Jacob O'Bryanthttps%3A%2F%2Fjacobobryant.com%2Ffeed.xml2022-10-25T20:12:51.000ZLast post! Merging with TFOS newsletter next weekhttps%3A%2F%2Fjacobobryant.com%2Fp%2Fstuff-i-read-the-last-one%2F2022-10-25T20:12:51.000Z<p>I've recently decided to redo my <a href="https://tfos.co/">Tools for Online Speech newsletter</a> a bit. Previously it's been targeted at people who have signed up for one of my products and are thus familiar with some of my work already. I'm now slowly trying to make it more accessible to people who've never heard of me before.</p>
<p>I've been enjoying the groove I've had going with this newsletter for the past month or so. As I was thinking about how to structure the TFOS newsletter, I thought it'd work nicely to throw in a "Recommendations" section where I share things I read in the past week, as I've been doing in this newsletter. You can see an example in <a href="https://tfos.co/p/join-the-community/">yesterday's post</a> (the Recommendations section is near the bottom, albeit without commentary because I was short on time).</p>
<p>I'm also going to be writing more essays, which was the original purpose of this newsletter from long ago 🙂. So it feels like a good fit to merge this list into the TFOS newsletter. As such, this will be the last email you'll get from "Jacob O'Bryant's Newsletter"; next week, the sender name will be "Tools for Online Speech."</p>
<p>And a personal announcement: my second daughter was born last week. Here's <a href="https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?t=40">a short video</a>!</p>
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<p><a href="https://botharetrue.substack.com/p/the-three-arguments">The Three Arguments</a> (Both Are True). A fun read from someone I met on the internet.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.readtangle.com/otherposts/jan-6-committee-hearings-summary/">What we learned from the January 6 hearings</a> (Tangle). Succinct (and seemingly fair IMO, not that I watched any of the hearings myself) summaries of the hearings from earlier this year. This was published in July, so it doesn't cover any more recent hearings (I... think there was another hearing recently?).</p>
<p><a href="https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/on-short-bursts-of-impossible-stress">On Short Bursts of Impossible Stress and Depression Caused by Nothing</a> (Resident Contrarian). Another post from one of my internet friends!</p>
<p><a href="https://meyerson.medium.com/if-youre-capitalizing-every-word-of-your-headlines-you-re-missing-a-chance-to-connect-with-4c011c269e8b">If you’re capitalizing every word of your headlines, you’re missing out</a> (Charlie Meyerson). I have never done this consistently one way or the other. I converted all the titles in <a href="https://jacobobryant.com/archive/">my archive</a> to lower-case so at least they would be consistent!</p>
<p><a href="https://www.samstack.io/p/quasi-experiments-and-education">Quasi-experiments and Education</a> (Samstack). A critique of the methodology used in Bryan Caplan's <em>The Case Against Education</em>. I'm a big not-fan of formal education, so although I haven't read Caplan's book, I'm sure I would like it. All the more reason to pay attention to a post like this!</p>
<p><a href="https://nabeelqu.co/post-popper">Notes On Karl Popper</a> (Nabeel Qureshi). I like a little philosophy every now and then, in measured doses.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.thediff.co/p/newsletter-economics-in-2022">Newsletter Economics in 2022</a> (The Diff). "The value of a newsletter as a media product scales roughly with the subscriber base, but the value of potential connections within that subscriber base will scale superlinearly."</p>
<p>See you next week!</p>Jacob O'Bryanthttps://jacobobryant.com/Stuff I read: 17 October 2022https%3A%2F%2Fjacobobryant.com%2Fp%2Fstuff-i-read-2022-10-17%2F2022-10-17T19:16:44.000Z<p><a href="https://www.mnot.net/blog/2021/02/18/no-news">No news is... a sign of a stagnating Internet</a> by Mark Nottingham. "[N]o matter what you think of the proposed News Bargaining Code, Facebook’s actions this week [Feb 2021] are a dramatic demonstration of a failure of the Internet to evolve, and a failure to meet its design goals."</p>
