Category: Food for thought

Quoting Dror Poleg from his post Everything Not Forbidden Is Compulsory.

The constraints that held possible and likely together are collapsing. Now, many more combinations are not just possible, they happen all the time. A programmer launching an app in San Francisco is likely to reach only a handful of customers, but she might reach a billion of them. An office worker sneezing in Wuhan will likely infect only a few colleagues, but he might infect people on five continents within weeks. A mortgage-backed securities trader on Wall Street is likely to ruin his life, but he might spark a global financial crisis. A factory worker uploading a lip-synching video to TikTok will likely be seen by a handful of people, but he might reach hundreds of millions, catapulting a 50-year-old song to the Billboard 100. 

What changed? We no longer live in an industrial, linear economy constrained by physical space and time. Our nonlinear economy is dominated by software and stories and biological formulas that spread across elaborate networks with limited friction. 

This is not just a world of new winners or new knowledge, but a world that redefines what it means to know and what it means to win. Every victory is ephemeral, every insight is contingent and limited. As soon as something is known, it will be exploited until the knowledge becomes useless. In the past, our knowledge accumulated, and our actions were limited. Now, it is exactly the opposite: Our actions can achieve unlimited outcomes, but knowledge decays rapidly.

I love using RSS. And I would recommend others to also use it. Thats why I have a message the bottom of all my posts on how to use RSS.

David Oliver talks about similar motivations as mine but brings up an important point on how creating your RSS feeds aggregator is a skill.

We start by finding someone whose judgement we trust and subscribing to their feed, and then we find out who they trust and subscribe to their feed, and so on. Part of the judgement that we’re looking for in these trustees is not simply whether or not content is accurate but whether or not it is worth our attention. Over time, we can curate our little garden of content, make it diverse, and eliminate unnecessary noise. But, much like a real garden, pruning and weeding is essential and intentional. So, using an RSS reader is more than having a nice aggregator: It’s a skill and a routine. And that’s also where the magic lies because it’s that very process of engaging with content and deciding whether or not it has value to you that makes using an RSS reader a better experience and one where you own your attention.

This—unfortunately—is going to keep a lot of people away from RSS. The algorithmic aggregator that social media companies offer are just good enough for a lot of folks to invest in the skill of using RSS.

Benj Edwards writing for Ars Technica presents an intriguing analogy, comparing creativity to a finite natural resource like forests and explaining how early AI models could have a long lasting effect on creativity and its ultimate destruction. 

Today, the AI industry’s business models unintentionally echo the ways in which early industrialists approached forests and fisheries—as free inputs to exploit without considering ecological limits.

Just as pollution from early factories unexpectedly damaged the environment, AI systems risk polluting the digital environment by flooding the Internet with synthetic content. Like a forest that needs careful management to thrive or a fishery vulnerable to collapse from overexploitation, the creative ecosystem can be degraded even if the potential for imagination remains.

Depleting our creative diversity may become one of the hidden costs of AI, but that diversity is worth preserving. If we let AI systems deplete or pollute the human outputs they depend on, what happens to AI models—and ultimately to human society—over the long term?

Joe Wiggins explaining how diversification affects risk.

Although diversification is by no means a free lunch, it is an effective means of reducing and controlling risk, if done prudently. It works because by combining securities and assets with different future potential return paths it significantly constrains the range of outcomes of the combined portfolio.

If we move from a single stock holding to a diversified 50 stock portfolio we greatly lower the potential to make 10x our money, but also (nearly) entirely remove the risk of losing everything.

Diversification is a tool whereby we can (very imperfectly) create a portfolio with a range of potential outcomes that we are comfortable with. When individuals complain about over-diversification, what they typically mean is that the range of outcomes has been narrowed so that average outcomes are very likely. There is, however, no right or wrong level, it simply depends on our tolerance for risk. Or, to put it another way, our appetite for extremely good or extremely bad results.

Saurabh Mukherjea talking to Nandita Rajhansa on his book Behold the Leviathan: The Unsual Rise of Modern India and dropping a suggestion on how to live your life. 

A lot of people in our country like sukh shanti, I don’t blame them, if you live in a city like Bombay or Bangalore, jahan perpetual churn hai, perpetual traffic hai, sar kaa phodi hai, you like sukh shanti.

Sukh shanti waale jag pe holiday karna hai, right. Karma bhoomi aapki chaos main honi chahiye, holiday aapki sukh shanti main honi chahiye. Don’t mix the two. For Christ’s sake don’t try to setup your karma bhoomi in a country with sukh shanti because phir barbaadi aapko bahut kareebi se dekhne milega. Live in chaos, holiday in peace and that way you will have a great life, you will compound your wealth and have a fulfilling life. India is a definition of chaos and that’s why India rocks. 

This made me chuckle. Of course you need to survive the pollution and traffic first. 

Bruce Schneier talking about some inner workings of NSA in context of the Signal chat leak.

When the NSA discovers a technological vulnerability in a service such as Signal (or buys one on the thriving clandestine vulnerability market), does it exploit it in secret, or reveal it so that it can be fixed? Since at least 2014, a US government interagency “equities” process has been used to decide whether it is in the national interest to take advantage of a particular security flaw, or to fix it. The trade-offs are often complicated and hard.

