More Steve Jobs

Posted on by David Wright

I’ve waited to post this because frankly I was bored of the whole Steve Jobs tribute thing. I made my play for eyeballs and it worked on the day.

I read Pete Warden’s blog, which is excellent, and he contributed this bit to the Guardian following Steve’s death:

Several times he never even got as far as showing off the features we’d been slaving over because Steve would immediately focus on a bad visual element in the interface. Whether it was an ugly button, a mis-aligned font, or a control panel with too many buttons, we’d never recover. All our work under the hood meant nothing, he had seen enough and we’d failed.

Very very very very important point. The most important thing I’ve yet read about Jobs.

I have the same issue with my weekend project. I am very proud of the code I’ve learned and built, but the thing looks like a piece of garbage and so IS a piece of garbage.

Never lose sight of what matters. CEOs (bosses in general) might be frustrating creatures because they have laser-like focus on some small aspect of your work. But that’s probably the only part of your job that is at all useful.

Levels Not Rates

Posted on by David Wright

As I suspected, Sumner’s advocacy should probably be focused on level targeting, as opposed to NGDP targeting. Most important of all is to set a ‘backdated’ level so that we can get back to the trend we were knocked from when this recession started.

I imagine this would involve an immense expansion of the money supply, something an order of magnitude larger than what we’ve already seen.

See his response to my question on his blog:

If the Fed were to do 5% NGDP targeting right now, it wouldn’t help very much. If they did 5% NGDP level targeting from right now, it would help a little more.

If they did 5% NGDP targeting backdated to 2009, we’d get an explosive recovery, actually too fast.

I’d recommend aiming for 6% or 7& for a couple years, then 5% thereafter.

If the Fed did price level targeting from right now it wouldn’t help much. If they backdated it to level targeting from 2008 it would help more, but not as much as NGDP level targeting.

An explicit 2% inflation target (not level targeting) would be the weakest of all, as it’s not much different from what they have been doing.

If they go to level targeting of any sort, futures targeting doesn’t add much.

Watch The Kids Play. Then Beat Them Up (or Eat Them).

Posted on by David Wright

Steve Hanov’s latest post discusses a recent conference he attended. He really caught my eye with his general observations of startups:

  • Disruption – Disruption is big. If you’re not disruptive, you might as well be selling mainframes and typewriters. Companies are disrupting each-other at an astounding rate. Sometimes, while one company is busy disrupting an industry, another one will sneak up behind it and try to disrupt it when it is not looking. That is why companies need to be agile and pivot frequently.
  • Metrics – The info-geeks have taken over. Founders are demanding dashboards for their business, updated in real time. But not only for themselves — every click of the web site, and every cancellation is streamed to every employee to give an accurate picture of the health of the company. A special version containing only the “Customer Happiness Index” and a huge happy face is streamed to the investors.
  • Crowd-sourced employee recognition – At least three companies are working on this. It can be hard for bosses to identify their best contributors to allocate bonuses. The idea is to crowd-source this from their workforce. “So we’ll give them a button — so whenever anybody does something nice, other people will just push it and they get a — a pony point — yeah! And then I just have to add them all up to find the best contributors!” If you’ve worked at a large company for more than a year, you already know what an awesome idea this is. Just rename “pony” to “stab”.
  • Skype – Ask anybody, in tiny or large companies. Odds are that they bypass their Enterprise Collabosoft GrouperWare system and secretly use Skype to communicate. Just a minute while I go privately Skype to people about why Microsoft should acquire my startup.

Great stuff, right? And no doubt smaller, nimbler, more tech-savvy (younger and geekier) companies are taking advantage of all these things. Do they make employees more productive? Perhaps. If they do, what’s going to stop a larger company from just doing this stuff anyway?

Nothing. Remember the tech trends. Everything else is just adoption, which isn’t really exogenous, but rather function of the rate of the other trends.

Anyway, remember Marc Andreessen’s investment strategy? Pick startups that will beat the big boys at their own game by being, well, better at computers.

Earlier I disagreed with this view. Still do.

Obviously this is true at some margin. There will be disruptive startups that take over big industries. But I think something else drives most innovation. Let’s call it the Cronus strategy.

