Notes from 7–14/10

New Evidence for the Strange Geometry of Thought

10 min readOct 13, 2019

Work spanning decades has found that regions in the brain — the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex — act like a GPS. Their cells form a grid-like representation of the brain’s surroundings and keep track of its location on it.

Recent fMRI studies show that cognitive spaces reside in the hippocampal network — supporting the idea that these spaces lie at the heart of much subconscious processing.

But the usefulness of a cognitive space isn’t just restricted to already familiar object comparisons. “One of the ways these cognitive spaces can benefit our behavior is when we encounter something we have never seen before,” Bellmund said. “Based on the features of the new object we can position it in our cognitive space. We can then use our old knowledge to infer how to behave in this novel situation.” Representing knowledge in this structured way allows us to make sense of how we should behave in new circumstances.

Three Big Things: The Most Important Forces Shaping the World

The three big ones that stick out are demographics, inequality, and access to information.

1. A demographic shift that reconfigures modern economies.

When people talk about what nation will own the next century they point to leadership in AI and Machine Learning, where China looks so competitive. But it’s staggeringly hard to grow an economy when you lose a fifth of your working-age population in a single generation. China could invent something as big as the next internet, but when mixed with its demographics have an economy that muddles along. Europe, Japan, and South Korea are the same or worse.

2. Wealth inequality that’s grown for four decades hits an inevitable breaking point.

The takeaway is that power is transitory. It shifts when those who don’t have it get so fed up that they bond together to gain enough influence to take it back. Never underestimate the power of a unified group of powerless people with a shared goal.

3. Access to information closes gaps that used to create a social shield of ignorance.

The greatest innovation of the last generation has been the destruction of information barriers that used to keep strangers isolated from one another.

This is a good point that highlights something easy to overlook: 1) everyone belongs to a tribe, 2) those tribes sometimes fundamentally disagree with one another, 3) that’s fine if those tribes keep their distance, 4) the internet increasingly assures that they don’t. Opening your mind to different perspectives is good and necessary. But when fundamental, unshakable views that used to be contained within tribes expose themselves to different tribes, people become shocked to learn that what’s sacred to them isn’t always a universal truth.

People who have never had a voice can, practically overnight, have the biggest.

A third shift is that it is now harder to hide behind, yet easier to spread, false and misleading information. I don’t know how to reconcile that contradiction, but you see both everywhere.

Blockchain

The End of a Stablecoin — The Case of NuBits

This kind of drop happens in phases when a stablecoin is exposed to a lot of volatility due to demand not being diversified. The way to deal with these cycles of downward pressure — caused in part by lack of diversification — is to have large reserves, potentially many times over circulating supply, which can be quickly used.

NuBits had only a small, fractional reserve that was not algorithmically controlled. It could not be used to automatically, with arbitrageurs, cover the drop in demand and keep the price unaffected.

This second crash was also caused by insufficient reserves. A lack of reserves prevented the NuBits team from being able to protect the NuBit price from a small demand dip. Then, when people noticed the price starting to drop, big NuBit holders got surprised and afraid and tried to get out of their position. Holders selling off dropped the price further, causing a rapid cascade.

It’s not entirely clear why the reserves ran low in the first place. A contributing factor was that NuBit reserves were stored as Bitcoin. Most of the reserves were created a few months ago when Bitcoin was high and people bought a lot of NuBits. The value of the NuBits reserve fell as Bitcoin’s price fell.

First, improperly diversified collateral guarantees that the stablecoin price is volatile to market fluctuations of the collateralising asset. This is unfortunate as the goal of the stablecoin is precisely to hedge against that.

Secondly, if a token is presented as a stablecoin and then its peg breaks, the people holding it are likely to get angry and possibly attempt legal action.

Smart Contract Management Solution: How it works & why you need it

Source Code Management through github
Smart contract compiler — verify the bytecode
Smart contract registry
Gateway APIs
Transaction analyser
Address book for your wallets, tokens, contracts etc
Vulnerability scanning with MythX

Five Fascinating Data Visualizations that will Help You Understand Centralized Crypto Exchanges

· Hot Wallets: Hot wallets are typically the main interaction point between external parties and an exchange. Exchanges use this type of wallets to make an asset available to trade.

· Cold Wallets: Exchanges use cold wallets as a secured storage of crypto-assets. This type of wallets typically hold larger amounts of assets that are not intended to be traded frequently.

· Deposit Addresses: Deposit addresses are, often temporary, on-chain addresses used to transfer funds into an exchange. The focus of this type of address is to facilitate user to exchange money flows.

· Withdrawal Addresses: Withdrawal addresses are, often temporary, on-chain addresses that are used to transfer funds out of the main exchange wallet. Sometimes withdrawal addresses can play a dual role as deposit addresses.

