Things I enjoyed reading
Here is a curious discussion about the business model of grocery deliveries being no different from those of classic offline stores.
The company's entire business model depends on those algorithms working psychological magic. Grocery stores make money by selling you not just the things on your shopping list but all the things that aren't on your list—that bag of chocolate chip cookies you can’t resist, or that ready-to-eat rotisserie chicken that sure would make an easier dinner than the recipe you had planned. Grocery stores already have an efficient way of presenting these items to prospective buyers: shelves. That's why the milk is in the back of the store. Companies like Jokr need to be no different, a taller task in app form, because apps don't have shelves, so they need algorithms.
I've used those a few times, and most of my groceries come from Amazon Fresh and other online shops, but being able to spot a missing ingredient and get it delivered within 20 minutes while cooking something else is pretty sick.
I will definitely do that again.
The last time I mentioned chess, I got distracted by an article where a human trained a computer to play chess good enough.
Here is another one: where a human trained themselves to climb up an international score table by quite a lot.
I got back into chess this most recent time, by picking up this book. The idea is you do a set of puzzles, let’s say 300. Then you do the same set in half the time, then half again, etc. 7 sets is the standard, the last set you’re supposed to be able to complete all the tactics in a day. This sounded like a novel approach, so I did a few sets of the ~300 beginner problems. By the third set, I felt like I was just remembering the exact positions. Plus I didn’t love some of the puzzles, so I’d get stuck on one then get frustrated when the answer was one of those “and then white has a crushing position”, which is totally useless for a beginner who can’t identify when a position is “crushing”.
I probably don't have enough patiens anymore to go through hundreds of puzzles, but would absolutely love it back in my childhood, where I had to do them by the book instead, and never enjoyed carefully copying positions from a picture just to find out twenty minutes later that a pawn got missed.
Would a person fit into a quart bottle? Doubtly so, but then three centuries ago there wasn't much entertainment going on either, so lots of people paid for entrance just to find out that was a bet aimed at researching how naive people are.
One thing is certain: the crowd rioted, tearing up benches, destroying the sets and scenery, and dragging whatever possible out onto London’s streets, staging a bonfire, with the theater’s curtain hoisted as a kind of victory flag. The event was not without humor: tricked by his own social class, the Duke of Cumberland (son to the King) was particularly enraged and drew his saber, intending to charge the bottle, only to be quickly disarmed. Quoting a letter sent by “a Scotch Jacobite lady”, Timbs ribs the Duke: “Fools should not have chopping-sticks”.
However the article takes the plot way further and ends up with an unusual twist and another piece of historical literature. I won't spoil that.
An essay about social networks, existing and upcoming, which I find quite amusing after working with social networks for quite a long time.
This is the classic social media chicken-and-egg cold start problem. Every Silicon Valley PM has likely heard the stories about how Twitter and Facebook's critical keystone metrics were similar: get a user to follow some minimum number of accounts. Achieve that and those users turn into WAUs, or even better, DAUs. Users failing to follow enough accounts were the most likely to churn. Many legendary growth teams built their entire reputations inducing tens or hundreds of millions users to follow as many other users as possible.
I especially like how the author highlights the impulse to judge, which to me sounds like the main way many use social media.
I never thought of MasterClass from this perspective: not as a platform to master something, but as a source of inspiration. So think Pinterest, but with more context.
But the spark that ignited it all — the whole reason that the kid puts in the hard work and asks his parents to go to a basketball camp — came from admiring the best of the best.
Masterclass is selling the LeBron James poster we put on our bedroom wall, not the skills coach we hire to train us three times a week. And they’ve learned that adults aren’t so much different from our 11-year-old selves: we love to be inspired by the greatest humans on this planet.
I wonder if that makes it effective anyway? There were a few masterclasses I got inspired by, and they were definitely worth their price.
Wish something like that found me eariler rather than later.
I didn't make a fortune out of startups I've worked for in the past, which obviously doesn't do judgement to my abilities to evaluate startup offers, but who knows what could be in the future?
For shareholders, the fundraise is usually good news. However, they now own a smaller piece of a larger pie. When your percentage of ownership is decreased via the issuance of new shares you’re experiencing dilution. If you were the lucky holder of 100,000 shares, you used to own 1% of the company. After this round, you only own 0.83%, and future rounds of funding will further dilute your shares.
