2016-03-21

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.