A historical collection of our writing.
During the industrial age, economies of scale were a major source of competitive advantage. Many production processes exhibited decreasing unit costs over a very large range of output. Steel was a classic example which resulted in a few very large steel companies dominating the market (at least […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
There was a fun Twitter convo about strong AI between Patrick Collison and Marc Andreessen. I also love speculating about this topic but before I engage in that I want to point out that from an employment perspective this is a red herring. A car is not a horse. And yet cars replaced horses in […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
I haven’t been posting much the last couple of weeks. There are a variety of reasons for that including spending extra time reading and learning new things but the main reason is that I am trying to understand better where we are today. What do I mean by that? I have been making the argument […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
Susan and I are looking for a personal assistant to help with many different organizational tasks. If you know someone who might be interested, please point them to our Craigslist ad. We built a simple video application process using Ziggeo and Firebase to help screen candidates (will open source […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
The definition of a commodity is a good that is “supplied without qualitative differentiation.” You can’t charge more than others for crude oil, you have to turn it at least into gasoline. And if you really want to charge a lot more you have to turn it into a plastic product. CPU cycles and memory […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
I recently finished Dave Eggers’s “The Circle” which provided a good challenge to my baseline view that more transparency is good and that data protection is a futile effort. One of the systems in the novel is an easy to deploy camera that anyone can point at anything and provide a livestream. […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
