April 29, 2024

s18e07: Do Not Reply Stickers; Computers were a Bad Idea; Two Things About Startups; and more tidbits

0.0 Context Setting

A sunny and crisp Monday April 22nd in Portland, Oregon.

Lately I’ve been flashing back to 1995, 16 years old and buying Oasis’s (What’s the Story?) Morning Glory and belting it out on the piano by... being a dad in his 40s and sitting down at the piano and belting the album out.

Some tidbits this week.

0.1 Events: Hallway Track, and Pulling the Cord

Hallway Track is still on hiatus.

Pulling the Cord, my plain-speaking guide to stopping traditional technology procurement is gearing up for its first non-test session, likely in May.

Last session had some big updates, the upshot of which is that the 1.0 talk will run to about 90 minutes to give everything time to breathe. And me time to breathe, to be honest.

This newsletter is where you’ll find out about the next session.

Next, on Very Little Gravitas, my general-purpose consulting vehicle: my calendar is opening up for late-June/early July, so get in touch if you have a problem you’d be exceedingly excited to have solved and off your plate. Here’s what I do.

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1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 Do Not Reply Cards, but Stickers

Florian Fangohr and I have still been working away at the Do Not Reply cards¹, of which you can now buy stickers!

They’re pretty fun. I spent a long long long time working on the copy for the stickers -- turns out that the copy that works for cards you post on social media next to/with your posts doesn’t quite work in the context of a sticker on a water bottle or laptop or whatever.

Here are two of my favorite new designs:

We’re selling the set of 15 for $35, you absolutely do not get any bonus stickers, and 10% of the proceeds go to Trans Lifeline.

... and you, my dear newsletter readers, can buy Do Not Reply stickers with a 10% discount!

This is also a reminder for anyone who has “done a thing” and gets anxious and the sweats about “telling people about the thing”, which is to say: you have to tell people about the thing otherwise nobody will know about it. Which is how I’m justifying tell you all about this thing right now. It is not skeezy to tell people about your thing.

If you happen to be the kind of person who runs a shop or influences the kind of people who run a shop (say, a museum shop? A gallery shop? Some other sort of really cool shop where really cool people buy really cool things?) then drop me a line and make me freak out about learning how to do wholesale. Ha.

1.2 Small things

Computers were just a bad idea

Long story short, HiSense TVs have a bad universal plug-and-play implementation (which is the software standard involved in a thing telling other things on a network that it can do a thing, so other things can talk to it). That implementation means that Windows gets super confused if a thing instead of advertising itself as one thing, ends up advertising itself as a gazillion things (technical term), with the end result that your Windows computer becomes unusable².

Caught my attention because: look, if you read priscilla’s writeup, this was pretty much impossible to diagnose but for the fact that they were able to google for a resulting reddit thread based on the symptoms. But the actual reason -- another smart device on the network being ill-behaved means that these days, it could be any number of things, from the apocryphal non-existent backdoored bluetooth toothbrush, to, I don’t know, a coffee mug. We are so screwed.

T-Shaped Pylons

The UK got some new electricity transmission pylons and they’re T-shaped³ and a) they look super cool, and b) super... European?

Caught my attention because: Infrastructure!

Centering Things

Centering things is hard⁴, a blog post that goes into extreme detail into the practical work of “centering something”.

Caught my attention because: Abstractions all the way down, the importance of paying attention to detail, and the effort/trade-off involved in paying attention to detail and ease of (good enough?) implementation.

Two things about “startups”

The first is Benjamin Sandofsky’s notes on the failure of the Humane Pin⁵, which goes into how funding for startups works versus non-vc funded businesses, and how some of the lessons people can learn from being at Apple (i.e. the backing of the world’s largest company by market capitalization) don’t really translate to being a startup business. Also, panicking at turning some interesting hardware into a mass-market consumer product, not being able to do it in time, and then “pivoting” to whatever the hot thing is at the moment, i.e. voice-based LLM interfaces.

(Of which! Voice-based LLM interfaces! Such a hot mess right now! A lot of the problems in voice interfaces like lack of discoverability and opaqueness of features that invariably just lead to frustration are still not solved! Maybe they can’t be! Certainly they can’t be with the current state of capability!)

Secondly, and somewhat relatedly, Steve Blank on what it was like doing sales-driven product development at a startup⁶, of which the big takeaway lesson when you want an executive to commit to using something is knowing what it would take to get them to use it and then calling their bluff, which in this case is working up a fully-cancellable sales order, because at least then they’ve got to figure out who’s going to sign something.

Caught my attention because: product development.

Buggy buggy bug bugs

Matt Johnson-Pint keeps a list of leap day bugs, and he has a list of 2024’s leap day bugs⁷. My favorite is the one about streetlights in Paris.

Caught my attention because: Software! Again!

Oh wait. Here’s a paper suggesting that we might have to add a negative leap-second⁸, which I have to imagine is a hilarious concept for software developers who already need to keep up to date on the falsehoods they believe about time⁹.

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OK, that’s enough! I’ve had a busy last couple of weeks. How have you been?

Best,

Dan

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