Dozen Worthy Reads 📰 (No. 145)
Twitter, Costco, TikTok, Product Leadership, Universities, and SPAC's
Hi All,
Hope you all are doing well. People who know me know how passionate I am about education. This article from last week on The Margins : The International Student Bait-and-Switch made me wonder about getting an education in the United States. More fundamentally, I’ve always thought that the United States had a more profound respect for human dignity. That I could be a productive member of this society, my work would be respected and judged on its merits, and then in return, I’d get at least a baseline of sanity, a quiet place that I could live my life in. While that has been true for me, I don’t know if this is true for the next generation. The United States should not only want but also need immigrants.
I hope you all have a fine week and as always if you like this please share!
On COVID-19 Vaccines. This link has the current status of the vaccines. I also have a list of the different types of vaccines right at the bottom. of this newsletter I took this list from the link. Fascinating…
On H1-B Visas
Speaking of immigration, Tech’s Increasing Dependence on Foreign Students, in Six Charts has an account of who’s actually applying for H1 visas:
On GPT3 : Quick thoughts on GPT3 is a good writeup as is the below from ArkInvest’s James Wang | @jwangARK
Barely a month since OpenAI released it to developers, GPT text generator already is performing remarkable tasks. With only two examples in English, Sharif Shameem, founder of Debuild, taught GPT to generate JavaScript (JSX) code. When asked to generate a button that looked like a watermelon, GPT promptly produced code that rendered a circular button with green borders and pink interior. Asked to make a table of the richest countries in the world, it produced a list of developed countries ranked by GDP. Unlike Siri or Alexa which retrieve information from the internet, GPT internalizes knowledge after training on massive datasets and then synthesizes answers in well-written English. Today, Twitter is teeming with examples of GPT feats, from imitating famous philosophers to performing basic accounting tasks.
GPT appears to be the first example of artificial intelligence (AI) that a non-technical person can “train”. While today’s AI tools can perform specific tasks like recognizing images, translating languages, and answering questions, users can’t instruct them to do other tasks. Based on Shameem’s experiment, GPT can be “told” what to do with text examples. With just two examples, it seems to “understand” and execute the task. Though not “general” artificial intelligence by any stretch, GPT could evolve into an “idiot savant”: after ingesting all the information on the internet, GPT should be able to deliver amazing - better than human -results.
In the short term, we believe OpenAI is shaping up to become the Twilio of text generation. Longer term: AI will likely intermediate, disintermediate, and enhance all jobs involving language.
On the various generations of mobile networks
I came across the below while researching something for my article on Jio and I thought it was a good reminder of the different generations:
First generation - 1G : 1980s: 1G delivered analog voice.
Second generation - 2G : Early 1990s: 2G introduced digital voice (e.g. CDMA- Code Division Multiple Access).
Third generation - 3G : Early 2000s: 3G brought mobile data (e.g. CDMA2000).
Fourth generation - 4G LTE : 2010s: 4G LTE ushered in the era of mobile broadband.
Fifth generation - 5G : A unified, more capable air interface. It has been designed with an extended capacity to enable next-generation user experiences, empower new deployment models and deliver new services. With high speeds, superior reliability and negligible latency, 5G will expand the mobile ecosystem into new realms. 5G will impact every industry, making safer transportation, remote healthcare, precision agriculture, digitized logistics — and more — a reality.
Examples of GPT in action …
In economics and consumer theory, a Giffen good is a product that people consume more of as the price rises and vice versa—violating the basic law of demand in micro economics. For any other sort of good, as the price of the good rises, the substitution effect makes consumers purchase less of it, and more of substitute goods; for most goods, the income effect (due to the effective decline in available income due to more being spent on existing units of this good) reinforces this decline in demand for the good. But a Giffen good is so strongly an inferior good in the minds of consumers (being more in demand at lower incomes) that this contrary income effect more than offsets the substitution effect, and the net effect of the good's price rise is to increase demand for it. A Giffen good is considered to be the opposite of an ordinary good. Giffen goods can be compared to Veblen goods which similarly defy standard economic and consumer demand theory but focus on luxury goods.
Examples of Giffen goods can include bread, rice, and wheat. These goods are commonly essentials with few near-dimensional substitutes at the same price levels.
Security Theater - a cool term. Show to make a user feel secure …
Bruce Schneier’s “security theatre,” which refers to security measures that make people feel secure, without doing anything to protect their security. The most prominent examples of security theatre are processes such as pat-downs at sporting events or liquid bans at security checkpoints in airports.
Products this week. I came across four cool products this week on PH.
