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Contents
Hold the Line
What I’ve been reading recently
2.1 Philosophy
2.2 Cryptocurrency
2.3 Software engineering
2.4 Marketing
2.5 Expats and Digital Nomads
2.6 Politics
1. Hold the Line
There have been a lot of calls to “hold the line” recently. Politically, to get back to some once-hated but now dearly missed status quo. Financially, to hold speculative assets. And personally, as everyone copes with being indoors.
This week, speculative fever seems to be outpacing the growth of the coronavirus. For anyone familiar with the history of excessive retail speculation, this is probably unnerving. Typically, it’s a sign of Bad Things To Come. And I’m not just talking about the 1928 crash, preceding WW2. Take this quote from Gold Wars by Ferdinand Lips, talking about the fall of the Roman empire, (it’s in reference to their attempts to debase their currency under Nero and others)
“It should be of interest to the modern Keynesian economists, as well as to the present generation of investors, that although the emperors of Rome frantically tried to “manage” their economies, they only succeed in making matters worse. Price and wage controls and legal tender laws were passed, but it was like trying to hold back the tides. Rioting, corruption, lawlessness and a mindless mania for speculation and gambling engulfed the empire like a plague. With money so unreliable and debased, speculation in commodities became far more attractive than producing them.”
In the U.S. it feels like we’re becoming more familiar with the above by the hour. I’m not as confident that the speculation, rioting, corruption, etc, are caused by the inflation of currency values as this author is, but it would be difficult to deny that these symptoms, when seen together, often mean a spiral downwards for large empires.
The upshot to to all this? The memes.
2. What I’ve been reading recently
2.1 Philosophy
Selected Dialogues of Plato - For someone who purports to like philosophy, I’ve read a relatively small amount of ancient philosophy, so, this week, when I felt a fatigued with all the finance/crypto related reading I’ve been doing, I decided a couple of Plato’s dialogues involving Socrates. Namely, Ion and Protagoras.
The History of Western Philosophy (Bertrand Russell) - If you’re not familiar with this book, it’s widely recommended as one of the places to start learning about philosophy. It’s a perfect companion whenever you’re reading anything by an older philosopher. This time, I reread the entry on Protagoras, and some pieces Russel wrote on Sparta’s influence on Greece around when Socrates and Plato were alive.
The History of Western Philosophy (A.C. Grayling) - This is a relatively new book that attempts to cover much of western and eastern philosophy, all in one go. I haven’t read it front to back like the Russell book above, but, like the Russell, it’s useful for a quick refresher on topics like the Sophists. I’m not sure I’d recommend it over the Russell, however.
What is Acid Communism? - A great introduction to the concept of Mark Fisher’s Acid Communism. No: Acid Communism has little to do with acid (the drug) or communism. Instead, you should think of Acid Communism more like placeholder for any possible post-capitalist world.
To Fisher, most people seem stuck on capitalism, unable to think of alternatives. Fisher calls this “stuckness” capitalist realism. Capitalist realists see capitalism as the only system compatible with human nature, and living within the mindset that capitalism is all that is feasible, it causes them to focus on mitigating the negative effects of capitalism, instead of trying to think of an alternative.
“Acid communism emerges from Fisher’s constant cry within Capitalist Realism to imagine a new future. The communism element is debatably symbolic, simply representing a philosophy that goes beyond capitalist realism, and thus into a world that could go beyond capitalism itself.”
Geotraumatics, Expenditure, and Death: Towards a Transcendental Deduction of Oil - A phenomenological essay on oil I liked. In the future, I want to do something similar in the future on the phenomenology of changing beliefs. I’ve never really written like this, but many of my favorite authors have pieces that in one way or another focus on first-person experience in interesting ways.
It’s interesting trying to “transcend” writing in different ways. One short story that comes to mind is Murakami’s Blind Widow Sleeping Woman; if you’re interested in how Murakami uses phenomenology there, this is a good essay to read.
