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I’ve been too busy with work to write much recently, but in lieu of that, here’s a batch of links to other stuff I’ve been doing elsewhere.
The thing I’m most excited about:
Wave raises $200m from Sequoia, Stripe, Founders Fund and Ribbit at a $1.7b valuation. It’ll fund faster expansion across Africa. I’m pumped for us to save tons of money + time for even more people!
A question I get asked with some frequency is: why bother measuring X, why not build something instead? More bluntly, in a recent conversation with a newsletter author, his comment on some future measurement projects I wanted to do (in the same vein as other projects like keyboard vs. mouse, keyboard, terminal and end-to-end latency measurements) was, "so you just want to get to the top of Hacker News?"
The implication for the former is that measuring is less valuable than building and f…
Welcome to this week's edition of "building a startup in 2020," in which all
your meetings are suddenly remote, and you probably weren't prepared for it.
I know I wasn't. We started a "fully remote" company back in 2019, but that
was supposed to mean we still got together in person every month or two to
do strategic planning, share meals, and resolve any accumulated
conflicts. Well, not this year. Instead, we had to learn to have better
remote meetings, all while build… [Spoilers for several old musicals.] TV Tropes lists dozens of examples of the “I want” song (where the hero of a musical sings about their dream of escaping their small surroundings). After watching a bunch of musicals on maternity leave, I’m wondering how many examples there are of the song genre “I’ll never leave my […] As I’ve mentioned, I think the tax code could be improved. In a departure from my usual style, this post fleshes out some fairness-based arguments for one of my favorite changes. (I think that this proposal, and many of the arguments in favor, is old. Wikipedia quotes Joseph Stieglitz making the basic point in Economics … More Improving capital gains taxes
I love Nora. She is a really fun sister. I give her a hug and a kiss
each night. Nora is pretty much always nearby so I can go and cuddle
her. Unless she's nursing. Or sleeping. Or having her diaper
changed. Which is a lot of the time. But, overall, Nora is a really
really fun sister. She's also very silly, and she makes silly faces.
As a "fully remote work" company, we had to make some choices about the
technologies we use to work together and stay in touch.
We decided early on - about the time we realized all three cofounders
live in different cities - that we were going to go all-in on remote work,
at least for engineering, which for now is almost all our work. As several
people have pointed out before, fully remote is generally more stable than
partly remote. In a partially remote team, the remote workers seem to … Before we had kids, Jeff and I fostered a couple of cats. One had feline AIDS and was very skinny. Despite our frugal grocery budget of the time, I put olive oil on her food, determined to get her healthier. I knew that stray cats were not a top global priority, and that this wasn’t even the best way of helping stray cats, but it was what I wanted to do.. . . . .The bike path near where I live has a lot of broken glass on the ground nearby. My family likes to go barefoot in the summer, and a lo… Several people I know are expecting a first baby soon, and I wrote up notes for one of them. Might as well share here too: Medical:Scott Alexander’s Biodeterminist’s Guide to Parenting is an interesting read, and some parts are actionable. If you live in an old building (pre-1978 in the US), here’s my writeup on lead paint. […] I just finished Karen Pryor’s “Don’t Shoot the Dog: the New Art of Teaching and Training.” Partly because a friend points out that it’s not on Audible and therefore she can’t possibly read it, here are the notes I took and some thoughts. It’s a quick, easy read. The author started off as a dolphin […] Music
Dagny, Love You Like That (2017)
Willow, Wait a Minute!, ARDIPITHECUS (2015)
Blue Kid, The Dismemberment Song, Upright, Love (2012)
Gregory and the Hawk, The Bolder Thing To Do (Demo Version), Self-Titled Demo (2007)
Frances Forever, treehouse, pockets (2018)
Cavetown, Boys Will Be Bugs, Animal Kingdom: Comet (2018)
UPSAHL, Drugs (2019)
Destructo Disk, I Wish I Was A Riot Grrrl, Punk Rocks For Kids Who Can't Skate (2018)
Sidney Gish, Impostor Syndrome, No Dogs Allowed (2017)
The Derevolutions, … For the last few years I’ve been avoiding factory farmed eggs because I think they involve a lot of unnecessary suffering. I’m hesitant to be part of that even if it’s not a big deal on utilitarian grounds. This is a pain since factory-farmed eggs are used all over the place (e.g. in ice cream, … More Demand offsetting Jeff and I are expecting a third child in June. We gave away most of our baby stuff in the interim, so I’m now considering what stuff to get. Since I’m more experienced than I was the first time, I feel like I don’t need to do as much trial and error. Basic principlesClothesCarryingCleaningFeedingSleepingMiscMaybeA note […] (Translated from a transcript of an ancient Sumerian speech by Uruk's most well-respected Scriptological Ethicist)
Writing is a profoundly dangerous technology:
Access to writing was initially, and still remains, uneven. What's worse, the rich are more likely to be literate, so it not only creates inequalities but exacerbates existing ones.
