Voting

November already! It’s voting season again, and a big thanks to the Washington State vote by mail system this week, it is really wonderful. Hard to understand why every state doesn’t learn from, it has certainly driven up my participation and engagement level. It’s no surprise Washington is in the top 5 states by participation rate — and I hope we learn from the top 4 and improve.

Interactive Art Installations

I took a spin thru software for interactive art installs this week. I used to do some large scale halloween decorating and used DMX control software at that time, software has improved a lot sicne then. I am particularly interested in video projection mapping, gosh there are a lof of nice choices. I could just roll something by hand but using one of these seems smart, they all seem to handle multiple projectors mapping onto arbitrary geometries:

• madmapper. Lots of features, lots of guides, nice UI, seems to be reasonably active.
• qlab. Looks very on point, nice iOS companion app
• millumin. UI maybe not as slick, but still looks pretty complete
• isadora. A little more techie maybe.
• Touchdesigner. Seems to have a very strong pro community around it
• resolume. Really nice VJ features
• visution: UI not so polished but still looks complete

I intend to try a small experiment with one of these.

These additional projects may have promise but they seem limited in some substantial way

• heavym. only supports 1 output at the moment.
• mapmap. open source but abandoned.
• lightform creator. cool but limited to their out of stock hardware.

Web3 this week

I largely stayed away from web3 this week, but I did read a few things. Haseeb is a bit more rational than some of the adherents — for example Why decentralization is a bit of a red herring. And then Packy McCormick on sc3nius, worth reading.

And then there is this primer on DAOs. I want to like DAOs, there is something interesting about software for new organizational models. But when you have to understand 87 new concepts and 123 projects to wrap your head around the simplest DAO – well, radical transparency loses its meaning when it is wrapped up in obtuse complexity.

Random

I’d like to build out an astrophotography pc and setup. tho living amidst the light pollution and mirk of seattle is not really conducive to great astrophotography.

And a macrophotography setup — adaptalux.

Tough tech investing landscape 2021 – kind of the antidote to web3.

Pixar rules for story telling.

May December collaboration – nice to see new artists embracing great work of the past, and older artists embracing the art of today. Enriching for all.

Leadership Lessons

Every job has a signficant sales and marketing component. Engineering is no exception. You have to communicate what you are doing regularly and emphatically (and also listen to the response you get, and adapt accordingly).

Ryan Petersen of Flexport on the container issue – I love this guy. Not focused on blame or grand policy. Just digs in, identifies issues, and proposes an array of common sense and direct solutions. We need more of this kind of leadership.

Startup Financing

A standard approach to startup cap tables – seems useful and overdue. I spent so much time in excel as both an investor and then as a startup founder. Would be good to regularize this.

Great thread and data on startup exits. I’m surprised at the number of earnouts and I wonder if these are all really earnouts (certain business goals must be hit to get the comp) vs time vesting (employees must stay a certain length of time).

Web3 Gaming

I’ve been mostly looking at using web3 as a developer. I decided to try from a different direction and use web3 as a user. The top game seems to be the Axie Infinity game.

You need to jump quite a few hurdles to try out Axie Infinity.

• First to the Axie Infinity site
• Then download something called Mavis Hub. Why is this a different name? Anyway, downloaded.
• Then log in with a Ronin Wallet (there are some other choices but this is recommended). Who or what makes Ronin Wallet? Don’t know.
• Then led to the SkyMavis site, another organization. Starting to feel like this is part of the game.
• Ronin wallet only runs in Chrome or Firefox, so get Chrome installed (thought all this web3 stuff was going to free us from the Man). Ronin wallet plug in installed.
• Now get ETH in the ronin wallet. Off to the roninchain site (yet another organization) with several choices to buy assets with the Ramp Network, yet another branded service. 3 choices — WETH, AXS, or SLP. AXS seems right.
• And whoa whoa whoa. Just to start playing, need 3 AXS and that is like $380 at today’s prices. $380 to play this game? For a pokemon like-game? Are they naked or something?

First observation — such a jumble of brands and organizations. The general web3 approach of “we will replace monolithic commerical offerings with a mishmash of micro offerings from orgs you have never heard of” doesn’t really fly.

Second, the cost to play is ridiculous. No thanks, I am not putting $380 into this. A smart observer compared it to a pyramid scheme, and later arrivers like me have to dump a lot of cash in to support the earlier adopters.

There are easier and cheaper ways to have fun or to speculate.

I get that new platforms might be cruftier and clumsier than the mature solutions of the preceding generation but there has to be something positive about web3.

web3, crypto this week

Kept on trying to learn about web3 this week,taking a random walk thru services. dfinity.org is complicated to grok, the “hello world” app for a hosted app is a little byzantine. fleek.co was a little easier to use tho i seem to have lost my app. I am still trying to understand what ipfs is good for. polkadot and substrate seem like ingredients, not solutions. Everyone introduces a bunch of new unique terminology, I am awash in concepts.

