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Once, small firms centred on inventors were responsible for most of our innovation. Larger firms might buy or exploit these steps forwards, but they did not typically make them. And then for a brief period, this changed: many of the best new products, tools, and ideas came from research labs within large corporations. This brief period also happened to be the era when scientific, technological, and economic productivity sped forward at its fastest ever clip. Yet almost as soon as it arrived, the fruitful period was over and we returned to a situation where small companies and small-business-like teams at universities developed innovations outside of large companies and sold them in a market for ideas. Though we might enjoy the innovation created by small flexible firms, we should not dismiss the contributions made by large corporate labs. The corporate lab may be creeping back, but aggressively prosecuting antitrust against large firms growing organically through in-house research could easily snuff this spark out.

Source: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab – Works in Progress

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

But if this is your vision of the romance-writing world, you might have missed its evolution into a billion-dollar-a-year business. In 2016 romance made up 23 percent of the overall U.S. fiction market, and the net worth of some of its writers exceeds that of John Grisham (see Nora Roberts and Danielle Steel). According to Christine Larson, a romance expert and journalism professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, 45 percent of the romance writers she surveyed made enough to support themselves without a day job—“that is shocking for any group of writers,” she said—and thanks mainly to their embrace of digital publishing, 17 percent make more than $100,000 a year. Not Mark Zuckerberg money, but far more than the $45,000 median income of American working women.

Source: Vivian Stephens Helped Turn Romance Writing Into a Billion-Dollar Industry. Then She Got Pushed Out. – Texas Monthly

Serverless adoption rates have been climbing ever since the technology was brought into the spotlight with the release of AWS Lambda in 2014. That is because serverless makes an offer that cloud developers simply can not resist, providing the following benefits:

• Server management is abstracted to vendor
• Pay-as-you-go model where you only pay for what you use
• Automatically scalable and highly available

These benefits are achieved by the characteristics that define the technology. Serverless applications are stateless distributed systems that scale to the needs of the system, providing event-based and async models of development. This has worked in favor of the technology, resulting in a desirable solution for the cloud.

However, does this offer always live up to what it is perceived as?

With further inspection, there is no doubt that serverless adoption also opens up developers to the possibility of falling into anti-patterns specific to the model. This is especially concerning seeing the high adoption rates of serverless. As more of the industry moves to reap the benefits, we must be wary of what works and what does not work. Serverless is definitely beneficial, however, the wrong use of it could leave a sour taste, pushing the industry away from the technology.

Therefore the purpose of this piece is to highlight the anti-patterns that plague serverless architectures and how they may be avoided. Hence enabling the success of serverless applications and also promoting its adoption.

Source: Breaking Down Serverless Anti-Patterns – DZone Cloud

In fact, the company refers to its target customers as CATS: “curious, aspiring 30-somethings.” CATS are old enough not to be planning to return to school, but young enough, in theory, that they need help advancing in their career. A CAT is a person whose life has become complicated, who has had to put aside some of the things they loved to do, who isn’t exactly doing the thing they dreamed of doing, David Schriber, MasterClass’s chief marketing officer, told me. They’re anxious about their future, their present, their position relative to that of their peers. “They’ll talk about having anxiety that their co-workers or the people on their social networks all seem to know more about a subject than they do,” Schriber said, referring, presumably, to pre-pandemic focus testing. “Someone will come to the office party and talk about wine, and then they’ll feel like I don’t know enough about wine. Someone else will talk about photography, and they’ll be like Man, I should pay attention to who the photographers are these days. Or their boss will say things like ‘You need to work on your leadership profile, or hone your creative judgments,’ and the poor 30-something is like Where am I gonna get all this?” Something about this struck me as clammy and sad, as far away from They can’t take your education away from you as it’s possible to be. As though it’s revealing another layer of unpaid labor—cultural labor—one is expected to do in order to secure the privilege of performing actual labor.

Source: Can MasterClass Really Teach You to Serve Like Serena Williams? – The Atlantic

s terrible as the pandemic has been, it has proved unexpectedly good for some—specifically billionaires, yeast manufacturers, and streaming services, of which MasterClass is now one. For a certain cohort of people looking to pass the hours at home, namely those with leisure time and money, the new courses in cooking, mixology, and gardening arrived at the perfect homesteading moment. But the fact that MasterClass is so popular now also speaks to people’s fears, especially economic uncertainties that have only been exacerbated by the pandemic. Tens of millions of jobs have been lost, and many newly unemployed people are looking for a different direction. And if they’ve kept their jobs, they are dealing with a whole new way of navigating work, which is stressful and confusing. In a way, MasterClass seems ideally suited to frustrated 30-somethings for whom education has not necessarily resulted in upward mobility or even a job, who feel stuck in their career without a clear path to success.

