• Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe. I did not realize how much this was a story of a marketing dynasty. A triumph of marketing and business development over morality and good sense.
• This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth. The entire internet is compromised and we better get cracking to fix it. Our software and internet industries were created by optimists and enthusiasts, but increasingly are inhabited by bad actors.

A thread across both these books – it is a great strength of our free market economy that we allow new companies to easily create new offerings and enter the market – but we don’t have great mechanisms for assigning responsibility for the societal problems they may create. The innovators get rich and move on, society is left with the huge costs of opioid addictions or the huge costs of easily hackable software systems. The innovators should bear more responsibility, but this is a hard problem to fix.

After these two books, I needed some lighter fare:

• We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor. A lighthearted tale of galaxy exploration by an idiosyncratic post-human AI and its clones. There are many more books in the series and I enjoyed, but probably won’t continue as I have too many other books on the pile:

And then a transition back to more serious fare:

• Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang. Deep dive into the lives of migrant workers in modern China. A real “wild wild west” economic scene, inside of a very traditional hierarchical society. Interesting.

• Salvation, Salvation Lost, The Saints of Salvation by Peter F. Hamilton. Far reaching space opera, tons of far-fetched ideas. Solid and fun.
• The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Interesting argument about the evolutionary basis of morality and religion, and the implications for political arguments. Makes the strong argument that the mainstream Democratic party has a substantial problem in appealing to large parts of the population. Certainly thought provoking.
• A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion. A tired mother acts rashly and events ensue that destroy lives. Really grew on me.

• CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders. Well written but just not my taste, too much farce.
• All This Could Be Yours by Jami Attenberg. A patriarch dies and all the family sh$t comes out, and boy did he damage everybody in the family.
• Blood River by Tim Butcher. The author recreates Stanley’s trip through the Congo. Illuminating and saddening and terrifying.

I am continually disappointed by the number of “secure email portals” i am asked to sign into. Every medical provider, every financial institution. And each of these seem to use a different underlying implementation. Some of the smaller medical providers seem to use some SAAS solutiuons, tho these seem like very obscure SAAS solutions.

The most recent one is from a very large insurance provider who should probably know better. Their “security questions” are particularly humorous — “What is the longest book you have ever read”, “What’s your dream job”, “What’s your least favorite city”, etc. A) I will never remember what I entered for these, B) the answers are not stable over any reasonable amount of time. There are a lot of crappy cities I haven’t been to, a lot of books I haven’t read.

It is too bad we can’t have secure end-to-end email like we do messaging.

The Year in Biology – a great overview of biology advances, especially for biology ignoramuses like me.

I need to do a deep trial of Obsidian and/or Dendron. They seem right up my alley.

The great CharlesF on preparing for lower valuations.

Scott Galloway on the importance of choosing your sector: key quotes: “Sector dynamics will trump your talent…someone of average talent at Google has done better over the past decade than someone great at General Motors…Look for the best wave to ride”

Listening through by Kevin Smokler. Great way to understand an artist. I have of course done this for the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, but starting to use it with other lesser known artistis.

Noah Smith on progressive industrialism. A necessary and compelling part of a progressive view.

Nice thread on modest purchases that have had a big impact on people.

Learning how to do timelapse photography on the Canon EOS R or 5R. Thankfully there are a number of cookbooks — the simple way, the harder way.

• Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama by Sam Leith. Gosh I wish I had read this earlier in my life, or studied rhetoric. So much I don’t know about effective communication.
• Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver. So, there are some seriously dated and bad cultural takes in here, but the core ideas are provocative – the Western world has slowly lost its sense of shared mission and values, which has resulted in our current political morass. Published in 1948, but just as relevant today, as long as you can get past some of the objectionable content.
• The New Wilderness by Diane Cook. I like speculative fiction when it shows real people adapting to a new situation. These kind of thought experiments can teach us something. But when the characters don’t seem like real people at all, and behave in weird-ass ways, I lose interest.
• The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation by Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman. Interesting details on how proliferation has happened. The political conjecturing is weak and spy thriller-ish.

Dare Obasanjo has a nice post with a simple framework for evaluating job alternatives.

It led me to reflect on my own job selection logic. When I started my career back in the 80s, I was working in the Midwest, and it was a time of industrial restructuring and downsizing. Layoffs were unfortunately common. A very smart colleague at Booz-Allen, Bert Jones (who I have lost contact with), shared these simple ideas with me.

If you want to avoid layoffs, you should

• work in the most important business (or businesses) to the company. This means learning to read company financials and really understanding where revenues, margins, and growth comes from.
• and in that business, have a job either making things or selling things. Every other job is subject to downsizing. But if you are making or selling the most important things to the company, you are pretty safe.

These points were useful more generally throughout my career. Even when I was at Microsoft during a period of heady growth, and layoffs were not a threat, these factors impacted directly how much support I received – the closer I was to the core Windows (or Office) businesses, the more support I received, and the more opportunities I had to have an impact.