I am bullish on the idea that there is some application use for web3 infrastructure, tho nothing I am finding is really compelling yet, and the complexity of using them is orders of magnitude too high. The cost to use any of these services is a complicated mystery; there is a lot of value in a publicly maintained, clear price list for services as is provided by AWS or Azure or GCS — I can have a “hello world” lambda up and running in minutes with a very clear cost expectation and a lot of cost and scale controls.

It would be great if someone made it trivially easy to move s3 storage to ipfs, and demonstrated exactly how that would be substantially cheaper. Cloudflare is attempting to move s3 usage to r2 — full s3 compatibility at a much lower cost – they are making it trivial to understand – I get that. If some IPFS offering would do the same, I would get that.

One thing I am quite sure about — the “Goodbye AWS!” sentiment on various web3 sites — how running an app on the blockchain will free apps from the tyranny of AWS (and Azure and Google…) — this is false. The blockchain operates on hardware that some organization is hosting and operating. There will be organizations that are better at operating hardware at scale, and they will aggregate up a bunch of blockchain processing traffic and then they will have the new Amazon (which might be the same as the old Amazon). This is just the nature of industries, every industry since the beginning of time has behaved this way – “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”. I suspect a lot of vendors and investors understand this dynamic very well and are being disingenuous.

I also keep reading “crypto currency is different, we need a different regulatory regime.” Regulatory structures are in place, in part, to moderate the behaviour of the powerful and to protect the individual investors (and yes are abused by established players to achieve regulatory capture, but that is not a reason to drop them). When I hear a new entrant claiming we need a whole new regulatory regime, they are either naive about how this will play out — or they are disingenuous, they want to be a dominant player in the new regime and capture outsize rewards. THey are not acting on the behalf of the individual investor.

A variant of this is “The SEC’s posture towards crypto in the US is definitely hurting innovation”. Well yes it may be slowing innovation and this seems like a feature, not a bug. Maintaining a market that protects small investors and encourages them to participate in the market is a very good thing. Financial “innovators” often do not protect small investors.

The burden is on the crytpocurrency innovators to fully embrace the protections provided by the SEC and demonstrate how they can operate within those strictures.

Random

I’m a sucker for shaders.

I need a Mini hologram portal.

Dave Winer continues to innovate and build. Inspiring.

Nature conservancy 2021 photo winners – the cenote one is awesome.

Kintsugi is beautiful.

Noah smith explains the risks of subsidies for expensive services

Mortgage debt service at all time low. Stunning.

• The Weak Spot by Lucie Elven. Strange characters acting in strange ways. Hard for me to care about any of these people.
• The Dance of Molecules by Ted Sargent. A little dated, but still good. Very nice language, better than most science books. I think Reardon recommended this one to me years ago, I should have read it then.
• Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. Sprawls over a huge swath fo history but ties it all together nicely. I was captivated. Deserving of the accolades it has been receiving.
• Dirty Work by Eyal Press. Examines the unpleasant jobs we ask people to do in society, and how we ignore and turn our eyes away from these jobs and their consequences. Sobering.

The fallacy of mid-market network gear

We have always used “consumer grade” networking gear in our house. Cable modems off of Amazon, Eero wifi access points (and apple wifi access points before that). The Eeros have a great mobile app and have generally been easy to setup and largely bulletproof.

But I don’t love being the IT guy for the house. So against my better judgement, in our current house I was talked into mid-market “var friendly” devices — Araknis routers and Ruckus access points with professional install. It has not been very clean. These vendors have crap mobile apps and the gear isn’t designed for users to manage. Our installer is not able to debug as he is busy doing installs. There is no consumer support path.

Our WiFi networks kept dropping a couple times a day. We complained about and got no answers besides “have you tried rebooting”. So I wrote a python script to monitor our connection every 10 seconds, and discovered that our connections were dropping every 12 hours exactly. I put my macbook on the wired network and ran the same script, no drops. So it seemed access point specific.

After weeks of badgering my installer, I finally got login admin access to both the Araknis routers and the Ruckus access points. The Araknis system logs show no problems. The Ruckus access points all reported connectivity problems every 12 hours. Ding ding. Back to the Araknis UI, and guess what the DHCP lease length is set to? 12 hours. Ding ding ding. I set it to 72 hours and all has been relatively good since then.

There are so many problems here.