Cronus, you see, had this problem:

Cronus learned from Gaia and Uranus that he was destined to be overcome by his own sons, just as he had overthrown his father. As a result, although he sired the gods Demeter, Hera, Hades, Hestia, and Poseidon by Rhea, he devoured them all as soon as they were born, to preempt the prophecy.

While the Greeks considered Cronus a cruel and tempestuous force of chaos and disorder, believing the Olympian gods had brought an era of peace and order by seizing power from the crude and malicious Titans, the Romans took a more positive and innocuous view of the deity, by conflating their indigenous deity Saturn with Cronus.

So call me a Roman and Marc a Greek, then.

Now I’m not saying that big companies are sitting back and chuckling to themselves at the silly little startups trying to nick their lunch. Quite the contrary. They are and should be terrified that they are missing the innovation boat and aren’t using current technology properly.

But corporates are conservative institutions: they have something to lose! And most startups fail for good reason. Their ideas are bad and Keith Richardses are hard to come by.

And most importantly…

MOST NEW THINGS ARE FADS

Oh, yeah. Just because the kids are using facebook doesn’t mean that you can use it to sell insurance or dishwashers, or make dishwashers for that matter.

My hunch is that it’s usually a cheaper strategy to let the startups sort out which technologies are disruptive to which industries and then either pull a Cronus or just steal the idea.

The question, of course, is which ideas are worthy of theft?

On The Autistic Cognitive Spectrum

Posted on by David Wright

If you haven’t, you should consider reading Create Your Own Economy, by Tyler Cowen.

In it, he discusses, among many many other things, the idea of autism: what it is, what it means, what skills people with that kind of ‘cognitive profile’ have and lack.

Ok, now read this.

Richard Stallman is definitely some kind of super-functioning autistic. Cowen, whose link I followed to the piece, approves, unsurprisingly.

The document is an introduction to what it takes to get Stallman (RMS) to come speak at some event for you. This is what he does for a living and so I was expecting there to be lots of very specific instructions. And there are lots of good to be specific, too. See Van Halen’s contract!

But get a load of this (long quote):

I am willing to stay in a hotel if there is no other way.
Please book the hotel for me and arrange to pay the hotel directly.

But please DON’T make a hotel reservation until we have fully explored
other options. If there is anyone who wants to offer a spare couch, I
would much rather stay there than in a hotel (provided I have a door I
can close, in order to have some privacy). Staying with someone is
more fun for me than a hotel, and it would also save you money…

…Above 72 fahrenheit (22 centigrade) I find sleeping quite difficult.
(If the air is dry, I can stand 23 degrees.) A little above that
temperature, a strong electric fan blowing on me enables me to sleep.
More than 3 degrees above that temperature, I need air conditioning to
sleep.

If there is a substantial chance of indoor temperatures too hot for
me, please arrange _in advance_ for me to have what I need.

If you are planning for me to stay in a hotel, DO NOT take for granted
that the hotel has air conditioning–or that it will be working when I
arrive. Some hotels shut off their air conditioning systems for part
of the year. They often think it is unnecessary in seasons when the
temperature is usually in the mid 20s–and they follow their schedule
like stupid robots even if there is a heat wave…

I like cats if they are friendly, but they are not good for me; I am
somewhat allergic to them. This allergy makes my face itch and my
eyes water. So the bed, and the room I will usually be staying in,
need to be clean of cat hair. However, it is no problem if there is a
cat elsewhere in the house–I might even enjoy it if the cat is
friendly.

Dogs that bark angrily and/or jump up on me frighten me, unless they
are small and cannot reach much above my knees. But if they only bark
or jump when we enter the house, I can cope, as long as you hold the
dog away from me at that time. Aside from that issue, I’m ok with
dogs.

If you can find a host for me that has a friendly parrot, I will be
very very glad. If you can find someone who has a friendly parrot I
can visit with, that will be nice too.

DON’T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me. To
acquire a parrot is a major decision: it is likely to outlive you. If
you don’t know how to treat the parrot, it could be emotionally
scarred and spend many decades feeling frightened and unhappy. If you
buy a captured wild parrot, you will promote a cruel and devastating
practice, and the parrot will be emotionally scarred before you get it.
Meeting that sad animal is not an agreeable surprise.

