Notes from 25/5–1/6

Hum Qing Ze

9 min readJun 7, 2020

COVID-19

Covid-19 Research Resources: Startups, Funding Trends, Tech Solutions, & More To Watch Amid Covid-19

In every crisis, someone profits.

COVID tracing tracker

Incredibly well done, Singapore is actually doing extremely well

AI

Since 2012, this metric has grown by more than 300,000x (a 2-year doubling period would yield only a 7x increase). Improvements in compute have been a key component of AI progress, so as long as this trend continues, it’s worth preparing for the implications of systems far outside today’s capabilities.

AI and Efficiency

We’re releasing an analysis showing that since 2012 the amount of compute needed to train a neural net to the same performance on ImageNet1 classification has been decreasing by a factor of 2 every 16 months. Compared to 2012, it now takes 44 times less compute to train a neural network to the level of AlexNet2 (by contrast, Moore’s Law3 would yield an 11x cost improvement over this period). Our results suggest that for AI tasks with high levels of recent investment, algorithmic progress has yielded more gains than classical hardware efficiency.

aitextgen GPT-2 on google colab

Docs

Once again, brilliant but potential dangerous way to democratise AI

Fact or Fiction: Verifying Scientific Claims

But unclear how to actually use it

Blockchain

Game theoretical framework for analyzing Blockchains Robustness

Brilliant survey, extremely long but well written

Latin American and Carribean Citizens Are Coordinating COVID-19 Deconfinement With This New Ethereum Application

Facebook’s Calibra Rebrands to Novi, Details Wallet Tie-Up With WhatsApp

The wallet and future financial services for the project will now be operated by a new entity, Novi Financial — a Facebook subsidiary that, it said, will operate independently from the social media giant at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters.

US Lawmaker Proposes Legislative Groundwork for National Blockchain Strategy

consider how blockchain tech-nology may be used to —

(I) increase market competition in each of the industry sectors identi-fied under clause (i);

(II) increase individual’s data privacy and enhance data security;

(III) better protect individual’s identity;

(IV) better secure monetary transactions; and

(V) any other use that may ben-efit society

Career

What Trait Affects Income the Most?

Specifically for the US

Cyberseek roadmap

Brilliant marketing for careers.

Durable Decisions

A durable decision is one that doesn’t change if its inputs haven’t changed.

Interesting way to put it as a neural network.

Having durable decisions means that they cannot get overturned if nothing has changed. This principle forms the basis of “Disagree and Commit”: you may disagree with a decision but have to be fully committed to making the product/team/company successful by going along with the implications of the decision.

Level-up your reality with Basecamp’s co-founder

Taking breaks, recharging, that’s where the big leaps of productivity are hidden. And it’s so funny, too, because there’s lots of people in technology who believe the heroic myths, for example, of the 10x programmer, that some programmers and some people in general are just 10 times as productive as other people.

leveling up is about having a wider field of view, and paying attention to more things

That process of absorbing a domain, and learning the terms, and learning the techniques, and learning the principles and the values and so forth is just intensely enjoyable. It’s something I continue to do.

I think that comparison is not helpful, and I think it’d be easier to learn, and you’d probably learn quicker, if you weren’t constantly comparing yourself to other people. If you were just comparing yourself to yourself. Am I progressing? Am I getting better? That’s a healthier way of doing it.

This is what happened. So I think the primary takeaway I have from stoicism is to separate the perception from the reaction.

Habits of High-Functioning Teams

Psychological safety
Hygiene
Share experience
Communicate

The 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey — 65,000 Devs Share Their Salaries, Top Programming Languages, and More

State of the universe

COVID-19 and the Great Rehiring

Data

Supercharging sustainable development: modelling

Policy Priority Inference builds on a behavioural computational model, taking into account the learning process of public officials, coordination problems, incomplete information, and imperfect governmental monitoring mechanisms. The approach is a unique mix of economic theory, behavioural economics, network science and agent-based modelling. The data that feeds the model for a specific country (or a sub-national unit, such as a state) includes measures of the country’s DIs and how they have moved over the years, specified government policy goals in relation to DIs, the quality of government monitoring of expenditure, and the quality of the country’s rule of law.

Introducing Company2Vec

Creative but won’t you just get a bunch of buzzwords?

A Single Line of Python Code Scraping Dataset from Webpages

Not sure if this is illegal but if you hunt the right API endpoint you can just use pandas straightaway

Your data science project needs a win condition.

Your win condition will have two components: a metric you want to optimize, and a threshold beyond which you consider that metric to be optimized.

But you can only figure those things out if you have a clear use case in mind for your project.

