What I'm Reading: August

Tech

• Amazon and Microsoft haven't convinced investors that their investment in AI is paying off

• Airlines are running out of flight numbers

• Awesome-runbook - a GitHub repository for runbook documents, tools, and resources

  • They merged my PR 😎

• A guide for prompt engineering

• A live, interactive cyber threat map

• The system verifying identity of cabin crews for airport security was vulnerable to SQL injection (it is kind of fixed now?)

• Erasure coding in distributed systems for fault tolerance

• Jeff Bezos' letter to shareholders describing two decision types: one-way doors and two-way doors

  • If a decision has permanent consequences (a one-way door), spend a lot of time making the right decision

  • If a decision can be reversed or its consequences can be fixed quickly (a two-way door), make the decision quickly and move on

• A real keyboard for iPhones!

• GitHub Copilot research shows Copilot AI-generated code is lower quality because of low code reuse and poor maintainability

• So you got a cease-and-decist from Facebook...

• In light of the Telegram founder's arrest, a history of the U.S. government's battle against encryption

Career

• What I learned [about working at a startup] by working for Mark Zuckerberg, from the founder of AppSumo

  • tl;dr - hire A players and fire quickly, pay your employees a lot, focus on one goal, move quickly, give ownership to the team, and sweat the details

• How to increase retention without increasing study time

  • "Overlearning" doesn't increase retention - meaning, once you "get it," you can stop studying. For example, if you're trying to memorize flashcards, once you recite them correctly once, there's no need to keep going.

• Some cap table worksheets for startup war games

• On engineering cultures: balancing "debate everything" vs. "just tell me what to do"

Etc

• A fun startup simulation game

  • (Let me know if you want tips or my spreadsheets...)

• Plastic in food is "widespread" and bottled water contains 240k plastic particles per liter. "Keep drinking, don't worry about it," says the plastic water bottle lobby.

  • Ways to reduce your exposure [1]:

    • Avoid plastic water bottles, use tap water

    • Store food in Pyrex / glass, not plastic tupperware / take-out containers

    • Don't microwave food in plastic

    • Don't eat out of plastic take-out containers (the plastic will flake off into your food as you eat)

    • Use wooden cutting boards, not plastic

    • Avoid fast foods and processed foods, which have higher levels of plastics in them

• Most frequently used emojis in 2021

  • Top 10: 😂 ❤️ 🤣 👍 😭 🙏 😘 🥰 😍 😊

• A study: Germany would have spent less on energy and would have met its climate goals more quickly if they hadn't transitioned away from nuclear power plants

• Great Value brand apple juice recall :(

• Who took the cocaine out of Coca-Cola?

• HP sued over printers that don't accept third-party ink

• Online therapy company BetterHelp settles with FTC for sharing customers' data with Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest for advertising purposes after promising to keep it private

• Risk aversion in dating by generation

  • Younger generations more risk averse (approaching people less in person, having less sex, smoking / drinking less, getting into fewer fights)... not mentioned: older generations cool as hell

College Stuff

• Olympic medalists by college

  • Top 3: Stanford, University of California, and University of Texas

• Half of high school seniors say they won't apply to colleges costing more than $40k

• Hopkins drops legacy admissions preference, sees increase in diversity

• USC re-affirms legacy admissions preference, but California lawmakers have approved a bill to outlaw giving preference to legacy or donors (it's now going to Governor Newsome to sign or veto)

• The ROI of an MBA!

Business School	ROI (annualized %)	ROI over 10 years after costs ($)
Kentucky (Gatton)	23.8%	$561k
Syracuse (Whitman)	22.0%	$751k
Georgia Tech (Scheller)	16.6%	$836k
Stanford	11.9%	$1.039m
Yale	11.9%	$822k
Maryland (Smith)	11.2%	$516k
Duke (Fuqua)	10.3%	$662k
Harvard	10.2%	$814k
Pennsylvania (Wharton)	9.0%	$678k
UC San Diego (Rady)	5.0%	$176k

Easy On The Wine...

• Remember hearing that a glass of wine a day protects against heart disease? As it turns out:

  • That was wrong, and alcohol consumption has no beneficial effect on heart disease at all

  • Alcohol consumption is a risk factor for cancer, even more so than UV radiation exposure

  • 1 to 2 drinks per day increases the risk of breast cancer for postmenopausal women

Risk Factor	Population-Attributable Fraction (PAF) of adult cancer cases [1]
Cigarette smoking	19.3%
Excess body weight	7.6%
Alcohol consumption	5.4%
UV radiation exposure	4.6%
Physical inactivity	3.1%

[1] - Population-Attributable Fraction estimates the proportion of cases of a health outcome in a population that can be attributed to a specific risk factor. Meaning, if cigarette smoking has a 20% PAF for cancer, it means that 20% of the population's cancers are attributed to cigarette smoking.