<p><a href="https://harihareswara.net/posts/2022/what-you-miss-by-only-checking-github/">What You Miss By Only Checking GitHub</a> by Sumana Harihareswara. "The place I saw this GitHub-only perspective that really gave me pause was in Working in Public [...] by Nadia Eghbal. [...] I picked up <em>Working in Public</em> because I care about open source as infrastructure and how we sustain it. But if you exclude development work on forges and platforms other than GitHub, then you are excluding quite a lot of active, widely-used open source projects." I also read Working in Public and had a similar gut-level reaction. Although I use GitHub for my projects, I resent the idea that GitHub <em>defines</em> open-source.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-age-of-algorithmic-anxiety">The Age of Algorithmic Anxiety</a> by Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker). Highly relevant to my work, and gives a fair critique of algorithmic recommendations instead of spreading FUD. I appreciated that the author actually uses the term "recommender system"—I believe it's the first article I've read in this genre to do so. Some time I'd like to write an essay called "In Defense of Recommendation."</p>
<p><a href="https://webtide.com/do-looms-claims-stack-up-part-1/">Do Loom's Claims Stack Up?</a> (webtide.com). I guess the JVM's Project Loom won't necessarily be a drop-in replacement for regular threads. I'll keep Loom on my list of things to look into if/when I start dealing with scaling issues, but probably won't worry about it much until then.</p>
<p><a href="https://sahillavingia.com/work">No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees</a> by Sahil Lavingia. A description of how Gumroad operates. I read this a while ago but thought about it again recently. This bit practically made my eyes pop out, despite not getting much discussion: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>In [Sid Yadav's] words, “most entrepreneurs have two options: work a full-time job and hustle nights/weekends, or leave your job and risk everything to start the company. Gumroad provided a third way: I could contract 20-35 hours a week, and for a couple days a week, incubate ideas and work on my next thing.”</p>
<p>In 2020, Sid left Gumroad to start his own creator economy company, Circle, together with former Gumroad coworker Rudy Santino.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Why is nobody talking about this! Having taken the "leave your job" approach for the past four years, I honestly think this model could end up powering the next Y Combinator, for several reasons. (Building that is my ultimate scheme, by the way—but I have to get my own business working first.)</p>
<p>And some stuff I wrote:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://jacobobryant.com/p/what-does-success-look-like-for-you/">What does success look like for you?</a></li>
<li><a href="https://tfos.co/p/its-working/">It's Working [Anakin emoji]</a></li>
<li>From the archive: <a href="https://jacobobryant.com/p/roots-and-branches-centralization/">Roots and Branches: Centralization and the Role of Software Startups</a></li>
</ul>Jacob O'Bryanthttps://jacobobryant.com/What does success look like for you?https%3A%2F%2Fjacobobryant.com%2Fp%2Fwhat-does-success-look-like-for-you%2F2022-10-10T23:48:47.204Z<p>I learned to program computers at a young age, and for a while I felt fortunate that I already knew what I wanted to do for my career. Since then I've learned that there are many different ways to have a coding career; I haven't been able to fully escape the ordeal of figuring out what to do with one's life.</p>
<p>I think it's useful to think about criteria for success—what criteria in a given career path define success, and do those criteria match up with what you personally care about?</p>
<p>I'll give some examples. I like this model that Jason Crawford <a href="https://rootsofprogress.org/a-career-path-for-invention">has discussed</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Broadly speaking, there are three domains of activity important to technological progress: science, invention, and business. Science discovers new knowledge; invention creates useful machines, chemicals, processes, or other products; and business produces and distributes these products in a scalable, self-sustaining way.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Applying these three areas to my criteria idea: in science, you're successful if you create new knowledge; in invention, you're successful if you create something useful; in business, you're successful if you make money.</p>
<p>There is often overlap of course. Successful startup founders often create something useful, for instance. But that's not what defines success: if you make a derivative but not-yet-widely-adopted product and you figure out how to market it effectively, you're a successful business person. If you do the opposite—create something novel and useful, but fail to turn it into a profitable business—then you might be a successful inventor, but you're not a successful entrepreneur.</p>