Source: Can MasterClass Really Teach You to Serve Like Serena Williams? – The Atlantic

I don’t know why I was in tears while reading parts of this. Maybe it is from the envy of reading about the risk-taking culture of the US. That is something close to my heart. During moments of sadness, I have to remind myself I chose this path. It is not easy working for a 20-year-old startup, in fact, it is very hard and most of the time depressing.

It’s not a coincidence that Amazon was born in this country. More than any other place on Earth, new companies can start, grow, and thrive here in the U.S. Our country embraces resourcefulness and self-reliance, and it embraces builders who start from scratch. We nurture entrepreneurs and start-ups with stable rule of law, the finest university system in the world, the freedom of democracy, and a deeply accepted culture of risk-taking. Of course, this great nation of ours is far from perfect. Even as we remember Congressman John Lewis and honor his legacy, we’re in the middle of a much-needed race reckoning. We also face the challenges of climate change and income inequality, and we’re stumbling through the crisis of a global pandemic. Still, the rest of the world would love even the tiniest sip of the elixir we have here in the U.S. Immigrants like my dad see what a treasure this country is—they have perspective and can often see it even more clearly than those of us who were lucky enough to be born here. It’s still Day One for this country, and even in the face of today’s humbling challenges, I have never been more optimistic about our future.
I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today and am happy to take your questions.

Source: Statement by Jeff Bezos to the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary

So as we look at the myriad ways Google and Facebook have let us down and led us astray, let’s remember that no one has the manual. No one fully understands these systems, even the people who designed them at their birth. The once impressive, now basic, algorithms that made Google and Facebook distinct and useful have long been eclipsed by even more sophisticated and opaque data sets and machine learning. They are not just black boxes to regulators, journalists, and scholars. They are black boxes to the very engineers who work there.
As Arbesman writes of other complex systems, “While many of us continue to convince ourselves that experts can save us from this massive complexity—that they have the understanding that we lack—that moment has passed.”
So the next time Congress calls technology company leaders up to testify, we should remember that no one really understands these behemoths. They sure do understand us.

Source: There’s No Such Thing As a Tech Expert Anymore | WIRED

If you’re anything like the nearly 100 million people worldwide who have a Costco membership, you probably love Costco’s Kirkland Signature. You can get two dozen cage-free eggs for $6.50, or a 1.75-liter bottle of French vodka for $19.99.
But despite these products’ exceptional prices, their quality doesn’t suffer at all. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Many of their products pass purity tests with flying colors.
Kirkland also has a passionate and loyal fan base — not something you typically find with a private label brand. One guy even got a Kirkland Signature tattoo on his left arm and held his 27th birthday party at the Costco food court.
Kirkland’s success defies our intuition and experience. Shouldn’t lower prices lead to lower quality products? How can they offer rock-bottom prices but still have some of the best products around?
The answer is this: they get the best manufacturers in the world — who already have products on Costco shelves — to make Kirkland products. Yeah, you read that right. While customers might not know it, Kirkland products are often made by the same manufacturers who make the branded products that sit next to them on the shelves.

Source: How Costco Convinces Brands to Cannibalize Themselves – Napkin Math

When you experience someone else’s genius work, a little part of you feels, “That’s what I could have, would have, and should have done!”
Someone else did it. You didn’t.
They fought the resistance. You gave in to distractions.
They made it top priority. You said you’d get to it some day.
They took the time. You meant to.
When this happens, you can take it two ways:
You could let that part of you give up. “Oh well. Now I don’t need to make that anymore.”
Or you could do something about that jealous pain. Shut off your phone, kill the distractions, make it top priority, and spend the time.
It takes many hours to make what you want to make. The hours don’t suddenly appear. You have to steal them from comfort. Whatever you were doing before was comfortable. This is not. This will be really uncomfortable.
The few times in my life I’ve made a real change like this, it felt awful on the surface. I wasn’t shallow-happy about it. I wasn’t smiling. I was annoyed and fighting it inside, but on the outside I did the work. And in the end, got the deeper satisfaction of finishing.

Source: Where to find the hours to make it happen | Derek Sivers