Alex's notes

A survey from Deloitte found that 43% of companies see compliance as their greatest challenge and several key trends.

When companies run surveys and industry analysis that they share with the media, they’re gaining exposure for themeselves.

The “the first AI software engineer” Devin, from Cognition Labs, was found to be fixing bugs of it’s own doing, solving problems in a roundabout way, and taking a long time, in a debunking video by a human software engineer.

What if the entire services industry merges with SaaS when it becomes possible to deliver a service with artificial intelligence?

I try to be careful about what I read in the morning as that has a way of setting the tone for the day.

Henrietta Lacks passed away from cervical cancer in 1951, but her cells have been continuously used in medical tests due to their ability to replicate quickly.

A products is not just collection of features, but a promise to solve a problem or enhance the customer’s life in some material way.

The energy spent making a decision should be proportional to the consequences.

While well intentioned, a utilitarian approach to maximizing expected value of the greater good (or minimizing suffering) has unintended side effects.

Knowledge collapse is the paradox where increasing access to certain types of knowledge actually harms understanding.

Business strategy should concisely answer who the most import customers are, how to attract them, and what the entire company must work towards to win that market.

The big orange cones with steam coming out of them in Manhattan are from the leaking network of steam pipes that heat commercial buildings.

A theory of how plants cooperate comes from research of how fungus connects tree roots together into common mycorrhizal networks (CMN).

In a two party system you never want both party A and party B buffering at the same time because it creates artificial delays in the system.

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Between 2008 and 2021, the market was operating under zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP).

I received a one question feature survey from Screen Studio and I thought it was the best survey I have ever received.

When employees lose their sense of agency they start to look outwardly as the source of their problems and solutions.

The parable of the six foot man who drowned in the stream that was five feet on average is a reminder to plan for the possibility of low ends when building a portfolio.

Contempt undermines any rational argument you might make to convince another person of anything.

Productive engineers should write one pull request per day.

Interest rates are a technology that allows people to transact across time.

Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern summarized Goodhart’s law most succinctly saying, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Author Edward Chancellor neatly summarizes why interest rates are so important, “Interest rates are the price of time.

Astronomers found that Mimas has an ocean underneath it’s surface by observing and modeling it’s orbit.

A study of over 100,000 people in England found that found that cognitive deficits from COVID-19 infection (memory, reasoning and executive function) were similar between those whose symptoms resolved in less than 4 weeks and 12 weeks but were larger in t…

In Money AI Bubble, the author argues that the market is in an AI bubble.

I watched an interview with Susan Rogers, sound engineer for Prince, and she described Prince’s prolific production process.

Institutions end up perpetuating the problems they aim to resolve, either intentionally or unintentionally.

One way to measure product market fit is to look at the time it takes between putting a product out in the market to the first $1MM in ARR.

According to a report by Common Paper of 1,000 businesses, commercial agreements take a median of 3 to 4 days to sign depending on the size of the company.

A collection of benchmarks for B2B businesses (mostly relevant for early-stage SaaS).

If you are running a B2B business, you need to pay attention to anecdotes more than data.

Something I’ve noticed about building products over the years is that it always feels like I’m doing it wrong.

Smart people don’t like taking chances because they are afraid of being wrong.

In a recent paper, researchers were able to use the properties of DNA self-assembly to classify images.

A study of 270 patients diagnosed with Long COVID found that 53% of patients had response times that were 2 standard deviations slower than the control mean after controlling for age-related decline and comorbidities.

Inspired by (Almost) Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret, I thought it would be interesting to do the same for my startup.

The needs stack is a way of describing what a customer is trying to do when they are buying.

There are many packages for completions in Emacs.

I read The mistakes we make the second time by Harry Glaser.

Embark for Emacs seems like a useful way to further customize Emacs actions (M-x).

I was thinking the other day that there are few objects that I use somewhat regularly that are more than 10 years old.

In How to Live an Asymmetric Life, Graham Weaver talks about how to confront fear and get the most out of your life to a class of soon-to-be business school graduates.

There doesn’t seem to be a good web-based query editor for an Amazon RDS hosted postgres.

There are many theories put forth to explain human consciousness and experiments are running to test them.

I want to better utilize AI tools in my day-to-day work.

An English physician once described radium as “the unknown god”.

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I was watching an interview with Kobe Bryant where he talks about his workouts and approach to basketball.