<p>I personally would love to be both a successful inventor <em>and</em> a successful founder. But I'm gradually coming to grips with the realization that if I had to pick one or the other, I'd rather be the successful inventor.</p>
<p>(At least I was able to figure out during undergrad that I don't care very much at all about creating new knowledge, and thus I scrapped my tentative plans of going to grad school.)</p>
<p>Unfortunately, there isn't actually a career path for invention, which was the whole point of <a href="https://rootsofprogress.org/a-career-path-for-invention">Jason's essay</a>. Entrepreneurship is possibly a good-enough fit for me, especially since I do genuinely care about having the things I build become widely adopted, at least to a degree, I think. But building a business is very much a means to an end.</p>
<p>A corollary of my "criteria for success" framing is that <em>ambition</em> is not the main thing that defines a career in entrepreneurship. (I'm trying not to use <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=orthogonal">the "o" word</a>.) I've found that I prefer to help develop <a href="https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech">public goods</a>, even if it is at odds with creating or joining a high-growth startup. (For example, earlier this year I turned down a soft acquihire offer from a company that otherwise would've been a good fit for my skills and interests, probably.) But I don't think that makes me any less ambitious. In fact I think the software industry/society would benefit from having more people who funnel their ambition toward public goods!</p>
<p>(Advice for my younger self: go ahead and read all those Paul Graham essays, but also try to have <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_of_Wikipedia">a variety</a> of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds">role models</a>.)</p>
<p>If I do end up achieving business success, I'll be very interested to experiment with ways to help make "software inventor" or "open-source developer" an actual career path.</p>Jacob O'Bryanthttps://jacobobryant.com/Stuff I read: 10 October 2022https%3A%2F%2Fjacobobryant.com%2Fp%2Fstuff-i-read-2022-10-10%2F2022-10-10T22:22:33.055Z<p><a href="https://midrange.tedium.co/issues/substack-walled-garden-risks/">No More Walled Gardens</a> by Ernie Smith (Midrange). A succinct explanation of some qualms I have with Substack. Relatedly, I liked this nugget from Dave Winer's <a href="http://this.how/standards/">Rules for standards-makers</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We want interop so that our users are free to move.<br>So our products compete on the basis of performance, features and price, and not lock-in.<br>This is as basic as the Hippocratic Oath that doctors take.<br>It honors and respects the users of our products.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That being said, lock-in can benefit users insofar as it enables companies to allocate resources to a product's development—a product with lock-in developed by a well-funded company will quite plausibly produce more value for end users than a non-locked-in product developed by one person in their spare time. So while I don't in general think that building things with lock-in is the same as e.g. violating the Hippocratic Oath, I am very interested in finding sustainable ways to allocate resources to common goods.</p>
<p>(Back to the original article, by coincidence on the same day I <a href="https://forum.tfos.co/t/cross-platform-rss-recommendations/45">wrote up some thoughts</a> about how Substack's recommendation feature could be replicated in a cross-platform way.)</p>
<p><a href="https://herman.bearblog.dev/a-better-ranking-algorithm/">A better ranking algorithm</a> by Herman Martinus. The creator of <a href="https://bearblog.dev">Bear Blog</a>, a minimalist blogging platform, discusses the implementation of Bear Blog's <a href="https://bearblog.dev/discover/">discovery feed</a>.</p>
<p>Also on the subject of ranking algorithms: <a href="https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/truth-behind-filter-bubbles-bursting-some-myths">The truth behind filter bubbles: Bursting some myths</a> by Richard Fletcher, Director of Research at Reuters Institute. A good one to link whenever the recommendation-algorithms-are-bad assertion is made. Amusingly, DuckDuckGo <a href="https://twitter.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1247521259468066816">tweeted this article</a>, saying "Since our private search engine doesn't keep your search history, our search results don't suffer from this harmful effect"... when in fact, the article says that Google et. al. <em>increase</em> the diversity of sources that people are exposed to.</p>
