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A Theory of Grift
Plus! Buy The Change You Wish to See in the World; Schmuck Insurance; Uncertainty; Block Trading; Ads
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Altman's Ambition
Sam Altman is not playing around.
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A counter-intuitive guide to better leadership
Intuition works from the shadows. Look at it directly and you get rationalization, not explanation—the verbal brain fills the gaps with a plausible story.
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Sam Altman Is Full of Shit
Note: In my last newsletter, I said that my next post would be the second part of my Facebook autopsy. Don’t worry, that’s still coming, but given the recent drama between Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Scarlett Johansson, I felt the need to write something. Don’t worry, I
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America's best-paid CEOs have the worst-paid employees
Broadly speaking, the role of an establishment economist is to come up with new ways of saying, "actually, your boss is right." In other words, the world we're living in is the best possible world, and the fact that you got contact burns from collapsing on the scorching sidewalk outside of the grocery store where you…
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I'm Bearish OpenAI
A shift toward products and a research brain drain should ring your alarm bells
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When Nothing Ever Goes Out of Print: Maintaining Backlist Ebooks (2016)
A talk given at the ebookcraft conference, March 30, 2016
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Did Automattic commit open source theft?
The maker of WordPress took 2M customers from its biggest rival: has a red line been crossed?
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Bureaucrat Mode
The road to hell is paved via collaboration, consensus, inclusiveness, stability
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In Response to Google
Google has chosen to send a response to my article to Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable. Here is my response. (1) On the March 2019 core update claim in the piece: This is baseless speculation. The March 2019 core update was designed to improve the quality of our search
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Notes on China
Deeply researched interviews
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Most Tech Jobs Are Jokes and I Am Not Laughing
I've followed through on my commitment to interview in the tech industry without relying entirely on in-network referrals as I normally do (for a good reason - my network consists largely of the most competent people at mediocre companies!). It is dystopian out there. These are some anecdotes on my interviewing…
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Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover
[English]These are currently difficult times for customers and resellers of VMware products who want to reorder, extend licenses or simply activate product licenses. After the Broadcom takeover…
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Steam's Last Stand
In the year 1900, automobile sales in the United States were divided almost evenly among three types of vehicles: automakers sold about 1,000 cars powered by internal combustion engines, but over 1…
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Quick takes on the recent OpenAI public incident write-up
OpenAI recently published a public writeup for an incident they had on December 11, and there are lots of good details in here! Here are some of my off-the-cuff observations: Saturation With thousa…
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VisiCalc – The Early Days (2003)
Peter Jennings early history of VisiCalc
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Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often
Sending helpful & engaging pushes, filtering annoying pushes, and finding the frequency sweet spot.
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Up to a Quarter of Rental Inflation Is Due to Price-Fixing
From 2020-2024, rent prices spiked by a third. How much of that is due to collusion by corporate landlords and a software coordinator? And where is the Fed?
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Random Thoughts about Unity
From the outside, Unity lately seems to have a problem or two. By “lately”, I mean during the last decade, and by “a problem or two”, I mean probably over nine thousand problems. Fun! But what are they, how serious they are, and what can be done about it?
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The business of wallets
How digital wallets work, and how payment costs drive a lot of product decisions inside and around them.
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Solar will get too cheap to connect to the power grid
The cost of solar panels is plummeting, and this will flood the power grid with cheap electricity. But that’s just Act 1. We won’t stop building solar at the limits of the grid - we’ll build a lot more. This post explains why we'll keep building more,
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The Rise and Fall of Ashton-Tate (2023)
Vulcan & dBASE
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Platform Strategy and Its Discontents
Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.
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Rare things become common at scale (2014)
Software doesn't scale through architecture and automation alone. New, more difficult problems appear that didn't exist before, causing new downstream consequences.
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Reflections on Luck and Skill from the Part Time Poker Grind
In the early hours of May 13th, 2024 and after about sixteen hours of play over two days, I achieved one of my poker dreams and outlasted 773 entrants in the RunGood Poker Series $800 No Limit Hold’em Main Event hosted at Graton Casino and Resort to claim the outright win and top prize of $85,780.
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The Algorithm Behind Jim Simons's Success
Reflections on a Wall Street legend.