Author: Ben

  • Seven Lessons from My 30s

    Source: Nano Banana

    Turning 40 is a milestone that should come with a manual. It doesn’t, of course, but it does come with a decade’s worth of receipts for lessons learned the old fashioned way.

    As I ponder the next decade ahead of me, I’ve been reflecting on the things I picked up in the last one that have shaped my understanding of people and the world around me. I share seven of these lessons in the hope they might be helpful to — or at least amusing to 😅 — the reader.

    1. You Don’t Know Where You Rank in Someone’s Priorities Until You’ve Seen Them in a Crisis

    It’s easy to be a good partner during the good times.

    The real test of character comes during the bad times. It is only when the pressure is on and pleasantries feel like a wasteful luxury that people reveal their true priorities — and, especially, where you rank in those priorities. It’s in those moments of crisis that you can see who someone fundamentally is.

    This advice applies to both love and business: if you can, don’t enter into a partnership — getting married, starting a company together, having a kid together — with someone until you understand how they handle crisis. How do they act when they’re scared, angry, or cornered? Do they collaborate with their partners, or do they retreat into self-preservation? Do they treat partners like equals or burdens? Sources of strength or resources to be exploited?

    I’ve sadly learned several times in the past decade how people who are giving and collaborative when things are one way can quickly close off and prioritize themselves when things got tough.

    To be clear, this isn’t to say people who react poorly under pressure are “bad” or deserve to be cut out of your life. Crises are difficult for even those with the strongest of moral character, and you can still have a friendly or productive working relationship with someone who doesn’t consider you one of their top priorities.

    But understanding how someone acts in a crisis is a vital data point I would recommend thoroughly understanding before entering into any kind of serious partnership.

    2. Profession can be an Oddly Good Read on a Person

    I used to hate the question, “So, what do you do?”

    It felt reductive, and almost insulting, especially when I was starting out in my career and my job was only a very small piece of what I felt I had to offer.

    But I’ve come to appreciate that while a job is never the whole story about a person, it can be an incredibly revealing chapter. When you spend most of your waking hours on something that also shapes your finances, social status, and daily challenges, it inevitably molds you. Jobs define our incentives, hint at our training and skills, and frame our definitions of success and failure.

    Knowing someone is a practicing doctor in the US, for example, gives you a hint about their:

    • age & education — given the amount of medical training necessary to practice medicine in the US
    • their income — likely relatively high, with more precision possible if you know their specialty
    • a sense of their views on the US healthcare system — I’ve never met a physician who likes the health insurance companies who impose rules and paperwork on them to get paid, their electronic medical record system, or medical malpractice lawsuits
    • their approach to risk — having being ingrained in the ethos of “first do no harm”
    • their views on credentials — given the amount of time (and money!) they spent on getting their Medical Degree as well as the additional licensing and certification necessary to practice

    You won’t always get every detail right — and profession won’t give you a good indication on many aspects of their personality or personal lives that have little to do with their career — but it’s a more useful than not set of heuristics for understanding the people you meet.

    This is why I’ve grown very wary of interfacing with politicians. To succeed there requires a level of self-obsession that’s hard to square with sincerity. Success is driven by saying what’s popular, not necessarily what’s true (or even what you believe). Politicians with any level of success are also surrounded by people paid to flatter them. It creates a backdrop where genuine connection is difficult, power dynamics are twisted, and relationships easily become transactional. Andrew Yang captured some of this in a piece he wrote for Politico Magazine in 2021 entitled “When I Ran for President, It Messed With My Head”.

    Of course, there are exceptions. But in my experience, it is foolish to underestimate how influential the incentive structure of a career can be.

    3. There’s Little Upside in Talking About Politics

    To start with the obvious: policy matters. It shapes our lives, and in a democratic society, ignoring it is irresponsible.

    That said, I suspect many of us engage with politics far too much for our own good. The problem is that modern political discussion and news isn’t about logic — it’s about evoking visceral, tribal outrage. This is bad for two reasons. First, it leads to bad policy — it makes us seek symbolic victories and “cultural” retribution rather than nuance and sustainable compromise. Secondly, it leads to bad behavior by training us to see the world in terms of “us” versus “them.”

    In my 20s and early 30s, I loved a good political debate. I had a neat little box of “obvious things all reasonable people should believe.” That argumentativeness and certainty cost me. A long time friendship ended abruptly this past decade, likely over some position I took in one of those debates (it was never entirely clear to me). I also nearly became unfriendly with a former mentor over a political disagreement over that “neat little box of obviousness”.

    As someone who values his relationships, these were not proud moments. And it led me to ask: what upside did I get from seeking these debates? A temporary satisfaction that “I am more righteous than the ‘other tribe’”? Scoring some kind of rhetorical point? Hardly seems worth it.

    I now try to disengage from the daily outrage cycle of political news and who-said-what. After all, it rarely has real impact on policy, and the news cycle usually moves on after a few days. Instead, I try to focus on tracking substantive policy changes and analyses. It’s a lot more boring, but that’s a feature, not a bug.

    I also am a bit embarrassed to admit but I now actively avoid discussing politics with people — both online and in real life. This isn’t to say that I don’t have my own opinions (and in moments of weakness, I’ll share some of them on social media), but in recognizing there’s little upside, I’ve come to realize nobody really cares what I think. They just want to know if they should get angry with me or at me, and I don’t see the point in playing that game any more.

    4. Embrace the Unlikely

    If my 30s taught me anything, it’s that the improbable is inevitable. In the last decade alone, I experienced things that I thought were highly unlikely to happen in my lifetime:

    • was fired
    • called as a witness in legal proceedings (twice!)
    • lived through a global pandemic
    • saw a vaccine developed in under a year
    • saw US inflation go above 9%
    • watched a massive political re-orientation on globalization in the West

    Statistically speaking, over a long enough horizon, unlikely things will inevitably happen. But, beyond that, because unlikely things are highly correlated with one another, unlikely things will likely happen together. In my list above, for example, at least 3 of those things are directly related to COVID.

    So, what do you do in a world where the improbable is not only inevitable but will likely co-occur?

    First, prepare where you can. Get an estate plan, a rainy-day fund, a diversified portfolio, and make contingencies.

    Second, and most importantly, try to embrace the unlikely. The chaos of 2020 was a period of great stress for me and my family. I remember wondering at points if this was the end of the global economy and of in-person interaction. These are especially unsettling thoughts when you have a toddler at home and weren’t sure when you would next see your aging parents.

    But, in hindsight, 2020 was also one of the most transformative and productive years of my professional life. I helped build a telemedicine operation (that is, as of this writing, still doing pretty well); learned how to code AI models and had some of that work ultimately published in peer-reviewed journals; and tried my hand at policy work which led to new friendships and professional opportunities.

