Forget about AI taking your job, maybe we’ll all just live forever.
It may just be the marketing, but the newly announced DC-1 tablet from Daylight seems poised to scratch an itch of our times. As summarized by Om Malik:
What the company has created is a beautiful tablet — about the size of a normal iPad Air. It is just a “little less than white,” white, with a gorgeous screen. It is very simple, elegant, and lovely. It has an e-ink like screen, and the matte monochrome paper-like display is optimized for reading, writing, and note-taking. It refreshes at 60 frames per second, a pretty big deal for these kind of displays.
I love at least the idea of this.
Complaining about modern technology, addictive software, and the ills of social media can be is tiresome. But it’s also a real, difficult-to-mitigate problem. So I hope this forthcoming thing works as advertised and becomes a commercial success.
And I would love to see this company, on the heels of that success, expand their offerings to additional form factors (the phone being the obvious next choice) or prove the market enough to inspire more mature companies to enter whatever the term for these “deliberate computing” or “modernized retro” or “neo-vintage” or “tech nostalgist” concepts should be.
Nothing currently available has really done the trick. Even the cheapest FreeWrite devices are comically expensive as an isolated electronic typewriter with extremely small displays, and devices like the reMarkable also have a (purposefully) narrow, limiting use case.
The closest thing would be the tablets by Boox, which have good and pretty fast e-ink screens but don’t quite achieve the advertised frame rate here (which if true would be fast enough to function like a regular monitor), feel just a tad underpowered, and don’t have the fun (if potentially gimmicky?) Amber backlight. I actually have a Boox Palma, which is an awesome little phone-sized version of what the DC-1 should bascially turn out to be minus the stylus support, and it’s overall fantastic. It’s a convenient form factor for reading, runs customized Android so Kindle, Libby, and many other apps all work perfectly, and can do the internet and anything else a phone or tablet can do (minus the phone itself). The screen really is pretty fast (you can technically watch a video in grayscale, though not particularly well), and the backlight temperature can be tuned to a slightly warm color for dark environments. Still, it’s just the slightest bit slow such that no one could mistake it for a truly normal computer with a magic screen.
While Boox has made some solid devices, if the DC-1 can run its customized Android system as well and quickly as in the demos, it might function as the productivity and consumption machine for writing, reading, and potentially drawing that the iPad and other tablets have largely failed to achieve due to either not being able to do enough or simultaneously way too much. Maybe this finds the sweet spot.
As a parent with pre-phone-age children, I would love to see more entries in the not-quite-so-smart phone pantheon. There are things I love about modern phones that make using a purposely old-school device too limiting: maps, streaming music, audiobooks, e-books, email (sigh), and yes, sometimes the Internet. Also a top-notch camera (must. take. photos. of. kids). A future world where there are good phones with paper-like aesthetics combined with a curated but powerful productivity and consumption suite of apps would be great.
Here’s a mini-documentary that describes how the new “LivePaper” display works compared with regular e-ink:
The world's first 60+ FPS e-ink display by @daylightco on Episode 45 of S³
See how it works, the 6-year development journey, and Daylight's vision for the future of personal computing. pic.twitter.com/s8DK0iLA1Y
— Jason Carman (@jasonjoyride) May 25, 2024
Sometimes it’s the right features–not more features–that make a new product worth it.
Yesterday, the FTC passed its proposed ban on noncompetes along party lines.
This is not a done deal. The US Chamber of Commerce (which is a large lobbying organization, not a part of the government) intends to sue immediately, and they won’t be alone. Among other complaints, the Republican members of the committee who voted against it and the future litigants do not believe the FTC has the authority to do this.
The FTC’s final rule–including a very long full discussion of their rationale and authority–is here.
One of the exceptions of interest to those following consolidation in healthcare:
The final rule does not apply to non-competes entered into by a person pursuant to a bona fide sale of a business entity.
The original proposal had a limitation to the sale exception that defined a “substantial owner, substantial member, and substantial partner” to “mean an owner, member, or partner holding at least a 25 percent ownership interest in a business entity.”
The final rule does not require the seller to have a minimum ownership stake for the exception to apply.
This presumably means that, for example, all doctors who sell their practices to private equity are still bound by their noncompetes, regardless of practice size. (Non-legacy “partners” who weren’t partners at the time of sale would be free).
