While being on a career break right now makes the fundraising campaign tougher this year, it does make for a lot more time to train, and with the weather turning fully to spring I took advantage of it. It’s only an hour in the saddle but it’s the first step on a journey to July!
And while it’s still early and I have a long way to go, I’ve already gotten the first couple of donations that will get me to my goal, so thank you to my early bird donors!
Two and a half years into owning my Framework 13” and I finally fixed my lingering issues:
- Fixed s2idle using a tip from the forums,
- Fixed spurious wake-ups by disabling XHCI in /proc/acpi/wakeup
- Enabled suspend-then-hibernate to automatically hibernate after 30 minutes suspended
I updated my original blog post so I don’t forget any of this.
Maintenance done! She’s road worthy and now I gotta get training as I did nothing over the winter. Fortunately I have three months and plenty of time to get ready for the big ride!
Kindness of strangers
We had the privilege to witness the 2024 eclipse in beautiful Durango, Mexico. To get there we took a bus from Mazatlán, and it did not go as planned, as a four hour trip turned into an eighteen hour ordeal; an ordeal that became one of my favourite parts of the trip as we experienced, first hand, the wonderful kindness of strangers.
After traveling to Utah to view the annular eclipse in November, an experience that was absolutely incredible, both because of the eclipse itself and because of the people with whom we shared it, Lenore and I knew we had to travel somewhere to view the great North American total eclipse of 2024. After looking at cloud coverage maps, it didn’t take long to make our decision: we needed to go to Durango City, Mexico.
Now, despite being a location of deep and fascinating history, beautiful architecture, and delicious food, Durango isn’t exactly a common tourist destination, which means, in the past, traveling there would have been a bit challenging. Fortunately for us, ten years ago a brand new highway was opened that connects Mazatlán to Durango, turning what was once a 7 to 8 hour journey across a highway colourfully referred to as The Devil’s Backbone into a 3-4 hour trip through 63 tunnels and across one of the highest cable-stayed bridges in the world.
Realizing this, we came up with our plan: we’d fly into Mazatlán, spend a couple of days there, and then take a bus to Durango the day before the eclipse, tour around that afternoon, view the eclipse the next day, and then return to Mazatlán the day after and enjoy a few more days of sun and sand before flying home.
I would’ve never guessed that bus trip would turn into one of my favourite memories from the trip. And not for the reasons you’d expect.
Continue reading...Just released version 3.6.7-2 of my old NetHack port for the Nintendo DS with some QoL improvements and bug fixes. It’s amazing how, when you step away from a project for, oh, 15-ish years, you start to notice little warts that you’d just gotten used to…
Don’t ask me why, but I restarted tinkering with my old DS port of NetHack! I forgot how much fun it is coding for platforms like the DS. It’s just so… simple.
I was also reminded that, you know, my port plays really damn well. I forgot how many hours I logged in it! So, if you’re a NetHack fan, own a DS, and have a flash card, all four of you can try it out!
https://github.com/fancypantalons/NetHack/releases/tag/NetHackDS-3.6.7-1
If I’m asked what I accomplished on my break, the first thing I’ll list is using my iFixit kit to repair the shoulder buttons on my old Nintendo DS Lite (easy repair, corroded contacts in the micro switches). Why? Because it was there.
From Jenny Odell in “How to Do Nothing”, on the power of what she calls “manifest dismantling”, or the intentional dismantling of the artifacts of “progress” as part of recalibrating our relationship with both our environment and each other:
“When we pry open the cracks in the concrete, we stand to encounter life itself–nothing less and nothing more, as if there could be more.”
Strategy Investors Aren't
The tech company lifecycle
Schematically, the life-cycle of a technology company has traditionally followed the following rough trajectory:
//_://
- Come up with idea
- Get funding
- Grow business
- …
- Exit
Before the folks in the back object, yes, I realize this is an incredibly simplified model. The transition from step 1 to 2 often never happens at all. Steps 2 and 3 are not so much linear steps as repeating cycles of growth and investment. And before step 5 ever happens, the vast majority of startups outright fail.
But, schematically, this captures the essence.
In those early stages, the typical sources of funding come from individuals or organizations with a single primary goal: to make money. The deal is fairly straight forward: An investor identifies what she believes is a promising company. She’s impressed by the idea and the team and she believes that there’s real potential for the company to grow and succeed. Recognizing the potential, she and the owners of the company strike a deal: she’ll provide the company with money, and in exchange she’ll receive some ownership stake. Her expectation is that, over time, the company will increase in value, as will her ownership stake, and so at step 5, she’ll be able to cash in that stake and make a profit.