• Our installer doesn’t have the time or depth to solve these problems.
• The Ruckus and Araknis products don’t expose config tools to users.
• The Araknis has a stupid 12 hour default for DHCP.
• The Ruckus devices are stupidly on dynamic IPs by default, and all 3 of them try to do lease renewal at the exact same time.
• Neither Araknis nor Ruckus have effective consumer support services.
• The Ruckus issues with DHCP are clearly known in user forums, for some time, and Ruckus does nothing about.
• All of this just creates pain for consumers and for our installer. If I was an installer I would dump all this crap and install consumer grade devices.

Almost all these problems go away with Eeros. I hear very good things about Unifi too tho their website reads like they are creeping into the mid-market which scares me.

I am probably never going to get to step out of the role of home IT guy. All I can do is buy products that automate a lot of the problems away or give me easy self service solutions.

What are tokens exactly?

When I am not in the router weeds, I am trying to keep up with the new hotness. This is a good explanation of cap tables for crypto companies.

Historically when an entity issues a financial instrument, it is backed by some guarantee of financial value. The government issues currency, backed by the taxing power of the government. Municipalities issue bonds, backed by their taxing power. Corporations issue bonds, backed by their ability to generate cash to cover the bonds. Companies issue equity, which is a claim on the cash flow and earnings of the company. Etc.

What exactly are tokens backed by? They aren’t a claim on the issuing company’s cash flow or equity. (And why not?) The company could create an arbitrary number of new distinct token offerings. A token is just a claim on the part of the token pool it is in, and there is no economic value associated with that, except for whatever the token holders decide, or what the tokens can be traded for. They seem pretty vacuous.

Maybe I am done with the tech industry for now

The tech industry has always had an affinity for hucksterism. FUD and vaporware were big deals when I started in the industry. (And it is not like the tech industry originated these practices – go read the history of Edison, or the various trading companies during the mercantile era. I am sure these practices span all of human commercial activity and will continue to do so.)

But you tire of it. And as I try to keep up with crypto and NFTs, I find myself more and more aligned with some of the harsh critics – NFT criticism by Dan Olson, more NFT criticism, crypto critic Stephen Diehl.

I could just sit back and be a critic. But maybe I should just be done with the tech industry for a while. I will always be an enthusiastic user of tech. But the industry machinations and hype cycle is just not fun or interesting right now.

But I don’t really want to quit understanding change

The day you quit embracing change and quit learning is the day you die, or at least that is what my grandfather said. Seth Godin on embracing change – “We can choose to live behind the curve or ahead of it.”

I have a slightly different formulation of this. Technology change, and change of any sort, is constantly sweeping through our society, largely uncontrolled by any of us, crashing like waves.

And the wave metaphor is good — you can deal with these waves in a couple ways. You can twist your feet into the sand, anchoring yourself, and try to fight off the waves. Or — you can grab a board and surf them.

Something big is changing in our society about employment. I don’t really understand it yet. I am listening and learning. When the generation before ours went to work, they dedicated themselves to a company for a lifetime, and the company dedicated itself to them. My generation still had a lot of that, tho 5-10 years at a job was considered an ok amount of time, and company pensions started to disappear. The commitment level on both sides has continued to drift down. It is going to be interesting to see how this evolves.

Random things bubbling up to the surface

I do love interactive art. I might play around with Isadora

Interactive fiction db and twinery tool. Interactive fiction games were part of my early intro to personal computing.

I was playing around the neopixel LED strips and posted a little code i wrote to control one via MQTT. Might be helpful to someone playing around with.

The yayagram — a physical device for interacting via Telegram.

National Book Award Finalists – always good choices

When I was a kid, we visited the cereal factories in Kellogg, Michigan. I love a good factory tour, but the smell of millions of pounds of grain cooking was enough to turn me off cereal for a long time. I can’t imagine working there.

I used to make my own tombstones for Halloween.

Many people have told their Steve Jobs stories this year on the 10th anniversary of his passing. Mine is just a small story.

In about 1981, when I was a junior at The Ohio State University, I was trying to figure out what was next for me – job, graduate school, what kind of graduate school (business, EE). I was fortunate to have a good family friend, Jim Dutton, who was CEO of a startup, Caere Corporation, out in Los Gatos. He offered to host me on a tour of Silicon Valley to help me make up my mind. Just the opportunity to fly to California and to visit Silicon Valley seemed like an amazing adventure to me.

I flew out and stayed with Jim, Joan, and his family. I didn’t understand exactly how connected Jim was. Over the next 3 days I was able to visit a lot of companies, and I got the chance to talk personally with Gene Amdahl at Amdahl Corp, Bob Noyce at Intel, and Steve Jobs at Apple. They were all a little intimidating, but Steve especially so, he was intense and excited about his work. He was in his full beard days. He pressed me hard on why I was considering various paths.

