The Diff - Longreads + Open Thread

Longreads

• In The Verge, David Pierce covers the Excel world championships. For readers who have popped the F1 key off their keyboard and who felt their heart race when XLOOKUP() came out, there are some nice in-jokes—the contest is sponsored by Eve Online, for example. There's the game of solving problems, and there's also the metagame of optimizing around the contest's rules: one round is all about the high score at the end, while another eliminates the lowest-scoring player at set increments. Modeling out the new optimal strategy given that kind of tweak that someone who lives in Excel will have no trouble with, but there's always another metagame: if you're good enough at Excel to be competitive, is it really the best thing to be good at?
• Marian Kleinberg walks through the process of designing a Lego orrery. Lego is a great way to internalize the fact that a limited set of inputs can lead to effectively unlimited outputs given sufficient creativity, and the business has some fun economic nuances around user-level network effects, generational retention, and partnering with media brands to outsource IP protection ($, Diff). At the same time, parts that are specific enough to reason about have their own cost; this piece spends some time looking at how the exact specifications of Lego pieces force approximations from the end product. So this is also a fun look at a digital simulation of an analog process in the physical world equivalent of an embedded system.
• In GQ, Rosecrans Baldwin asks why everyone is using steroids. This is an easy topic to underrate, but it's a big deal if people are hormonally a different age than they are physically. The usual life path is that young people have more ambition and energy, but less social and financial capital, so there's a limit to the scope of the trouble they can get into. That's changing as the market for talent gets more efficient and as investors target younger people, but it's also changing in the opposite direction as people in their forties and fifties dial back the behavioral clock a few decades. And it's one of those practices with feedback loops: if you take a little bit of a drug that makes you want to compete more, and makes you less worried about risks, there's a good chance that taking more of something stronger sounds like a good idea, too.
• William Deringer writes in The Journal of Modern History about the rise of actuarial tables and present value calculations in early modern England. You'd think that these would be used in a commercial context, where people are trying to get an advantage over one another, but it turns out that a common early application as in a religious context where they both sides—someone donating an income-producing asset to a church, and the church itself—wanted a square deal. The Diff has written before about the religion/finance connection: they're both fields that try to determine the tradeoff between actions in the present and their positive and negative consequences over an indefinitely long future. Sometimes the connection is more literal than that.
• Ruxandra Teslo on the tradeoffs of hiring disagreeable nerds. Organizations are initially defined by who starts them and ultimately defined by which traits the select for and against. If your organization's goal is to produce insights others wouldn't come up with, it's not going to thrive if it also excludes the kinds of people who are good at that, many of whom are also pretty annoying to be around. (You can take this in a further, more Coasian direction, and imagine every organized group of people as an effort to make personal pathologies as un-pathological as possible.)
• In this week's issue of Capital Gains, we ask: should you learn to code? It's a big investment, which is uncertain both because you won't know if you're good at it for a while and because of the uncertain distribution of future developer skills. But it's also because it's hard to tell how much coding will change due to AI tools. Overall, though, it's still a safer bet.
• This week on The Riff, we talked about the cycle of populism and elitism, inequality discourse as a fight within a different 1%, investing if you're expecting AI, and more. Listen on Twitter/Spotify/Apple/YouTube.

Books

The Trolls of Wall Street: The meme stock trend felt like it came out of nowhere, but it had been brewing for a long time. When WallStreetBets suddenly turned GameStop from a small-cap to a large-cap in the space of a few months, it was already nearly a decade old—and it really was a group effort, with RoaringKitty as more of a mascot than a ringleader. This book goes through the history of the community, touching on some of the underlying developments that made the boom happen, and looks at where we go from here. (It also has incredible timing, since it was written in the aftermath of one GameStop run-up and came out right around the same time as another.) There's a longer review for paying subscribers as well ($).

Open Thread

• Drop in any links or comments of interest to Diff readers.
• Financial engineering has limits, and it's rarely a good main advantage even if it helps with other advantages. But are there any companies that succeeded mostly by finding a clever way to finance themselves?

Diff Jobs

Companies in the Diff network are actively looking for talent. See a sampling of current open roles below:

• Well-funded deep tech startup that's solving water scarcity is looking or a software engineer. Experience with Deck.GL and Typescript is ideal, Python also helps. (Los Angeles)
• A startup building high-performance tools for simulating complex crypto products is looking for a low-level engineer. CUDA required, extensive C++ experience also matters. (Remote, EU preferred)
• A startup building high-performance tools for simulating complex crypto products is looking for a low-level engineer. CUDA required, extensive C++ experience also matters. (Remote, EU preferred)
• A startup building tools to enable people build communities and own their own data is looking for a site reliability engineer with deep Kubernetes experience. (Remote, SF preferred)
• A well-funded startup is building a platform to identify compliance risks associated with both human- and AI-generated outputs. They are looking for a cloud infrastructure engineer to join their team of world-class researchers. (NYC)

Even if you don't see an exact match for your skills and interests right now, we're happy to talk early so we can let you know if a good opportunity comes up.

If you’re at a company that's looking for talent, we should talk! Diff Jobs works with companies across fintech, hard tech, consumer software, enterprise software, and other areas—any company where finding unusually effective people is a top priority.