    Out of that tumultuous year came something positive that, I have to admit, would not have happened otherwise. So while 2020 was a terrible year in many fundamental ways, I’m grateful I was in a position to embrace it as an opportunity.

    5. Genius Doesn’t Generalize

    Smart people tend to be smart about multiple things. So it makes sense to seek out the advice of people who know better.

    However, we live in an age of unhealthy hero worship powered by influencer marketing and interview podcasts. We assume that because someone is brilliant in one domain, they’re worth listening to in others.

    But, in my experience, nothing could be further from the truth. What it takes to achieve genius-level mastery in one area often comes at the expense of others.

    I’m always baffled when people ask Elon Musk for life advice or Warren Buffett for his opinion on anything besides investing. A quick read of their biographies shows that their personal lives are a mess. Their genius is highly specialized. Their situations are extreme. At best, you get a different perspective. More likely, you hear something that is likely completely irrelevant to you.

    Source: XKCD

    It’s worth remembering this the next time you hear a billionaire investor weigh in on sociology, a Nobel Laureate scientist weigh in on politics, or an author of fiction weigh in on technology. It’s far more fruitful to consult a few smart friends or read about actual expert opinion than to mind the opinion of a famous (and/or rich) person on a topic outside their expertise.

    6. Good Taste is Overrated

    In our careers, “good taste” is something worth cultivating and investing in. It signals judgment and makes you hard to replace, especially in this new world of AI.

    But in life? I’ve come to a radically different conclusion: it’s much better to have low standards.

    My inability to distinguish a $20 bottle of wine from a $200 one means I can get the same pleasure from wine as a world-class sommelier for a fraction of the cost.

    My love for bad action movies and rewatching sitcoms means there’s always something to watch on an airplane.

    My willingness to enjoy fast food means I can find a decent meal almost anywhere in America.

    I used to be slightly ashamed of all of these things as evidence of my “uncultured palate”. Now, I see it as a gift. Being easy to please is a superpower for everyday contentment. And, it frees up time and mental energy to focus on what I can discern and care more about.

    7. Play Stupid (Status) Games, Win Stupid Prizes

    Many things we pursue in life aren’t for a tangible reward, but to signal something about ourselves to others and (sadly, often) to ourselves. These status games are everywhere, and the trap is that you can never win. There’s always a new car to buy, a more exclusive vacation to take, a new trend to follow. Marketers are masters at playing on this to keep us on the never-ending spending treadmill.

    I felt this most acutely in the past decade with my kids. The entire “new parent industry” is a masterclass in exploiting a new parent’s desire to be a good parent. It’s engineered to make you feel guilty for all the things you aren’t doing (and all the products you aren’t buying) while feeling proud of the things that you are (and all the products you are buying). I remember the shame and anxiety when our eldest son didn’t seem to be hitting his speech milestones as quickly as the books suggested (or *gasp* as my friends’ kids were).

    Thankfully, my level-headed wife and pragmatic pediatrician helped me see the bigger picture: our son was happy, healthy, and developing just fine on his own timeline. And sure enough, he started talking up a storm at two-and-a-half and was reading full books not long after.

    This sort of un-grounded status seeking is everywhere: people staying in “prestigious sounding” jobs they hate, spending money to keep up with their friends’ Instagram lives, or chasing exotic investments just so they have a more exciting story to tell than “I just buy index funds.”

    The lesson isn’t to drop out of all status games: that’s probably impossible. I will sheepishly admit I buy high-end gadgets not because I need them but to signal that I’m the type of person who buys high-end gadgets. I’ve also maintained a ridiculous 425-day+ Reddit streak for reasons I can’t particularly defend.

    But, the lesson is to be deliberate. Recognize a status game for what it is, and then consciously decide if it’s one you actually want to play.

    Seeing Past the Surface

    Looking back, if there’s a single thread connecting these seven lessons, it’s about learning to see past the convenient surfaces. It’s about understanding the hidden incentives that drive people, the true priorities that emerge under pressure, and the surprising freedom that comes from ignoring the ones that don’t matter.

    This process of looking deeper is never really finished. The biggest thing I’ve come to appreciate is that the learning never stops. I’m sure my 40s will dismantle some of the certainties I’ve built in my 30s, and I can’t wait to see which ones.

    That, I suspect, will be the real adventure.

  • Gene therapy for Huntington’s shows promising clinical trial data

    Huntington’s Disease is one of the classic “uncurable” neurodegenerative diseases. A genetic mutation produces a mutant form of a protein (called Huntingtin) which leads to sudden onset of symptoms which gets progressively worse until death. It’s so bad that it’s considered a “textbook” example of the need for genetic counseling when people are considering getting their DNA sequenced: for some, it’s better to not know they’re a carrier or have the disease.

    But some exciting news from biotech company uniQure today may change that! UniQure announced the results of a Phase I/II study showing how a revolutionary gene therapy + brain surgery can slow disease progression by 75% over 36 months.

    What also stood out to me was the use of a synthetic control arm — basically using data collected on real world patients (rather than trial participants) to alleviate the time and cost burden of needing to recruit from a relatively rare disease population (as well as capture disease progression in a realistic setting). Overall, an amazing feat for everyone involved and hopefully a beacon of hope for those with Huntington’s Disease or carrying the gene.

    Pivotal Phase I/II AMT-130 Huntington’s Disease Update [PDF]
    uniQure presentation

  • LA child dies from SSPE — (yet) another reason to vaccinate

    Let’s summarize the case for measles vaccination:

    Sadly, a child in LA county died on Thursday from SSPE — while we don’t have a ton of information about the child’s age, it’s likely the child came down with measles prior to vaccination. For us to protect our kids and each other, we should not only get them vaccinated but insure broad enough vaccination so as to insure herd immunity.

    “This case is a painful reminder of how dangerous measles can be, especially for our most vulnerable community members,” L.A. County Health Officer Dr. Muntu Davis said in a statement. “Infants too young to be vaccinated rely on all of us to help protect them through community immunity. Vaccination is not just about protecting yourself-it’s about protecting your family, your neighbors, and especially children who are too young to be vaccinated.”

    Child dies from rare measles-related complication, LA County health officials say
    Amy Powell | ABC 7 News

  • Why are ultra-processed foods bad for you?

    Nutrition is a field that is fraught with studies that are not powered or designed well enough to make strong conclusions about what types of diets are the “best”.

    So it was interesting to see this article dig into the evidence over whether or not ultra-processed foods, a category that itself is a little hard to pin down — somehow we’re supposed to find it “natural” that burgers and cookies and breakfast cereals are in the same group — are “bad” for you and why.