I only realized later in life what a great gift this trip had been. I thanked Jim a lot at the time but probably didn’t thank him enough. And I never really appreciated the time that these people gave me until later. They took time out of their busy days to meet some nobody kid from Ohio, that was incredibly nice. I probably could have fought my way into a job at one of their companies at that time if I had been savvy enough, I might have missed a great adventure and a great financial windfall, but my career turned out ok.

Steve and these other leaders taught me that we always have the time to reach out and help people entering their careers, we always have the time to be helpful and gracious to young people. I try to live up to that.

Auto Makers Don’t Drive the Semiconductor Industry

Jalopnik has the automaker-sympathetic view of the chip shortage; contrast with Gelsinger’s advice to get moving to new chip technologies. As noted in Stratechery, “In the long run it is the car companies that will have to give in: there simply is no good economic reason for TSMC or anyone else to build new “old” fabs”. There is no fighting this wave.

In the early days of Hotmail (and other web properties), the team addressed scale and reliability by buying ever more expensive Sun servers that were “enterprise grade”, hardened, reliable. This approach to web scale reliability finally gave way to new system architectures built on replicated and distributed designs running on commodity hardware.

Some equivalent transformation is going to need to take place in auto systems design. It is inevitable that during the production and operating life of a car, the chips available at reasonable price and volume will change. How might this affect system design? Chips will have to be encapsulated in pluggable modules that are easily testable, easily changeable. It probably argues for consolidating chips into fewer places in the car, and increases the importance of software and hardware design for these systems.

Some automaker will figure this out (perhaps Tesla, Rivian, and others already have), and it will deliver them large economic and flexibility benefits.

Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast

Good article in The Atlantic about how Boeing destroyed its engineering culture. Sam says this may be a maxim – “Every successful creative culture is eventually absorbed by bureaucrats” – call it McKelvie’s law.

I was fortunate to spend a lot of my career at Microsoft during a time when the management chain had developer background and fully supported developers. Not that this meant the company was some tech-mad customer-aloof circus – everyone was pretty focused on market success, and were able to think clearly and creatively about technology.

I Don’t Get Web3, But I Keep Trying

I spend a bit of every week trying to wrap my head around NFTs, Crypto, Web3. I totally get the desire to break content and services free from large corporate ownership. Services like Radicle and Gitcoin seem interesting maybe (although I can’t find anyone using radicle).

But then I read this twitter thread and this article by some very vocal proponents of web3. These are not stupid people, so I am trying to understand their views, but I struggle with their language.

For instance: “NFTs give users the ability to own objects, which can be art, photos, code, music, text, game objects, credentials, governance rights, access passes, and whatever else people dream up next.”

The NFT concept of ownership seems closest to the notion of owning a meal you purchased. No one else can own that instance, tho the restauranteur retains the right to create and sell infinitely more instances. My own purchased meal has utility to me, but over a long time I can’t really resell it or expect it to grow in value.

Or owning an NFT is like owning a copy of a music track. I get value out if owning the track copy, but no one is ever going to pay me much for my specific copy of “Custard Pie” by Led Zeppelin, and Led Zeppelin retains the rights to sell as many copies of this track as they can, or create new and different versions.

This is very different than owning a unique piece of art or owning all the rights to some piece of code or to some piece of music. Certainly someone could contractually commit to sell some deeper piece of ownership along with an NFT, but a token itself doesn’t magically solve this ownership issue, nor are tokens required to sell these rights.

Another instance: “Ethereum is a decentralized global computer that is owned and operated by its users. Blockchains are special computers that anyone can access but no one owns.”

The industry has a pretty good definition of what a “computer” is, and there is a giant economy of Intel instruction set and ARM instruction set computers and tools — chips, SOCs, cloud instances, vms, dev toolchains, management tools, virtualization tools, etc etc etc.

My puny brain has a hard time understanding how blockchain compares to what we normally call computers. If I want to write some program that does some arbitrary task, how do I host that on a blockchain? If a blockchain is just a special computer that can only do one special kind of task, how is that useful?

Or: “Ethereum is powered by a fungible token, ETH, which is used to incentivize the physical computers that underlie the system.”

How does a token power anything? Or incentivize physical computers? You can’t incentivize code or semiconductors.

Words and definitions matter. This breezy use of well understood terms does not help to build understanding. It damages the arguments of the web3 proponents as it seems like they are trying to purposefully obfuscate.

IOT and WIFI

Interesting that low cost wifi chipsets are emerging, putting wifi at/near zigbee/zwave power budgets, if I understand the specs. Suspect zigbee and zwave don’t survive this assault.

Random

Brandi Carlile’s cover of Madman Across the Water is awesome. Of course Brandi’s cover of almost anything would be awesome.