<p><a href="https://linksiwouldgchatyou.substack.com/p/millennial-obsolescence">Millennial obsolescence</a> by Caitlin Dewey. Memes' origins are more centralized than they used to be.</p>
<p><a href="https://engineeringideas.substack.com/p/study-the-style-of-doing-science">Study the style of doing science from successes and engineering from failures</a> on Engineering Ideas. "Engineers often write success stories at the 'Golden Age' moment soon after the system has been deployed to production. All engineers who designed the system still work on it so the maintainability risks haven't had a chance to manifest yet. The production load hasn't changed much since the time when the system was designed and deployed so the scalability risks are also invisible."</p>
<p><a href="http://poetrychina.net/Story_of_Zen/zenstory0.htm">The Story of Zen</a>. An online course about Zen. I've read a couple of the pages in it so far.</p>Jacob O'Bryanthttps://jacobobryant.com/Stuff I read: 3 October 2022https%3A%2F%2Fjacobobryant.com%2Fp%2Fstuff-i-read-2022-10-03%2F2022-10-03T21:32:31.050Z<p><a href="https://www.lawfareblog.com/previously-undisclosed-olc-opinions-illuminate-growth-executive-power">Previously Undisclosed OLC Opinions Illuminate the Growth of Executive Power</a> by Jonathan Shaub (Lawfare). Discusses how the executive branch has become less cooperative with congress since the Nixon administration. "Choosing between constitutional hardball and conciliation" reminds me of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35356384-how-democracies-die">How Democracies Die</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-6-2022-a-self-authenticating-social-protocol">A Self-Authenticating Social Protocol</a> by Bluesky. Bluesky is an R&D organization started by Twitter. They're working on decentralized social media, and this post describes the high-level direction that they're going in. I see my own work as one layer above this: I'm interested in decentralization, but I'd mostly prefer to let other people work on new protocols while I build applications on top of whatever we have now. I'll be keeping an eye out for opportunities to build whatever Bluesky comes up with into my products.</p>
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<p><a href="https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/biases-the-wrong-model/">We don’t have a hundred biases, we have the wrong model</a> by Jason Collins (Works in Progress). Argues that behavioral economics et. al. have a model of human behavior—the rational actor model—which simply lacks the power to elegantly explain a lot of observed phenomena, in the same way that the geocentric model of the solar system couldn't explain the planets' observed trajectories unless you throw in a bunch of hacks. Suggests some starting points for working towards a new model of behavior.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/time-series-database/">How Time Series Databases Work—and Where They Don't</a> by Alex Vondrak (Honeycomb blog). I've been vaguely familiar with the concept of time series databases for a while; this post made my understanding more concrete.</p>
<p><a href="https://every.to/napkin-math/why-culture-eats-strategy">Why Culture Eats Strategy</a> by Evan Armstrong (Every). Another post in the category of "there are multiple ways to succeed." Although it's cliche, I do think "be yourself" is pretty good advice.</p>
</div>Jacob O'Bryanthttps://jacobobryant.com/Stuff I read: 26 September 2022https%3A%2F%2Fjacobobryant.com%2Fp%2Fstuff-i-read-2022-09-26%2F2022-09-26T20:08:32.533Z<p><a href="https://mignano.medium.com/the-standards-innovation-paradox-e14cab521391">The Standards Innovation Paradox</a> by Michael Mignano. This is a concise explanation of the pros and cons of building software on top of widely adopted standards like RSS (which powers podcasts, blogs, ...) and SMTP (which powers email). This is highly relevant to my work. Anyone interested in <a href="https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech">Protocols, Not Platforms</a> or "decentralization" should read it.</p>
<p><a href="https://rootsofprogress.org/why-did-we-wait-so-long-for-the-threshing-machine">Why did we wait so long for the threshing machine?</a> by Jason Crawford. It's an interesting bit of history and also has a good anecdote about the value of marketing.</p>
