Category: Food for thought

So this is how it begins.

In an episode that would be laughable if it were not symptomatic of a greater rot, a troupe of errant primates has reportedly plunged an entire nation into darkness. The Panadura Power Station, a facility emblematic of our fragile infrastructure, succumbed to an altercation among these unwitting simians, causing an island-wide blackout. The Ministry of Power and Energy, in its characteristic obfuscation, has assured the public that investigations are ongoing—a phrase which, in political parlance, often translates to indefinite inertia and zero accountability.

From Sri Lanka Guardian. Although funny, real reason is the systemic corruption.

Ars Technica lists down the worst offenders for enshittification. What caught my eye was the inclusion of PDF. 

But Acrobat was ultimately an Adobe product, with all that came with it. It was expensive, it was prone to bloat and poor performance, and there was no end to its security issues. Features were added that greatly expanded its scope but were largely useless for most people. Eventually, you couldn’t install it without also installing what felt like half a dozen seemingly unrelated Adobe products.

By building PDF capabilities into its OS, Apple allowed me to go Adobe-free and avoid some of this enshittification on my computers.

After reading the article, I realized the author was right. When I first used PDFs, I remembered how painfully slow Acrobat Reader was. Searching for alternatives, I found Foxit, which was blazing fast. I haven’t used Foxit in a long time, so I am not sure if it has also slowed down like Acrobat Reader.

When I switched from Windows to Mac, Preview became my go-to app for viewing PDFs. Over the years, I never once used Acrobat Reader’s features like commenting, signing, or annotating—not even once.

While the term enshittification was coined in 2022, it existed all along.

Steve Mould explains how much of the lead in your pencil we actually use—or rather, how much we waste.

Alexandra Witze writing for Nature:

Fragments of the asteroid Bennu, carefully collected and ferried to Earth by a robotic spacecraft, contain the building blocks for life, NASA announced today.

Not only does Bennu contain all 5 of the nucleobases that form DNA and RNA on Earth and 14 of the 20 amino acids found in known proteins, the asteroid’s amino acids hold a surprise. On Earth, amino acids in living organisms predominantly have a ‘left-handed’ chemical structure. Bennu, however, contains nearly equal amounts of these structures and their ‘right-handed’, mirror-image forms, calling into question scientists’ hypothesis that asteroids similar to this one might have seeded life on Earth.

This is an interesting discovery. The closest I read something similar in fiction was in Dan Brown’s Deception Point where NASA discovers a meteorite filled with fossils.

The discovery also raises a few questions.

Glavin is most perplexed by the discovery of an equal mixture of left-handed and right-handed amino acids on Bennu. He, like many scientists, had thought that organic molecules from primordial asteroids would have had the same left-handed dominance as those from life on Earth. Now, researchers have to go back to the drawing board to understand how life might have been seeded on Earth.

“I felt a little bit disappointed at first, like it invalidated 20 years of my research,” Glavin says. “But this is why we explore — to learn new things.”

I tried to understand why amino acids are left handed, but that was too heavy for me to understand.

John Gruber talking about how no one’s working on million dollar ideas because everyone’s chasing billion dollar ideas!

The whole tech world needs more projects that aren’t trying to become billion- (let alone trillion-) dollar ideas, but are happily shooting for success as million-dollar ideas (or less!). Many of the best and most beloved movies ever made weren’t big-budget Hollywood blockbusters. If your list of all-time favorite movies doesn’t include a bunch that were made on shoestring budgets, your whole list probably sucks, because you have no taste. The same is of course true for music, games, and everything else. Indie art is often great art, imbued by the souls and obsessions of its creators, and blockbuster art is often garbage art, imbued only by soulless corporate bureaucracies.

Can we bring back small phones? Is that a million dollar idea?

From the post Too many Americans still fear the future by Noah Smith

Being older makes it harder to adapt to changes in the technical-social equilibrium. If you’re 18 and just starting out at the bottom, big changes are almost pure opportunity; if you’re 50 and you have a mortgage and kids in college and a high salary at a big corporation, you probably want to keep things stable.

The 18 year olds are seeing the 50 year olds getting laid off and thinking about FIRE—Financial Independence, Retire Early.

