• Nope, the Dunning-Kruger Effect is just bad statistics

    The Dunning-Kruger effect encapsulates something many of us feel familiar with: that the least intelligent oftentimes assume they know more than they actually do. Wrap that sentiment in an academic paper written by two professors at an Ivy League institution and throw in some charts and statistics and you’ve got a easily citable piece of trivia to make yourself feel smarter than the person who you just caught commenting on something they know nothing about.

    Well, according to this fascinating blog post (HT: Eric), we have it all wrong. The way that Dunning-Kruger constructed their statistical test was designed to always construct a positive relationship between skill and perceived ability.

    The whole thing is worth a read, but they showed that using completely randomly generated numbers (where there is no relationship between perceived ability and skill), you will always find a relationship between the “skill gap” (perceived ability – skill) and skill, or to put it more plainly,

     (y-x) \sim x

    With y being perceived ability and x being actual measured ability.

    What you should be looking for is a relationship between perceived ability and measured ability (or directly between y and x) and when you do this with data, you find that the evidence for such a claim generally isn’t there!

    In other words:


    The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation
    Blair Fix | Economics from the Top Down

  • A Heart Atlas

    The human heart is an incredibly sophisticated organ that, in addition to being one of the first organs developed while embryos develop, is quite difficult to understand at a cellular level (where are the cells, how do they first develop, etc.).

    Neil Chi’s group at UCSD (link to Nature paper) were able to use multiplex imaging of fluorescent-tagged RNA molecules to profile the gene expression profiles of different types of heart cells and see where they are located and how they develop!

    The result is an amazing visualization, check it out at the video:

  • Cat Bond Fortunes

    Until recently, I only knew of the existence of cat(astrophe) bonds — financial instruments used to raise money for insurance against catastrophic events where investors profit when no disaster happens.

    I had no idea, until reading this Bloomberg article about the success of Fermat Capital Management, how large the space had gotten ($45 billion!!) or how it was one of the most profitable hedge fund strategies of 2023!

    This is becoming an increasingly important intersection between climate change and finance as insurance companies and property owners struggle with the rising risk of rising damage from extreme climate events. Given how young much of the science of evaluating these types of risks is, it’s no surprise that quantitative minds and modelers are able to profit here.

    The entire piece reminded me of Richard Zeckhauser’s famous 2006 article Investing in the Unknown and Unknowable which covers how massive investment returns can be realized by tackling problems that seem too difficult for other investors to understand.


  • Shein and Temu now drive global cargo

    Maybe you have shopped on Shein or Temu. Maybe you only know someone (younger?) who has. Maybe you only know Temu because of their repeat Superbowl ads.

    But these Chinese eCommerce companies are now the main driver behind air and ship cargo rates with Temu and Shein combined accounting for 9,000 tons per day of shipments!

    This is scale.


    Rise of fast-fashion Shein, Temu roils global air cargo industry
    Arriana McLymore, Casey Hall, and Lisa Barrington | Reuters

  • Geothermal data centers

    The data centers that power AI and cloud services are limited by 3 things:

    • the server hardware (oftentimes limited by access to advanced semiconductors)
    • available space (their footprint is massive which makes it hard to put them close to where people live)
    • availability of cheap & reliable (and, generally, clean) power

    If you, as a data center operator, can tap a new source of cheap & reliable power, you will go very far as you alleviate one of the main constraints on the ability to add to your footprint.

    It’s no small wonder, then, that Google is willing to explore partnerships with next-gen geothermal startups like Fervo in a meaningful long-term fashion.


  • Dexcom non-prescription glucose monitor approved

    Cheap and accurate continuous glucose monitoring is a bit of a holy grail for consumer metabolic health as it allows people to understand how their diet and exercise impact their blood sugar levels, which can vary from person to person.

    It’s also a holy grail for diabetes care as making sure blood sugar levels are neither too high nor too low is critical for health (too low and you can pass out or risk seizure or coma; too high and you risk diabetic neuropathy, kidney disease, and cardiovascular problems). For Type I diabetics and severe Type II diabetics, it’s also vital for dosing insulin.