Written language embodies the biases and prejudices of the people responsible for writing. Writing makes those prejudices more permanent and influentia… Previously: gift ideas for young children (0-2) I thought I’d list some toys our kids have especially liked. None of these are amazing revelations that you probably couldn’t find on other sites. I’m picking things that need little or no adult supervision, unless otherwise specified. A few of these (especially the Melissa and Doug toys) […] When a harm is created as a result of both external actions and a
psychological reaction, how should we apportion blame?
Today I made valentines. I made fruit valentines. There were orange
fruit valentines, and grape fruit valentines, watermelon fruit
valentines, and pineapple too. I made them for my classmates and
teacher. They had a little jokes or puns on the back. The jokes or
puns were on a sticker that we could stick on the back. I stuck on
googly eyes, and I drew a mouth. I added hearts and a sticker.
That's how I made the valentines. Here is a picture so you can see
some of my valentines:
2020 Giving in ContextIn 2020, I donated $ 24,918.01. By organization, these were:Legal Priorities Project: $ 10,005.50Long-Term Future EA Fund: $ 8,036.00Joe Biden for President: $ 2,800GiveWell (regrant): $ 1,551Center for Election Science: $ 1,000Charter Cities Institute: $ 1,000EA Cameroon: $ 250Against Malaria Foundation: $ 120GiveDirectly: $ 83.51Malaria Consortium: $ 30Nuclear Threat Initiative: $ 22Wild Animal Initiative: $ 10MIRI: $ 10This does not include donations made on my behalf a…
"Systems design" is a branch of study that tries to find universal
architectural patterns that are valid across disciplines.
You might think that's not a possibility. Back in university,
students used to tease the Systems Design Engineers, calling it "boxes and
arrows" engineering. Not real engineering, you see, since it didn't touch
anything tangible, like buildings, motors, hydrochloric acid, or, uh,
electrons.
I don't think the Systems Design people took this critici…
In the classic 1986 essay, No Silver Bullet, Fred Brooks argued that there is, in some sense, not that much that can be done to improve programmer productivity. His line of reasoning is that programming tasks contain a core of essential/conceptual1 complexity that's fundamentally not amenable to attack by any potential advances in technology (such as languages or tooling). He then uses an Ahmdahl's law argument, saying that because 1/X of complexity is essential, it's impossible to …
I mixed milk with some colored pigment. First, the color spread a
little tiny bit. And then when we added we added some dish soap the
colors spread and a big colorful wave.
Inspired by Luke Muehlhauser, I'm going to try to start using my blog to highlight some media I've enjoyed over the past ~quarter. Since this is my first post, this contains some stuff especially I liked in Q3 as well.
Music
Will Wood, The Normal Album (2020)
ミラクルミュージカル, Hawaii: Part II (2012)
Lots of stuff by Billy Cobb, especially:
Zerwee (2020)
Zerwee, Pt. 2 (2020)
Rocky Horror, on Strokes of Incarceration (2018)
Lots of stuff by Beach Bunny, especially:
Prom Queen, on Prom Queen (2… Life is short • There is no speed limit • How to Be Successful • You and your research • Becoming a Magician • 95th percentile isn’t that good When I’ve listened the most effectively to people, it’s because I was intensely curious—I was trying to build a detailed, precise understanding of what was going on in their head. Why it’s worth it to deeply understand the fiddly, boring-seeming details of the computer systems you use every day. A UBI (e.g. paying every adult American $8k/year) would reduce recipient’s need for money and so may reduce their incentive to work. This is frequently offered as an argument against a UBI (or as an argument for alternative policies like the EITC that directly incentivize work). This argument is sometimes presented as economically hard-headed realism. … More It’s not economically inefficient for a UBI to reduce recipient’s employment I spent way too long figuring out the how to make video calls feel natural. Here’s the best advice I came up with. Most people benefit significantly from privately funded public goods (e.g. Wikipedia). If we all contribute to such public goods, then we can all end up better off. But as an individual it’s almost never a good return on investment. I think of supporting such public goods as being a good citizen, but that leaves open … More Distributed public goods provision
I came up with this game. In the game one person thinks of something
and then gives the other person a clue. And the other person writes a
guess down on a blackboard or a piece of paper. Or really anything
you have that's laying around that's available for writing on. The
other person says whether it's right or wrong. And then when they get
it right the other person takes a turn. When they get it wrong the
other person gives them another clue and they guess again. It has to
be clos…
This is jewelry I made, but I didn't really make all of them. My au
pair Erika made a few of them but I made most of them. I made at
least six of them. Erika made two.
Free delivery within a half hour bike ride of West Somerville.
Otherwise I will send it to you in the mail. You pay for shipping.
