Curiosity about how the world works is underrated, particularly when combined with orientation towards the important bits of that.
Many people kinda sorta want to grow tomatoes, but few people really, really care about the supply chain for vegetables relative to the importance to humanity that tomatoes end up in the usual places at the usual times for the usual prices.
And thus you can have a career pretty much entirely based on “I care more about the tomato supply chain more than anyone you’ve ever met.”
(There are problems in the world more interesting than fresh tomatoes to work on, but that’s both true and not a knock on working on tomatoes.)
I also think you can probably learn more than anyone thinks is reasonable to know about tomato infrastructure in six weeks or so using motivated high schooler techniques like a) Googling a lot and b) finding a produce buyer at Whole Foods and asking them to geek out with you.
Not using “motivated high schooler” as a diminutive here, by the way, just saying that there is no deep magic required. I’ve watched motivated high schoolers sell $X0k of books they wrote, run vaccination information infrastructure for top 5 U.S. states, etc.
(An observation that @tqbf made about disassembly once that has stuck with me a long time: high schoolers empirically are surprisingly good at it because they haven’t had enough time to learn that everyone considers it hard.

I think that observation likely travels.)

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More from @patio11

15 Oct
CFTC fines Tether $41M and Bitfinex another $1.5M.

cftc.gov/PressRoom/Pres…

I doubt that is the last shoe to drop.
“Well at least they were 100% solvent 27.6% of the time instead of 27.6% solvent 100% of the time.”

Yeah but I wouldn’t put that second achievement past them yet!
Note the non-disparagement clause in the order that Tether will, with absolute night follows day certainty, break, and probably within the next 48 hours.

Because they just can’t help themselves.
Read 9 tweets
15 Oct
A Japan anecdote on the hospitality industry: after being shown our seat at a hotel’s (very nice) buffet it was explained:

“While of course your children are welcome to anything at the buffet if they are hungry and you don’t want to be rushed we could give them prepared plates.”
“Oh sure.”
“Would you like a plate built around [fish / meat / curry / other mains]?”
“Two of the noodles.”

*They arrive in under a minute.*

“Please take your time in browsing the buffet.”
And of course because Japan they’re nutritionally balanced and presented well. (Someone cared about making the colors pop.)
Read 4 tweets
15 Oct
Ghost and a GitHub action is a really fun combo to work with versus most other ways I’ve ever deployed a website.
It has the approximate immediacy of editing files on the server in a no-reload language with the git-based workflow I really want.

(And has content in a standard WP-y UI rather than in e.g. frozen markdown like my static site generator of choice, which is helpful for teams.)
“What are you building?”

Ask me next week.
Read 5 tweets
13 Oct
It’s surprising, but maybe not, how much Social Network and Big Short impacted peoples’ views on the typical behavior within the depicted industries and the metaphors and memes they used to refer to them in the future.
“It’s just like X said in…”
“You realize that person does not exist.”
“No it’s the story.”
“No that person literally did not exist. That character is a dramatic convenience. Their lines are not historical evidence.”
And a truly surprising number of technologists of my acquaintance learned everything they know about investment banking from the scenes designed to make investment bankers look like incompetent / corrupt actors.
Read 6 tweets
12 Oct
Comp packages at startups are going up and they’re opening both the geographical and life story hiring windows.

One structural reason, framed as a sketch:
Founders: The hiring market is absolutely mad!
Me: Good thing capital is abundant then.
Founders: No you don’t understand. We can’t even find engineers for mad money.
Me: Press X to doubt.
Founders: Not helpful.
Me: *sigh* What creative things are you doing to fix this.
Founders: Asking our network for referrals and hiring sourcers.
Me: Neither of those is creative, and both of them are trivially duplicated by every other firm your lead invests in, which all have *the same* network.
Founders: So what would you do?
Me: Probably tweet a bit.
Read 6 tweets
11 Oct
The cell phone camera may end up being one of the most important anti-fraud technologies ever developed.
Without going to much into secret sauce, and acknowledging there are a million different use cases:

Yesterday I tried to buy $50 of Steam credit, a transaction I have made many times before, with a credit card issued by a U.S. BigBank. They denied it due to perceived risk.
There are a few different loops you can imagine for instantly resolving this, and I’m sort of professionally irked that the bank has not long since fixed it using e.g. my authed phone session as a 2FA, but “Tell the user to take a photo of X” will feature into many in future.
Read 4 tweets

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