    The short answer is: yes they are bad, but it doesn’t seem to be exactly clear why. Potentially some combination of the foods being energy dense, quick-to-eat, and potentially impact our gut microbiome.

    What was most impressive to me, however, were the number of randomized controlled trials that were attempted with confined study participants (the only way to know who’s eating what and how much) — those are hard to do (and consequently relatively small) but are probably the most convincing evidence.

    Well worth a read if you’re even remotely interested in what the best science has to tell us about how and why processed foods impact our health.

    The first RCT on UPFs [Ultra-Processed Foods] was carried out by a team led by integrative physiologist Kevin Hall, who until April was at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), part of the HHS. For more than a decade, Hall has sought to overcome some of the limitations of nutrition research by confining study participants to a research hospital, so that their diets can be precisely recorded.

    In 2015, he was approached by two Brazilian researchers at a meeting after he presented the results of one such study, comparing a low-carbohydrate, animal-product-based diet with a low-fat vegan diet. “They told me they had enjoyed my talk, but that my focus on nutrients was very twentieth century and that really, I should be thinking about the extent and purpose of processing food,” says Hall, who had not then heard of UPFs. He was sceptical but intrigued enough that he devised a trial in which 20 adults stayed at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and consumed a diet high in either UPFs or unprocessed food for two weeks before swapping diets.

    Like many other researchers, Hall defined UPFs using a system developed by Monteiro. Known as NOVA, it classifies food into four groups according to the extent, type and purpose of processing8. Unprocessed or minimally processed foods, such as vegetables and pasta, are at one end of the scale. At the other end are UPFs, which undergo multiple industrial processes and usually contain substances rarely used in home kitchens, such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils and additives, including colouring and emulsifiers.

    Participants in Hall’s RCT could eat as much as they liked, but the food presented to them was matched for nutrient groups. To Hall’s surprise, the results, published in 2019, showed that participants consumed around 500 calories more per day on average while on the UPF diet — and gained an average of 0.9 kg over the two weeks9. They lost that same amount of weight while on the unprocessed diet.

    Are ultra-processed foods really so unhealthy? What the science says
    Nic Fleming | Nature News

  • The Surrealism of Authoritarianism

    Among the obvious hallmarks of authoritarianism are:

    1. Arbitrary paranoia from on high — where students singing patriotic songs on bike rides are suddenly viewed to be a threat
    2. Contradiction between reality and what the state wants you to believe — where state media simultaneously can champion “Labubu blind boxes” as signs of cultural & economic success but also frivolous “tools to exploit children’s wallets”

    While every society has its own forms of this, it’s very clear China under Xi Jinping has advanced in troubling directions on both, an alarming sign for anyone who lives in China but also a reminder to free societies that it’s easier than you think to step down this path.

    Labubu appears to be yet another sign of China’s global success. Figurines of the grinning, pointy-eared elf, marketed by a Chinese company called Pop Mart, are so wildly popular that fans around the world go to great lengths to get their hands on them. Many of them come in “blind boxes,” meaning that the consumer gets to see the contents only after purchase. The Chinese state news agency Xinhua boasted in mid-June that the Labubu craze “signals a broader shift in China’s role on the global stage”: The country is becoming a cultural center.

    At home, however, the Chinese Communist Party is working to dampen the enthusiasm. A June article in its main newspaper, the People’s Daily, criticized the “out of control spending” on blind boxes and similar products among minors who are “irrational” in their decisions and called for tighter regulation to prevent such objects from becoming “tools to exploit children’s wallets.”

    Blind boxes are but one cultural trend to incur the party’s ire. In recent years, Chinese authorities have gone after video games and K-pop, comedy clubs and Halloween parties, gay and lesbian activists and women’s-rights advocates, tech entrepreneurs and financial advisers. The incessant crackdowns, and the campaigns of censorship or censoriousness, suggest that the Chinese regime is intent on not just eliminating opposition, but also micromanaging its people’s lifestyles, consumption, and beliefs.

    Life has Gotten Surreal in China
    Michael Schuman | The Atlantic

  • (Finally) The End of Evergrande

    It’s been a long time coming but China Evergrande (which I blogged about nearly 2 years ago!), once China’s largest property developer and who’s debt crisis is widely viewed as the “Lehman Brothers” moment in China’s property crisis, has finally been de-listed, about 18 months after it was ordered to be liquidated.

    What remains to be seen is what China’s government will do as China’s property crisis continues. It’s somewhat ironic given that it was the Chinese government which triggered the property sector’s implosion when it tried to crack down on the property bubble. Only time will tell how much pain the central government is willing for the sector to endure — the US was unable to stomach this pain during the Great Financial Crisis and ultimately made “heroic” moves to save the housing sector.

    The clock started ticking for the delisting in late January last year, when Evergrande received a liquidation order from a Hong Kong court and trading of its shares was suspended. It has remained halted since then, having failed to meet requirements for a resumption of trading. In Hong Kong, a stock can be delisted if suspension lasts 18 months or longer.

    The move will further diminish hopes for any recovery for Evergrande’s shareholders, who have seen the value of their investment evaporate in recent years.

    China’s Once-Biggest Builder Evergrande Booted Out of Stock Market After Collapse
    Bloomberg News

  • New Age Bioprospecting for Antimicrobials

    One of the major contributors to improved healthcare outcomes and reduced mortality in the post-World War II era was the widespread use of antibiotics. Able to treat infection, these miracle drugs literally transformed bacteria from humanity’s primary killer to a manageable problem.

    But, in recent decades, the decline in the discovery of novel antibacterials (and other antimicrobials like antifungals) and the rapid rise in antimicrobial resistance has threatened this happy state. This has led many experts to worry about what will happen in a post-antibiotic world. After all, without effective antibiotics, we not only lose the ability to treat life-threatening diseases like tuberculosis (not to mention common ailments which are a nuisance today but may become more serious like strep throat, urinary tract infections, and ear infections), but we will also lose the ability to perform many surgeries safely (as recovery oftentimes counts on antibiotics to prevent and hold at bay infections).

    While we need to get smarter about how and where we use antibiotics (especially in agricultural applications) to slow the rise of resistance, the other half of this problem is in discovering and commercializing new antimicrobials. This is something we’ve largely failed to do since the 1960s, as the figure below from the C&EN article derived from data in a 2019 paper shows.