And yes, the dilution is the sneakiest unpredictable thing that is there to happen.
Might be one of the oddest books reviews I've ever read, but comparing to its topic it is not that bad. I will try to source it myself, but by the looks of it, a good writer can turn even a book on fishing into a slice of history and time, and touch a bunch of complex ideas from philosophy to poetry.
What the hell was this book? I put it aside and kept fishing. But a few years later, while I was on a river in Idaho at dusk and found myself in the middle of a tremendous caddis-fly hatch, an answer occurred to me. Caddis flies, like many aquatic insects, pupate in little husks attached to rocks in rivers. At the right moment in the summer, they emerge as flies, swim to the surface and take off, but not before pausing to dry their wings. They do this by the thousands and, as Walton puts it, they make the trout “bold and lusty.”
My own encounter with fishing was pretty limited so far (altough already more successful than the author's) – that book might push me even closer to perfection.
I could mention it purely for the title but the whole post is worth reading.
A product can be an absolute flop with users, but there might have been many difficult technical challenges that were overcame by the engineers to build it, that the product manager receives a bad performance review while the engineers gets promoted, or vice versa if the product was a success but trivial to build.
Now we understand that each role has their own strengths (a jack of all trades is a master of none) and also their own value system. Everyone wants the product to be successful, but the top priority for the UX designer is likely to build beautiful things, and for the software engineer it is likely to solve technical problems.
This is indeed one of the biggest issues of the industry. Different members of the team have different motivation and metrics to succeed. Many companies avoid holding people accountable, and share responsibilities within the whole team, which makes recognizing one's acievements even harder.
So it is quite odd to expect from an engineer a solid and regular QA, or from a UI designer – a thought-through colour scheme conversion flow.
A genius way to make safe sex toys with a 3D printer. I am more interested in making food-grade molds (think silicone molds for frozen desserts), but that's pretty much the same technique, and while I already have bees wax (handy for infusions) and a vacuum chamber (handy for other infusions!), it looks like the right time to get a 3D printer.
You will want to cut your toy out of a larger shape like a cylinder, cut that cylinder into half (so you have two sides), then add registration nobs. These are used to help align the mould. I used little pyramids with their tops chopped off and rotated to stick out of and into the sides of the mould where the mould halves meet. Remember when making these that you need to add clearance between fitted parts. Meaning the holes should be slightly larger than the 'pegs'. Usually 0.3mm on each side will be good for most printers.
And then one day I will open my food-grade molds company and someone would ask me what finally prompted me to get the printer...
A great approach to understanding the problem (and eventually its solution), using development as an example, but in fact it could easily applied to anything else in life.
The problem is that we get caught in the same mental rut. You need to take deliberate action to step out of that rut. In Barara Oakleys excellent book A mind for numbers this is called the einstellung effect. This is when you're so caught in old thought patterns that you can't step back enough to see the bigger picture.
According to the book you have two modes of thinking: the focused and the diffuse mode. The focused mode is just what it sounds like - deliberate step by step calculations. It's what you do when you try the obvious solutions or step lines in a debugger.
The book is worth reading too, I can tell it from the summary.
Things I didn't know last Tuesday
I kind of suspected that if there is no pizza pepperoni in Italy, it must be coming from somewhere else.
“Peperoni” is the Italian word for large peppers, as in bell peppers, and there is no Italian salami called by that name, though some salamis from Calabria and Abruzzo in the south are similarly spicy and flushed red with dried chilies. The first reference to pepperoni in print is from 1919, Mariani said, the period when pizzerias and Italian butcher shops began to flourish here.
Now the USA seems like the most possible candidate, but I still don't fully accept that the closest Italian alternative would be Diavola.
And odd correlation that prompted a dedicated name:
RHS is a psychosomatic stress-related illness recognized in Japanese culture which has been estimated to occur in 60% of Japan's older female population. It is claimed to be a condition where a woman begins to exhibit signs of physical illness and depression as her husband reaches, or approaches, retirement.
Somehow in Western literature it is rarely mentioned. How come it is not the case in Europe?
For those running out of space but wishing to grow both potatoes and tomatoes, I am pleased to announce:
The pomato is a grafted plant that is produced by grafting together a tomato plant and a potato plant, both of which are members of the Solanum genus in the Solanaceae family. Cherry tomatoes grow on the vine, while white potatoes grow in the soil from the same plant.
Look at that:
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