December 2024 – Page 2 – Documenting Life

“The spreadsheet revolution” – Dan Davis

10/12/2024Selflinks_read

“Excel made a whole new style of working possible for the financial industry in two ways. First, it facilitated the creation of much bigger and more detailed financial models; in the days when you had to fill everything in yourself having worked it out on a pocket calculator, you would really think twice about whether you really needed to estimate staff costs separately from other costs, let alone about how many divisions and geographies you were going to model for big companies.

But much more importantly, it allowed you to work iteratively. Rather than thinking about what assumptions made the most business sense, then sitting down to project them, Excel encouraged you to just set out the forecasts, then sit around tweaking the assumptions up and down until you got an answer you could live with”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-spreadsheet-revolution

“A little love song to the National Audit Office” – Ian Dunt

07/12/2024Selflinks_read

“They are really rather beautiful things, of the sort which we rarely appreciate. They’re the product of years of hard-fought for constitutional change. They are the kind of literature which a sophisticated political society produces, so that it can govern itself more effectively. They deserve a level of respect which we do not currently give them

But these reports only work where the political culture around them actually gives a damn. They rely on journalists and politicians bothering to read them, or at least skimming the executive summary. They rely on publications acknowledging that they exist and that their conclusions provide a final word on what is really happening”

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/a-little-love-song-to-the-national

“The End of The Twitter Era” – Ben Sandofsky

05/12/2024Selflinks_read

“Bluesky follows the classic crypto marketing strategy of rallying users behind a cause while downplaying their profit-driven motives. They make a big deal about filing as a Public Benefits Corporation, which means next to nothing.

Bluesky claims to be billionaire proof, which is either hopelessly naive or deliberately smarmy. Claims that their platform is open and decentralized are mostly bullshit. Nothing prevents the company from cutting off access to the network, just like Twitter did to third-party clients, and the option of spinning up your own Bluesky clone means nothing when the value a social network is the users and their network effects, not your tech stack.

You’re welcome to think I’m overly cynical, but when someone talks like a grifter, builds like a grifter, and raises money from grifters, they deserve all of the scrutiny of grifters”

https://www.sandofsky.com/end-of-twitter/

“Clintonism lost in 2000” – Freddie deBoer

05/12/2024Selflinks_read

“ If we could step back for just a moment and look not at the immediate question of which candidate and policy in which point of time, but at the general political strategy of the Democrats for the past 50 years – that is, moderating, triangulating, and other euphemisms for moving rightward – we would have to conclude that it has failed. And yet there is precious little appetite for actually coming up with a radically different approach, because ultimately politics is about taxes and the funding base of the party are rich people who won’t tolerate significantly higher taxes”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/clintonism-lost-in-2000

“Fast Crimes at Lambda School” – Benjamin Sandofsky

01/12/2024Selflinks_read

“Austen pitched investors that the real problem in higher education is how schools make money regardless of whether or not you get a job. If schools only got paid when a student makes money, there’s “Incentive Alignment.” VCs like Graham fell for it because if all you know is capitalism, everything looks like a free-market problem”

https://www.sandofsky.com/lambda-school/