An interesting article on the sheer dominance of USA and US Dollar.

Here’s an interesting question: Take a look at the interest rate of the Indian Market (comparable to the Fed rate in the U.S.). In 2011, while the U.S. offered a whopping 0.25%, the Indian Markets offered 8.5%. In simple terms, if you had put your money in a money market account in the U.S., you would’ve got a 0.25% return per year, and in India, you would’ve got 8.5% per year6.  

In other words, it will take only ~8 years to double your money in an Indian account compared to ~288 years in a U.S. account. So why shouldn’t an investor just keep their funds in India instead of the U.S.? 

The answer lies in currency and country risk. 

In 2005, 1 USD was equal to 44 Indian Rupees. Fast forward 20 years, now 1 USD is worth 86 Indian Rupees. So, the Indian Currency has roughly lost half its value (49%) when compared to the US Dollar. 

So, even if you gain some additional interest rate by parking your fund in an emerging market, if that currency depreciates against the US dollar, your net gain will shrink dramatically. Plus, you now also have to deal with country risk.

For all the hate Elon Musk gets—especially post his Twitter acquisition—there are some real, tangible benefits that he has given to the world. Quentin Stafford-Fraser talks about how he changed the EV space.

Though he neither founded Tesla nor designed the cars himself, his perseverance, vision, and willingness to spend his cash where others weren’t, has dragged an entire industry, mostly kicking and screaming, into a far better place, both technologically and for the planet.  I remember the shock of traditional car dealers in 2016, trying hard to sell a few more cars at discounts to fill their next quarter’s quota, when it was announced that quarter of a million people had put down a deposit for the recently-announced Model 3: a car they had never even seen.   It took that kind of major eathquake to rattle the enormous global inertia of the fossil-burning world and to kick investment in battery-production up to a whole new level.   I won’t pretend Musk was doing all of this for purely selfless reasons, or that he did it entirely on his own, but many thousands of Greta Thunbergs combined could not dream of having such an impact.  He changed the world.

Bonus: Quentin Stafford-Fraser created the first webcam.

Jennifer Pahlka explaining rule of law with the inaugration of Donald Trump for the second time.

In The New York Times a few weeks ago, Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey S. Kopstein characterize the incoming administration’s patrimonialism (rule through personal power and patronage) as “an assault on the modern state as we know it.” Noting that Trump won the presidential election fairly, they correctly assess that reversing this assault “will require more than a simple defense of ‘democracy.’ …The threat we face is different, and perhaps even more critical: a world in which the rule of law has given way entirely to the rule of men.”

I agree. The rule of men is fundamentally inconsistent with the principles and values of our nation, and I do not welcome any nepotism, graft, or abuse of the system for retribution that may be coming our way. But why would half of voters tolerate this? The authors propose that “a slew of self-aggrandizing leaders has taken advantage of rising inequality, cultural conflicts and changing demography to grab power,” suggesting that the rule of law is a hapless casualty of other circumstances. But the principle of a nation governed by laws not men should have been non-negotiable. It should have been a crown jewel of our democracy for which all else could be tolerated. It wasn’t. The crown jewel was tarnished, and unless we understand the nature of that tarnish, we have little hope of returning that jewel to its rightful place.

I learned about this term—planned obsolescence—when news broke out that Apple intentionally slowed down their older iPhones. And today I learned that there existed a lightbulb cartel who did this 100 years before Apple.

The cartel’s grip on the lightbulb market lasted only into the 1930s. Its far more enduring legacy was to engineer a shorter life span for the incandescent lightbulb. By early 1925, this became codified at 1,000 hours for a pear-shaped household bulb, a marked reduction from the 1,500 to 2,000 hours that had previously been common. Cartel members rationalized this approach as a trade-off: Their lightbulbs were of a higher quality, more efficient, and brighter burning than other bulbs. They also cost a lot more. Indeed, all evidence points to the cartel’s being motivated by profits and increased sales, not by what was best for the consumer. In carefully crafting a lightbulb with a relatively short life span, the cartel thus hatched the industrial strategy now known as planned obsolescence.

— THE GREAT LIGHTBULB CONSPIRACY