Of course, this also put me closer to the maelstrom, with greater focus on my performance, and that is not always the right fit, but I enjoyed it at the time.

• The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win by Maria Konnikova. Great insight into high-level poker and the thinking skills it teaches. Very good.
• Rosewater by Tade Thompson. A fun story set in a future Nigeria on a world in which a alien organism has invaded the Earth. Some good characters, I do wish the author would focus on smaller stories of characters coping in this world, rather than focusing on the big story about the future of the human race and the universe.
• The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. Amazing adventure of misjudgement, errors, atonement, and resolution for a set of interrelated characters. Great characters and great construction. Would be a fantastic mini-series.
• Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I wanted to like it, the setting could have been interesting, but I felt very little of Mexico in the book, and it was just kind of going nowhere. I gave up.

As an antidote to the web3 nonsense, I’ve been trying to play around with some more interesting and more fundamental innovations. Microsoft has a really nice quantum computing tutorial that I have been working my way thru. I have enough math, quantum, electonic, and cs background to wade through. You probably want to be reasonably comfortable with vectors and imaginary numbers or it might be frustrating.

I have a general impression, which is that it is very very very early in the development of quantum computing. And that there is probably not much interesting software work to do right now.

Looking at the history of digital computing, we had to invent a lot of layers of technology to get to the point where it was a mass market useful thing. We had to invent the transistor (and triode before that). We had to combine resistors into circuits to make logic gates, coming up with some conventions that a certain voltage/current value was a “1” and another value was a “0”. We had to invent Boolean algrebra. We had to combine gates into higher order components like adders. We had to move from discrete transistors to integrated circuits. We had to develop Von Neumann machines. We had to get to a standard system architecture of clocked cpus with memory. We had to develop assembly language and then higher order languages like Fortran. And we had to develop a lot of tools and process technology all along the way. All this work overlapped and moved in fits and starts, but took decades to wrangle all this together. By the time we got to Fortran, we could write code that many humans could understand and which you could express real world problems in.

Without all this, writing “software” for transistors would have been terribly hard.

With quantum computing, we are throwing out the transistor and starting back up the stack. We are establishing conventions for what the equivalent of a “1” and “0” is. But the stack above that is still early or nonexistent. We are nowhere close to a development platform that lets a lot of humans write code that is understandable and relates to a large body of real world problems.

Sam pointed me to this article that says useful quantum computers may require a few million qubits, and we are toying around today with systems of ~10-100 qubits. Feels about right.

I am optimistic about quantum computing – today’s transistors require us to fling around a huge amount of electrons to do anything useful. If we can get to circuit elements that can work with discrete quanta, man that will be a lot of computing performance. But it is going to take us a while.

I read a lot of books this year. There were some really good ones, and I couldn’t get down to a list of just 5 ala Bill Gates. I have 10 I would recommend. I was mostly drawn to nonfiction about macroeconomics this year, trying to get smarter about what is really happening in the world as we seem to enter a new era of money management. I was also drawn to some great escapist adventure stories, because well the real world has been challenging.

Economics and Society

The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes was excellent, a great telling of the factors that influenced Keynes. I was ignorant about him and never realized how committed he was to social reform and delivering economic benefits to everyone. Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity argues that the collapse of Rome gave rise to the diverse competitive structure of the West that made it so successful, and seems relevant today. Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 is an interesting look at a time period when American democracy was under great stress from pandemics and factionalism, certainly lessons for today. Secrecy: The American Experience is something I should have read long ago, the rise of government secrecy over the last century is not good for us. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears) is a hilarious tale illustrating the failures of extreme libertarianism.

Adventure and Mystery

Iron Lake is a great mystery set in Northern Minnesota. It was easy to imagine being there and the characters were excellent, I am very late to this book and author. The Blacktongue Thief is the start of a great new series, reminded me of Fritz Leiber’s “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” books that I read as a kid. Sharpe’s Rifles is a book from the midpoint of this character’s series, a fun romp in the Napoleonic era. Project Hail Mary is a great space exploration and first contact tale.

And then one more

Everything: A Book of Aphorisms is a very nice compendium of wisdom.

• Quantum Computing since Democritus by Scott Aaronson. I broke my pick on this one a little, you need to be very comfortable with advanced CS and quantum theory and my brain is rusty on both.
• I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt. Interesting background on the Jimmy Hoffa murder, such a big story earlier in my life.
• The Promise by Damon Galgut. A white South African dissolves as a group and individually after the end of apartheid.

I am kind of loving Wombo Dream. Endlessly fascinating. I asked it to create some Windows 95 inspired images, using the various styles, and the results just get trippier and trippier:

Holidays, birthdays, family activities. Omicron! In the midst of moving houses. I am just scattered all over the place right now. Hence a total grab bag of things.