Email:

It is very important for me to be able to transfer email between my
laptop and the net, so I can do my ordinary work…

I do NOT use browsers, I use the SSH protocol. If the network
requires a proxy for SSH, I probably can’t use it at all…

…In some places, my hosts act as if my every wish were their command.
By catering to my every whim, in effect they make me a tyrant over
them, which is not a role I like. I start to worry that I might
subject them to great burdens without even realizing. I start being
afraid to express my appreciation of anything, because they would get
it and give it to me at any cost.

…I do not eat breakfast. Please do not ask me any questions about
what I will do breakfast. Please just do not bring it up.

And on it goes. Fascinating stuff.

If In Doubt, DI-friggen Y

Posted on by David Wright

Peter Thiel’s latest idea: DIY science.

Surely the power of decentralized learning is the great innovation of our times. It defines the information age, non?

I am enormously sympathetic to this idea if only because so much of the way I think has been shaped by me just reading and learning about everything I can online.

If we could teach kids ONE thing in school, and that one thing was having the confidence to DIY, the world would immediately become a better place.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1790476/peter-thiels-latest-project-funding-for-diy-garage-scientists?partner=rss

More on NGDP

Posted on by David Wright

Amazing how this idea is now starting to go mainstream. Scott Sumner is going to be famous soon.

Here’s the WSJ and Scott’s commentary. The article has a lot of links to a lot of good information (in particular here) on whether NGDP targeting will work.

One thing that is a bit annoying is that the hierarchy of ideas goes: #1 Level targeting, #2 NGDP level targeting.

Targeting nominal GDP rates isn’t actually Sumner’s big priority, if I’m reading him correctly. Level targeting of inflation would be better than rate targeting NGDP.

How to Delete All Named Ranges in VBA

Posted on by David Wright

When you’re copying spreadsheets around all over the place (particularly if you use the excellent advanced copy trick for isolating unique cells), you build up a gigantic store of named range. These are infurating.

Well, luckily I’ve developed a little VBA sub that wipes them all out:

Sub deleteNames()
Dim counter
Dim nameCount

nameCount = ActiveWorkbook.Names.count
counter = nameCount
Do While counter > 0
ActiveWorkbook.Names(counter).Delete
counter = counter - 1
Loop

End Sub

This made my friggen day.

Study Failure, Too

Posted on by David Wright

Here’s a decent article on JaMarcus Russel. A few quick comments:

Those who excel at ANYTHING differentiate themselves at the higher levels on mental strength alone, I think. Here’s an important quote from Russell:

I take some responsibility, but I was one guy… . I may have missed a throw, but I didn’t give up 42 points, I didn’t miss a block.

Nope, not good enough. Everyone is going to be surrounded by incompetence. The great among us aren’t just people who have the highest levels of personal skill. The greatest walk around with an incompetence-minimizing force field that brings everyone’s level up.

It is precisely that JaMarcus didn’t take responsibility for his team members’ failures that makes him a poor leader. Let’s say his force field had a neutral effect on others. In that case, sure, he’ll respond to Top-1% coaches, teammates, management and trainers. But that situation rarely presents itself and, crucially, he also responds in a similar but opposite way to bottom-1% affiliations.

Don’t be Mick Jagger with all the talent. Be Keith Richards and elevate everyone else. It’s the harder job.

I’m reminded of an excellent podcast Bill Simmons did with the CEO of Ticketmaster. One fascinating observation was that we think of these gigantic sports franchises as being run like the best-performing corporations in the world. Well, they aren’t. A lot of the time it’s better to think of them like family businesses, which are often run poorly.

People will bring you down if you let them. Russell doesn’t have what it takes to excel at the highest level.

Why I want to learn C and OMG is it Tough

Posted on by David Wright

For some reason I don’t think I ‘get’ object oriented programming. I kinda know it has something to do with classes, whatever hell those are.

I find I write (think) in a procedural style, which is why I’m so fascinated by C, which I understand to be a procedural programming language. So some day I’m going to finish learning C (I’ve got WAY too much on to really dive into it right now), which is a deep and difficult language.

And so this (part 2 here) is a fascinating way to learning exactly how C works. It’s super simple, but just complicated enough that it’s out of my reach right now.

Once I figure all this out, I’d like to learn C++ and read this.