Trends Everywhere - The easiest way for data people to track internet trends
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Unstack - The world's fastest free all-in-one website builder
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Virtual Models by Rosebud AI - Faster go to market with AI generated models for photography
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Clean Spreadsheets - Automatically clean customer data with a few clicks
This week’s dozen:
Monetizing Twitter : If I Ruled the Tweets
On professional networks, like LinkedIn, most users are the product, but power users are the customers. Anyone can use LinkedIn for free, but users who need more capabilities - who want to recruit beyond their own network, see who’s viewing their profiles, or reach out to qualified leads - can pay for additional functionality. Like a social network, everyone on LinkedIn benefits from more people being on LinkedIn, but certain people and companies can pay to benefit more.
Great read on Costco and the Kirkland brand and how the economics work : How Costco Convinces Brands to Cannibalize Themselves
There’s a few reasons why Kirkland became the biggest private label brand. One reason is their low-price business model. Sinegal mentioned in a recent lecture that he prides Costco on having “absolute pricing authority”. It means customers can be absolutely sure that Costco has the lowest prices anywhere. There’s only one company at a time that can deliver on this promise! And Costco has. In fact, their whole business is built around offering lower prices. They have a captive customer base that shops in bulk at their store. And Kirkland sits right in the middle of this strategy.
Dfinity, the internet computer : A plan to redesign the internet could make apps that no one controls
Dfinity’s internet computer offers an alternative. On the normal internet, both data and software are stored on specific computers—servers at one end and laptops, smartphones, and game consoles at the other. When you use an app, such as Zoom, software running on Zoom’s servers sends data to your device and requests data from it.
This traffic is managed by an open standard known as the internet protocol (the IP in IP address). These long-standing rules are what ensure that the video stream of your face finds its way across the internet, from network to network, until it reaches the computers of the other people on the call milliseconds later.
Dfinity is introducing a new standard, which it calls the internet computer protocol (ICP). These new rules let developers move software around the internet as well as data. All software needs computers to run on, but with ICP the computers could be anywhere. Instead of running on a dedicated server in Google Cloud, for example, the software would have no fixed physical address, moving between servers owned by independent data centers around the world. “Conceptually, it’s kind of running everywhere,” says Dfinity engineering manager Stanley Jones.
In practice, it means that apps can be released that nobody owns or controls. Data centers will be paid a fee, in crypto tokens, by the app developers for running their code, but they won’t have access to the data, making it hard for advertisers to track your activity across the internet. “I don't want to hammer the data privacy angle too much because, honestly, ad-tech continues to surprise me with its audacity,” says Jones. Still, he says, the internet computer should change the game.
For those that know me well, you know that I don’t talk about Politics or Religion. I avoid both topics but this read from Sinocism was great : Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping's China by John Garnaut
But how does one do that in todays techno-geo-political environment. Do we consider TikTok to be spying on us irrespective of claimed “American” ownership? Do we consider their chips safe. The article below speaks of President Xi’s ideology and how that is being permeated. Truth after all, is nothing but repetition again and again. We live in a post truth society where we long to believe in something.. anything. The sad part is the impact of all this on tech. On hiring. On the phone you buy. The software you use. The surveillance equipment that your city government uses. All of it. And your data, once out there cant be put back in the bag.
Becoming a product leader. Notes from Nikhly Singhal : The skills product managers need to become a Director, VP, or CPO. The table below is a great representation of the skills you need:
Ringtones, App-stores and the OG app store : Remember Ringtones?
Consumers jumped on custom ringtones because they represented the first, mainstream way of getting portable music, on-demand. No store, no CDs, no desktops. That was revolutionary -- imagine the possibilities! People could make an identity statement in a unique way, becoming an audio fashion accessory that users, young ones in particular, loved.
The only problem was, selling custom ringtones constituted explicit copyright infringement which, as they probably say in the South, strangled the turkey before it hatched (maybe?).
But two things happened in the late 90s: 1) the rise of music piracy and 2) the development of digital micropayment technology. The former sunk music publishing revenues CD sales plummeted; the latter created centralized micropayments platforms that could effectively collect royalties to be paid to music publishers in a way the web could not.
When music publishers and labels saw the potential for ringtones to reverse declining sales revenues, they entered into royalty agreements with telecoms and ringtone providers.
On the future of universities this fall.. Which ones will survive : USS University
The Fake Nerd Boys of Silicon Valley ❧ Current Affairs
Contra to Packer, I think there’s actually a lot of value in retaining childish wonder, and never losing your ability to imagine a different world. This specific Silicon Valley obsession with pop culture objects is certainly a function of immaturity, but it’s not really about imagination. In fact, it’s something of the opposite.