2.2 Cryptocurrency
What I really think of Bitcoin (Ray Dalio) - In my experience, most people who are skeptical of Bitcoin simply don’t buy it and go on with their day. Ray Dalio does not fit this mold. He’s historically been somewhat skeptical of Bitcoin, and public with his views. However, this most recent post has made it sounds like he’s changed his mind, and become cautiously optimistic about Bitcoin’s potential as a gold-like asset.
“That is why to me Bitcoin looks like a long-duration option on a highly unknown future that I could put an amount of money in that I wouldn’t mind losing about 80% of.”
A Look at the Path for Bitcoin If It Is to Become an Alternative Storehold of Wealth - Bridewater Assocaites (full report) - In his LinkedIn post, Dalio attaches a long form report (8-pager) that he had some of the folks at Bridgewater assemble. You’ll have to scroll down a little to find it.
This report is excellent. I wish I’d saved myself the trouble of reading all of The Bitcoin Standard the other week, and just read this report.
“Bitcoin offers some attractive attributes, such as limited supply and global exchangeability, and is evolving quickly. For now, though, we do not see it as a viable storehold of wealth for large institutional investors, thanks mainly to a high degree of volatility, regulatory uncertainty, and operational constraints. Rather, we see it as more like buying an option on potential “digital gold”—it has a wide cone of outcomes, with one path leading to it becoming a true institutionally accepted alternative storehold of wealth.”
…
Bitcoin faces challenges that at least for now could slow broader adoption by institutional investors. We’d highlight three in particular:
Bitcoin remains an extremely volatile asset, and its future purchasing power remains a fundamentally speculative proposition. Compared to established storeholds of wealth, such as gold, real estate, or safe-haven fiat currencies, Bitcoin faces a much wider range of outcomes in terms of its future value.
Bitcoin still faces meaningful regulatory tail risks and lacks any of the underlying government backing or deep history that would provide a more fundamental baseline of future demand. While greater regulation might help Bitcoin gain broader institutional acceptance, it could also trigger selling by some of its largest existing owners who prioritize a lack of public oversight around the asset.
While there have been improvements, current levels of liquidity still constitute real structural challenges to holding Bitcoin for large traditional institutions such as Bridgewater and its clients.
Biden’s SEC Chair Could Increase the Adoption of Cryptocurrency - Regardless your stance on cryptocurrencies, everyone agrees that everything about their future turns on how it will be regulated in the near-to-medium term. Based on this article, the outlook seems more optimistic in the coming years.
“Biden is set to announce a new lead for the U.S. Securities and Exchanges Commisions (SEC) soon. Gary Gensler will likely be tapped for this position. He is uniquely qualified for this position.
Gensler served as the former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. He taught digital currency and blockchain at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He’s testified about cryptocurrencies in the past, before congress. Gensler’s future legislation could diminish the risks of trading these digital assets. In 2018, Gensler spoke optimistically at Bloomberg’s Institutional Crypto event providing insight into his potential policy goals”
Janet Yellen Will Consider Limiting the Use of Cryptocurrency - Probably the most obvious regulatory hurtle cryptocurrencies must come to terms with is KYC (Know Your Customer). For a sophisticated user, it can become challenging (although not impossible) to track down the identity of the owner of a given wallet. As such, cryptocurrencies are popular methods to pay for all forms of illicit goods and services. Janet Yellen, the Secrety of Treasury under Biden, seems to have begun weighing in.
“Cryptocurrencies are a particular concern," Yellen responded. "I think many are used—at least in a transactions sense—mainly for illicit financing."
She said she wanted to "examine ways in which we can curtail their use and make sure that [money laundering] doesn't occur through those channels."
2.3 Software Engineering
What Is the Python Global Interpreter Lock (GIL)? - A great introduction to Python’s Global Interpreter Lock. If you’re not familiar, for thread safety reasons, GILs makes it such that only one thread can only hold one instance of a Python interpreter. The GIL can make using multiple CPUs in Python more challenging than it might be in other languages.