An argument agains the notion of general intelligence. Hear, hear. I’ve met a ton of smart people and they are all uniquely smart in different ways.

• Edges and Silver by Linda Nagata. Edges was a ton of fun, nice work blurring software and biology and physics, and a fun “Alien” kind of plot. Silver got a little too metaphysical for me and lost the plot and characters a little.
• Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newitz. A lot of details about city life in early cities. I had trouble really getting the thesis of the book tho, I was lost in minutiae.
• Waves in Metamaterials by Baszlo Solymar and Ekaterina Shamonina. Didn’t read thoroughly, didn’t really “resonate” with me (sorry).
• The World Gives Way by Marissa Levien. Sometimes space adventures don’t end well, and humans have to cope with it.

Building a smart home app

I’ve spent some time over the last 3 months trying to build a smart home app. I wanted to yoke together all the embedded technology in my home — lights, sensors, cameras, various controllers, etc — and do something entertaining and fun with them. Most smart home apps are booooring — no one really wants to be the operations manager for their house. I wanted to create something a lot more fun, using all the smart home gear, maybe something like an Escape Room kind of game. or Hide the Thimble.

I largely failed.

The smart home space is a confusing welter of devices, oses, physical networks, protocols, apis, apps, services, very few of which work together. Getting devices to talk to services, even from the same vendor, is arcane — don’t take only my word for it — Mat Velloso tried to do some simple home automation work and realized what a can of worms smart homes are. I have Google, Apple, Amazon, Lutron, Zigbee, Zwave, Philips, Samsung, and every other kind of device you can imagine. I have tried many ways to hook them all together, having the most success with Hubitat. I really wanted to create a programmable substrate that I could use for apps in the home.

I got to a limping instance of a game with some invaluable help from Sam and Vlad. But it all fell apart repeatedly. The devices are unreliable, sometimes responding, sometimes not. Networks and protocols are unreliable. The object models for devices are wildly inconsistent, even within a single brand. Heterogeneous networks are a mess of differing transaction models, discovery mechanisms, etc. The various packages and libraries to program against smart home devices are not well supported, many have been abandoned or are stale. Naming and discovery of devices is, well, not even primitive.

At this point, it is not worthwhile to keep on tinkering. I’ve dumped most my gear into a box and into storage. There is no viable targetable smart home market. The PC software market and the mobile software market exploded because a high volume of homogenous (interconnected) targetable devices existed. No such state exists in the smart home market.

Tools for IOT Development

I have also tried to move upstream a little and dig into the tools for IOT development. I haven’t really found what I want there either. I’d like to write an app that I can easily move across different IOT devices.

Platformio has some promise and they have a big VSCode plugin, they have certainly aggregated a lot of devices in their tools. But they don’t really solve my problems. Their tool early binds you to a specific hardware platform and libraries, this isn’t what I want. And I had hoped that a great VSCode plugin would be appealing, but the plugin feels pretty heavy – a bunch of decorations added to VSCode, a whole new hierarchy. And if you want to target RPIs, you have to run the whole dev environment on an RPI – yuck.

There are almost no RPI plugins for vscode which I find surprising. Raspberry Pi Sync is just some lipstick on rsync (tho the developer’s name is KingWampy, have to like that). There is no plugin for Balena tho Balena separately has a pretty nice onboarding experience in the browser which I will be digging into further.

Microsoft has a suite of extensions for AWS IOT but they don’t seem to be actively maintained.

Overall the tool situation is not great — which is another comment on the market; with no volume targettable hardware, there just is not much point to great tools.

Auto Software

I’ve previously written about the problems in auto software. Not shocked to see the chip industry is frustrated with the auto industry as well – “It just makes no economic or strategic sense,” said Gelsinger, who came to the auto show to convince carmakers they need to let go of the distant past. “Rather than spending billions on new ‘old’ fabs, let’s spend millions to help migrate designs to modern ones.”

Random

2021 Audobon Photography Awards

A nice examination of housing affordability. As nutballs as the housing market is, this analysis suggests it is sustainable.

Seth Godin on change and the status quo. I really like his thought exercise around milk or solar power – imagine that the new idea is the status quo, how would that change your view of the change?

A perfume truck. If trucks work great for food, why not other retail categories?

The future of big cities as predicted in 1922 — very prescient

The best software for every need — a good list to start from.

Making the workplace work for moms (and all parents and kids, which pretty much covers everyone)

World tour of mustards – I do like a good mustard.

Yet another bull$&!t medical bill. Encapsulates how screwed up our health insurance system is, why the whole thing should be thrown in the trash.