The new rule, if it survives, will be retroactive to essentially all noncompetes starting on the effective date ~120 days from now.
The FTC has argued it has authority over at least some nonprofits here. They bookend their argument thusly:
The final rule applies to the full scope of the Commission’s jurisdiction. Many of the comments about nonprofits erroneously assume that the FTC’s jurisdiction does not capture any entity claiming tax-exempt status as a nonprofit. Given these comments, the Commission summarizes Commission precedent and judicial decisions construing the scope of the Commission’s jurisdiction as it relates to entities that claim tax-exempt status as nonprofits and to other entities that may or may not be organized to carry on business for their own profit or the profit of their members.
[…]
The Commission stresses, however, that both judicial decisions and Commission precedent recognize that not all entities claiming tax-exempt status as nonprofits fall outside the Commission’s jurisdiction.
See pages 50-54 of the final rule above for their argument regarding jurisdiction over nonprofits.
The only true exceptions to the ban are senior executives and the bona fide sale provision.
The press release is here.
If you have HBO Max, standup comic Alex Edelman’s one-man show was excellent. The official description of its main narrative thread: “In the wake of a string of anti–Semitic threats pointed in his direction online, standup comic Alex Edelman decides to go straight to the source; specifically, Queens, where he covertly attends a meeting of White Nationalists.” Here’s the trailer.
On April 23 at 2 pm ET, the FTC is holding a special open meeting with a live webcast to discuss the proposed final rule banning most noncompete clauses. At the end of the meeting, “the Commission will vote on whether to issue the final rule.”
Potentially huge news (that will then immediately be challenged legally).
Incredible story briefly detailed in NYT’s “Did One Guy Just Stop a Huge Cyberattack?” by Kevin Roose:
In the cybersecurity world, a database engineer inadvertently finding a backdoor in a core Linux feature is a little like a bakery worker who smells a freshly baked loaf of bread, senses something is off and correctly deduces that someone has tampered with the entire global yeast supply. It’s the kind of intuition that requires years of experience and obsessive attention to detail, plus a healthy dose of luck.
This could have been an unmitigated disaster. So much of the world’s infrastructure relies on random individuals being generally good or exceptionally thoughtful, in this case, the diligence of some dude who describes himself as a “private person who just sits in front of the computer and hacks on code.”
But, on the darker side: Given the seemingly miraculous nature of this catch, what are the odds there aren’t other backdoors already in place in our key systems?
From last year’s “Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result” by David Merritt Johns in The Atlantic (“Studies show a mysterious health benefit to ice cream. Scientists don’t want to talk about it.”):
In 2004, the English epidemiologist Michael Marmot wrote, “Scientific findings do not fall on blank minds that get made up as a result. Science engages with busy minds that have strong views about how things are and ought to be.” Marmot was writing about how politicians deal with scientific evidence—always concluding that the latest data supported their existing views—but he acknowledged that scientists weren’t so different.
The ice-cream saga shows how this plays out in practice. Many stories can be told about any given scientific inquiry, and choosing one is a messy, value-laden process. A scientist may worry over how their story fits with common sense, and whether they have sufficient evidence to back it up. They may also worry that it poses a threat to public health, or to their credibility. If there’s a lesson to be drawn from the parable of the diet world’s most inconvenient truth, it’s that scientific knowledge is itself a packaged good. The data, whatever they show, are just ingredients.
The data are just ingredients.
I got an underdesk elliptical a couple of weeks ago…I think maybe it’s awesome and wish I had gotten one a long time ago. I’m honestly a little surprised I can pedal while thinking.
I tried a few, and this is the one I landed on: very stable, pretty cheap, reasonably quiet.
I’m running low on my stash of Cometeer coffee. If you’re interested, you can get $20 off your first order and help subsidize my terrible caffeine addiction. (Full review here. Not an ad, but I do like cheaper coffee.)
The gaming company Valve started in 1996, became initially successful with the award-winning game Half-Life, even more famous for the early multiplayer mods/games Team Fortress and Counter-Strike, expanded to change videogame distribution with the Steam store/platform, made the innovative/beloved genre-bending puzzle shooter Portal, and even recently released the powerful handheld gaming device, the Steam Deck.
But in addition to (or perhaps, enabling) all that commercial success, they have an unusually flat organizational structure.
