Hello, Hello Hello.
How have you been? I have come back from the Maldives and it was insane. As my plane started it’s descent into Delhi, I was struck by how dirty and grimy and gray it was in comparison with where I was coming back from. Today will be a short-ish post - more like wading back in.
Here is a reminder of dramatic sunsets (mostly for me but you are welcome to partake):
Alright then, reminiscing done, let’s move on to today’s programming.
A lot has happened in the last month.
Crypto had a whole saga before its collapse:
FTX collapsed, prompting Sequoia capital to delete one of their fawning, 13,000 word love letters to SBF. People are calling for SBF to be arrested and here is a very good article about why he hasn’t been yet.
ECB folks wrote a pretty kickass article on exactly what they think about bitcoin (hint: they think it is hokum). Key excerpt:
“Since Bitcoin appears to be neither suitable as a payment system nor as a form of investment, it should be treated as neither in regulatory terms and thus should not be legitimised.”
Someone get the crypto boys some burnol.Ashish Singhal of Coinswitch wrote a rather self serving article in the Financial Express. Reminds me of that old saying about the pot calling the kettle black. Also, can you guess who is a large investor in Coinswitch? (hint, they have been named above).
ChatGPT-3 has been launched and it is absolutely mindblowing (a demonstration on its abilities will follow). It writes code too. Very well. I am finding that while it tends to use recursion a lot, it actually writes better code than I do.
Of course, Stack overflow quickly banned the use of ChatGPT to post answers as some of them are quite wrong. Ah well….China has imposed even more severe covid restrictions making iPhones’ shortage even worse. So, rather predictably, Apple is moving production out of China.
Tesla’s semi truck seems to be becoming real - finally. Here is a pretty good deep dive on it.
Meanwhile, on Reality Internet, Kanye West appeared on Alex Jones’ show and went on a tirade of all tirades. So much so that Alex Jones looked uncomfortable1. Kanye wore a black mask, drank YooHoo. Picture this, I am in a bar in on a small island sipping on unlimited frozen pina coladas and all I wanted to do in that moment was look at YooHoo’s marketing / comms slack channel. But wait, there’s more. Kanye tweeted out a photo of the star of david with a swastika in it. Elon texted him, telling him this wasn’t cool. Kanye tweeted out the photo of his texts with Elon. The key point is that Elon is really regretting buying twitter right now - given that he is in charge of holding back all the crazies.
Lastly, I got myself a mechanical keyboard and I am :D. People who know what I am talking about when I say "TVS Gold” will get it. Cannot recommend Keychron + gateron brown switches enough.
Ok. Recap over. Let’s talk about path dependence.
Path Dependence is when a decision made in the past constrains future options and forces development down a path. Sometimes over 1000s of years.
What if I told you that the size of Horses’ behinds in Roman times effectively determined the diameter of the boosters for the Space Shuttle?
Do I have your attention yet? OK, here we go:
Space Shuttle boosters (SRBs) were built at Morton Thiokol’s factory in Utah and were to be launched from Florida. Now, these had to be transported via rail. That meant that these boosters had to fit through certain tunnels. This restriction limited the SRB’s diameter to 4ft 8.5in.
Now, why 4ft 8.5in? Because the standard rail gauge in America is 4ft 8.5in. This was based on English rail system.
Why is the English rail gauge 4ft 8.5in? Because they followed horse and wagon ruts, and the Ruts in England date back to Roman times. Effectively, the chariots used in Roman times were responsible for the ruts carved in English roads. So 4ft 8.5in was really the width of the ancient roman chariots.
And what determined the width of roman chariots? Well, the amount of space it takes to put two horses side by side - which is about 4ft 8.5in.
Interesting eh? Now, a few confessions:
The above section was written entirely by ChatGPT. I fed a few of my old essays and I think it copied my ask and answer writing style pretty well.
The story above is absolute BS. The real diameter of SRBs is ~13 feet. Yes, they were transported by train but it took a lot of planning (and dismantling) to transport them.
In contrast, the (much wider) external tank (27 ft dia.) was transported by barge to Florida.
Jokes and dodgy AI generated text aside, there are a few very good (and true) examples of Path dependence available to us:
QWERTY layout: was generated to prevent jamming from fast typists2. Now, there are infinitely better suited layouts (like Dvorak) and even better devices like the Charachorder but it is now too late (for me at least) to retrain.
Platform Fees: Why do app stores charge 30%? In the 80s, Nintendo settled on a 10% fee to allow games to be on the nintendo console and another 20% from firms who could not make their own cartridges. That is the origin of the 30% platform fee. Sony, Valve, Microsoft, Nintendo - they all charge 30% even when the games are distributed on the internet today.
80 chars per line: A best practice in coding is to limit to 80 characters per line. Where does this come from? Old IBM punch cards which had 80 character per line.
10000 steps per day: You know that target of 10000 steps a day? It is complete, utter, absolute, grade-A horseshit. In the runup to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the precursor to Yamax Corp. created an early pedometer and called it Manpo Kei. Man = 10000, po = steps, kei = meter. Literally - 10000 steps meter. Also, it helps that the Kanji for 10000 (man) is 万 - looks like a man walking. There is nothing that makes it a scientific target for anyone.
And finally - Why are tweets 280 characters? Well:
Originally, twitter used SMS and SMS messages are 160 characters. So, after reserving 20 characters for username, you had 140 characters for your tweet.
In 2018, when twitter doubled the max tweet length, we got 140*2 = 280 characters.
Alright then. That’s it for today. More to come soon.
Housekeeping
As always, I look forward to hearing from you. If you liked this post, pls feel free to share this or subscribe to this newsletter using the links below. I try to write a 1000-2000 word essay once every two/three weeks.
That is an achievement.
Some claim that it was so that typists could impress customers by typing the word typewriter quickly. An argument for this theory is here.