On the future of search : Kevin Indig on searching for meaning and the meaning of search
Absolutely. So G2 in contrast to Atlassian is a marketplace, instead of a SaaS company. And so our group growth loops work a bit different as in that the more user-generated content we have, the better we perform in the search results on Google, the more reviews we get, that’s like the very simple essence or our very basic essential growth loop, but then there are other things that are coming on top. So we also have an editorial site, which is learn.g2.com, where we educate our audience, try to catch them earlier in the user journey and then funnel that traffic over to our marketplace. So it is an essence of a kind of different approach to SEO. And I think that’s like one thing that a lot of people need to keep in mind, that’s the strategy for us as companies fundamentally different compared to a marketplace, right?
So most of the content that we have on G2 is not self-created, is not company-created, it’s created by users. And so just by simply trying to improve the quality of our reviews, for example, we do a great deal in driving SEO. So one example is that we vet all of the reviews, right? Like you cannot simply go to G2 and post a review. It will have to go through a moderation process. And we make sure that you use the software that you review and that you are legit. And that allows us to have a very vast catalog of very high-quality reviews, which is then rewarded by Google.
SPAC’s : SPACs as a Call Option on Hype
This pattern means that SPACs tend to be very adversely-selected. The companies that go public via SPAC are not usually the ones that planned an IPO for a long time, but the ones that suddenly had an opportunity and really wanted to take it. The SPAC is the Vegas Wedding Chapel of liquidity events; it seems like an urgently good idea at the time, but doesn’t always turn out that way.
Great read on CCP and Bytedance and the options for TikTok to well uh, “shed the image”
Transposing China’s political system to the US would be similar to President Trump possessing unilateral power of appointment for his closest advisors, the cabinet, and the Republican Party, then Congress rubber stamped the former’s legislation. At its core, China’s current legal system represents the will of the Party. Xi’s ideologies, much like his predecessor’s ideologies, have been codified into the Constitution. The CCP has made clear “Government, military, society and schools, north, south, east and west — the Party is the leader of all”. The law exists to support and maintain the rule of the CCP, and can be easily bent to serve the CCP’s interests and ideologies. Although the commentary thus far is not controversial, it serves as a cornerstone for understanding CCP’s influence on Chinese tech companies and ByteDance’s particular situation, and a serves as a philosophical contrast to US ideology.
Midlife crisis, personal renewal and growth : Personal Renewal, by John Gardner
Brilliant, poignant, and thoughtful. If you read one thing this week, let this be it.
I’ve watched a lot of mid-career people, and Yogi Berra says you can observe a lot just by watching. I’ve concluded that most people enjoy learning and growing. And many are dearly troubled by the self-assessments of mid-career.
So you scramble and sweat and climb to reach what you thought was the goal. When you get to the top you stand up and look around and chances are you feel a little empty. Maybe more than a little empty.
You wonder whether you climbed the wrong mountain.
Vaccine Categories …
Inactivated Virus
These consist of viruses grown in culture and then killed as a means to reduce virulence (ability to infect and cause harm) and thus prevent infection from the vaccine. One benefit is they can be given to people with weakened immune systems. Examples include polio and influenza vaccines.
Live Attenuated Virus
In contrast to inactivated virus vaccines, these vaccines, also whole viruses, are live to elicit a stronger immune response but weakened to reduce virulence. Examples include those for measles, mumps, and tuberculosis.
Protein Subunit
Rather than introducing whole viruses to an immune system, a fragment of the virus is used to trigger an immune response and stimulate immunity. Examples include the subunit vaccines against Hepatitis B and shingles.
DNA based
These next-gen vaccines work through introducing viral genetic material (DNA) that cells use to make viral proteins that induce a range of immune response types. They can potentially be developed more quickly and easily than other vaccines, but no DNA vaccines have been approved for human use.
RNA based
Similar to DNA vaccines, these experimental vaccines provide immunity through introduction of genetic material (RNA). RNA vaccines can also be potentially developed more quickly and easily than other vaccines. No RNA vaccines have been approved for human use.
Replicating Viral Vector
This involves putting a gene for a viral protein into a different virus (one that will not cause illness but can replicate). Replication of the viral vector also produces copies of the viral protein, which triggers an immune response to that protein. Examples include ebola and dengue vaccines.
Non-Replicating Viral Vector
This approach is similar to replicating viral vector vaccines in that a viral gene is added to a different, non-replicating, virus and delivered to the vaccine recipient. No approved product of this kind has resulted to date.
Virus Like Particle
Virus-like particle (VLP) vaccines closely resemble viruses but are non-infectious because they contain no viral genetic material. Since VLPs cannot replicate, they provide a safer alternative to attenuated viruses. Examples include the HPV vaccine.
Other Misc Types
From a gene-encoded antibody vaccine to a self-assembling vaccine and more, these are the vaccines being developed that do not fall easily into one of the other product categories or details about its category are not publicly available.
Thank you for reading. Stay safe, be well!