    The “golden age” of antimicrobial discovery that ended in the 1960s came largely from researchers searching for these miracle chemicals in soil samples (“bioprospecting”), where bacteria and fungi, in order to compete, release them as “chemical weapons” against others. But, having long ago exhausted the “easy” antimicrobials, we were unable to replicate this success in the decades following the 1960s

    But maybe this is about to change. In March, two completely new classes of antimicrobial were published in two weeks (both in Nature) — equaling the total output of the 2010s! Both papers (one by a group from China Pharmaceutical University in Nanjing, China and the other from a collaboration between University of Illinois in Chicago and McMaster University in Canada) were centered around identifying biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) responsible, and with the lower cost of metagenomic sequencing and new computational methods, this may point to a new era of discovering novel antimicrobials to help us innovate our way out of our current antimicrobial resistance dilemma by re-inventing bioprospecting.

    A good reminder that what we need is the political and scientific willpower to keep funding this type of research and the types of genomic and protein databases that make this type of innovation possible!

    In March, the journal Nature published the discoveries of two paradigm-breaking antimicrobial compounds in as many weeks: a polyene macrolide antifungal called mandimycin and a lasso peptide antibiotic called lariocidin.

    Both these compounds, which use never-before-seen antimicrobial mechanisms, were found using techniques that let researchers look deep into the chemical diversity of microbes—much deeper than a typical antibiotic or antifungal screen might go. And it’s not just these two molecules. Scientists are using the new approaches to discover countless other antimicrobial compounds with the potential to become drugs.

    Bioprospectors mine microbial genomes for antibiotic gold
    Max Barnhart | C&EN

  • Google’s New Weapon in AI — Cloudflare

    Tech strategy is difficult AND fascinating because it’s unpredictable. In addition to worrying about the actions of direct competitors (i.e. Samsung vs Apple), companies need to also worry about the actions of ecosystem players (i.e. smartphones and AI vendors) who may make moves that were intended for something else but have far-reaching consequences.

    In the competition between frontier AI models, it is no surprise that Google, where the Transformer architecture virtually all LLMs are based on was created, was caught off-guard by the rapid rise of OpenAI and AI-powered search vendors like Perplexity and Chinese participants like DeepSeek and Alibaba/Qwen. While Google (and its subsidiary DeepMind) have doubled down on their own impressive AI efforts, the general perception in the tech industry has been that Google is on defense.

    But, as I started, tech strategy is not just about your direct competition. It’s also about the ecosystem. Cloudflare, which offers distributed internet security solutions (which protect this blog and let me access my home server remotely) recently announced that it would start blocking the webscrapers that AI companies use due to concerns from publishers of websites that their content is being used without compensation.

    However, because search is still a key source of traffic for most websites, this “default block” is almost certainly not turned on (at least by most website owners) for Google’s own scrapers, giving Google’s internal AI efforts a unique data advantage over it’s non-search-engine rivals.

    Time will tell how the major AI vendors will adapt to this, but judging by the announcement this morning that Cloudflare is now actively flagging AI-powered search engine Perplexity as a bad agent, Cloudflare may have just given Google a powerful new weapon in it’s AI competition.

    The Internet as we have known it for the past three decades is rapidly changing, but one thing remains constant: it is built on trust. There are clear preferences that crawlers should be transparent, serve a clear purpose, perform a specific activity, and, most importantly, follow website directives and preferences. Based on Perplexity’s observed behavior, which is incompatible with those preferences, we have de-listed them as a verified bot and added heuristics to our managed rules that block this stealth crawling.

    Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives
    Gabriel Corral, Vaibhav Singal, Brian Mitchell, Reid Tatoris
    | Cloudflare Blog

  • Helsinki goes a full year without a traffic death

    Helsinki, Finland (population: ~650,000) has not had a single car cash related death in over a year! That is impressive! They believe a combination of lower speed limits, improved pedestrian / cycling infrastructure, public transit improvement, and traffic camera all contributed.

    While Americans love cars (this writer included!), the fact that roughly 40,000 Americans die each year from motor vehicle fatalities (not to mention ~2.6 million emergency department visits related to motor vehicle crashes in 2022 and $470 billion in medical costs) should push us to question if we can do better by learning from the experiences of other places.

    I don’t relish driving even slower in a city, but it’s hard to deny the alternative is even grimmer.

    According to Utriainen, more than half of Helsinki’s streets now have a speed limit of 30 km/h. Fifty years ago, that proportion featured 50 km/h limits.

    Earlier this summer, Helsinki decided to lower speed limits near schools to 30 km/h, a measure that is set to take effect as the academic year begins.

    Street design has also played a key role. Pedestrian and cycling infrastructure has been significantly upgraded in recent years. In addition, cooperation with traffic police has intensified and more traffic cameras and automated enforcement systems have been introduced.

    “Public transport in Helsinki is excellent, which reduces car use, and with it, the number of serious accidents,” Utriainen noted.

    Vehicle technology has also improved, making both cars and other personal transport options safer than ever.

    Helsinki goes a full year without a traffic death
    YLE News

  • Cloudflare Tunnels for Your Home Server

    (Note: this is part of my ongoing series on cheaply selfhosting)

    If you’ve been following my selfhosting journey, you’ll know that I host some web applications — among them, network storage for my family, tools for working with PDFs, media streamers, a newsreader, etc. — from an inexpensive home server on my home network. It’s mostly a fun hobby but it’s helped teach me a great deal about web applications and Docker containers, and has helped me save some time and money by having applications I can control (and offer).

    But one of the big questions facing every self-hoster is how to access these applications securely when I’m not at home? This is a conundrum as the two traditional options available have major tradeoffs

    1. Opening up ports to the internet — One way to do this is to open up ports on your internet router and to forward traffic to those ports to your server. While this is the most direct solution to the problem of granting access to your hosted applications, this has several issues
      • First, some internet service providers and routers don’t actually let you do this!
      • Second, by opening up a port on your router, you’ll be opening up a door for everyone on the internet to access. This could expose your home network to malicious actors, and requires you to either accept the risk or set up additional security mechanisms to protect yourself.
      • Third, unless your internet service provider has granted you a static IP address (which is relatively rare for consumer internet plans), the IP address of your home will randomly change. Therefore in order to access your home server, you’ll need to setup a Dynamic DNS service which adds additional complexity to manage.
    2. VPNs or VPN-like solutions (Twingate, Tailscale, etc) — The alternative to opening up a port is to leverage VPN and VPN-like technologies. This is much more secure (and, in fact, I use Twingate, a great VPN-like service, for this type of secure remote access). But, this has one major downside: it requires each device that wants to access your hosted applications to have a special client installed. This can be a hassle (especially if you want to grant access to someone less tech-savvy), and, in some cases, near impossible (if you’re dealing with devices like a connected TV or eReader or if the device is behind a firewall that doesn’t like VPNs).

    I wanted a third option that:

    • would work nicely and securely with practically any internet-connected device
    • didn’t require client installation or configuration
    • didn’t require me to open up any new ports on my home router or expose a public IP address
    • could integrate authentication (as an extra layer of security)

    That’s how I landed on Cloudflare tunnels!