Email my dad, Jeff (jeff@jefftk.com) if you want to buy
something.
Butterfly Bracelet
It costs $8. I was thinking about butterflies when I made this
bracelet.
Pom-pom Bracelet
I was thinking about pom-p…
A few years ago I wrote The World in Which IPv6 was a Good
Design. I'm still
proud of that article, but I thought I should update it a bit.
No, I'm not switching sides. IPv6 is just as far away from universal
adoption, or being a "good design" for our world, as it was three
years ago. But since then I co-founded a company that turned out to be
accidentally based on the principles I outlined in that article. Or
rather, from turning those principles upside-down.
In that article, I exp…
Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks. With specfp, Sun managed to increase its score on 179.art (a sub-benchmark of specfp) by 12x with a compiler tweak that essentially re-wrote the benchmark kernel, which increased the Sun UltraSPARC’s overall specfp score by 20%. At times, GPU vendors have added specialized benchmark-detecting code to their…
A lot of people seem to think that distributed tracing isn't useful, or at least not without extreme effort that isn't worth it for companies smaller than FB. For example, here are a couple of public conversations that sound like a number of private conversations I've had. Sure, there's value somewhere, but it costs too much to unlock.
I think this overestimates how much work it is to get a lot of value from tracing. At Twitter, Rebecca Isaacs was able to lay out a vision for how…
We spent one day1 building a system that immediately found a mid 7 figure optimization (which ended up shipping). In the first year, we shipped mid 8 figures per year worth of cost savings as a result. The key feature this system introduces is the ability to query metrics data across all hosts and all services and over any period of time (since inception), so we've called it LongTermMetrics (LTM) internally since I like boring, descriptive, names.
This got started when I was looking for a st… Creating really good outcomes for humanity seems hard. We get bored. If we don’t get bored, we still don’t like the idea of joy without variety. And joyful experiences only seems good if they are real and meaningful (in some sense we can’t easily pin down). And so on. On the flip side, creating really … More Hedonic asymmetries When people come to an effective altruism event for the first time, the conversation often turns to projects they’re pursuing or charities they donate to. They often have a sense of nervousness around this, a feeling that the harsh light of cost-effectiveness is about to be turned on everything they do. To be fair, this is a reasonable thing to be apprehensive about, because many youngish people in EA do in fact have this idea that everything in life should be governed by cost-effectiveness. I&… I’m late to the party, but I've been thinking about the documentary “The Life Equation” about how people use data to decide make life-and-death decisions. The central example is a woman named Crecencia, a mother of seven who lives in rural Guatemala and has cervical cancer. The doctor treating her knows that screening other women for cancer is more cost-effective than treating this woman, and that the community doesn’t have enough money to fully fund both. The filmmaker writes: “Crecencia’s… Here are three places Jeff and I are donating this year. The first two are similar to what we’ve been doing for years, and the third represents a change.Direct workJeff and I want to support work that directly makes the world a better place. (Some arguments against falling into a “meta trap” here.) As usual for us, this year we’ve given just over half our donations to direct work. We made these donations to the Against Malaria Foundation, one of GiveWell’s top picks, except for small amounts th… Last week the Boston Effective Altruism group had a discussion on self-care for altruists. I've written about the topic before, but I wanted to share some of the more practical advice people had. Think beyond day-to-day choicesSelf-care isn’t just short-term decisions like whether to make time for yoga tonight. It’s larger life decisions too, like what job to take, where to live, how to budget money, and how to make time for partners, friends, and family.For me, having children was self-car…
What I've been doing instead of writing
Some reasons to measure
Thoughts you mightn't'a thunk about remote meetings
Songs about terrible relationships
Improving capital gains taxes
Nora
Several grumpy opinions about remote work at Tailscale
It's ok to feed stray cats
Books and websites on babies
Notes from “Don’t Shoot the Dog”
Media I Liked: Q1 2021
Demand offsetting
Baby stuff I’d get again, the third time around
The Troubling Ethics of Writing (A Speech from Ancient Sumer)
Gift ideas for preschool / early elementary children
Blameworthiness for Avoidable Psychological Harms
Valentines
My 2020 Giving
Systems design explains the world: volume 1
Against essential and accidental complexity
Milk Experiments
Media I Liked: Q4 2020
My favorite essays of life advice
To listen well, get curious
In defense of blub studies
It’s not economically inefficient for a UBI to reduce recipient’s employment
How to make video calls almost as good as face-to-face
Distributed public goods provision
Learning Game
Jewelry
IPv4, IPv6, and a sudden change in attitude
How do cars fare in crash tests they're not specifically optimized for?
A simple way to get more value from tracing
A simple way to get more value from metrics
Hedonic asymmetries
You have more than one goal, and that's fine
No one is a statistic
Two standard donations and one new one
Practical steps for self-care