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The end of big data
Databricks, Snowflake, and the end of an overhyped era.
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Mortgages are a manufactured product
Mortgages are popularly thought of as loans, but to understand the industry, it's better to model them as complex manufactured products.
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How to start a successful freelance business as a software developer (2017)
Start your freelance business on the right foot by avoiding common mistakes that you will hold you back from victory.
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Nonprofit boards are weird
With great power comes, er, unclear responsibility and zero accountability.
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How much do construction costs matter to the price of housing?
One of the goals of this newsletter is to figure out ways to improve construction productivity and reduce the costs of construction, particularly residential construction (ie: housing) - if you could reduce the costs of construction, housing costs would fall as well.
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Bad behavior is almost always good politics (2021)
Most great thinkers have speculated about the kind of leadership that might give rise to a better society, analyzing it through what’s sometimes called a “normative” lens: What should we be doing? In Leviathan, for example, Thomas Hobbes argued for a single, absolute sovereign to hold together the social contract. He…
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Catching Native Apps
If you imagine a world where the sum of all things you can do with a computer is exactly matched, and locked down for all time with what you can do inside a browser, then the arguments for the web are persuasive. Why write for a specific platform when you can write for all platforms at once and gain the other…
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Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
Why choosing a popular cloud service, like AWS or Google Cloud Platform, may be the wrong choice for you and what to do instead.
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An Economy of Overfed Middlemen
A venture capitalist called Equal Ventures just says it straight-up, we seek to invest in monopolization.
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How to Explain an Idea
What's an idea? What sorts of ideas are there? And how to explain them once you have them?
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How Apple names things
I love the way Apple names things: FireWire, App Nap, iPhone, iPod, EarPod, AirPod, AirPlay, FairPlay etc. It’s playful and there’s a lot of reuse of words and sounds. Having just finished reading the biography of Steve Jobs, I decided to visualize various Apple product and feature names as a network to see this reuse…
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4 in 5 Americans who need insulin have taken on credit card debt to cover cost
The average amount of debt is $9,000.
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Goodbye Medium, hello Ghost
Why Crypto Fireside is migrating from Medium to Ghost.
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Are forum platforms dead?
👋 Hello everyone. I'm Matt Mecham and today I will be your Rosieland guide. It feels that every other week a new article is written proclaiming the death of the venerable forum platform. The author often cites forums they used to frequent in the early 2000s and how they now hang out on Twitter and Discord, which, in…
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PayPal closes account of UK's Free Speech Union without explanation
I interviewed Toby Young about this ironic and shocking case of censorship.
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The AI Unbundling
AI is starting to unbundle the final part of the idea propagation value chain: idea creation and substantiation. The impacts will be far-reaching.
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Ev Williams to step down from Medium
Next month will be the tenth anniversary of the launch of Medium. As we gear up for the next decade, I’ve decided to hand over the CEO…
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Scary fraud ensues when ID theft and usury collide
What’s worse than finding out that identity thieves took out a 546 percent interest payday loan in your name? How about a 900 percent interest loan? Or how about not learning of the fraudulent loan until it gets handed off to collection agents? One reader’s nightmare experience spotlights what can happen when ID…
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Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
I dig into what's genuinely impressive about crypto (distributed trust, abuse prevention, true cloud computing) and what's deeply problematic: boundary interactions, governance concentration, transaction cost tradeoffs, and unclear incentives. My conclusion: crypto may only be useful for financial engineering, and…
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I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
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Mergers ruin everything
Bad merger policy is why wealth and power is so consolidated in America. But last month, two government enforcers started to turn the table on the monopolies who run our economy.
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The New American Micro-SaaS Dream
Raise millions of dollars from Venture Capitalists, rent a fancy office in San Francisco, hire an expensive team of "superheroes," and get valued, on paper, as a "unicorn."
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Negative incentives in academic research
In the first half of the XXth century, there were relatively few scientists, and these scientists were generally not lavishly funded. Yet it has been convincingly argued that these scientists were massively more productive. We face a major replication crisis where important results in fields such as psychology and…
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Tech CEO pleads to wire fraud in IP address scheme
The CEO of a South Carolina technology firm has pleaded guilty to 20 counts of wire fraud in connection with an elaborate network of phony companies set up to obtain more than 735,000 Internet Protocol (IP) addresses from the nonprofit organization that leases the digital real estate to entities in North America.
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Dutch antitrust authority fines Apple for fifth time
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