    Cloudflare Tunnels

    Enter Cloudflare Tunnels, a product in the Cloudflare Zero Trust family of offerings. By running a small piece of software called cloudflared on your home network (i.e. as a Docker container on your home server), you can link:

    • the services/resources on your home network
    • domains hosted and secured by Cloudflare
    • third party authentication services (like Google login)

    What that means is my local Stirling PDF tools (which live on my home server at the domain pdf.home) can now be reached by any internet-connected device at https://pdf.[mydomain.com] while locked behind a Google login which only allows users with specific email addresses through (i.e. my wife and myself)! All for free!

    How to Setup

    Transferring Your Domains

    To get started, transfer your domains to Cloudflare. The specific instructions for this will vary by domain registrar (see some guidelines from Cloudflare). While you can technically just change the nameservers, I would highly recommend fully transferring your domains to Cloudflare for three reasons

    • Cost: Cloudflare (as of this writing) offers at-cost domain registration. This means they don’t add any markup on top of what it costs to actually register the domain and so it’s typically cheaper to buy and renew domains with Cloudflare
    • Security: Cloudflare offers free and automatic HTTPS protection on all domains and basic DDOS protection as well
    • Extra Configurable Protection: I am not a cybersecurity expert but Cloudflare, even on their free tier, offer generous protection and domain features that you can further customize: bot protection, analytics, a sophisticated web application firewall, etc.

    Creating the Tunnel

    Once you have your domains transferred to Cloudflare, go into your Cloudflare dashboard and create your tunnel. Start by clicking on Zero Trust on the sidebar. Then go to Networks > Tunnels and click on Create Tunnel

    Select the Cloudflared option

    You will be asked to name your connector — pick any name that suits you, I went with OMV (since my homeserver is an OpenMediaVault server).

    Then copy the installation command. Paste it somewhere and extract the really long token that starts with “ey…” as you’ll need it for the next step.

    Setting up Cloudflared

    Set up cloudflared. The following are instructions for OpenMediaVault. Depending on your home server setup, you may need to do different things to get a Docker container up and running using Docker compose but the Docker compose file and the general order of operations should match. Assuming you use OpenMediaVault…

    • If you haven’t already, make sure you have OMV Extras and Docker Compose installed (refer to the section Docker and OMV-Extras in my previous post, you’ll want to follow all 10 steps as I refer to different parts of the process throughout this post) and have a static local IP address assigned to your server.
    • Login to your OpenMediaVault web admin panel, and then go to [Services > Compose > Files] in the sidebar. Press the  button in the main interface to add a new Docker compose file.

      Under Name put down cloudflared and under File, adapt the following. Copy the token from the installation command 
    services: 
  cloudflared: 
    image: cloudflare/cloudflared 
    container_name: cloudflare-tunnel 
    restart: unless-stopped 
    command: tunnel run 
    environment: 
      - TUNNEL_TOKEN={{the long token from before that starts with ey...}}
Code language: Dockerfile (dockerfile)
    • Once you’re done, hit Save and you should be returned to your list of Docker compose files. Notice that the new Cloudflared entry you created has a Down status, showing the container has yet to be initialized.
    • To start your Duplicati container, click on the new Cloudflared entry and press the  (up) button. This will create the container, download any files needed, and run it.

    Go back to your Cloudflare Zero Trust dashboard and click on Networks > Tunnels. If your Docker container worked, you should see a HEALTHY status showing that your Cloudflared container is up and running and connected to Cloudflare

    Connecting your Services to the Tunnel

    Click on your now active tunnel in the Cloudflare interface and click on Edit (or use the three-dot menu on the right hand side and select Configure) and then click on the Public Hostnames tab at the top. Press the Add a public hostname button.

    For each service you want to make available, you will need to enter:

    • The Domain you wish to use (and have transferred to Cloudflare)
      • The Subdomain you want to map that service to — if the domain you wish to use is example.com, an example subdomain would be subdomain.example.com. If you leave this blank, it will map the “naked” domain (in this case example.com)
      • The Path you want to map the service to — if the domain and subdomain is subdomain.example.com and you add a path /path, then the service would be mapped to subdomain.example.com/path
    • The Type of service — Cloudflare will map many different types of resources, but chances are it’ll be HTTP.
    • The URL of the service relative to your network — this is the IP address (including port) that you use within your network. For example: 192.168.85.22:5678 (assuming your home server’s local IP is 192.168.85.22 and the port the service you want to link is set to 5678)

    Press Save once you’re done and go ahead and test the subdomain/domain/path you just added (i.e. go to https://subdomain.example.com/path). It should take you straight to your application, except now it’s through a publicly accessible URL secured behind Cloudflare SSL!

    Suggestions on Service Configuration

    You need to repeat the above process for every selfthosted application that you want to make publicly available. Some suggestions based on what I did:

    • I made public every service I host with a few exceptions related to security, such as:
      • The OpenMediaVault console & WeTTY — Since this controls my entire home server setup (and grants access to all my network attached storage), it felt a little too important to make it easy to access (at least not without a VPN-like solution like the one I use, Twingate)
      • The PiHole administrative console — Similarly, because my PiHole is so vital to how the internet functions on my home network and regulates DNS in my home, it felt like locking this behind Twingate was reasonable
      • The NAS — As there are important and sensitive files on the OpenMediaVault file server, this was again one of the things where security trumped expediency.
      • Duplicati — I was less concerned about security here, but Duplicati is largely a “set it and forget it” type of backup tool, so it felt like there was little benefit to make this publicly available (and only potential risks)
      • The Ubooquity Admin interface — I’m again not super concerned about security here, but I have rarely needed to use it, so it didn’t make sense to add to my “surface area of attack” by exposing this as well
    • For a media server like Plex (or Jellyfin or Emby), you don’t have to, but I’d encourage you to connect two domains:
      • One that is easily memorable by you (i.e. plex.yourdomain.com) for you to access via browser over HTTPS and protected by authentication
        • and access control (see later in the post for how to configure)
      • One that has a long, hard-to-guess subdomain (i.e. hippo-oxygen-face.yourdomain.com) that will still be served over HTTPS but will not be protected by authentication. This will allow access to devices like smart TVs and the Plex clients which do not expect the servers to have additional authentication on top of them.
      If you have Plex and you follow this second suggestion, you can further secure you server by going into your Plex configuration panel from a browser and pressing the wrench icon in the upper right (which takes you to settings)

      Under your server settings (not Plex Web or your account settings which are above), go to Settings > Remote Access and press the Disable Remote Access button. This disables Plex’s built-in Relay feature which, while reasonably functional, is not under your control and limited in bandwidth / typically forces your server to transcode more than necessary

      To allow Plex apps (such as those on a TV or smartphone) to access your server, you’ll need to let Plex know what the right URL is. To do that go to Settings > Network and scroll down to Customer server access URLs. Here you’ll enter your hard-to-guess subdomain (i.e. https://hippo-oxygen-face.yourdomain.com) and press Save Changes. This informs Plex (and therefore all Plex clients) where to look for your media server


      To confirm it all works, login to your Plex account at https://app.plex.tv/ and confirm that your server shows up (you may have to wait the first time you do this as Plex connects to your server).