1)Deposit Addresses Transferring Funds Into the Exchange Main Wallet

2)Exchange Main Wallet Distributing Funds to Withdrawal Addresses

3)Withdrawal Addresses that Also Act as Deposit Addresses

4)Inter-Exchange Transfer

5)Co-Spend Transactions for Withdrawal

Life Optimisation

I’ve Logged 10,000 Hours as a Chief of Staff in a Large Tech Company; Here’s My POV on the Role

Super Organizer — Because a CoS is often brought in to help bring order to things, the individual needs to be a methodical organizer. This a probably the most well understood attribute of a good CoS.
Strategic Thinker — The CoS needs to be able to see the big picture of things. A strategic mindset helps align detailed work to the big picture strategy, as well as evaluate what is urgent versus important.
GSD Reputation — GSD stands for Get [Stuff] Done. The Principal and the leadership team need to know that responsibilities or tasks that fall to the CoS are guaranteed to get done. The CoS should have a reputation for never dropping the ball.
Trusted Operator — The CoS is often exposed to sensitive or confidential information in the normal course of executing the role. Consequently, the person in that role has to innately appreciate how to manage such information in confidence and with discretion.
Expert Facilitator — Finally, a day-to-day part of being a CoS requires managing conversations, synthesizing multiple points of view, and aligning on direction…all in an impartial and professional way. In that regard, the individual needs both the temperament and tools to facilitate and land a wide variety of conversations at various levels of the organization. In my own case, I have invested time and energy in becoming an expert at leveraging Human Centered Design (or Design Thinking) methods because I find such tools well-suited to this need.

Orientation #1 — The Principal

A strategic advisor and confidant (a highly trusted person with whom to discuss and pressure-test ideas);
An extra set of hands (to help with presentation development or ghost-writing communications);
A proxy for the Principal (for people who can’t get time with the Principal); and/or
An organizer (to help manage a picture of the priorities, projects, decisions, and actions that should be in the brain space of the Principal).

Orientation #2 — The Leadership Team

Formulating and managing the strategic agenda of the leadership team;
Setting the cadence of leadership team interactions, and running staff meetings;
Identifying the appropriate inspection topics and mechanisms for leadership staff; and
Ensuring a strong, candid team dynamic by creating an optimal environment for productive, professional dialogue.

Interact — How can I help this leadership team work better together?
Interface — What are the critical interfaces between this leadership team and other organizations in the company, and how can I help strengthen those interfaces?
Plan — How might I design and orchestrate our strategy and planning efforts to get the best results?
Measure — How are we inspecting our progress, and how do we hold ourselves accountable for achieving our desired results?
Communicate — What are we messaging to the broader organization, at what cadence, and through what mechanisms?

Orientation #3 — The Organization

Organizational design — working with the Principal and organizational development (OD) professionals to design the most effective organizational structure;
Key business capabilities — prioritizing what the organization needs to be great at, then influencing how orchestrated investments in people, processes, and technology drive the advancement of such capabilities;
Critical interfaces and dependencies — clarifying and overseeing connection points within the unit and with other organizational functions;
Governance — defining the critical recurring interactions, inspection mechanisms, and decision rules to ensure strong project execution; and
Optimization — generally looking for and addressing gaps and inefficiencies across the organization.

The Average Worker Spends 51 Percent of Each Workday on These 3 Unnecessary Tasks

1. Unnecessary Commuting (13 percent)

2. Unnecessary Meetings (16 percent)

No meeting without an agenda.
No “status updates” during which you “go around the room.”
No meeting longer than 30 minutes.
Leave a meeting the moment you realize you’re not adding value.
Replace PowerPoints with a group reading of a briefing document.

3. Unnecessary Emails (23 percent)

Turn off email during peak working hours.
Limit the number of emails an employee can send each day.
Discourage CC, BCC, and Reply All emails.
Discourage Sisyphus-like behaviors like trying to achieve “zero Inbox.”

Here’s an idea: Customize the company-wide email client so that it’s impossible to close any internal email until you’ve rated its usefulness to you and your job.

Product

The 99 Types of Product Managers

Hence Product Managers are refocusing on the most strategic streams of their role:

Defining the product roadmap, along with engineering managers.
Understanding business goals. In large companies, there is a sh*t ton of information (data, user feedback) to process and dozens of stakeholders to manage. This can become a full-time job and that’s why product operations managers are helpful in large corporations.
Defining the product vision = how do I see my product evolving in the next 5 years?
Defining the product strategy = how do I go there?

What does an agile product roadmap look like?

Each team should present this type of outcome-based roadmap for review at the beginning of an annual cycle. It should align with the strategic goals leadership has set and ensure their OKR’s use metrics that ladder up to these goals

Product Planning by Netflix: From Idea to Execution

Nothing but making people want less expensive films could save Netflix, and they did it! The team came up with the queue and rating system, which also showed recommendations due to the customer’s preferences.

I can’t call Netflix a pioneer in the streaming industry, but I can certainly call the company a creative and robust competitor, and here is why. Back in the days, Disney, NBCUniversal, FX, Apple, and even Wallmart started their shows and pulled their streaming platforms. And again, Netflix had come up with something exceptional to stay ahead.

They had nearly two minutes until a user gets bored with searching for the content that would get them interested and not leave to the competitor’s site. So Netflix had to figure out how to make the right content pop up in front of the right people and make them stay.

Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, spent billions to make a bet on streaming and it paid off. The team developed an algorithm that predicts what a user will watch next, which not only made users stay on the website, it built customer loyalty and made Netflix №1 preferable TV series provider on the market.

Programming

Learn graph theory algorithms from a Google engineer

7 hour watch.

127 Helpful JavaScript Snippets You Can Learn in 30 Seconds or Less — Part 6 of 6

Didn’t know there were 6 parts to this

I should just turn this into a searchable reference?