<p><a href="https://danluu.com/writing-non-advice/">Some thoughts on writing</a> by Dan Luu. Opening line:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I see a lot of essays framed as writing advice which are actually thinly veiled descriptions of how someone writes that basically say "you should write how I write"</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I find it extremely refreshing to read posts like this which have the intellectual honesty to say "X is <em>one</em> way of doing things" instead of "X is <em>the</em> way to do things." I have never benefited from any tweet of the form "Successful founders do X."</p>
<p><a href="https://worksinprogress.substack.com/p/notes-on-progress-thinking-like-a">Notes on Progress: Thinking like a dog</a> by Rosalind Arden. Discusses how studying dogs could help us learn about dementia and Alzheimer's. It was fun to read.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/im-a-professional-dad-who-leaned">I'm a professional dad who "leaned out" to support my wife's career</a>. Talks about "greedy jobs" where working—for example—60 hours/week provides more than 150% of the value of working 40 hours/week, and how in these cases it makes economic sense to let one spouse do most of the working rather than both trying to have full-time careers. (Of course economics isn't the only factor in this kind of decision.) It made me think about whether or not software engineering tends to be a greedy job. I think in <a href="https://every.to/p/what-i-miss-about-working-at-stripe">some cases</a> yes, but certainly not all.</p>
<p> </p>Jacob O'Bryanthttps://jacobobryant.com/Stuff I read: 19 September 2022https%3A%2F%2Fjacobobryant.com%2Fp%2Fstuff-i-read-2022-09-19%2F2022-09-19T18:47:47.235Z<p><a href="https://www.amediaoperator.com/newsletter/the-washington-post-should-commit-to-local/">The Washington Post Should Commit to Local</a> on A Media Operator. Argues that WaPo should pitch local news orgs on doing bundled subscriptions with them as a way to compete with The New York Times.</p>
<p><a href="https://lawreviewblog.uchicago.edu/2022/06/28/keller-control-over-speech/">Lawful but Awful? Control over Legal Speech by Platforms, Governments, and Internet Users</a> by Daphne Keller. A straightforward overview of the pitfalls (in the US, at least) of regulating social media, and recommendations on the best path forward. See also <a href="https://techpolicy.press/what-will-amplification-mean-in-court/">What Will “Amplification” Mean in Court?</a> on Tech Policy Press, which includes several citations to Keller's work.</p>
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<div class="text-xl font-bold"><a href="https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our-sat-act-requirement-for-future-admissions-cycles/">We are reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles</a> from MIT Admissions. An informative piece about the benefits of standardized tests. I'm glad I'm out of school.</div>
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<div class="text-xl font-bold"><a href="https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/">The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero</a> by Patrick McKenzie. It's an obvious point IMO, in the same way that e.g. reducing pollution to zero wouldn't be worth the cost, but still an interesting read.</div>
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<div class="text-xl font-bold"><a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/12/05/so-hows-that-retirement-thing-going-anyway/">So, how’s that retirement thing going, anyway?</a> by Joel Spolsky. Also links to <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/03/18/more-on-sabbaticals/">More on Sabbaticals…</a>: "I really like the formula of working for four years, and then taking one year off." Amusingly this is kinda-sorta the inverse of what I've done: I worked for one year after college and now have spent almost the past four years attempting to build my own startup. I'm already in pretty deep at this point, but I've <a href="https://jacobobryant.com/p/blog-tradeoffs/">written previously</a> that I think I would've been better off had I had planned on taking a 1-year sabbatical instead, with the expectation that I'd get a job again afterwards—and if it just so happened that one of my projects seemed to have strong business potential, only then would I think about treating it as a startup.</div>
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<div class="text-xl font-bold"><a href="https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/interview-patrick-collison-co-founder">Interview: Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe</a> on Noahpinion. Kind of interesting.</div>
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<div class="text-xl font-bold"><a href="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/pgwrong">Paul Graham is Wrong</a> by Aaron Swartz. That'll show him. (RIP Aaron).</div>