We could summarize the approach as: hire great people and don’t stop them from doing great work. At Valve, employees themselves choose what to work on and how to be valuable.
So, from–of all things–the Valve new employee handbook from 2012:
On Choosing the Right (and Right Amount of) Work
What about all the things that I’m not getting done? It’s natural in this kind of environment to constantly feel like you’re failing because for every one task you decide to work on, there will be dozens that aren’t getting your attention. Trust us, this is normal. Nobody expects you to devote time to every opportunity that comes your way. Instead, we want you to learn how to choose the most important work to do.
While people occasionally choose to push themselves to work some extra hours at times when something big is going out the door, for the most part working overtime for extended periods indicates a fundamental failure in planning or communication.
What a revelation: Working too much is a failure. Focus, flexibility, and rest are important.
If the work can’t done in a reasonable amount of time, then there is a problem somewhere in the process from the conception to scope to plan to execution.
Imagine the typical modern doctor charting at home on a routine basis after a full clinic day: this is an unadulterated system failure.
Dovetailing with Productivity is a Trap, this type of overwork often suggests that we are trying (or being forced) to do too many things. After all, good care is inefficient (also discussed here and here).
And while it’s not feasible in all work settings, at least for ourselves we can learn focus and self-accountability through the Basis of No.
On Failure
What if I screw up? Nobody has ever been fired at Valve for making a mistake. It wouldn’t make sense for us to operate that way. Providing the freedom to fail is an important trait of the company— we couldn’t expect so much of individuals if we also penalized people for errors. Even expensive mistakes, or ones which result in a very public failure, are genuinely looked at as opportunities to learn. We can always repair the mistake or make up for it. Screwing up is a great way to find out that your assumptions were wrong or that your model of the world was a little bit off. As long as you update your model and move forward with a better picture, you’re doing it right. Look for ways to test your beliefs. Never be afraid to run an experiment or to collect more data. It helps to make predictions and anticipate nasty outcomes. Ask yourself “what would I expect to see if I’m right?” Ask yourself “what would I expect to see if I’m wrong?” Then ask yourself “what do I see?” If something totally unexpected happens, try to figure out why. There are still some bad ways to fail. Repeating the same mistake over and over is one. Not listening to customers or peers before or after a failure is another. Never ignore the evidence; particularly when it says you’re wrong.
I like that Valve made a new employee handbook like this. How many jobs in healthcare have expectations and culture so baked in (and that anyone would actually read or believe)?
Cognitive bias is universal, but how you deal with it varies. I don’t know if their culture of failure acceptance and learning works in real life as it does on paper, but something tells me people are more generous in this setting than the finger-pointing that our typical internal reporting and medical malpractice so often devolve into.
For reference on how not to create a culture of accountability and improvement: Simple Sabotage.
Growth is not a Purpose
We are all stewards of our long-term relationship with our customers. They watch us, sometimes very publicly, make mistakes. Sometimes they get angry with us. But because we always have their best interests at heart, there’s faith that we’re going to make things better, and that if we’ve screwed up today, it wasn’t because we were trying to take advantage of anyone.
We do not have a growth goal. We intend to continue hiring the best people as fast as we can, and to continue scaling up our business as fast as we can, given our existing staff. Fortunately, we don’t have to make growth decisions based on any external pressures—only our own business goals. And we’re always free to temper those goals with the long-term vision for our success as a company. Ultimately, we win by keeping the hiring bar very high.
The need for growth–growth as an intrinsic good, growth at all costs–has clearly ruined a lot of things. Compromising quality for growth poisons the well and destroys culture. It’s a short-term play that fundamentally changes organizations in ways that are often irreversible.
In healthcare, an old academic medical center turned into a sprawling regional healthcare network is almost unrecognizable. But there are so many other examples. The question we often forget to ask is: is this decision really good for patients?
In some ways, hiring lower-powered people is a natural response to having so much work to get done. In these conditions, hiring someone who is at least capable seems (in the short term) to be smarter than not hiring anyone at all. But that’s actually a huge mistake.
The typical business argument is: When you take a group of A-caliber people and hire a bunch of Bs, the non-stars don’t rise to the level of the old status quo, they inevitably drag the caliber down, bit by bit, hire by hire. If the argument that Bs hire Cs is true, then it’s no surprise that growth often results in dilution to the point of unrecognizability.