Critically, these financially motivated investors have one goal in mind: to see the value of the company increase. Now, that value can take many forms: cashflows, intellectual property, talent, sales channels, etc. But so long as there is a viable path that ends with the investor selling their stake and making a profit, they’re happy. This is known as the exit.
But exit it must. After all, the investors aren’t in it for charity. They’re in it for profit, and at some point, they gotta be able to cash in their chips.
Now, by and large, the motivations of the investor and the motivations of the company are aligned on a primary goal: to make the company more valuable<footnote about “valuable” doing a lot of work in this sentence>.
That’s not to say there isn’t conflict. The founder, who is passionate about his idea and his team, might want to grow the company, while the investor may want to minimize costs in order to maximize the runway and reduce the chance that her ownership stake could be diluted in a subsequent funding round. The founder might find himself wanting to pursue a half dozen new ideas, each of which might have some promise of success, while the investor might prefer to minimize her risk by focusing on a known, proven idea.
But, fundamentally, the goal of the founder and the investor are basically the same.
But what does an exit look like?
Well, the archetypal exit, the one that I suspect most people imagine, is the IPO: that moment when a private company transforms itself into a public one, at which time those investors can sell their stakes on the open market
, hopefully for a nice, healthy profit. But going public is far from the only way to exit, and in fact the less common one. Taking statistics from S&P:
Global M&A activity and equity issuance fell sharply in 2022 after reaching some high marks in 2021, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence’s newly released Global Q4 2022 M&A and Equity Offerings report. The total value of global announced M&A fell 35.8% year over year to $2.983 trillion, while the total value of global equity issuance plummeted 66.6% to $351.76 billion.
So in what was a down year across the board, M&A activity still dwarfed IPO activity by many multiples.
In the past, these acquisitions would typically involve one technology company swallowing up another one, though these days, thanks to the decline of the IPO, we’re also seeing the rise of refinancing deals among private investors who are stuck holding onto older, mature, private companies
. But in either case, the investor is able to cash in by selling their stake to the acquiring firm. The balkanization of tech
One thing you might immediately notice about the life-cycle of a small tech companies is that only in a fraction of cases do we end up with large companies. Rather, as has been discussed endlessly
, large tech companies have used acquisitions as a way to eliminate competition and monopolize whole markets. Folks familiar with this issue will likely immediately think about the then-Facebook acquisition of Instagram, a purchase that, even at the time, set off alarm bells amongst competition advocates. But that acquisition is only the most visible of what has become a trope in the valley: start up a small company, get some seed funding, then show enough potential to be acquired by Google or Facebook. Lather, rinse, repeat. In fact, it’s likely that many of the products that you, dear reader, are most familiar with are the product of an acquisition. Google, famously, acquired a large number of its tent pole properties: DoubleClick YouTube, Android, and Google Docs, among many many others.
There are many motivations for a technology company to acquire another. I suspect the first thing that folks think about is something like those aforementioned Google acquisitions: one company buys another because they want to add their distinctiveness to their own
. However, there are many other motivations. There’s what folks in the business refer to as the acquihire: one company buys another, not for their technology, but for their team.
Perhaps the startup possesses some other unique IP–patents, trademarks or brand awareness, etc–that the acquirer is interested in. This is often the playbook of patent trolls, who acquire a company’s IP in order to engage in frivolous lawsuits, but it’s just as commonly done by large companies looking to build their own arsenal of patents, often for defensive purposes.
But these days, with companies like Google and Facebook throwing off gushers of cash, we’ve increasingly seen what I think of as the catch-and-kill acquisition. In this case, the acquirer seeks out potential competition and acquires them only to shut down their operations<insert footnote about Notion acquiring Skiff), thereby eliminating possible competition and protecting their monopoly position.
Regardless of their motivations, the end result is big technology companies getting bigger by killing off smaller players in the space.
Neo-antitrust
The origins of antitrust
The Bork decision
The revival/reinvention of antitrust as a market structural issue
Scrutiny on big tech acquisitions
The strategic investor
Microsoft/OpenAI deal
Strategic investors aren’t
Unaligned incentives
“can you successfully post replies to M.B. from your blog?”
There’s only one way to find out…
Well, what started off as an icy mess turned into an absolute banger of a day up at Sunshine! Just gotta wait for that snow to thaw. Ngl, though, spring skiing conditions in Alberta on January 30th is weird…
Stories like this are why, despite being in tech for decades, I tend to avoid closed smart devices:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/fossil-smartwatches-go-extinct-company-quits-wear-os-ecosystem/
An analog or old school digital watches can work for decades, but remotely updatable, closed digital devices can be subject to rug pulls at the whim of their controling corporations. We’ve seen this repeatedly with IoT devices and it was only a matter of time before a major wearable went the same route.