• Labcorp charges almost $3K for some blood work, and Premera “negotiates away” $2.3K of this. What nonsense. Everyone is inflating costs for their own reasons and it is all abusive garbage. I don’t believe for a second that these labs cost anywhere close to $3K and I don’t think Premera did any work at all to negotiate this down.
• Premera pays almost $500 for the labs (and who knows if they really did, all I have is their claim they did)
• We are stuck with $119.50 which is probably not far from the true cost of the labs, but why didn’t Premera “negotiate away” this when they were negotiating away $2.3K?
• Amount you saved – another total fiction. Based on the nonsense total charge and Premera’s claims of what they paid.

In all this, I have no power as consumer to do anything. The insurers and providers are motivated to jack numbers up. The system results in a lot of profits being diverted to insurance companies and administrative overhead that does nothing to benefit patients.

I started blogging 20+ years ago. I used Blogger to start, used the Radio Userland stack for a while, toyed with Drupal, jumped to MovableType for quite a while, then to Wordpress. I started out with a simple static site and then got pulled slowly to dynamic sites. I’ve felt for a while that Wordpress had become a giant complicated thing but inertia left me there.

Last week tho my wordpress install had some corruption and for a day or two I couldn’t edit it. So I finally got off my butt and have moved to a static site on github pages – kind of back where this whole journey began, and I am happy to be back to a static site. The static site tools are a lot better than Blogger ~20 years ago!

I read The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro because one of the smartest readers I know recommended that I take a chance on it. It is not my cup of tea but I tried to keep an open mind and be thoughtful about.

The question that I will pose to my friend is “what exactly did you find compelling in here” – I am very curious to know what resonated with him.

The book is not a serious book. The author throws out anecdotes to fit his desired narrative, and uses bombast in place of data to sell his story. He purposefully ignores anecdotes or data that don’t fit his story. I don’t think the author is stupid, this is all intentional, he seeks to enflame and enrage people who already agree with him, not advance the dialog about issues.

He makes much of the term “ultracrepidarianism” — criticising left-leaning “experts” who opine outside their domain, while he opines outside his domain. Consider the chapter on corporate behavior – Shapiro has not spent his career inside of corporations at the executive level – his analysis of how corporations operate is so off it is “not even wrong”. There is certainly criticism to be leveled at corporations, but being agents of the authoritarian left is not one of them! CEOs and boards are focused on the profits and quarterlies, execs are focused on their own careers and their own comp. The revolving door between gov and industry to drive regulatory capture is a real thing and it is driven by $s, not by any authoritarian left motivation. I am sure there are examples ocassionally of corporations acting in different ways, but it is not the norm or a significant theme. I suspect the other chapters on media and entertainment are just as off, but I have less experience there.

Throughout the book Shapiro repeatedly comingles the behaviour of the progressive left and the behaviour of anti-Trumpists. They are completely different motivations. He claims that anti-Trumpists “hated Trump because they hated his supporters” and this is utter rubbish. I know a lot of anti-Trumpists and they are pretty clearly focused on Trump and his coterie.

Shapiro repeatedly claims that conservative views are being stifled in society. Given the ratings of Foxnews, and given his own status as a bestselling author and a media presence with a lot of reach (which he brags about), this just isn’t supported. He and other conservatives seem to have plenty of ways to reach their audiences. He just doesn’t like the fact that not everyone wants his message.

And that is the core point – much of the book seems like whining. People are judging him, people aren’t listening to him, boo hoo hoo. In the last chapter, he quits being a whiney bucket, and talks about taking matters into his own hands, and creating media content and media platforms that are aligned with his politics. And I say bravo, this is what he should do, and is free to do. He and his allies should get their stories and views out in as compelling fashion as they can and find an audience. May the best ideas carry the day. He should work on more compelling ideas to bring forward, and spend less time on whining.

• The Last Flight by Julie Clark. A great tale of women trying to escape from abusive situations. On the edge of my seat. Well crafted.
• Shape by Jordan Ellenberg. I should love this book but it was just ok. A tricky book to write as the audience is bimodal at least. I found it tedious at times.
• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. Admittedly this is a very similar story to The Martian but with two main characters, but still a lot of fun.
• The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins. One strange-ass story, really pulled me in. I am not sure I want a heavy diet of this kind of story but one was good.

Auto Software

Tesla beats Mustang thanks to charging network — the traditional car OEMs really don’t seem to understand how big a software hole they are in.  It is not just autonomy or entertainment systems, but the entire end-to-end lifecycle of the car – presales website, configurator, post-sale site and services, charging network software, mobile app, in-car software, etc.   It is all driven by software and Tesla is ahead on all of it.

