Category: daily

• February 10, 2022

  Zone 2

  I have not done Zone2 workouts since I used to d triathalons. More than a decade ago? What happened to the time…. I started doing zone-2 heartrate based workouts for all my ‘easy’ workouts the last few weeks. My hard workouts have suddenly gotten very easy and outputs that used to be a struggle are…
• February 7, 2022

  Don’t bet against Zuck

  I have heard and read several people saying you don’t want to bet against Zuck.   I have no doubt he is brilliant, knowledgeable, and capable.   I’m not betting against him, but here is why I might. Facebook has had an empirical innovation deficient.  They react to competitor innovation and do so effectively.  Their…
• February 3, 2022

  Attention Grab

  Meta’s earnings report resulted in a 20% drop in its stock price. I recently noticed, not being a very active Facebook user, that when I look at my feed I get an ad in the first post, then in the 4th post, then every 3 posts after that. I am also getting a number of…
• January 31, 2022

  Bonus Incentives

  The Bark Gift Shop Ltd. case from HBR has an example of a CFO setting sales targets for stores with a bonus incentive based on exceeding targets. I got curious about the optimal policy a manager would use in this scheme. I had to make some assumptions about how increased effort reduced the marginal increase…
• January 26, 2022

  Speculations about Inflation

  I know very little about inflation. Today I am only writing to get some thinking out so that it can be a base on which to build. My current knowledge can be summarized by, “Too much money chasing too few goods”. My current thinking is that companies like Amazon and TSMC making capital investments that…
• January 25, 2022

  Colab vs Cloud9/Lambda

  I was attending the first session of an AWS certification course.  The instructor was giving some examples of AWS tooling and said something that I found surprising.   The gist of the statement was that AWS Lamba + Cloud9 is just like Google Colabs. To be clear – I am not calling out the instructor.…
• January 23, 2022

  Electronic Oceans

  My favorite part from my Quantum Field Theory class from grad school was the idea that particles are excitations of a quantum field. Take your body, and all the cells in your body, and all the molecules in those cells, and all the atoms in those molecules, and all those electrons in those atoms, and…
• January 21, 2022

  Long Google, Short Netflix

  Chamath Palihapitiya said a few months ago that the cheapest inflation hedge would have been to go long on Google and short on Netflix. At the time I heard this on the All In Pod, I believe Google was around $2900 and Netflix was at $680. Today, after Netflix earning and interest rate hikes, they…
• January 20, 2022

  Efficient Crypto Frontier

  I have had a few conversations and listened to a few podcasts where some people are confused by the crypto-markets dropping along with stocks in response to interest rates and inflation. I’m not an expert, but I am willing to play one today. My mental model for this is simple – capital asset pricing model…
• January 19, 2022

  Daily Inspiration

  I started this section on the blog because I was inspired. There are several Twitter threads I have seen about writing and everyone one of them has mentioned that the great writers were consistent. I just want to get less bad. I suspect practice still applies. The action-initiating inspiration was from Seth Godin’s podcast Akimbo.…