So I’ve been plugging away at a little side project for kicks. I haven’t written code for a month, now, due to other issues and distractions but I have been thinking about it, and it occurs to me how novel that is: without the pressure of deadlines I can actually spend time thinking about the problem, ensuring I build the right thing first, without the pressure to deliver the fast wrong answer.
Review: Legends & Lattes
Review of Legends & Lattes (Legends & Lattes #1.0) by Travis Baldree (9798985663211)★★★★
My wife had previously raved about this book, and then I ran across a mention of it on Hacker News of all places. Commonly described as a ‘cozy’ fantasy novel, this was a delightful little treat and definitely worth the read.
Worn out after decades of packing steel and raising hell, Viv the orc barbarian cashes out of the warrior’s life with one final score. A forgotten legend, a fabled artifact, and an unreasonable amount of hope lead her to the streets of Thune, where she plans to open the first coffee shop the city has ever seen.
However, her dreams of a fresh start pulling shots instead of swinging swords are hardly a sure bet. Old frenemies and Thune’s shady underbelly may just upset her plans. To finally build something that will last, Viv will need some new partners and a different kind of resolve.
A hot cup of fantasy slice-of-life with a dollop of romantic froth.
Anyone who knows my wife knows she’s, well, calling her a ravenous reader is doing a disservice to her book consumption habit. Books being such a central passion in her life, I’m always asking her what she’s reading, what she’s read, what she liked, and what she didn’t, and so it was that at some point she told me about this book she loved by an audiobook narrator that she really likes: Legends & Lattes.
So, I will absolute profess to some initial skepticism. I’ve long been a fantasy reader, having initially cut my teeth on pulp horror from the likes of Stephen King and Dean Koontz before taking a hard turn to David Eddings and Robert Jordon. So I’m far from unfamiliar with the genre. But I’ll freely admit that a fantasy book about an Orc opening a coffee shop seemed… a bit far fetched?
In hindsight this was, honestly, a pretty dumb assumption on my part. Terry Pratchett made an entire career out of building a fantasy world (Discworld) in which books are centered around the invention of modern contrivances (paper money, movies, the telegraph, etc). Why not a coffee shop?
Well, as the year was winding down I ran across a book recommendations post on Hacker News and decided to poke around, and I’ll be damned if Legends & Lattes didn’t earn a mention! I relayed my surprise to my wife, and she offered to re-listen to the book with me on our anniversary vacation, and you know what? It was great!
Continue reading...First day out skiing and I’m treated to this stunning view of the Lake Louise area. Just incredible.
Great piece that really speaks to my own experiences establishing and evolving a product function. Loved the bit about focusing on and celebrating incremental improvement over bemoaning the failure to live up to some platonic idea of product management.
I kinda feel like we’re just too inured to the modern miracle that is SQLite. That a fully featured relational database supporting much of the SQL standard can be packaged up in less than 1MB of portable code is incredible. And they guarantee to support the current (open, portable) file format until 2050, which is why it is specifically supported by the Library of Congress!
Unexpected ipv6 benefit: upgrading Debian testing, NetworkManager package broke (I still don’t know how). Rebooted to a system with no network connectivity. Thanks to a hard wired dock, all I had to do was an “ip set [iface] up” and everything autoconfigured and I could access Google and the Debian package repos (for the curious, I just had to run
apt-get install --fix-broken
).
Review: Descent
Review of Descent by Tim Johnston (9781616204303)
A book billed as a thriller that explores a family as they come to grips with the disappearance of a child, the book defied my expectations, for good reasons and bad.
The Rocky Mountains have cast their spell over the Courtlands, who are taking a family vacation before their daughter leaves for college. But when Caitlin and her younger brother, Sean, go out for an early morning run and only Sean returns, the mountains become as terrifying as they are majestic.
Written with a precision that captures every emotion, every moment of fear, as each member of the family searches for answers, Descent races like an avalanche toward its heart-pounding conclusion.There’s no book in recent memory that I found as challenging to review as I’m finding this one. I think that’s because Descent tries to be two things at once: both a thriller, telling the story of the disappearance of Caitlyn, a high school senior and track star who is abducted while going for a run during a family vacation to the Colorado Rockies, and a deep character study of the family members–her father Grant, her mother Angela, and her brother Sean–and their lives, together and apart, as they grapple with the nightmare of a daughter and a sister who disappears without a trace. Each of these stories would, individually, be a gripping read. Unfortunately, I feel Mr. Johnston tried to do too much, and as a result, taken as a whole, nothing works as well as it could.
Of course, I still enjoyed the book very much, and was up way too late during the big climax. But, the more I thought about the book and talked about it to my wife, the more I couldn’t overlook the flaws in this debut novel.
Continue reading...