Waltz—along with Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the other officials in the Signal group—have just made the trade-offs much tougher to resolve. Signal is both widely available and widely used. Smaller governments that can’t afford their own military-grade encryption use it. Journalists, human rights workers, persecuted minorities, dissidents, corporate executives, and criminals around the world use it. Many of these populations are of great interest to the NSA.

At the same time, as we have now discovered, the app is being used for operational US military traffic. So, what does the NSA do if it finds a security flaw in Signal?

Previously, it might have preferred to keep the flaw quiet and use it to listen to adversaries. Now, if the agency does that, it risks someone else finding the same vulnerability and using it against the US government. And if it was later disclosed that the NSA could have fixed the problem and didn’t, then the results might be catastrophic for the agency.

It is really fascinating to read how these clandestine agencies work. Fodder for a spy novel.

Jason Cohen talking about how a theory can give accurate predictions, but fail on the explanation of why.

The Mayans’ conception of the Earth, moon, sun, planets, and stars, was as ludicrous as every other ancient civilization, yet their priests routinely predicted the timing of eclipses with impressive accuracy. The priests leveraged this accuracy as evidence that their religion was correct, and that their exalted position in society was justified.

Their religion—and therefore their explanation of how the universe worked—is laughable to the modern reader: The Earth in the center (of course), with thirteen tiers of heaven whirling above and nine levels of underworld threatening from below. Eclipses are not caused by a physical object blocking the light of the sun, but rather spiritual beings temporarily consuming the sun or moon (Figure 1). Even the most fervently religious person today would classify these ideas as fanciful mythology, though the Mayans were no less certain of the veracity of their religion than modern-day humans are of theirs.

Nevertheless, they were careful observers and meticulous calculators. They understood that eclipses happened roughly every 173 days, adjusted by a 405-month cycle and additional smaller correction. They tracked these cycles and updated their model over the centuries, and as a result, their theory yielded accurate predictions, even though the theory’s explanation of why was entirely incorrect.

Dror Poleg succinctly explaining how convenience trumps authority.

At my office building, there is a bathroom. Every other week, the toilet gets clogged and the landlord has to call in a plumber. “Someone flushed wet wipes,” says the plumber. “You should tell people to not flush anything other than toilet paper.”

At first, the landlord put up a sign that said “Please do not flush wet wipes.” After every incident, the signs became more aggressive, using terms like “absolutely forbidden” and even “this is disgusting.” The landlord even tried to punish tenants by delaying the repair and keeping the toilet closed for days. 

Nothing worked. The signs continue to get more aggressive, and the toilet continues to get occasionally clogged. 

How do you prevent people from throwing wet wipes into the toilet? 

There’s one strategy the landlord hasn’t tried yet: Put a little bin next to the toilet, so people could have somewhere else to throw their wipes.

I read an interesting post by Jacob Kaplan-Moss about taking advice from someone who’s been in the tech industry far longer than you and how to give advice as a silver sage yourself.

…advice people with long careers on what worked for them when they were getting started is unlikely to be advice that works today. The tech industry of 15 or 20 years ago was, again, dramatically different from tech today. I used to joke that if you knew which was was up on a keyboard, you could get a job in tech. That joke makes no sense today: breaking into the field is now very difficult, and getting harder every year.

So even when people with long careers try to give newcomers advice, while it may be well-intentioned, it’s likely to be useless. If you’re new to tech, ignoring advice from old heads is probably a good idea. And if you’re a fellow old head who’d like to help people new to the industry, do it by paying close attention to what works for them and pass on that advice.

I think this applies to everyone, irrespective of the field in which they are working on. Commonly called as, generation gap. The young ones will always roll their eyes the moment silver sage starts giving advice. Then what can the silver sage offer? Stories.

After reading the post, I coincidentally listened to the Paisa Vaisa podcast by Anupam Gupta and Aashish Somaiyaa on How Investor Behavior is Reshaping Mutual Funds. Below is the transcript of what caught my attention.

The people who are young today, jo yeh log OTT pe dekh rahe hain, kitabon main proper literature padh rahe hain, hum log toh tabloid main padhte the. Oh my god, look Harshad Mehta and his Lexus and see what has happened. So for us it was really vivid, I mean we knew boss yeh to scam hota hai, for these people it’s a story. [Link]

…

It’s a different world. Matlab aap sportsman ko dekho, cricketer ko dekho, humare yeh jo young log hain unka, for the lack of better word, disposition, attitude, its totally changed. And rightfully so. Inko confidence hai because inka PE multiple zyada hai. Inko future ka visibility zyada hai. Humara PE multiple low tha, humko future kaa visibility hi nahi tha. [Link]

The younger ones don’t need advice. They need to hear the stories and vivid experiences that the silver sage went through, and how those experiences shaped what the silver sage is today.

Gordon Brander talking about why you should not rebuild software ecosystem. And if you are rebuilding a software ecosystem, you might be screwed.

Software can be rebuilt, because software is a machine. But a software ecosystem is not a machine. It is a living system. When we attempt to rebuild the ecosystem, we’re making a category error. We’re confusing the software for the ecological process unfolding around it.

…

You can’t rebuild an ecosystem, just like you can’t rebuild the Amazon rainforest. You can only grow with it, or bulldoze it and start over from zero.

May be that’s why legacy modernisation projects are so complex. Because you are screwed but you don’t know where.