For example, suppose you’re building a fashion recommender system to help people find matching shirts and pants. Does it matter if your performance metric is 1% higher? Will users be able to tell the difference between 0.99 AUC and 0.98 AUC?

Win conditions aren’t always just simple metrics. If your project is to build a fashion recommender system for online shoppers, then the finished product isn’t an algorithm — it’s an app. If your project is to build a dashboard that makes it easy to spot certain trends, then your win condition is the deployment of that dashboard.

Development

Diving into Go by building a CLI application

Go is so simple to make? Incredible

solidjs fast UI library

Need to figure out what these things do eventually anyway

The Current State of Web Browsers

Browsers claim to want to protect you from tracking tools. Companies want to track you. Evolve.

4 Design Patterns You Should Know for Web Development: Observer, Singleton, Strategy, and Decorator

Just keeping as a general reference

Organisations

Integrating Chaos: Building Resilient Organizations with Chaos Theory

They found that the “amount of procedures, vertical layers, interface structures, coordination bodies, and decision approvals within organizations had increased by anywhere from 50% to 350% over a 15-year period.” And in the top 20% most complicated organizations? The managers in those organizations “spend 40% of their time writing reports and 30% to 60% of it in coordination meetings.”

Complex adaptive systems:

They consist of many agents acting in parallel and are not hierarchically controlled
They continuously shuffle these building blocks and generate multiple levels of organization and structure
They are subject to the second law of thermodynamics, exhibiting entropy and winding down over time unless replenished with energy. In this sense, complex adaptive systems are vulnerable to death.
They have a capacity for pattern recognition and employ this to anticipate the future and learn to recognize the anticipation of seasonal change

Chaos manager roles

Emergence Architect: Increase the opportunity for changes that have large positive effects by engaging in more small experiments
Authority Aligner: Increasing the credibility of top-down leadership by focusing on personal authority in addition to positional authority.
Reality Sensemaker: Shift from the illusion of top-down control to better control though improved sensemaking, better feedback & making appropriate decisions at lower levels of the organization
Chaos Injector: Ensures that the organization is not stagnant and looks for ways to inject “energy” throughout the company
Survival Guide: Can increase the perceived credibility among employees, customers, society and shareholders by shifting organization’s mission to survival

Product

Who are Growth Product Managers

Build a growth strategy plan to acquire new customers by defining the target market, identifying personas, and aligning them to the most efficient acquisition channels. Regularly analyzing the key Product Growth metrics of your product and optimize the Growth strategy accordingly.
Apply behavioral psychology to the customer purchase funnel to improve the product’s design, and run A/B tests to assess success.
Apply best practices for how to best engage customers, and retain them for the long term.
Analyze the user lifecycle, including the activation, retention, dormancy, and resurrection phases, and deploy experiments to improve the lifetime value (LTV) and decrease churn.
Focus on making your product profitable, including selecting key markets and outreach channels.
Apply best practices of experience design, measure the effectiveness of your monetization strategy. Design and define pricing plans that utilize quantitative and qualitative methods.

How we use Slack at Slack

We use channels to organize our work into focused, easily searchable conversations — for announcements, teams, projects, culture and, of course, #pm-fun. We also have a public channel for every feature we develop that anyone in the company can peek inside to see the latest status and updates.

Our cultural norms allow us to make the most of channels. My team knows to @mention me in a channel if they want to make sure I see something, but we use @channel, which pings all members of the channel at once, sparingly.

All that work can’t be done with conversation alone, which is why we’ve connected the third-party tools we know and love to Slack, helping us get through tasks a little bit faster. Today, there are over 2,000 apps to choose from on Slack’s platform, and I use a handful of them every day. I can review and approve PTO requests via Workday or expense reports via Concur, all without leaving Slack.

Services we love to hate — a design game

Good services have:

Clear expectations of who to talk to when the user needs help completing their goal
Flexible and quick flows to not be burdensome.
Built trust and credibility in order to personalize an experience and recommend content.
Integrated so seamlessly into your daily routine that it makes your day easier.

Bad services have:

Dead ends and set unclear expectations
People altering their day
People trying to complete their goal a number of times
An old and outdated infrastructure that can’t maintain a good user experience.

Input-Output Metric Framework for Product Managers

Product Team Pitfalls

Start with first principles, don’t just copy
Know your users in depth to know what to build
Test your ideas early, don’t hide in a corner and just build
Don’t only do what your boss wants
Don’t compromise on everything just to make people happy
Don’t force your beliefs on others, falling to confirmation bias
Skills come with repetition and sometimes you might not know why things feel odd (okay this seems forced… is it because 7 is a nice number?)