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<div class="text-xl font-bold">And something I wrote: <a href="https://tfos.co/p/algorithm-update/">The Sample algorithm update; upcoming Yakread features</a>. I also made <a href="https://twitter.com/the_sample_umm/status/1571929563122536448">this beautiful pun</a> about it which I hope someone who does SEO notices.</div>
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</div>Jacob O'Bryanthttps://jacobobryant.com/Stuff I readhttps%3A%2F%2Fjacobobryant.com%2Fp%2Fstuff-i-read-2022-09-12%2F2022-09-12T17:24:58.275Z<p>I have returned! (As a reminder, you signed up for this—my personal newsletter—either on <a href="https://jacobobryant.com/">my website</a> or via <a href="https://thesample.ai/">The Sample</a>.) I don't remember when was the last time I sent this out (early this year maybe?) but here are a few updates:</p>
<ul>
<li>I migrated my website + this newsletter to <a href="https://biffweb.com/p/announcing-platypub/">a new publishing platform</a> (along with a few other sites/newsletters I publish), so now the writing/publishing workflow is very convenient (hence resuming this newsletter).</li>
<li>One of those other websites is called <a href="https://tfos.co/">Tools for Online Speech</a>. This grew out of my weekly announcements for The Sample. I write about stuff I'm building. It's meant to be accessible to a broad audience.</li>
<li>I started working on a new product, <a href="https://yakread.com/">Yakread</a>. It is the world's finest reading app.</li>
<li>Next month I will have two kids.</li>
</ul>
<p>Thanks to Yakread I have actually started reading stuff other than tweets regularly, so I've decided to try again to use this newsletter to share stuff I'm reading. It's part of my ongoing experiment to find practical ways of doing "social media" without having it be concentrated in a few huge platforms. I'll probably include any major announcements about my work, and if you want more details you can subscribe to the <a href="https://tfos.co/">TFOS newsletter</a>, or (if you're interested in my Clojure work) the <a href="https://biffweb.com/newsletter/">Biff newsletter</a>.</p>
<p>Alright, so here it is, a few articles I've read lately:</p>
<p><a href="https://nintil.com/talent-review">Talent: a review</a> on Nintil. I like the reminder that talent and ambition come in many different shapes. (I found this piece after reading <a href="https://danluu.com/talent/">Misidentifying Talent</a> by Dan Luu.)</p>
<p><a href="https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/im-trying-to-figure-out-why-i-dont">I'm trying to figure out why I don't like Effective Altruists</a> by Resident Contrarian. Especially amusing were the comments about the EA criticism contest.</p>
<p><a href="https://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/">HOWTO: Get tenure</a> by Matt Might. Very touching ending.</p>
<p><a class="
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" href="https://stripe.com/blog/sorbet-stripes-type-checker-for-ruby" data-js-controller="AnalyticsButton" data-analytics-category="Links" data-analytics-action="Clicked" data-analytics-label="">Sorbet: Stripe’s type checker for Ruby</a> on the Stripe engineering blog. I was thinking of Clojure while I read this.</p>
<p><a href="https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/amia-srinivasan/">Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism</a> (transcript) from Conversations with Tyler. A lot of the more abstract ideas went over my head, but there was still plenty of interesting stuff to think about.</p>
<p><a href="https://tedium.co/2020/10/13/eternal-september-modern-impact/">No More Eternal Septembers</a> on Tedium. It reminds me of an engineer in a company I worked at who half-jokingly (but only half, I think) mentioned in a meeting that we should be careful not to try to make things <em>too</em> easy for new hires—butterflies won't develop properly unless you let them break out of the chrysalis on their own. In general I reject that framing and prefer the analogy of an explorer (along the lines of Lewis & Clark): you should build roads after you make it through the jungle. This is a motivation for my work on <a href="https://biffweb.com/">Biff</a>.</p>
<p>A few months ago I also finished reading <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43885149-dominion">Dominion</a> by Tom Holland. It describes how Christianity has influenced western culture to a degree that few realize. It's one of those things where once you learn about it, you see it everywhere.</p>
