Worth noting, apropos of the occasional discourses about getting customer service via Twitter, that the entire U.S. government has a blessed side channel.

It is calling your Congressman’s office. Can’t get a passport? Call and talk to Constituent Services. They do this all the time.

Immigration issue? Half their caseload.

Tax issue? They will happily bug the IRS on your behalf.

I'm joined this week on Complex Systems by @dsquareddigest , my favorite non-fiction author of recent years, to talk about organizational design, financial fraud, and the quirky business that is selling words for money.

complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/dan-d… His new book, the Unaccountability Machine, is an exploration into how modern organizations work that goes deeper than "It's the Algorithm" or "Late stage capitalism."

We cover information flow (and blockages), finding and losing technology of organizational design, etc.

I am surprised that a financial infrastructure provider would have the described policy regarding employees benefitting from equity appreciation in their customers.

coindesk.com/tech/2024/08/1…
The policy is, in brief, that the company kept a list of employee wallet addresses (anonymous numbered accounts) and provided it to customers, who would respond by voluntarily (maybe) cutting each of those employees in for equity ownership.

(Crypto pretends it isn’t equity.)

Falsehoods that compliance departments believe about addresses, example #2742.

https://twitter.com/bendodge/status/1824278074684477674

Note that this is very often addressable by individual compliance departments the same way a vast number of inconsistencies are addressed: a human eyeballs the situation, writes down a tweet length note, and hits Approved.

Imagine you’re talking to a time traveler back in 2000:

“Oh some good news: America does have end-to-end supply chain for high-value electronics.”
“Really?”
“Receivers for worldwide geosynchronous satellite-based ISP. Also ours.”
“Holy cow.”
“Private space industry, naturally.”

https://twitter.com/luke_metro/status/1817641791606407548

“Wow American had a sound industrial policy?! Or perhaps some technological revolution?”
“Nah it was basically one guy.”
“One guy.”
“He also runs one of the major auto manufacturers.”
“Oh so he’s from Ford or…”
“No that’s new too.”
“What.”
“Yeah he’s enormously controversial.”

There is something specially cursed about having one’s conversation about running vaccination infrastructure blocked out of concerns for misinformation, with a banner telling the user to go to the CDC for up-to-date accurate information.

https://twitter.com/mjreard/status/1819259043845718359

Ahh excellent, why didn’t I think of that in 2021. In lieu of running a nationwide information gathering effort to find the vaccine and distribute the information, I could have simply told people “Oh ask the CDC. I bet they know where it is.”

If a bank app displays something which appears to be a policy of the bank, consider that the people who caused that text to appear there may not understand the bank’s policy or be able to speak authoritatively regarding it, or that one may not have interpreted the text correctly. For example, the text “You cannot change this limit.” does not necessarily imply “We cannot change this limit.”

The good news: we got much better at running The Sort. The bad news: we got much better at running The Sort.

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1818758295856771135

We, the societal we, implemented a relatively effective nationwide (and increasingly worldwide) dragnet for talent, then plucked that talent from the not-random-but-constrained walk through lives it would counterfactually have encountered and tracked it fairly narrowly.

An extended anecdote to demonstrate the power of a Dangerous Professional incantation: “What are my options?” Today I’m traveling to Japan with Ruriko and the kids. The plan was a single stopover flight on my usual carrier, who shall remain nameless.

On checking from the car, it looked like the first flight was 2 hours delayed. And thus scene set for a chat.

Today on the Complex Systems podcast I talked with @KelseyTuoc on the social purpose of equity in tech community, how the deal broke down between tech companies and tech reporters, and a bit about fellow Internet weirdos over indexing on impact.

complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/repor… As always, comments in my own spaces are my own, which (while it is a disclaimer that will get you zero point zero grace from many reporters these days) you really have to say when you were previously in a Comms department discussing how journalism works.

Hugops all around today re: the Crowdstrike issue, including for all tellers working for a particular large national institution who are currently entirely stopped on anything requiring computer access. Frantic branch manager was serially delivering the news that they were impacted by quote the MicroSoft outage end quote and that ATM and online access *might* work.

