Notes.
A quick thanks to everyone who sent classical music recs the other week. I've been enjoying this Andras Schiff album (via Vinson) in particular.
Pathfinding.
- Alphabet is looking to sell Boston Dynamics.
- I'm reading The Mythical Man-Month, the legendary book of essays on software development management, and am really enjoying it. It's worth reading the book's Wikipedia page, which has a bunch of good tidbits; see also these two sections.
- How Studio Neat built a healthy, low-touch business.
- Managed by Q is giving equity to their cleaners & handymen.
- A quick shout out to YC for getting serious about hardware. It was only a year ago that they established it as an explicit thing, and now their list of hardware companies is really impressive. Applications for their next class close this week - I'm looking forward to seeing who pops up there :)
Building.
- Via Noah, an *awesome* video tour of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab with Tom Lipton. That big French lathe at 15:00ish is really cool, but you really should watch the whole thing.
- Geoff Manaugh on the future of glue (and composites) in construction. Incidentally, VHB tape is *awesome.*
- Bunnie Huang on bookbinding. This is partly just to say that you should do stuff and write blog posts about it.
Logistics.
- A contrarian piece about how autonomous vehicles will really hurt Uber.
- If autonomous cars drive 23 hrs/day, the miles rack up *fast* (via Reilly).
- Little robots, working together like ants to move big things.
- The MTA will close the M line for 10 months in order to make upgrades in advance of the L closure.
Evaluation.
- I like the nyc-architecture.com "Top 10 Skyscrapers" page. The order seems to be arbitrary and the layout is very web 1.0; the list also contains not ten or even twenty items but 21. But it's a good list, and a number of the actual building pages contain some pretty good info & pictures.
- How Trump is wrong about manufacturing jobs & China.
- Why AlphaGo is not AGI.
Stuff that doesn't fit into my dumb/arbitrary categories.
- BuzzFeed is hiring fellows for their hardware (ish) OpenLab (via Adam).
- On GM's acquisition of Cruise, the autonomous vehicle startup.
- From Gabe, an extremely detailed piece about Google's containerization systems (most of this is way over my head).
- Autodesk is giving board seats to a few activist investors.
And.
On Dropbox's custom built server hardware, and the
complex process of ditching AWS.
Love, Spencer.
p.s. - We should be better friends. Send me a note - coffee's on me :)