    Because insulin dosing needs to be done just right, I was always under the impression that one of two things would happen along the way to producing a cheap continuous glucose monitor, either:

    1. The FDA would be hesitant to approve a device that wasn’t highly accurate to avoid the risk of a consumer using the reading to mis-dose insulin OR
    2. The device makers (like Dexcom) would be hesitant to create an accurate enough glucose monitor that it might cannibalize their highly profitable prescription glucose monitoring business

    As a result, I was pleasantly surprised that Dexcom’s over-the-counter Stelo continuous glucose monitor was approved by the FDA. It remains to be seen what the price will be and what level of information the Stelo will share with the customer, but I view this as a positive development and (at least for now) tip my hat to both the FDA and Dexcom here.

    (Thanks to Erin Brodwin from Axios for sharing the news on X)


  • “Corporate” Design

    Read an introspective piece by famed ex-Frog Design leader Robert Fabricant about the state of the design industry and the unease that he says many of his peers are feeling. While I disagree with some of the concerns he lays out around AI / diversity being the drivers of this unease, he makes a strong case for how this is a natural pendulum swing after years of seeing “Chief Design Officers” and design innovation groups added to many corporate giants.

    I’ve had the privilege of working with very strong designers. This has helped me appreciate the value of design thinking as something that goes far beyond “making things pretty” and believe, wholeheartedly, that it’s something that should be more broadly adopted.

    At the same time, it’s also not a surprise to me that during a time of layoffs and cost cutting, a design function which has become a little “spoiled” in the past years and of which calculating financial returns is experiencing some painful transition especially for creative-minded designers who struggle with that ROI evolution.

    If Phase 1 was getting companies to recognize that design thinking is needed, Phase 2 will be the space learning how to measure, communicate, and optimize what the value of a team of seasoned designers brings to the bottom line.


  • Costco Love

    Nice piece in the Economist about how Costco’s model of operational simplicity leads to a unique position in modern retail: beloved by customers, investors, AND workers:

    • sell fewer things ➡️
    • get better prices from suppliers & less inventory needed ➡️
    • lower costs for customers ➡️
    • more customers & more willing to pay recurring membership fee ➡️
    • strong, recurring profits ➡️
    • ability to pay well and promote from within 📈💪🏻

    Why Costco is so loved
    The Economist

  • How packaging tech is changing how we build & design chips

    Once upon a time, the hottest thing in chip design was “system-on-a-chip” (SOC). The idea is that you’d get the best cost and performance out of a chip by combining more parts into one piece of silicon. This would result in smaller area (less silicon = less cost) and faster performance (closer parts = faster communication) and resulted in more and more chips integrating more and more things.

    While the laws of physics haven’t reversed any of the above, the cost of designing chips that integrate more and more components has gone up sharply. Worse, different types of parts (like on-chip memory and physical/analog componentry) don’t scale down as well as pure logic transistors, making it very difficult to design chips that combine all these pieces.

    The rise of new types of packaging technologies, like Intel’s Foveros, Intel’s EMIB, TSMC’s InFO, new ways of separating power delivery from data delivery (backside power delivery), and more, has also made it so that you can more tightly integrate different pieces of silicon and improve their performance and size/cost.

    The result is now that many of the most advanced silicon today is built as packages of chiplets rather than as massive SOC projects: a change that has happened over a fairly short period of time.

    This interview with IMEC (a semiconductor industry research center)’s head of logic technologies breaks this out…


    What is CMOS 2.0?
    Samuel K. Moore | IEEE Spectrum

  • Store all the things: clean electricity means thermal energy storage boom

    Thermal energy storage has been a difficult place for climatetech in years past. The low cost of fossil fuels (the source for vast majority of high temperature industrial heat to date) and the failure of large scale solar thermal power plants to compete with the rapidly scaling solar photovoltaic industry made thermal storage feel like, at best, a market reserved for niche applications with unique fossil fuel price dynamics. This is despite some incredibly cool (dad-joke intended 🔥🥵🤓) technological ingenuity in the space.