Covid simulation. Fascinating

An accelerator for fine art. Super interesting idea.

I’m only 20 years behind, time to jump into Processing.

Penpot — open source design and proto platform

Decentralized woo hoo. Yep.

22 emerging technologies to watch in 2022 – too bad all the web3 brains are not working on these problems

Some super smart software people have gone to work at Stoke. Wishing them the best, I hope to get out for a visit in December.

“Don’t worry so much about someone stealing your ideas. In fact, it’s probably worth working harder to get people imagining that they might.” – totally agree.

Boy, howdy. I was once a consultant to F500 companies and it felt like being a carrion bird.

Great counsel — replace pitch decks with teaching decks.

From Debt: The First 5000 Years — “The one thing we can be confident of is that history is not over, and that wherever the most exciting new ideas of the next century come from, it will almost certainly be from someplace we don’t expect.”

Eradicate medical debt for pennies on the dollar — RIP Medical Debt. Need to read more about, but I like that the debtholders take a haircut – there is no way all this pain should accrue to consumers.

ResearchRabbit looks awesome

I don’t know why, but I feel like I need an electric scooter.

Are you playing to play, or playing to win?

How to play Paperback. Count me in!

• The Simulated Multiverse by Rizwan Virk. A mishmash of ideas and abstractions. A little bit of quantum woo. It is an easy read but doesn’t really go deep enough to teach much.
• Zorrie by Laird Hunt. A gentle tale about life, love, and loss. Everyone will find something to relate to in here.
• Iron Lake by William Kent Krueger. Fantastic tale of love, loss, betrayal, greed, and murder in a small town in northern Minnesota.
• The BlackTongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman. Tremendously fun adventure of a young thief and friends. Intrigue, betrayal, swashbuckling, magic, humor. Fun characters, well written.
• What They Forgot to Teach You at School by The School of Life. Short read, discusses all the emotional and communications skills that school never really teaches, but that are critical to an adult.

• Hell of a Book by Jason Mott. Great story of a writer struggling with the terrible events in his life, and the terrible toll racism has on all.
• Escape from Rome by Walter Scheidel. Quite the slog but a compelling argument that the fall of Rome was essential for the creation of the competitve and progressive West. One wonders how this dynamic will play out over the coming century. One also wonders if this is an argument for devolving more rights and programs to the state and local level.
• The Wilkes Insurrection by Robbie Bach. Really well paced and a couple of great characters. Very good first outing from Robbie.
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. The evolution of debt, markets, and money as seen by an anthropologist. Vlad and John turned me onto this, it is a bit wordy, but super interesting, a very different view from the conventional wisdom. I am still processing, it is very relevant to current discussions about student debt forgiveness and debt ceiling.
• The Incal by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Mœbius. Highly rated graphic novel, not really my cup of tea. A bajillion creative concepts jammed willy nilly into one story, leaving little room for character or coherent plot.
• Unrequited Infatuations by Stevie Van Zandt. What a life and what a character. Greatly appreciate his passion and commitment to art. Inspiring.

I came of age and started my career in the early stages of the PC revolution. And my gosh was this exciting — the wresting of computer power away from controlled impersonal computer centers and delivery into the hands of free individuals. An explosion of creativity followed. It was thrilling. I went to work at Microsoft not because of the financial potential — I didn’t even know what a stock option was. I went to Microsoft because I had to be part of this revolution.

I felt this excitment again during the web revolution — letting anyone create a website and making it dramatically easier to reach audiences. The web was empowering and freeing. And then the mobile revolution — pushing computing off the desk and into the hands and pockets of people, freeing and empowering again.

The greatest technology revolutions all share this sense of freedom and empowerment. And during these times, mission-driven orgs pop into existence, and people commit to missions, creating career highlights.

There are smarter people than me who have articulated the problems with web3/crypto. Complexity, unnecessary technology, scams, criminality, etc.

But ignore all the problems for a moment. The web3 folks are articulating a vision of freedom and empowerment — freedom from giant corporate walled gardens of identity and content, freedom, to take your data anywhere. These are good things. I get why people are excited about freedom.

Is anyone else articulating a vision of freedom, empowerment, opportunity?

Meta is at least talking about the metaverse, but it is all locked up in Meta’s hands. But there might be something there.

What bright future are Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple talking about? They are are incrementalling their current tech, but what breakthrough are they driving in freedom and opportunity? No one gets excited about the 723rd AWS service, or Windows/Office/Teams version 27, or iOS version 19. Drudgery.

What are web3/crypto critics presenting as an alternative? It is not sufficient to say “web3/crypto sucks”.

Some of the smartest people I know are moving towards space startups, which has a great mission, but it doesn’t have the freedom and opportunity vibe.

We have to articulate an alternative vision that leads to more freedom and opportunity. Or people will continue to go down the web3 rabbithole.