<p> </p>Jacob O'Bryanthttps://jacobobryant.com/Return of the Biffhttps%3A%2F%2Fjacobobryant.com%2Fp%2Freturn-of-biff%2F2022-02-08T04:23:13.570Z<p>My experiment of sharing good articles I’ve read weekly hasn’t really worked since I still don’t actually read articles very consistently. New experiment: I’ll send this out once or twice a month and just give some quick updates about stuff I’ve been working on. I do actually work sometimes, so this should be a piece of cake.</p>
<p><strong>The Sample</strong> (<a href="https://thesample.ai/">https://thesample.ai/</a>)</p>
<p>Several exciting things happened last month. We started out with a bang when one of our publishers told me he was having trouble importing his subscribers into Substack. Long story short, when Substack says “you own your list,” they mean “you own your list with an asterisk,” and the asterisk part means that in certain situations they will block you from importing subscribers.</p>
<p>Here’s what happened. By default we use a “mechanical turk” approach to integrating with newsletter platforms: when someone subscribes to a newsletter from within The Sample, I go to the newsletter’s signup page and paste in the person’s address manually. (In case you’re wondering, why yes, I am very tired of filling out captchas). Usually, Substack does not use “double opt-in,” i.e. as soon as you hit the “subscribe” button, you’re on the list—no need to go click a confirmation link in an email. However, Substack will sometimes silently send a confirmation email if the signup looks fishy. Evidently ~50 Substack signups per day coming from the same IP address looked fishy, because in mid-Decemberish these confirmation emails started getting triggered a lot.</p>
<p>The kicker here is that if someone receives a confirmation email and <em>doesn’t</em> click the link, then Substack puts them on a block list for your newsletter. If you try to import them via a CSV file, they’ll be skipped. So Substack users who joined The Sample were in a situation where some of their subscribers—some of whom they got from us via paid promotion!—never made it on to their list, with no way to fix it.</p>
<p>So that took most of a week for me to clean up. Fortunately most people were unaffected and I only ended up refunding $200 or so.</p>
<p>Other than that, I’ve added a bunch of integrations for newsletter platforms that actually have APIs (unlike Substack), and starting tomorrow I’ll be making a handful of changes to the product which I hope will boost retention.</p>
<p>We’ve also been continuing to mess around with Facebook ads, and things are (finally) looking great. Our cohort of Facebook leads from last week costed $1.45 per signup on average, and the revenue per user for the previous week is already up to $1.44. If we keep getting numbers like those for future cohorts, we can start dumping all the money we can into Facebook ads.</p>
<p>We also took a <a href="https://twitter.com/the_sample_umm/status/1489709350977298434">team photo</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Biff</strong> (<a href="https://biff.findka.com/">https://biff.findka.com/</a>)</p>
<p>Biff is my Clojure web framework which I first released almost two years ago, and upon which The Sample is built. I do a big release for it about every 8-12 months, but other than that I haven’t spent much time on trying to get more people to use it because I’ve been mainly focused on my own business.</p>
<p>However that has felt like a bit of a shame since I think Biff has, in my humble opinion, the potential to have a large impact on the Clojure community. There are various other potential benefits too; in general, it’s felt like a very “important but not urgent” category of project. Now that the business is almost beginning to stand on its own wobbly two feet, I’ve started to spend Fridays + some time over the weekend working on it. I’m partway through another big release, and going forward I’m planning to continue spending a day or so on it per week. (I’ve got some dank not-yet-public announcements to make about this soon).</p>
<p><strong>Parenting</strong></p>
<p>Our daughter is over a year old now. She can walk while hardly ever falling down. Sometimes she goes into our room and plays peek-a-boo by opening and closing the door while we stand in the hallway. She likes to eat toast with avocado on it.</p>
<p><strong>Recommendations</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>I read <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/">Meditations on Moloch</a> for the first time and it gave me the heebie jeebies. <a href="https://nintil.com/slaying-alexanders-moloch">Slaying Alexander’s Moloch</a> was a good counterpoint to it though and made me once again feel comfortable sleeping with the light off.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/">The housing theory of everything</a>, which argues that a lot of today’s societal problems could possibly be fixed by just building more houses.</li>