This article gives a practical overview of concurrency in Python (I/O bound vs CPU bound bottlenecks) and provides a solid overview of the history of the GIL in Python. It’s also remarkably brief, considering the content. Would highly recommend if you need a refresher on the GIL or just concurrency in general!
The developers of Python receive a lot of complaints regarding this but a language as popular as Python cannot bring a change as significant as the removal of GIL without causing backward incompatibility issues.
The GIL can obviously be removed and this has been done multiple times in the past by the developers and researchers but all those attempts broke the existing C extensions which depend heavily on the solution that the GIL provides.
Of course, there are other solutions to the problem that the GIL solves but some of them decrease the performance of single-threaded and multi-threaded I/O-bound programs and some of them are just too difficult. After all, you wouldn’t want your existing Python programs to run slower after a new version comes out, right?
The creator and BDFL of Python, Guido van Rossum, gave an answer to the community in September 2007 in his article “It isn’t Easy to remove the GIL”:
“I’d welcome a set of patches into Py3k only if the performance for a single-threaded program (and for a multi-threaded but I/O-bound program) does not decrease”
Software Development topics I’ve changed my mind on after 6 years in the industry - A brief set of bullet points about the title. I found myself nodding along quite a lot, especially to the below:
Software architecture probably matters more than anything else. A shitty implementation of a good abstraction causes no net harm to the code base. A bad abstraction or missing layer causes everything to rot.
Java isn't that terrible of a language.
Despite being called "engineers," most decision are pure cargo-cult with no backing analysis, data, or numbers
My own thoughts on these:
I used to hyper-focus on code quality early in my career. Was I writing everything just right? What horrible things would go wrong if I didn’t implement my object oriented abstraction in just the right way? What if we don’t lint the project? Gasp! While these things can still be somewhat important, I find that the place I pay the most attention to now is the design phase. That’s where shit can really hit the fan. Conversely, it’s often OK to trade code quality for velocity (especially in a startup setting).
I actually like Java. Sorry everybody.
This leaks in everywhere in our industry. Interviewing, technological choices, project management practices. Everywhere.
Dask - Dask makes parallel computing on Python (including distributed machine learning) simple. For those indoctrinated into the Python machine learning environment, it may seem crazy to adopt yet another tool. But, while tools like Spark seem ideal for large streaming, machine learning, and batch projects, Dask is still able to carve out a nice niche by not requiring a JVM, being smaller and lightweight, and being closer to the pandas/numpy environment most that build data science projects are used to.
If this sounds interesting, I’d encourage you to read this comparison with spark as well!
Spark is mature and all-inclusive. If you want a single project that does everything and you’re already on Big Data hardware, then Spark is a safe bet, especially if your use cases are typical ETL + SQL and you’re already using Scala.
Dask is lighter weight and is easier to integrate into existing code and hardware. If your problems vary beyond typical ETL + SQL and you want to add flexible parallelism to existing solutions, then Dask may be a good fit, especially if you are already using Python and associated libraries like NumPy and Pandas.
Dask has been very convenient for some of my use cases at work, but most the time, we still use Spark.
2.4 Marketing
A guide to your Substack metrics - I’m curious what people think of this Substack, and I’m not really sure what to make of the metrics. It seems, based on what I read here, what I’m writing is fairly healthy :)
This article is probably worth a read if you’ve decided to start a substack and wonder what the metrics page is all about.
“We've found that open rates of 50-60% or higher are a good signal of engagement, although this number varies depending on how often you email your list. If you send out daily emails, for example, a 40% rate is also healthy.”
How to increase your luck surface area - The author discusses striking the right balance between doing work and talking about the work you’ve done. The claim is that, to get serendipitous events, you must do the work you’re interested in, and communicate that work. I’ve noticed this a lot while blogging: when a post is on an especially marketable topic, I’ll often get people reaching to me interested in partnering. Once I almost started a business that way.
