Stuff I read: 3 October 2022
Previously Undisclosed OLC Opinions Illuminate the Growth of Executive Power by Jonathan Shaub (Lawfare). Discusses how the executive branch has become less cooperative with congress since the Nixon administration. "Choosing between constitutional hardball and conciliation" reminds me of How Democracies Die.
A Self-Authenticating Social Protocol by Bluesky. Bluesky is an R&D organization started by Twitter. They're working on decentralized social media, and this post describes the high-level direction that they're going in. I see my own work as one layer above this: I'm interested in decentralization, but I'd mostly prefer to let other people work on new protocols while I build applications on top of whatever we have now. I'll be keeping an eye out for opportunities to build whatever Bluesky comes up with into my products.
We don’t have a hundred biases, we have the wrong model by Jason Collins (Works in Progress). Argues that behavioral economics et. al. have a model of human behavior—the rational actor model—which simply lacks the power to elegantly explain a lot of observed phenomena, in the same way that the geocentric model of the solar system couldn't explain the planets' observed trajectories unless you throw in a bunch of hacks. Suggests some starting points for working towards a new model of behavior.
How Time Series Databases Work—and Where They Don't by Alex Vondrak (Honeycomb blog). I've been vaguely familiar with the concept of time series databases for a while; this post made my understanding more concrete.
Why Culture Eats Strategy by Evan Armstrong (Every). Another post in the category of "there are multiple ways to succeed." Although it's cliche, I do think "be yourself" is pretty good advice.
Published 3 Oct 2022