<li><a href="https://htmx.org/">HTMX</a>. A big part of the Biff release I’m working on is removing the SPA/ClojureScript part and replacing it with HTMX. It, along with its companion project Hyperscript, lets you keep the simplicity of a server-rendered app while still supporting enough interactivity for most things. See also <a href="https://hotwired.dev/">Hotwire</a> and <a href="https://fly.io/blog/how-we-got-to-liveview/">Phoenix LiveView</a>. I’m excited about this space. It <a href="https://twitter.com/htmx_org/status/1490797381633204225">also looks like</a> the HTMX author is now getting paid to work on the project.</li>
</ul>
Jacob O'Bryanthttps://jacobobryant.com/Building for the open webhttps%3A%2F%2Fjacobobryant.com%2Fp%2Fnewsletter-2021-12-26%2F2021-12-26T18:58:03.386Z<p>I've been tickled pink to have both my posts from the past two weeks hit the orange site (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29541043">first</a> and <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29618494">second</a>). I thought both discussions had some valuable comments. Both of those posts were slightly theoretical. I have a third post incubating that will focus more on practical specifics. I'd like to lay down a suggested roadmap for anyone else who's interested in building for the open web but isn't convinced that blockchain is the way to go.</p>
<p>If you're in that camp, would you hit reply and introduce yourself? Maybe we can collaborate somehow.</p>
<p>Some articles I read last week:</p>
<p><a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3351323">Why Section 230 Is Better Than the First Amendment</a>. The author argues for why getting rid of Section 230 would be a bad thing. The main takeaway I got from it is that even though there's a lot of overlap between Section 230 and the First Amendment, Section 230 makes it much cheaper to defend against frivolous lawsuits. Without it, small/young services that host users' content may have a harder time growing, which means Facebook et. al. will become even more entrenched. I'm particularly interested in this debate since I run one of these services. One question I have: how much does a US law like this matter for a company with a global user base?</p>
<p><a href="https://simonowens.substack.com/p/was-randy-cassingham-the-first-member">Was Randy Cassingham the first member of the Creator Economy?</a>, an account of one of the first email newsletters. It was launched in the same year I was born. "At the time, most people who had email addresses used them to forward jokes."</p>
<p><a href="https://www.worksinprogress.co/an-inconvenient-sleuth/">An inconvenient sleuth</a>, an essay from an anonymous biologist arguing against the Covid lab-leak hypothesis. Published last July. I haven't followed this topic; my understanding was that mainstream opinion started out saying it didn't come from the lab in Wuhan, but then that reversed sometime this year (I think?). I'm unaware if there's currently any sort of consensus on this. This article made me do a Bayesian update back in the direction of "it didn't come from the lab."</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Yes, the origin was in the one city in China that has a virological research lab, out of hundreds that do not. But what proportion of the population are laboratory workers at risk, versus what proportion consume meat at wet markets? ... How do we account for the other reasons why laboratories are where they are – precisely because of the high diversity of bats and bat coronaviruses in the region, and because other epidemics originated not far from that area, which was known for years to be a source of zoonotic risk?</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://thebrowser.com/notes/lars-doucet-2/">Lars Doucet On Taxing The True Value Of Land</a>, a readable introduction to land value tax/"Georgism". Another one from the department of stuff-I-don't-follow-but-still-found-interesting.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The chief insight of Georgism is to shift the paradigm from a two-input model of the economy (labor and capital) to a three-input model (land, labor, and capital).</p>
<p>You know how once we discovered that most infectious diseases are caused by germs, it totally upended our knowledge of medicine? And how once we discovered that things are made of atoms, it moved us from alchemy to chemistry? I feel like Georgism can do the same thing for economics.</p>
</blockquote>
Jacob O'Bryanthttps://jacobobryant.com/