software reduces or eliminates the need to be hands-on with customers making each additional transaction cost nothing.

Not every technology business will meet all of them, but it is highly skeptical if a company purports to be a tech company and doesn’t exhibit most of these characteristics (like WeWork).

More people in the US have quit their job in 2021 then ever before (since it started being tracked). COVID-19 made people re-evaluate whether or not their jobs were worth it—many have decided to change jobs are quit altogether, especially in retail and food services.

See also:

• The number of quits keeps climbing, 4.3 million people quit their job in August 2021
• Two-thirds of remote workers want to continue to work remotely

• Depreciate: unless you are building accounting software, you probably mean deprecate.
• Receive: it’s inevitable you will track down bugs due to a misspelled variable name recieve.
• Referrer: if the inventors of the HTTP_REFERER header can’t spell it correctly, neither will you.

A confounding aspect of conservative politics is how they view the rule of law. Conservatives tend to see laws as being designed for certain kinds of people. In their mind, a terrorist is already a terrorist and if the same law is used to define one of their tribe as a terrorist it’s the left being fascist.

Liberals tend to see the rule of law justified with morality—the law defines people and is justified through morality. Acts of terrorism are defined by the law. An American can be held to the same standard (domestic terrorism) because terrorism is morally wrong.

Read the Reddit thread

See also:

• This is also in-group favoritism, a conservative doing bad things is still part of the tribe because of morality (not legality)

In an experiment testing the causes of zoom fatigue, researchers found that having the camera on during virtual meetings resulted in fatigue (likely due to self-presentation), not time spent or frequency of meetings.

They also found gender and organizational tenure moderate the relationship between camera on and fatigue—women and new employees are more fatigued.

Read The Fatiguing Effects of Camera Use in Virtual Meetings: A Within-Person Field Experiment.

Exporting org-mode documents using ox is very slow when there are many org-id links in the contents.

After some profiling I found the following code is called during export in a loop over each org-id link which returns the link’s file location.

(car (org-id-find id))

Unfortunately, org-id-find will load the file and all of it’s associated modes. This is very slow when all it needs is the file location.

Replacing it with the following makes the code roughly 10x faster.

(org-id-find-id-file id)

As a temporary workaround, you can overwrite org-export--collect-tree-properties:

(eval-after-load "ox"
  ;; Org export is very slow when processing org-id links. Override it
  ;; to skip opening the file and loading all modes.
  (defun org-export--collect-tree-properties (data info)
    "Extract tree properties from parse tree.

    DATA is the parse tree from which information is retrieved.  INFO
    is a list holding export options.

    Following tree properties are set or updated:

    `:headline-offset' Offset between true level of headlines and
                       local level.  An offset of -1 means a headline
                       of level 2 should be considered as a level
                       1 headline in the context.

    `:headline-numbering' Alist of all headlines as key and the
                          associated numbering as value.

    `:id-alist' Alist of all ID references as key and associated file
                as value.

    Return updated plist."
    ;; Install the parse tree in the communication channel.
    (setq info (plist-put info :parse-tree data))
    ;; Compute `:headline-offset' in order to be able to use
    ;; `org-export-get-relative-level'.
    (setq info
          (plist-put info
                     :headline-offset
                     (- 1 (org-export--get-min-level data info))))
    ;; From now on, properties order doesn't matter: get the rest of the
    ;; tree properties.
    (org-combine-plists
     info
     (list :headline-numbering (org-export--collect-headline-numbering data info)
           :id-alist
           (org-element-map data 'link
             (lambda (l)
               (and (string= (org-element-property :type l) "id")
                    (let* ((id (org-element-property :path l))
                           (file (org-id-find-id-file id)))
                      (and file (cons id (file-relative-name file))))))))))

See also:

• Another downside of using ID links in org-roam

A paper published in Nature looked at brain autopsies of people that died from COVID-19. Brain endothelial cells were found to be infected and there was an increase in string vessels (lost capillaries).

This helps to explain how brain damage happens and relates it to the 76% of patients who may have impairment and a range of psychiatric symptoms.

See also:

• Animals they researched showed the damage repaired over time giving hope for recovery of long COVID
• A different study found COVID-19 infection reduces grey matter thickness in parts of the brain
• Half of COVID-19 survivors had lingering symptoms after 1 year

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