      Because this approach does NOT have extra access control and authentication, and because there are malicious actors who scan the internet for unguarded media server domains, it’s important that your subdomain here be long and hard-to-guess.

    Authentication and Access Control

    Because Cloudflare Tunnels are part of Cloudflare’s enterprise offering to help IT organizations make their applications secure & accessible, it comes with authentication support and access controls built-in for any application connected to your Cloudflare tunnel. This means you can easily protect your web applications against unwanted access.

    To set this up, log back in to the Cloudflare dashboard, go to Zero Trust, and then go to Access > Policies in the sidebar and press the Add a policy button.

    Enter a Policy name (pick something that describes how you’re restricting access, like “Jack and Jill only“).

    You can then add the specific rules that govern the policy. Cloudflare supports a wide range of rules (including limiting based on IP address, country, etc), but assuming you just want to restrict access to specific individuals, I’d pick Emails under Selector and add the emails of the individual who are being granted access under Value. Once you’re set, press the Save button at the bottom!

    Now you have a policy which can restrict a given application only to users with specific email addresses 🙌🏻.

    Now, we just need to set up Cloudflare to apply that policy (and a specific login method) to the services in question. To do that, in the Cloudflare Zero Trust dashboard, go to Access > Applications in the sidebar and press the Add an application button in the screen that comes up.

    Select the Self-hosted option. And then enter your Application name. Press the Add public hostname button and enter in the Subdomain, Domain, and Path for your previously-connected subdomain.

    Scroll down to Access Policies and press the Select existing policies button and check the policy you just created and then hit the Confirm button. You should see something like the following

    Finally you can configure which login methods you want to support. Out of the box, Cloudflare supports one-time PIN as a login method. Any user who lands on the domain in question the first time will be prompted to enter their email and, to verify the user is who they say they are, they’ll be sent a PIN number to that email address which they’ll then need to enter. This is straightforward, and if that’s all you want, accept the current default settings.

    However, if, like me, you prefer to have your users login via a 3rd party authentication service (like Google or Facebook), then you have a little bit of extra work to do. Press the Manage login methods link where you’ll be taken to a screen in a new tab to configure your Authentication options. Where it says Login methods, press the Add new button.

    You’ll be given the ability to add support for 3rd party logins through a number of identity providers (see below).

    You can select any identity provider you wish — I went with Google — but whatever you select, Cloudflare will provide instructions for how to connect that provider to Cloudflare Zero Trust. These instructions can be quite complicated (see the Google instructions below) but if you follow Cloudflare’s instructions, you should be fine.

    Once you’re done, press the Save button and return to the tab where you were configuring the application.

    Under Login methods you should see that Cloudflare has checked the Accept all available identity providers toggle. You can keep that option, but as I configured only want my users to use Google, I unchecked that toggle and un-selected the One-time PIN option. I also checked the Instant Auth option (only available if there’s only one authentication method selected) which skips the authentication method selection step for your users. Then I pressed Next

    The next two screens have additional optional configuration options which you can skip through by pressing Next and Save. Et voila! You have now configured an authentication and access control system on top of your now publicly accessible web service. Repeat this process for every service you want to put authentication & access control on and you’ll be set!

    I have a few services I share access to with my wife and a few that are just for myself and so I’ve configured two access policies which I apply to my services differently. For services I intend to let anyone without access control reach (for example my Plex server for Plex apps), I simply don’t add them as an application in Cloudflare for access control (and just host them via subdomain).

    I hope this is helpful for anyone who wants to make their selfhosted services accessible securely through the web. If you’re interested in how to setup a home server on OpenMediaVault or how to self-host different services, check out all my posts on the subject!

  • LLMs Get Trounced at Chess

    While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated they can do many things well enough, it’s important to remember that these are not “thinking machines” so much as impressively competent “writing machines” (able to figure out what words are likely to follow).

    Case in point: both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot lost to the chess playing engine of an old Atari game (Video Chess) which takes up a mere 4 KB of memory to work (compared with the billions of parameters and GB’s of specialized accelerator memory needed to make LLMs work).

    It’s a small (yet potent) reminder that (1) different kinds of AI are necessary for different tasks (i.e. Google’s revolutionary AlphaZero probably would’ve made short work of the Atari engine) and (2) don’t underestimate how small but highly specialized algorithms can perform.

    Last month we reported on the somewhat-surprising news that an emulated Atari 2600 running the 1979 software Video Chess had “absolutely wrecked” an overconfident ChatGPT at the game of kings. Fans of schadenfreude rejoice, because Microsoft Copilot thought this was a chance to show its superiority to ChatGPT: And the Atari gave it a beating.

    After conquering ChatGPT, Atari 2600 Video Chess destroys Microsoft Copilot: ‘The vintage silicon mastermind bested me fair and square’
    Rich Stanton | PC Gamer

  • The War on Harvard’s Private Equity/VC Collateral Damage

    Republicans have declared a “war on Harvard” in recent months and one front of that is a request to the SEC to look at how Harvard’s massive endowment values illiquid assets like venture capital and private equity.

    What’s fascinating is that in targeting Harvard in this way the Republicans may have declared war on Private Equity and Venture Capital in general. As their holdings (in privately held companies) are highly illiquid, it is considered accounting “standard practice” to simply ask the investment funds to provide “fair market” valuations of those assets.

    This is a practical necessity, as it is highly difficult to value these companies (which rarely trade and where even highly paid professionals miss the mark). But, it means that investment firms are allowed to “grade their own homework”, pretending that valuations for some companies are much higher than they actually have a right to be, resulting in quite a bit of “grade inflation” across the entire sector.