(It is, ahem, sporadic.)

I have many thoughts on this thread, but it also stands on its own.

https://twitter.com/swiftonsecurity/status/1813375862877671692

Any customer service process you create, where the nature of the product sold does not radically exclude most of the population, needs to be robust against substantial diversity in capabilities of the general population.

My colleague @jeff_weinstein, who also worked on Stripe Atlas, had a good podcast episode about product management, engaging with users, creating delight, dealing with incidents from a comms perspective, etc.

lennyspodcast.com/building-produ… A thing that I really like about Jeff, which appears to be contrarian enough in large tech companies to mention, is that he exudes willingness to talk to customers without shunting that responsibility off to someone in a different org silo, to read about at next quarter’s sync.

There is something a little magical about giving your kids Dragonbox for the first time and watch them just intuit some of the rules of algebra, based on good game design. Liam even raged at the app for not allowing him to use the communicative property of multiplication. He definitely doesn’t know those four words, but “If 1X is X and X1 is X then clearly it doesn’t matter if I drag the one onto the X or the other way!!!”

Two weeks ago my buddy @fulligin pulled me aside and said "I have something to show you." That something was the Daylight Computer, which I was previously unaware of.

I've since bought one and am using it fairly extensively for reading. Vincent recorded some impressions: The DC-1 has a whiff of magic to it, comparable to the first time using a Kindle.

(Other people profess to have this feeling from the iPhone/iPad the first time. I honestly don't remember those as being "my life now has a before and an after" moments. Kindle was that.)

Matt Levine has a great piece today (well, you knew that) covering Goodhart’s law in the context of how ineffective it is to track mouse movements as a proxy for white collar productivity.

I think this is tempting thing for management to institute because there is a… suspicion. That suspicion is not “so-called ‘email jobs’ are actually not productive at all.” This is believed by many people on the Internet. Those people are greatly miscalibrated. The world runs on email. Email causes physical results in the world. Coordination/communication are valuable

A memorable moment in new employee training for me was when the trainer said that most people working professionally in our field could not whiteboard out funds and data flow between all entities in a credit card transaction. She asked why I could, given no experience in industry

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1800142794536984682

The answer I gave was that I had credit card processing accounts before and read the documentation and contracts carefully. This was true, but was a bit of a fib.

The real reason was I was curious about how PayPal worked in 2004 and had some time to kill.

Once upon a time I wrote letters on behalf of people to banks. I don’t do that anymore, in general, but I still get asked sometimes. I have been told, but not tried much, that GPT is very good when you tell it to cosplay as me specifically doing this.

So today I got an email. In “help the correspondent learn to fish” mode, I suggested they use ChatGPT to do this. But, since prompt engineering is a thing, thought I could take 30 seconds to write an example prompt.

And why not try it.

So.

chatgpt.com/share/7695f02b…

An interesting outcome of LLMs plus CNC machines would be reversing the much-lamented decline in adornment on buildings.

“For an upcharge of $X00 per square foot, we can do a frieze in any style you can imagine.”

https://twitter.com/urbancourtyard/status/1796854381565853743

(If one doesn’t like the LLM part of it then sculptors exist, and decoupling their location from the building’s location is ~newly an option.)

Somewhat self-indulgent because I'm mentioned in the thread, but yeah, this is a concrete example of Google getting convincingly outcompeted in search, *which should surprise me* and no longer does.

https://twitter.com/tr_babb/status/1795198571442029037

I haven't yet replaced my core uses of Google Search with "just ask an LLM already, they have a non-zero chance of getting it right" but I think there are a lot of searches for a lot of people where that is already obviously the optimal play.

I think Twitter porn bots are something like a visible test of non-state capacity.

Similar to the old line about McDonalds restrooms’ cleanliness: easy to check, hard to fake, surprisingly difficult to solve at scale, solvable at scale given sufficient capacity. And when I think of capacity degradation at Twitter under current management the people who expected it to failwhale and then go hard down permanently were clearly wrong and the people who expected no impact to capacity in firing X0% seem to also be wrong.