There’s something to this idea, but the author’s formula implies the amount of communication you do should be directly proportional to the amount of work you do on your topic of interest. I disagree here. I think the distribution should be more skewed towards the topics you’re interested in. However, people a lot more successful than me seem to argue in favor of more communication. An successful indie-hacker I met once in Japan, Takuya Matsuyama, told me he focuses 30% on his blog and 70% on his “actual work”, but that he thinks the ideal distribution is closer to 50-50. Mine is probably closer to 5-10% telling, 95-90% working, but maybe that’s because I’m earlier in my career than him.
2.5 Expats and Digital Nomads
Especial Economic Zone of Yucatan, will be transformed into “Technology Wellbeing Pole” - I’ve been interested in the expat community all over the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico for some time now. The Yucatan Peninsula—especially the Riviera Maya—can be a wonderful place to work or relax, and it has the added benefit of being on east coast time. On a couple of different occasions I’ve spent over a month there, working remotely, but I’ve never fully made the plunge to living there.
There was some news a few years back around a special economic zone (with tax incentives) being set up in Progreso, a beach town near the capital of the Yucatan, Merida. I’ve never been to Progreso myself, nor have I heard great things about it, but the concept seemed interesting to me. Unfortunately, it seems the economic zone is still very much in flux (this article is also a little stale, as there hasn’t been much on this in the last year).
I’m still very interested in the expat community in Mexico, and, more broadly, how cities become technological hubs in the first place. I also have a decent amount of experience staying in the Yucatan, so, down the line, I’ll probably write on this topic some more. Stay tuned.
2.6 Politics
J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues - JK rolling’s essay from back in June 2020 on why she finds some current trends amongst trans activists to be concerning. The essay is surprisingly personal; it goes deep into Rowling’s own past.
“So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.”
J.K Rowling (ContraPoints) - ContraPoints is a popular, and (somewhat) left-leaning Youtube channel that typically focuses on social and political issues. This episode was a response to J.K. Rowlings stance on trans activism and recent legislation. On several occasions, I found parts of her arguments against Rowling convincing. Especially in relation to the “bathroom argument”.
In all honestly, I didn’t want to talk about this video; the topic is just too radioactive. But it suits the purpose of substack too well for me not to touch on. Natalie Wynn, the host, did change my mind on the “bathroom argument” (for whatever that’s worth). Take a look for yourself:
On Justice and Accountability: The Attack on Capitol Hill - A brief essay where the author advocates for holding the people that attacked the capital accountable for their actions. Not only to be consistent with our overseas actions, but to prevent further attacks.
“...a recovering government looks to a series of goals to achieve. The four primary goals include: (1) taking steps to establish the truth of what happened following a conflict, (2) taking steps to reform internal state systems to ensure that the conflict cannot rear its head again, (3) providing victims with reparations for harms suffered, and (4) punishing perpetrators for their abuses.”
America has a serious human capital problem | Andrew Yang + Chamath Palihapitiya | Yang Speaks - Yang and billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya talk free form about the challenges those with considerable amounts of influence face tackling big problems. It’s bizarre to hear that the biggest challenge isn’t finding the money.
“I really haven’t met a problem that is one of capital. And I think I have more than enough resources to solve all the critical problems we’re trying to solve, except one critical one: which is human capital. And I think that’s the most improtant thing to take away…Let’s just say you and I said, ‘Hey—let’s get every single home in America to be carbon neutral’, how would we do it?
…
As it turns out, it’s not one of capital, because you can get hundreds of billions of dollars of project finance to do that, because people spend hundreds of billions of dollars buying the bonds of utilities every single day in the market place. The really complicated part is can you get 15 or 20 engineers to build to build the right app that allows you to basically understand how energy is managed and recirculated? Can you get the right battery scientists and chemists to build the right battery storage technology? Can you string those batteries together across a neighborhood?
So what I’ve found is most of these solutions are one of human capital, and it doesn’t take tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. People find ways of spending that much money, but that’s just a lot of poor planning.
…
In that early phase, the single hardest thing to find are the people.” —Chamath