What I'm Reading: July
- Ben Leibowitz
- Aug 1, 2024
- 2 min read
Back by popular demand!
Tech
Companies are spending a ton on Generative AI projects that aren't showing great (if any) returns, and most are unlikely to do so within the next 10 years.
Guidelines and tools for treating software documentation as a first class citizen
Awesome-runbook - a GitHub repository for runbook documents, tools, and resources
Also, if anybody knows the maintainer of this repo, tell them to merge my PR...
Etc
Talent Search vs. Talent Development
A mathematician notes that his profession puts a lot of effort into the talent search, but lacks the muscle for developing even kids who are identified as high-potential.
Interesting parallels to companies that focus more on hiring than internal talent development
Pizza arbitrage - making DoorDash pay you for your own pizza
To acquire customers, DoorDash will sometimes run a "demand test" where they add the restaurant to their platform without the restaurant's permission, and they will subsidize the order and remove fees so they can go to the restaurant to say, "Look how many orders we can get you."
One guy figured out that for one restaurant, a pizza listed for $16 on DoorDash, and DoorDash would pay $24 to the restaurant - if you're that restaurant owner, you could buy your own pizza on DoorDash for $16, DoorDash would pay you $24, and you profit $8 in your own pizza arbitrage trade... that's exactly what they did.
Ever wonder how they make decaf coffee?
Soak them in a solvent to extract the caffeine from the beans!
Or hit it with high pressure CO2... the carbon dioxide dissolves the caffeine molecules
Or try the Swiss Water method: https://youtu.be/tAEQ4G-1jTQ
Study shows: as it turns out, yes - money can actually buy happiness
The housing crisis is also an income crisis
900,000 of the poorest workers can afford no more than $377 of housing per month, and the lowest tenth of workers can afford no more than $733 per month.
Increasing housing through supply won't fix the problem.
Return on investment for lots of different colleges
If Bloomberg has a paywall, try this for the raw data: https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/roi2022/
tl;dr - the return on many elite private universities is no better than public universities
Lots of schools in the article, but a few fun ones below (sorted by ROI)
College | Cost / year | ROI over 10 years |
MIT | $73k | $407k |
University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis | $47k | $404k |
Princeton | $74k | $340k |
Georgia Tech | $29k | $293k |
Harvard | $76k | $275k |
JHU | $71k | $231k |
UCLA | $35k | $211k |
UMD College Park | $27k | $200k |
Cornell | $75k | $190k |
Cal State University LA | $15k | $190k |
Virginia Tech | $27k | $187k |
University of Southern California | $77k | $170k |
University of Maryland Baltimore County | $26k | $150k |
Wake Forest | $74k | $130k |
Loyola University Maryland | $67k | $126k |
Juilliard | $73k | -$28k |