Andy Wong

Strait of Hormuz: A CitriniResearch Field Trip The Field Report from Analyst #3 is live. citriniresearch.com/p/strait-of-ho…

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told everyone it would "10x productivity." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the usage reports. 47 people had opened it. 12 had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds. Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "AI enablement." I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're "AI-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT. I said we needed "enterprise-grade security." He asked what that meant. I said "compliance." He asked which compliance. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "career development conversation." He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "saved 40,000 hours." I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. "Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot." The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000. But this time we'll "drive adoption." Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "investing in AI." Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

It seems unintuitive that a small 25 basis point interest rate hike in Japan would spike all risk assets, including tonight's -20% $ETH candle. But you need to understand the way the carry trade works: It's a leveraged unwinding.

This is gold. DOD summary of agile BS. media.defense.gov/2018/Oct/09/20…

Sad that the only workable @Pocket Mac app is killed

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Trying to come up with analogy to explain #xzbackdoor to my mom. Best I’ve come up with so far: Imagine a grizzled, tired, old oil pipeline maintainer was approached by a plucky young kid who was new to the small town the oil pipeline passed through. Slowly, over years, the kid gained the old guy’s trust and did more of the critical work of keeping the pipe well maintained, often without the grizzled veteran checking too carefully. Most the work was actually helpful, but unbeknownst to anyone, once he had unfettered access the kid sprinkled nearly undetectable explosives into the flow of oil that would only detonate when they were turned into gasoline that ran in the vehicles that made up the Presidential motorcade. It would have been the perfect way to get away with assassinating the President but a random Prius owner, who hyper optimized his car’s performance, noticed the gas he was getting was slightly less performant so analyzed its makeup and traced the explosive back to the source, foiling the kid’s plan. Don’t love it, and resulted in lots of questions around how such explosives would actually work and survive the refining process, but best I’ve come up with. Any better suggestions?

I attended the SBF trial. It was one of the most mind-blowing experiences of my life. Seeing him get a 25 year sentence today is as surreal as it felt sitting right behind him in that courtroom. Here’s my story of that day:

Imagine this: 1. You get home from work at 5:10pm every day. 2. You do not check email after 4:59pm. 3. You do not worry about a single thing until 9:01 am the next morning. 4. Every single stressful problem simply gets passed on to someone else. 5. You’ve never had to fire somebody in your life. 6. If the company loses money because of something you did, your paycheck doesn’t change. 7. You know exactly how much money will hit your bank account every other Friday. 8. When you’re on vacation for a week, nobody can reach you and you do not bring your computer. 9. Your phone NEVER rings outside of business hours. 10. If you lose your job, you could make a few phone calls and likely have an offer for more $. This is what 99% of jobs in the USA are like. Being an employee is the correct path for almost all humans. Not everybody has what it takes or even wants the life of an entrepreneur, which is the opposite of the above. Entrepreneurs are underpaid for the stress they endure and the value they create for so many of their employees.

Comparing 10-year stock returns: Tesla          Ford +1,763%     - 33% Netflix      Disney +919%      +26% Apple      Blackberry +882% - 54% Amazon   Walmart +668% +112% Meta        News Corp +578%.    +44% PayPal     Citigroup +73% - 3%

If you invested $10,000 in Hong Kong's stock market exactly 10 years ago, you'd have $6,805 today. Even less when adjusted for inflation.

@Jira seems JIRA is down?

Well, well, well. That felt coordinated. Turns out it was.

As a Director at Amazon, I repeatedly saw that big tech career incentives basically guarantee cycles of too much growth, and then layoffs. I just had someone email me, and say that they're worried about their career as a development manager. 🧵

@satyanadella Now they will have to use Teams!

@Pocket breaks the original pocket mac app, while the pocket 2 app is terrible

Vicious Self-Degradation > you Google > Quora spots query and id’s as frequent > Quora uses ChatGPT to generate answer > ChatGPT hallucinates > Google picks up Quora answer as highest probability correct answer > ChatGPT hallucination is now canonical Google answer

👀

28.5097, -82.2464 flight WN4456 to dallas, texas

Scrum is a cancer. I've been writing software for 25 years, and nothing renders a software team useless like Scrum does. Some anecdotes: 1. They tried to convince me that Poker is a planning tool, not a game. 2. If you want to be more efficient, you must add process, not remove it. They had us attending the "ceremonies," a fancy name for a buttload of meetings: stand-ups, groomings, planning, retrospectives, and Scrum of Scrums. We spent more time talking than doing. 3. We prohibited laptops in meetings. We had to stand. We passed a ball around to keep everyone paying attention. 4. We spent more time estimating story points than writing software. Story points measure complexity, not time, but we had to decide how many story points fit in a sprint. 5. I had to use t-shirt sizes to estimate software. 6. We measured how much it cost to deliver one story point and then wrote contracts where clients paid for a package of "500 story points." 7. Management lost it when they found that 500 story points in one project weren't the same as 500 story points on another project. We had many meetings to fix this. 8. Imagine having a manager, a scrum master, a product owner, and a tech lead. You had to answer to all of them and none simultaneously. 9. We paid people who told us whether we were "burning down points" fast enough. Weren't story points about complexity instead of time? Never mind. I believe in Agile, but this ain't agile. We brought professional Scrum trainers. We paid people from our team to get certified. We tried Scrum this way and that other way. We spent years doing it. The result was always the same: It didn't work. Scrum is a cancer that will eat your development team. Scrum is not for developers; it's another tool for managers to feel they are in control. But the best about Scrum are those who look you in the eye and tell you: "If it doesn't work for you, you are doing it wrong. Scrum is anything that works for your team." Sure it is.