I am glad to see Xevo alum end up in so many great places — Amperity, Docusign, Curbside, Axon, Afresh, Clearscale, Discovery, Dignifi, Indeed, Amazon, News Break, Crowdstrike, Stoke Space Tech, Slalom, Google, Oracle, and more I probably missed.   Good luck to you all!

NFT Redux

Some of this art is beautiful and entrancing, Foundation seems like a good exchange to find NFT art.  A lot of it is generative content, created by neural nets, using a lot of shaders.  It can create very engaging content.  I love dorking around with shaders and neural nets as much as anyone, and i have no skill/practice in creating art, so I really admire this work, but I can’t wrap my head around paying $5k-30K for a rendered video capture of one of these.  Maybe I would pay that much for source code access.  

Who is paying these prices (and more) for generative content (much of which has much less artistic content than the ones I prefer)?  Yet another argument that this is all just unfounded speculation.

It is easy to discount all this NFT and crypto stuff as speculation.  But the quality of talent diving into it is significant.  

Space

What could go wrong?  NASA is going to slam a spacecraft into an asteroid.

Interesting thread from Tren Griffin on size of the space economy.  If I was young and starting my career again, this would be very exciting.

Random

“We are basically a country of contrarian assholes, and when our leaders tell us to do one thing we tend to respond by doing the exact opposite.”

Booker Prize shortlist.  I find a lot of Booker nominees to be unreadable but probably some gold in here somewhere

Hand drawn illustration library, free for commercial and personal use.

How to open google docs in different google accounts – i had no idea docs.new/1 or docs.new/2 would work

The three minute song may not be the best.

No links, gosh there is a lot of contrary advice on the web about how to smoke brisket.  My first attempt earned a “C” at best.

QED venture investment lessons.  I love most of these.

NFTs

I went down the NFT rabbit hole this week a little.  The whole NFT thing seems nutty to me, but there is a good chance that I am just old and my brain is inflexible.  So I decided to force myself to dip in.  I tried to buy an NFT.

TLDR: A confusing welter of accounts and companies I had to deal with, a blizzard of expensive fees, my ETH ended up getting fractured across multiple wallets and intermediate locations, and i lost all my auctions to people who were willing to spend large amounts of ETH for ephemeral goods.  I am not much smarter about NFTs.

The first challenge: decide what NFT to buy.  NFTs cover nearly the entire gamut of human expression.  Opensea.io at the moment has 19M+ listed and that is only one marketplace.  Much of the activity is collectibles with designed scarcity.  I declined to chase these, I went after NFTs for more traditional art.  My thinking is that NFTs don’t really change human behaviour and human interests, and the same kind of things that have been deemed valuable and collectible for the past 1000 years will continue to be the things we value and collect.  All the regenerative collectibles seem a little risky to me, I can’t imagine that anyone will care about these in 15 years, just like no one really cares about beanie babies any more.  There are some categories of collectibles that have retained value — baseball cards, comics — I would imagine that NFT-based sports and comic collectables may also have some value, collectables that appeal to a large interest community existing outside the crypto space may be a smart play.  But I will stick to the more traditional arts for the moment.  I could be way off.

I also wanted a bit of a personal connection to the item.  We moved to Seattle at the beginning of the grunge wave, so I settled on this photo sheet from the early days of Nirvana. It was being offered on Opensea which seems to be the largest and most established market. I had never heard of Opensea before this adventure, but they are backed by big names so presumably someone has done some due diligence.

Now to make a bid, I needed to have a crypto wallet, I don’t have one.  I do have some ETH held up at Coinbase, but that is not a wallet.  Opensea suggests a bunch of wallets from unknown organizations, I went with their recommended default of Fortmatic, a second company.  Fortmatic is backed by lesser names and with lesser dollars so no idea if I should really trust them, but damn it, I am going down this rabbit hole.

Now in possession of a wallet, I need to get some crypto currency in it.  A bunch of new terms and organizations — I can provide WETH, DAI, or USDC.  DAI and USDC hold out the promise of just using a credit card to add some dollars, so I tried those to start.  I am handed off to Moonpay for payment processing, a company that I have never heard of, that there is little info about, and is based outside the US.  I have one sketchy LinkedIn connection to someone at Moonpay, I am not feeling great about this.  And I am blocked because they demand a residential billing address and not a PO Box, and all my credit cards go to a PO box.  

I work around this, and then Moonpay wants me to send them an image of my driver’s license so they can verify my identity.  I just want to buy a picture, guys.  I can buy real physical art with far less trouble.  I declined to go any further down the Moonpay path.

So I went back to the WETH option.  I don’t have any WETH, I have ETH at Coinbase. WETH is some wrapping of ETH because ETH isn’t compatible with some standard.  So I decide i will transfer some ETH over to my Fortmatic wallet to be converted to WETH.  Except my Coinbase account isn’t enabled for transfers yet, and now Coinbase wants my driver’s license.  I crossed that bridge a long time ago, Coinbase needed my driver’s license at account opening time.  Why they need it again I don’t know, but what the hell.  

