The Understory

Weeklyish notes from the field.

What I’m Reading

Warren Buffet’s final letter to shareholders

Several things stood out to me while reading through Warren’s final letter, principal of which are his integrity and clarity of purpose.

Greatness does not come about through accumulating great amounts of money, great amounts of publicity or great power in government. When you help someone in any of thousands of ways, you help the world.

Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation by Byrne Hobart

I’m about halfway through the book and I have mixed opinions on it overall which feels like a good sign. This quote in particular is in reference to increasing homogeneity, similar to what’s described in The Decline of Deviance.

The cybernetic outrage machine rewards those who reinforce extremes by supplying dopamine and engagement. Meanwhile, divergent opinions are algorithmically filtered out.

Why the open social web matters now from Ben Werdmuller

An excellent talk from the senior director of technology at ProPublica on how to think about building open social platforms that serve the needs of real communities.

The opportunity right now isn't to build a better Twitter or to provide a nice place for people who care about Linux to chat: it's to build infrastructure that vulnerable people can actually use to organize, to communicate safely, and to build community. But we can only do that if we're building with those communities from day one, not building for them based on our assumptions about what they need.

How to draw an orange from Mike Monteiro

Thoughts on creativity, agency, the torment nexus, and AI. If you don’t have time to watch the talk, Mike’s newsletter touches on some of the same themes.

Being told we can’t draw is the first step to telling people that no, you’re not as competent as you think you are. Once you convince human beings that they’re incapable of putting their thoughts and feelings on paper, convincing them that they’re incapable of filling out a union card is that much easier. Once you convince human beings that they cannot express themselves, it’s that much easier to convince them that they can’t govern themselves.

The Devil Needs No Advocate from Pablo Enoc

When an artist pushes back against the use of generative AI tools, what they are saying is something like this: I do not approve of technology corporations amassing wealth by exploiting my work as an artist without consent.

There’s no artist saying they don’t want the literal software processing their data because it’s software. It’s about who owns the software and what they do with it.

I Canceled My Family's Health Insurance (and joined CrowdHealth) from Nat Eliason

Healthcare (and health insurance) is broken. CrowdHealth, a healthcare crowd-funding platform, is an interesting experiment. Nat’s write-up has a ton of good data and answers to questions that come up for anyone thinking about health insurance.

The last thing that pushed me over the edge here was a sense of duty to help nudge health care in a better direction.

I’ve been complaining about health insurance for years, but still forking over tens of thousands of dollars a year to support their broken business.

Voting with my dollars is a way to push the industry in a better direction.

Tools I’m toying with

Spurious Correlations

Correlation is not causation. This site is chock full of charts that show surprising correlations without causation. For example:

Flourish

I’ve been asking ChatGPT to help me create some complex charts which generally works fine until I want to customize. Flourish looks like a really great tool for building dense data visualizations.

Quote

In God we trust. All others must bring data.

― W. Edwards Deming

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