    If Harvard is forced to re-value these according to a more objective standard — like the valuations of these assets according to a 409a valuation or a secondary transaction (where shares are sold without the company being involved) both of which artificially deflate prices — then it wouldn’t be a surprise to see significant “grade deflation” which could have major consequences for private capital:

    • Less capital for private equity / venture capital: Many institutional investors (LPs) like private equity / venture capital in part because the “grade inflation” buffers the price turbulence that more liquid assets (like stocks) experience (so long as the long-term returns are good). Those investors will find private equity and venture capital less attractive if the current practices are replaced with something more like “grade deflation”
    • A shift in investments from higher risk companies to more mature ones: If Private Equity / Venture Capital investments need to be graded on a harsher scale, they will be less likely to invest in higher risk companies (which are more likely to experience valuation changes under stricter methodologies) and more likely to invest in more mature companies with more predictable financials (ones that are closer to acting like publicly traded companies). This would be a blow to smaller and earlier stage companies.

    The problem is investors are often allowed to keep using the reported NAV figures even if they know they are out of date or weren’t measured properly. In those scenarios, the accounting rules say an investor “shall consider whether an adjustment” is necessary. But the rules don’t require an investor to do anything more than consider it. There’s no outright prohibition on using the reported NAV even if the investor knows it’s completely unreasonable.

    Private Equity Caught in Crosshairs of Elise Stefanik’s Attack on Harvard
    Jonathan Weil | Wall Street Journal

  • CAR-T Bests Solid Tumors

    The promise of immune cell therapies is to direct the incredible sophistication of the immune system to the medical targets we want to hit. In the case of CAR-T cells, we take a patient’s own immune T-cells and “program” them through genetic modification to go after cancer cells. While the process of the genetic modification to create those cells is still incredibly expensive and challenging, we’ve seen amazing progress with CAR-T in liquid tumors (e.g., leukemias, lymphomas, etc).

    But, when it comes to solid tumors, it’s been far more challenging. Enter this Phase II clinical trial from China (summarized in Nature News). The researchers performed a random controlled trial on 266 patients with gastric or gastro-esophageal cancer who resisted previous treatment and assigned 2/3 to receive CAR-T or best-medical-care (the control) otherwise. The results (see the survival curve below) are impressive — while the median progression-free survival is only about 1.5 months different, it’s very clear that by month 8 there are no progression-free patients in the control group but something like ~25% of the CAR-T group.

    The side effect profile is still challenging (with 99% of patients in CAR-T group experiencing moderately severe side effects) but this is (sadly) to be expected with CAR-T treatments.

    While it remains to be seen how this scales up in a Phase III study with a larger population, this is incredibly promising finding — giving clinicians a new tool in their arsenal for dealing with a wider range of cancer targets as well as suggesting that cell therapies still have more tricks up their sleeves

    The phase II clinical trial in China tested chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells in people with advanced gastric cancer or gastro-oesophageal junction cancer, which are solid tumours. To create CAR-T-cell therapies, T cells are collected from a person with cancer and tweaked to produce proteins that target cancer cells. The T cells are then infused back into the same person. CAR-T-cell therapy has revolutionized cancer treatment but has been most successful against blood cancers.

    “Solid tumours generally don’t respond well to CAR-T-cell therapy,” says Lisa Mielke, a cancer researcher at the Olivia Newton John Cancer Research Institute in Heidelberg, Australia. The trials are among the first in which CAR-T-cell therapy has had promising results against solid tumours. They provide “evidence that there is potential for CAR T cells to be further optimized for future treatment of patients with solid tumours”, adds Mielke.

    Cancer-fighting CAR T cells show promising results for hard-to-treat tumours
    Rachel Fieldhouse | Nature News

  • Great Expectations

    This is an old piece from Morgan Housel from May 2023. It highlights how optimistic expectations can serve as a “debt” that needs to be “paid off”.

    To illustrate this, he gives a fascinating example — the Japanese stock market. From 1965 to 2022, both the Japanese stock market and the S&P500 (a basket of mostly American large companies) had similar returns. As most people know, Japan has had a miserable 3 “lost decades” of growth and stock performance. But Housel presents this fact in an interesting light: it wasn’t that Japan did poorly, it just did all of its growth in a 25 year run between 1965-1990 and then spent the following two decades “paying off” that “expectations debt”.

    Housel concludes, as he oftentimes does, with wisdom for all of us: “An asset you don’t deserve can quickly become a liability … reality eventually catches up, and demands repayment in equal proportion to your delusions – plus interest”.

    Manage your great expectations.

    There’s a stoic saying: “Misfortune weighs most heavily on those who expect nothing but good fortune.”

    Expecting nothing but good feels like such a good mindset – you’re optimistic, happy, and winning. But whether you know it or not you’re very likely piling up a hidden debt that must eventually be repaid.

    Expectations Debt
    Morgan Housel

  • Why Self-Hosting is Having a Moment

    I am a selfhoster (as anyone who’s read many of my more recent blog posts knows). I’m also a fan of the selfh.st site (which documents a lot of news & relevant interviews from the self-host world) so I was delighted to see the owner of selfh.st get interviewed in Ars Technica.

    Nothing earth-shattering but I appreciated (and agreed with) his breakdown of why self-hosting is flourishing today (excerpt below). For me, personally, the ease with which Docker makes setting up selfhosted services and the low cost of storage and mini-PCs turned this from an impractical idea into one that I’ve come to rely on for my own “personal tech stack”.

    What gave rise to self-hosting’s relative recent popularity? That led Sholly to a few answers, many of them directly relating to the corporate cloud services people typically use instead of self-hosting:

    • Privacy for photos, files, and other data
    • Cost of cloud hosting and storage
    • Accessibility of services, through GitHub, Reddit, and sites like his
    • Installation with Docker (“a game-changer for lots of people”) and Unraid
    • Single-board computers (SBCs) like the Raspberry Pi
    • NUCS, mini-PCs, workstations, and other pandemic-popular hardware

    Finally, there’s the elephant in any self-hosting discussion: piracy.

    Self-hosting is having a moment. Ethan Sholly knows why
    Kevin Purdy | Ars Technica

  • I’m just a Medical Guideline

    Medical Guidelines are incredibly important — they impact everything from your doctor’s recommendations and insurance coverage to the medications your insurance covers — but are somewhat shrouded in mystery.

    This piece from Emily Oster’s ParentData is a good overview of what they are (and aren’t) — and give a pretty good explanation of why a headline from the popular press is probably not capturing the nuance and review of clinical evidence that goes into them.

    (and yes, that title is a Schoolhouse Rock reference)

    The headlines almost always simplify or distort these complexities. Sometimes those simplifications are necessary, other times…well, less so. Why should you care? Guidelines often impact health insurance coverage, influence standards of care, and play a role in how health policy is developed. Understanding what goes into them empowers you to engage more thoughtfully when talking to your doctor. You’ll be more aware of when those sensationalized headlines really mean anything, which is hopefully most of the time nothing at all.