OK so now that my Coinbase account is working, i transfer some ETH to my Fortmatic wallet.  A blizzard of confirmations and fees and charges to move the ETH and to convert to WETH.  No idea what all this is, but it is not cheap.  Along the way i get introduced to Uniswap and Etherscan, there sure are a lot of organizations riding on my transaction, grabbing their piece of the flow.  Each of these has slimmer backing in turn, and seems more risky – apparently I am now trusting part of my transaction to a company in Kuala Lumpur.  Nothing against Kuala Lumpur, it just seems like an incredibly convoluted chain.   

Finally I complete my bid.  And now I wait.  The original creator minted 10, 9 have sold already, I have the high outstanding bid, I have no idea what happens now.  In the time it took me to set up all the above accounts and linkages, several of the items were sold, so I may have missed out.   In the meantime I downloaded the JPG of the image.

Update: I got outbid on that first piece, and so I have moved onto another piece.  and somehow i have two identical bids on this new piece, super strange, the Opensea/Fortmatic experience seems buggy.  Oh and every bid or cancelled bid requires a crazy expensive fee.  What a twisty mess.

Update II.  Outbid again.  For a crazy price on a simple photo.  There are people who are far freer with their money than I am.  I could buy a nice large format physical print for less than these prices.  

Update III. And Opensea now reports that the 2nd item I bid on, actually sold two days earlier for a price below my bid and a number of other bids greater than mine. WTF, this sale transaction did not appear when I was bidding. This whole process seems mysterious and arbitrary.

The entire process has been very unsatisfying.  I don’t have the thing I want.  I am not even sure what I get if I win.  A lot of people took a bite of my transaction, and I bet that I get none of that back if I don’t win.  I am not even sure how I get my ETH back if I don’t win, it is now WETH in a fortmatic wallet.  I have had to trust a basket full of unknown organizations.  I have a whole bag of numbers now — wallets, transaction IDs, etc — that I feel like I need to hang onto.  

NFTs, Part II

Maybe I should focus on generating some NFT-able content instead.  Great list of generative art and assistive art tools here.  In case you want to start making NFTs, or just dabble in creative arts.  Some of these are dead already but lots to explore.

Visionist is a fun app for monkeying with photos.  Silk 2 is fun for creating generative art.  Humbeatz seems like it might have been fun but I am wary of an app that has not been updated in 3 years.

Real World Art

For far less money than an ephemeral NFT, we purchased a great porcelain piece from Marianna Haniger and a stone piece from Bruce Richardson at the Lopez Island Artist’s Studio Tour this weekend.  Beautiful pieces, we supported local artists, some of their proceeds they are donating to local charities.  So much more satisfying than an NFT.  The Studio Tour is a great annual event.

Re NFTs, this tweet captures how I currently feel.

Contacts

The contacts app is my least used and least favorite of the standard iOS apps.  It solves very few problems i have with people.  Out of my thousands of contacts, there are at most a couple hundred that are super important, and contacts does nothing to help me nurture and build those relationships. 

When I was last managing a team, the contacts app wasn’t relevant at all.  It did nothing to keep me in touch with people on the team.

All my communications tools are message- or thread- or folder-or channel-centric, none of them are really people-centric, but that is what I want.  ios Messages does the best job, but only for message content — i can’t see the last 7 emails i sent to a contact, or add notes, or schedule a meeting, or see the last 3 times we met, …

clay.earth seems interesting.  I really love the idea of a contact-centric app, where i can actively think about and monitor my engagement with people.  

Tools

Untools is a repository of frameworks for helping you think about problems.  Super handy.  I kind of wish this was embodied in a “problem” app or “decision” app that would let you keep track of all the problems you are wrestling with, and let you easily try different frameworks out.  You can buy templates that you stick into Notion, a step towards an app.

I am not sure how I missed Platform.io.  I have largely given up on arduino-class devices because the toolchain is terrible.  This seems to address most of the terribleness, and expand to other devices.  I have thrown away most of my arduino-class hardware but maybe I need to retry.

Random

Apparently our tolerance for risk changes in a very predictable way during the week.  Decisions on mondays and fridays may be more fraught.  If you know this, how do you change your week’s schedule and pace?  Are there a class of decisions for which you want to encourage greater risk taking, and a class for which you want to discourage risk taking?  Almost certainly so.

A good list of history books.  Many of these are quite broad in scale, I also like histories that bear down on a development — The Strange Death of Liberal England and Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power are two of my favorites.