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A collection of 56 posts

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Facebook’s Feasible Future is Apple’s Fictitious Present

CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg just had his Jerry Maguire moment. In his mid 30s and at the height of his career Zuckerberg has released an about face mission statement for the future of his company. That’s where the metaphor ends though. Unlike Tom Cruise’s character Zuckerberg won’

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Cloudflare, The Most Important Company You’ve Never Heard Of

Nearly a decade ago when it was difficult for small sites to handle large amounts of traffic, especially from DDoS attacks, I remember stumbling on Cloudflare‘s first promotional video. At the time it seemed like magic. No hardware or software configuration needed, and you could ensure your site would

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Square, Twitter, and Cryptocurrency

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, recently made public statements (shown below) voicing his support for Bitcoin while showing his lack of support for other cryptocurrencies. Given Jack is CEO of two publicly traded companies with a combined value of over $50b, it is no small thing for the

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Tesla Predictions

Was riffing with some brothers on Tesla and some predictions came out of it. We’ll check back on this one in a few years. Let’s start with the no gradient prediction. Before 2030 Tesla will be worth $100 billion as an independent company. – Twitter Resolved • True. Tesla crossed

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What I Learned from the Ethereum Classic 51% Attack

Beginning January 5 2019 Ethereum Classic was the victim of a 51% attack allowing the malicious party to successfully double spend tokens to exploit one exchange. I cover a timeline of the events, some learnings, and end with applicable excerpts from the original Bitcoin white paper. On January 6, the

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In 2018

In 2018 I made a concerted effort to focus my attention on the slow moving trends behind the constant events of the news cycle. That’s where you stay the most informed. The Economist, Peter Zeihan, and Benedict Evans, among others, helped me with this. Below I cover things that

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no gradient in 2018

Founded on September 26 2017, 2018 has been the first full year of operation for no gradient. Let’s see what went down. Viewership in 2018 * 9,632 site views * 5,711 site visitors * 1,211 YouTube podcast views (1,296 all time, 1,324% increase) * 2,309 podcast downloads

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Make Peace with the Distance

People hate distance; that is, they are predisposed to want to close the gaps of difference amongst themselves that announce and protrude in everyday encounters with each other. In other words, as human beings, we hold ubiquity not only as the standard to which all acts are measured, but as

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Yang2020 Presidential Campaign and how not to Accept Cryptocurrency

Update: The Yang2020 campaign appears to no longer be accepting cryptocurrency donations. A partner of mine filled out the form in December 2018 and never heard back. If you have any information please contact me here. In July 2018 Andrew Yang’s campaign made headlines (the original story I linked

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The Results are in, the US Financial System is Stable

Intro The Federal Reserve recently published its first financial stability report, which summarizes the Fed’s framework for assessing the state of the US financial system and presents the Fed’s current evaluation. This is important because the findings outlined in the Fed report are used in the design of

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no gradient 2.0 Debuts at the World Series of Poker

Justin Dunn- previous podcast guest– debuts the new no gradient look as he competes in the 49th annual World Series of Poker No-Limit Hold’em Championship in beautiful, hot, transactional, Las Vegas, Nevada. Qualifying by winning a smaller tournament, he has survived day one and starts today with 16.5k

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Robo-Advisors Eat the Old Guard’s Lunch

Investing is becoming ever more commoditized with the rise of index funds and passive strategies, forcing financial institutions to differentiate themselves on user experience. The Old Guard institutions like Black Rock and Vanguard were built in an age when user experience was not a priority. The New Guard institutions, often

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1000 Podcast Downloads, We Doing It

Brothers and sisters, I’m pumped to announce that the no gradient podcast has hit 1,000 unique downloads. I’ve talked with a marathon world record holder, a shamanic healer, a Marxist who tried to join the marines, a married couple in an open relationship, and just plain great

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Project Treble, Coming into its Own

Project Treble is the biggest re-architecture of Android since it was born, and Google announcing that the Android P beta will be supported by nearly a dozen smartphones is the clearest indication yet that it is working. The following shows the one year adoption rate of each version of Android:

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Of Delusionists and Blochaters

For every popular phenomenon there is an equal and opposite group of detractors. This creates a positive feedback loop where the promoters become more fervent in their support as the detractors become more fervent in the opposite, and vice versa. This leaves us with two irrational groups. Blockchain is no

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Publications

The Economist – The 24 hour news cycle is exhausting and superficial. Published once a week, The Economist takes a step back covering events and trends shaping our world. It’s coverage of the United States is particularly impartial given it is based overseas. Benedict Evans Newsletter – There is a lot

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Books

The Alchemist – One of the simplest and most beautiful stories I have ever read. Sometimes you must let go of what’s comfortable. The Little Book of Common Sense Investing – This book will blow your mind. Conventional wisdom tells us that the best way to grow wealth is to have

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Podcasts

Naval Ravikant on Everything – Naval Ravikant has so many amazing perspectives on life and here shares them all in this interview. It’s long, but worth it, given the huge impact it can have on how you view your life and your time. The World this Week – The 24 hour

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Nonprofits

Wikipedia – Providing a repository of knowledge in dozens of languages for the entire world. A contribution to Wikipedia is an investment in humanity. EFF – Digital rights are more important with every passing day, the Electronic Frontier Foundation time and time again has proven itself not only as a watchdog to

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Reminiscing on the Release of Windows 7

Coming off the disaster that was the release of Windows Vista with its performance and compatibility issues, there was a palpable sense in the community that Windows 7 had to be our saving grace. Despite Windows having the vast majority of the market share, we fanboys felt under attack. Everyone

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Only this time it’s Blockchain

In A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Burton G. Malkiel writes: “It was called the tronics boom, because the stock offerings often included some garbled version of the word “electronics” in their title, even if the companies had nothing to do with the electronics industry. Buyers of these issues didn’

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Hodlers, Consider This

Given the absolute stunning rise in the value of the cryptocurrency market, this is leaving many with the difficult decision of whether they should sell some of their position or not (remember, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing). So what should you do? There is no single

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We don’t Need Super Intelligence for AI to be Super

In The Impossibility of Intelligence Explosion, François Chollet writes: “Arguably, the usefulness of software has been improving at a measurably linear pace, while we have invested exponential efforts into producing it. The number of software developers has been booming exponentially for decades, and the number of transistors on which we

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Big Tech is Eating the World

This article has been added to no gradient retracks because it no longer represents the views of this publication. In 2011 Marc Andreessen declared “Software is Eating the World”. It is now evident that the software doing the eating is owned by a smaller and smaller set of companies. These

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Snap Inc. and the Brave New World of Internet Centralization

Snap Inc., one of the highest valued tech IPOs of the last decade, is built on cloud infrastructure from Amazon and Google. It has committed $2 billion to Google Cloud Services and $1 billion to Amazon Web Services over the next five years. This is a tech company that has