Subscribe
31 posts

Essay

The Volt, Part 1: Lineage

My grandfather, James P. Berry, bought the first Chevy Volt sold in Rock Hill. Unveiled in 2007 (the same year as the iPhone) and taking 3 more years to come to market, the Volt was an odd car. An entirely electric drivetrain that had a 40 mile battery but could burn gas to power a generator to run the motors for unlimited maximum range. Commute on electricity, road trip on gas. The best of both worlds. In a car industry notorious for imitation, it's still amazing to me that no other automaker … (Continued)

Craft vs Trade - Programming

I was having a conversation with a friend just starting out, later in life, on his journey as a software developer, and we were talking about code schools and college degrees. There seems to be a paradox, that some companies hire code school graduates and have success when others don't, while at the same time not all companies have success hiring junior developers straight out of college. So what determines success? One model that might explain this apparent paradox is that some programming is … (Continued)

Loss Due To Measurement

Every time you put something into a measurement container, some small amount of the stuff stays in the container after you empty it out. The measuring scoop you use for flour, the measuring cup for cream, the mixing bowl to combine it. We like to think that we can measure things for free, but it's just not true. Cooking a roast with a temperature probe in it makes it easy to hit exactly the right temperature, but the meat around the probe always cooks a little differently. How big is the effec … (Continued)

Incentives Matter - Google and Dark Mode

In conversation with a friend today, he made a passing remark: How can Google's own emails look like crap when viewed in Gmail, on a Google phone, using Google's dark mode? I think there are three things at play here. The first is that Google isn't just one thing. It's thousands of groups, mostly working independently. Of course we know this, but it's easy to forget when we use the shorthand of talking about a vast multinational corporation as a single thing. The second thing is incen … (Continued)

Yuval Levin on EconTalk

I'm not familiar with Yuval Levin (I don't even remember his previous appearance on EconTalk, which I must have heard), but he was on EconTalk recently talking about his new book. The book sounds interesting enough, and if I had room on my to-read shelf for it, I'd probably add it, but I don't so I won't. But the bits of conversation that emerged centered around three things that really stuck with me. First was the idea of formative institutions. One view of people is that children know what' … (Continued)

The Paradox of Pain

I'm currently about six months into Invisalign. It took about a week to rewire my brain from feeling that it was weird to be wearing the aligners, to it being weird not to wear them. Now, I actually start to feel a little on-edge when I can't get somewhere to brush and put the trays back in. And things definitely seem to be moving in the right direction. So far so good. One thing I was told early on by one of the non-certified assistants at the orthodontist's office is that a common pattern … (Continued)

Why do hackathons work?

Reading about Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, both histories emphasize that part of the successful R&D formula is hiring the best minds you can, giving them resources, and then leaving them alone to follow their curiosity wherever it goes. (Expect that they produce something, but not what or when.) The closing chapters of "Range" by David Epstein echo this as well. Hyper-specialization is a trap. Great results in the lab can be achieved by recognizing promising people, bringing them into your lab, an … (Continued)

The world that C, Unix, and C++ Built

It is difficult to comprehend what modern computers would look like without Bell Labs. In some abstract way I was aware of this, but reading Kernighan's new Unix history/memoir really hit that home when he talked about Bjarne Stroustrup developing C++ while he too worked at Bell Labs. Stroupstrup's name and the fact that he invented C++ was lodged deep in my brain from my high school AP Computer Science class where it was just one of those factoids in the textbook that was bolded to indicate th … (Continued)

SteerMouse and the Logitech G604

Steph and I are in the middle of the process of moving (big moving day is the day after tomorrow) and so it's been a long week of work, eat takeout, pack until bedtime. People talk about how you have more stuff than you think in your house when you go to pack, and for better or worse I will say that we have about as much stuff as I thought we would have, it just takes a long time to pack  it all. But one bright spot this week has been SteerMouse adding support for the Logitech … (Continued)

USPSA and Friendship Distance

At dinner last night, the topic came up again about how I've gotten a great deal of satisfaction out of shooting USPSA, but that I've never really made friends (in the "hang out and drink beer together"/"help you move"/"bail you out of jail" way) through USPSA. I've met lots of interesting USPSA people and had good internet conversations, but that only goes so far. All of the shooting friends that I've made were made shooting either IDPA or Parrish's Action Pistol matches. … (Continued)

Reputation and Resilience

If your reputation can't absorb a few blows, it wasn't worth anything in the first place. Ryan Holiday, Ego Is The Enemy It's so tempting to think that your reputation is fragile. You feel like you spent years building it up, and then someone posts something negative about you. More people pile on. People you've never heard of before, who just enjoy the bandwagon of hate. People so empty that they have to keep busy pointing out the flaws of others to avoid facing their own. Meanwhile, … (Continued)

Improving Reading

I wouldn't call myself a voracious reader, but I try to spend 30 minutes each day doing serious, dedicated reading. Not reading to pass the time while I wait for my food at a restaurant or scrolling through my RSS reader after dinner. Sitting in a comfortable chair, with my phone out of reach, a book in my hand, a notebook within reach, with nothing else to do, for half an houror more. I am also in a never-ending experiment with different ways to take notes on books in a way that gives me the b … (Continued)

On Moderation

As you move about on the internet, on each page, ask yourself "Who moderates this?" If it's someone's Twitter feed, that person doesn't just moderate it, they directly control it. Every tweet is either written by them or retweeted by them. But if you click one of their tweets and Twitter shows you the responses, who moderates those? Nobody. Literally. Even the person who originally posted the tweet, unless they block the person that replied, has no control of the content shown just below to … (Continued)

(Most) Everyone Is A Loser

Competitive shooting is an interesting sport because on any given weekend, 60-100 people show up, divided among 6-8 gear divisions. So, out of those 100, 5 or 6 might win their division. Roughly 95% of the people who show up will not win. And yet they show up anyway. You might think that the rational thing to do would be to only show up to matches you have a good shot at winning. But that's not what people do. I regularly win local matches that I show up to, but I'm planning my year around Nat … (Continued)

Being sick and reading

The last few days have been strange. I've never caught a sore throat in the middle of summer before, so yesterday afternoon when I noticed my throat was scratchy, I figured I hadn't been drinking enough water. Working at home, I got up from my desk to get some, but drinking it didn't help. A few hours later, a package arrived from Amazon. Becoming Superman, the autobiography of J. Michael Straczynski. Growing up, we weren't a religious family in the traditional sense, but we watched 90s Sci-fi … (Continued)