My favorite links from this week:
- How military operations get their codenames
- Why Amazon is eating the world
- The Atlantic has a project called Life Up Close that I enjoyed. My favorite quote is from someone on foot in the rainforest of Peru, upon seeing a live jaguar: “He was running, really mad, angry, roaring, showing his teeth, hair bristling—and stopped about 10 or 12 meters from us and then jumped off the road,” he recalls. “We almost shitted our pants.” – Yep, that makes sense to me
- American Equity
- Unforeseen consequences and that 1929 vibe
- An excellent Kent Beck post about partitioning complexity. I learned a couple new tricks from this, and often found myself nodding my head. I already use many of these tactics, but I didn’t have names for them (and never really thought deeply about them). The one I notice most people find novel is the “Predict test results”. I use this one all the time.
- Future of money or speculative hype?
- Another Kent Beck post musing about unit tests vs. integration tests
- Meritocracy is a trailing indicator
- 10 things nobody tells you before an Antarctic expedition
- A short but concise summary of why blockchain just isn’t as radical as you want it to be
- A short video about how bacteriophages may be a protector against antibiotic-resistant bacteria (7m)
- Turns out, mumbling is a clever compression device
- Adults Beware: On the Wisdom of Goosebumps books
- Step into the VC Time Machine (be sure to read the Sequoia deck!)
- A cool post about detecting nuclear explosions around the world (and the false positives)
- A map of Odysseus’ travels in The Odyssey
- The coral reef pattern of incremental improvement (especially applicable to improving monolithic apps)
- Does every senior leader on your team have a backup?
- Bill Gates reviews John Doerr’s new book
- The next time you feel like complaining at work, do this instead
- New anti-American bill passed in Russia
- Supernovae are much more powerful than you can nearly imagine
- How to fix MoviePass
- Why forced data portability is a mistake
- An excellent, excellent visualization of the current climate change trajectory
I finished reading Russian and The West Under Lenin and Stalin. Reading the history of Russia and how it behaved during WWII is fascinating and educational.
