Nat’s 2022 Technical Link Pile: Random

See the Intro for context.

[20221231] 36 Things I Learned in 2022 – #1 blew my mind: For the first time in history in 2020, the weight of things produced by humans (concrete, metals, plastic) was greater than the weight of the global living biomass.

[20221224] Reported Sleep Duration Reveals Segmentation of the Adult Life-course into Three Phases – early adulthood (19-33yrs), mid-adulthood (34-53yrs), and late adulthood (54+yrs). They appear stable across culture, gender, education and other demographics. 

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Acoustic Bandcamp Recommendations

Last updated: 2022-04-10

Bandcamp is a great place to buy music, because most of the money you pays goes straight to the artist. If you buy on a special Bandcamp Friday, then Bandcamp don’t even take their usual commission on the sale – all the money goes straight to the artist.

I like acoustic stringband music, with or without vocals. I go beyond those boundaries for great music. Here are some sounds you should check out. It’s a mixture of famous and up-and-coming, instrumental and vocal, boundary-pushing and traditionally brilliant.

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5G Public Works Project

I’ve seen a few people propose a big government project around 5G mobile technology. I couldn’t find more detail to any proposals, so I did my own research to inform my own opinions on what’s needed and what’s not. I wrote up where I landed so I won’t forget it, and I’m sharing in case it’s useful to you. If you have corrections, etc. please contact me on Twitter as @gnat or in email (nathan@torkington.com).

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Joining a startup? Read this.

Here’s a braindump of some things I’ve learned over the years. Caveat lector: my experiences inform this, and they aren’t representative of all the possibilities, etc. Ignore this if you want; I’ve been meaning to write some notes for Kiwis or Aussies who are joining startups for the first time, and someone just became my excuse.

Maturity

Startups are very immature organisations, unlike a corporate or university – I always describe it as “there’s more work to do than there are people to do it”. So there’s huge opportunity to do stuff you wouldn’t ordinarily do, which is great. There’s also a lot less support, which can be unnerving. There’s nothing preventing you from working super-long hours and burning out, and only your coworkers to notice (HR is almost non-existent in very early stage startups). And even compensation is weird (“stock options”?) and can bite you if you’re not prepared.

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The T in CTO doesn’t stand for Talk

Looks like NZ will get a CTO real soon now. It’s hard to avoid the word “debacle” in describing how it came about: a false start at making an appointment, a whiff of impropriety in the appointments process that resulted in a Ministerial demotion ….

This is a shame because there are very real reasons that NZ should be increasing its IT heft in Government. There’s the potential to do a lot of good at the intersection of IT and government: preventing blowouts, giving informed advice to the civil service, and being a trusted advisor to politicians. Other countries are tackling these problems, with and without a person whose job title is CTO.

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Proposed Changes to NZ’s R&D Incentives

There’s an open consultation about to end, on the changes MBIE would like to make to NZ’s R&D incentives. In particular, they’ll phase out the Callaghan Growth Grants and replace them with R&D tax credits. As the FAQ says, There are differences in the definition of eligible expenditure between the Growth Grant and the proposed R&D Tax Incentive (for instance, overseas expenditure on R&D). The proposed R&D Tax Incentive has no R&D intensity threshold, a much higher cap and lower minimum R&D expenditure threshold than the Growth Grant. Some firms may get less money, but others might get more.

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Twitter’s Summer Reading List

I asked my Twitter friends for recommendations of books to read over Christmas. I said that I’ve already consumed the new Expanse novel and the new Philip Pullman (intended to indicate that I like that style of sf) and I said I like non-fiction if it’s interesting and well-written (e.g., Bakewell’s book on Montaigne, or Holmes’s “Age of Wonder”).

Here’s what they recommended …

Finally:

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On Moving to New Zealand

Hello, American friends!  President-Elect Trump has given his speech and begun to redact his campaign website of the obviously illegal and impossible campaign promises, and you look up from your keyboard through an election-defeat hangover and want to move to New Zealand.

First of all, consider staying.  America’s problems won’t be solved if all the tolerant and progressive people leave.

But that’s not an easy choice for everyone.  If you don’t think you’ll be safe, or you’re concerned about the effects on your children of growing up in the cloud of President Trump, you might be looking elsewhere.

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“Outcome is a function of process”

I was just catching up on Tim Kong’s excellent blog, when I read this great quote from Dan Carter:

“One thing we talk about over and over with this current All Blacks side is about never focusing on the outcome. We view the outcome as a function of following our processes. That might sound a little dry to some, but looking back at every major loss we’ve had over the years, they mostly started with us thinking too far ahead of the game.”

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Startups and failure

(Wynyard Group, an NZ tech high-growth company [or, perhaps, not-so-high growth] just entered voluntary administration. On Twitter, a friend was adamant bad luck had nothing to do with it. Instead of a tweetstorm, here’s my response in a vintage retro format known as “a blog post”)

You can always look back at every failure and assign one or more causes, because SOMETHING always kills the startup.  And someone is always responsible for the fatal decisions. That’s “pilot error” for startups.

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