One of the interesting things about new form factors for educational content is that they don’t have to read as new form factors for educational content.
“That’s not educational content.”

During much of my twenties I avoided frying eggs because I thought “frying” belonged to the class of operations one had to have “cooking talent” to be allowed to attempt.
(There are a lot of discourses about “permission to be allowed to try”, incidentally, and bulldozing as many as possible is one of the best things the Internet has ever done.)
(A statement I believe which is fathoms deeper than it appears: Anyone can learn to cook, in the same sense that anyone can learn to program.)

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More from @patio11

25 Feb
Day 42 of VaccinateCA.com and we've got a couple of announcements to make:

blog.vaccinateca.com/whats-next-for…

The big one: we're officially a non-profit, and have hired a small team to support getting reliable information about covid-19 vaccine availability to Californians.
Which should not overshadow the thing we do every day, which is the most important thing we do every day:

Today we called hundreds of pharmacies/etc across the state of California, asked the pharmacist on duty about how to get a covid-19 vaccine, and wrote down what they said.
Our site is now available in five languages, most recently featuring Korean, and we're working on other translations.

We are also working with distribution partners to get the data we collected in front of users wherever they are, whomever they're engaged with. More news soon.
Read 9 tweets
24 Feb
If you know someone who might be impressionable on this score, feel free to mention “Actually, many companies are hiring during the pandemic. Many companies structurally cannot pause hiring for more than 10 weeks or so without breaking their operations.”
Many, many, many people develop impressions of the market by averaging the last three comments they heard, and if this is their algorithm, they very rarely weight those comments by e.g. perceived ability of the commenter to influence a hiring process at their employer.
I was exactly like this during university, and e.g. was quite worried about what a liberal arts professor thought about the likelihood of tech companies to hire someone with an East Asian Studies degree for an engineering job.

“Clearly an expert in this” I unironically thought.
Read 5 tweets
23 Feb
One of my favorite genres of email to get is "Hey I correctly think I have almost exactly the same needs you do for a particular professional service; who would you recommend?"

It's easy to answer, creates value for everyone, and my accountants et al continue loving me.
"Why don't you just put a list on a website?"

Tricky because a) that bit about "correctly" understanding one's own needs is not universal and b) due to nature of my position in ecosystem have to be cagey about certain forms of implicit endorsement.
(Also operationally speaking some firms work *a lot* better if you get an intro to a responsible decisionmaker who will know they're coming via a particular referral, versus being told their name and to come in through the front door.)
Read 9 tweets
21 Feb
I got reminded by the renewal email that it’s been a year of paying @ByrneHobart so let me make an unsolicited plug:

diff.substack.com one of my very best sources of analysis, shower thoughts, and intellectual frameworks over course of last year, and improving over time.
Speaking of which: one of my big surprises over the last few years has been increasing exposure to internal analyses and/or products designed to move the behavior of high-status institutions, and...

You could pay $100k for reports that are much less useful than a single Substack
It’s well-known in e.g. the intelligence community that everyone reads the same New York Times but there is a driving conceit there that so-called Open Source Intelligence only has say 90% of the good stuff.

And yet, on topics of deep societal interest, over and over again:
Read 5 tweets
20 Feb
Evony, an operation I know about only because they previously made terrible and I presume effective ads, has honed their craft for years and now has a Twitter ad which is inescapable for me for last few days.

It’s almost literally an infohazard; I am disgusted and sorta awed.
The ad is a 10 second video clip of a fantasy themed puzzle game. It is incredibly well-constructed: you understand the rules within the first three seconds.

And the player is, very intentionally, a }^}+{^ing moron.

That’s the entire pitch.
They have weaponized Someone Is Wrong On The Internet and I think I am in a look-alike audience of people who are extremely disposed to clicking on this ad because aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa I am serious this thing is an infohazard for me.

Anyhow: disgusted, but at least a bit impressed.
Read 4 tweets
19 Feb
Echoes with the American experiment, where labor and capital within a cultural, linguistic, and immigration union is broadly mobile and by law and custom is encouraged to take into account different policy/tax regimes:

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
"Is a Youtuber labor or capital?"

Yes.

No really, that's a serious answer.
"You've got to do better than that."

The traditional example of someone straddling that boundary is a doctor in private practice. They are labor in the sense that every doctor is skilled labor. They are capital because of a) control and b) the skills (and, ahem, license) are
Read 8 tweets

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