    Where Do Official Medical Guidelines Come From?
    Gillian Goddard | ParentData

  • On (Stock Market) Bubbles

    I spotted this memo from Oaktree Capital founder Howard Marks and thought it was a sobering and grounded take on what makes a stock market bubble and reasons to be alarmed about the current concentration of market capitalization in the so-called “Magnificent Seven” and how eerily similar this was to the “Nifty Fifty” or the “Dot Com Bubble” eras of irrational exuberance. Whether you agree with him or not, it’s a worthwhile piece of wisdom to remember.

    This graph that Marks borrowed from JP Morgan is also quite intriguing (terrifying?)

    There’s usually a grain of truth that underlies every mania and bubble. It just gets taken too far. It’s clear that the internet absolutely did change the world – in fact, we can’t imagine a world without it. But the vast majority of internet and e-commerce companies that soared in the late ’90s bubble ended up worthless. When a bubble burst in my early investing days, The Wall Street Journal would run a box on the front page listing stocks that were down by 90%. In the aftermath of the TMT Bubble, they’d lost 99%.

    When something is on the pedestal of popularity, the risk of a decline is high. When people assume – and price in – an expectation that things can only get better, the damage done by negative surprises is profound. When something is new, the competitors and disruptive technologies have yet to arrive. The merit may be there, but if it’s overestimated it can be overpriced, only to evaporate when reality sets in. In the real world, trees don’t grow to the sky.

    On Bubble Watch
    Howard Marks

  • Pivoting from Consumer to Utility: Span

    As a Span customer, I’ve always appreciated their vision: to make home electrification cleaner, simpler, and more efficient through beautifully designed, tech-enabled electrical panels. But, let’s be honest, selling a product like this directly to consumers is tough. Electrical panels are not top-of-mind for most people until there’s a problem — and explaining the value proposition of “a smarter electrical panel” to justify the high price tag can be a real challenge. That’s why I’m unsurprised by their recent shift in strategy towards utilities.

    This pivot to partnering with utility companies makes a lot of sense. Instead of trying to convince individual homeowners to upgrade, Span can now work directly with those who can impact community-scale electrification.

    While the value proposition of avoiding costly service upgrades is undeniably beneficial for utilities, understanding precisely how that translates into financial savings for the utilities needs much more nuance. That, along with the fact that rebates & policy will vary wildly by locality, raises many uncertainties about pricing strategy (not to mention that there are other, larger smart electric panel companies like Leviton and Schneider Electric, albeit with less functional and less well-designed offerings).

    I wish the company well. We need better electrical infrastructure in the US (and especially California, where I live) and one way to achieve that is for companies like Span to find a successful path to market.

    Span’s panel costs $3,500, and accessories involve separate $700-plus purchases. It’s unavoidably pricey, though tax rebates and other incentives can bring the cost down, but the premise is that they offer buyers costs saving through avoiding expensive upgrades. The pitch to utility companies is also one of cost avoidance, just at a much larger scale. Span’s target utility customer is one at the intersection of load growth, the energy transition, and existing regulatory restrictions, especially in places with aggressive decarbonization timelines like California.

    Span’s quiet turn toward utilities
    Lisa Martine Jenkins | Latitude Media

  • RISC-V in Computers

    One of the most exciting technological developments from the semiconductor side of things is the rapid development of the ecosystem around the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA). One landmark in its rise is that the architecture appears to be moving beyond just behind-the-scenes projects to challenging Intel/AMD’s x86 architecture and ARM (used by Apple and Qualcomm) in customer-facing applications.

    This article highlights this crucial development by reporting on early adopters embracing RISC-V to move into higher-end devices like laptops. Companies like Framework and DeepComputing have just launched or are planning to launch RISC-V laptops. While RISC-V-powered hardware still have a steep mountain to climb of software and performance challenges (as evidenced by the amount of time it’s taken for the ARM ecosystem to be credible in PCs), Intel’s recent setbacks and ARM’s legal battles with Qualcomm over licensing (pretty much guaranteeing every company that uses ARM is now going to work on RISC-V) coupled with the open source nature of RISC-V potentially allowing for a lot more innovation in form factors and functionality may have created an opening here for enterprising companies willing to make the investment.

    “If we look at a couple of generations down the [software] stack, we’re starting to see a line of sight to consumer-ready RISC-V in something like a laptop, or even a phone,” said Nirav Patel, CEO of laptop maker Framework. Patel’s company plans to release a laptop that can support a RISC-V mainboard in 2025. Though still intended for early adopters and developers, it will be the most accessible and polished RISC-V laptop yet, and it will ship to users with the same look and feel as the Framework laptops that use x86 chips.

    This Year, RISC-V Laptops Really Arrive
    Matthew S. Smith | IEEE Spectrum

  • Revenge of the Plug-In Hybrid

    While growing vehicle electrification is inevitable, it always surprised me that US automakers would drop past plug-in hybrid (PHEV) technology to only embrace all-electric. While many have attacked Toyota’s more deliberate “slow-and-steady” approach to vehicle electrification, it always seemed to me that, until we had broadly available, high quality electric vehicle charging infrastructure and until all-electric vehicles were broadly available at the price point of a non-luxury family car (i.e. a Camry or RAV4), that electric vehicles were going to be more of a upper middle class/wealthy phenomena. Considering their success in the Chinese automotive market (and growing faster than all-electric vehicles!), it always felt odd that the category wouldn’t make its way into the US market as the natural next step in vehicle electrification.

    It sounds like Dodge Ram (a division of Stellantis) agrees. It intends to delay its all-electric version of its Ram 1500 in favor of starting with its extended range plug-in hybrid version, the Ramcharger. Extended range electric vehicles (EREVs) are plug-in hybrids similar to the Chevy Volt. They employ an electric powertrain and a generator which can run on gasoline to supply additional range when the battery runs low.

    Interestingly, Nissan, Hyundai, Mazda, and GM’s Buick have made similar announcements as well.

    While it still remains to be seen how well these EREVs/PHEVs are adopted — the price points that are being discussed still feel too high to me — seeing broader adoption of plug-in hybrid technology (supplemented with gas-powered range extension) feels like the natural next step on our path to vehicle electrification.

    Consumers are still looking for electrified rides, just not the ones that many industry pundits predicted. In China, Europe, and the United States, buyers are converging on hybrids, whose sales growth is outpacing that of pure EVs. “It’s almost been a religion that it’s EVs or bust, so let’s not fool around with hybrids or hydrogen,” says Michael Dunne, CEO of Dunne Insights, a leading analyst of China’s auto industry. “But even in the world’s largest market, almost half of electrified vehicle sales are hybrids.”

    As EV Sales Stall, Plug-In Hybrids Get a Reboot
    Lawrence Ulrich | IEEE Spectrum