    But, in a classic case of how cheap universal inputs change market dynamics, the plummeting cost and soaring availability of renewable electricity and the growing desire for industrial companies to get “clean” sources of industrial heat has resulted in almost a renaissance for the space as this Canary Media article (with a very nice table of thermal energy startups) points out.

    With cheap renewables (especially if the price varies), companies can buy electricity at low (sometimes near-zero if in the middle of a sunny and windy day) prices, convert that to high-temperature heat with an electric furnace, and store it for use later.

    While the devil’s in the details, in particular the round trip energy efficiency (how much energy you can get out versus what you put in), the delivered heat temperature range and rate (how hot and how much power), and, of course, the cost of the system, technologies like this could represent a key technology to green sectors of the economy that would otherwise be extremely difficult to lower carbon output for.


  • The IE6 YouTube conspiracy

    An oldie but a goodie — the story of how the YouTube team, post-Google acquisition, put up a “we won’t support Internet Explorer 6 in the future” message without any permission from anyone. (HT: Eric S)


    A Conspiracy to Kill IE6
    Chris Zacharias

  • Using your ear to control devices

    Very cool that we’re still finding new things we can control that can be applied to making the lives of people better.


  • Intel’s focus on chip packaging technology

    Intel has been interested in entering the foundry (semiconductor contract manufacturing) space for a long time. For years, Intel proudly boasted of being at the forefront of semiconductor technology — being first to market with the FinFET and smaller and smaller process geometries.

    So it’s interesting how, with the exception of the RibbonFET (the successor to the FinFET), almost all of Intel’s manufacturing technology announcements (see whitepaper) in it’s whitepaper to appeal to prospective foundry customers, all of it’s announcements pertain to packaging / “back end” technologies.

    I think it’s both a recognition that they are no longer the furthest ahead in that race, as well as recognition that Moore’s Law scaling has diminishing returns for many applications. Now, a major cost and performance driver is technology that was once considered easily outsourced to low cost assemblers in Asia is now front and center.


    A Peek at Intel’s Future Foundry Tech
    Samuel K. Moore | IEEE Spectrum

  • Iovance brings cell therapy to solid tumors

    Immune cell therapy — the use of modified immune cells directly to control cancer and autoimmune disease — has shown incredible results in liquid tumors (cancers of the blood and bone marrow like lymphoma, leukemia, etc), but has stumbled in addressing solid tumors.

    Iovance, which recently had its drug lifileucel approved by the FDA to treat advanced melanoma, has demonstrated an interesting spin on the cellular path which may prove to be effective in solid tumors. They extract Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocytes (TILs), immune cells that are already “trying” to attack a solid tumor directly. Iovance then treats those TILs with their own proprietary process to expand the number of those cells and “further activate” them (to resist a tumor’s efforts to inactivate immune cells that may come after them) before reintroducing them to the patient.

    This is logistically very challenging (not dissimilar to what patients awaiting other cell therapies or Vertex’s new sickle cell treatment need to go through) as it also requires chemotherapy for lymphocyte depletion in the patient prior to reintroduction of the activated TILs. But, the upshot is that you now have an expanded population of cells known to be predisposed to attacking a solid tumor that can now resist the tumor’s immune suppression efforts.

    And, they’ve presented some impressive 4-year followup data on a study of advanced melanoma in patients who have already failed immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy, enough to convince the FDA of their effectiveness!

    To me, the beauty of this method is that it can work across tumor types. Iovance’s process (from what I’ve gleamed from their posters & presentations) works by getting more and more activated immune cells. Because they’re derived from the patient, these cells are already predisposed to attack the particular molecular targets of their tumor.

    This is contrast to most other immune cell therapy approaches (like CAR-T) where the process is inherently target-specific (i.e. get cells that go after this particular marker on this particular tumor) and each new target / tumor requires R&D work to validate. Couple this with the fact that TILs are already the body’s first line of defense against solid tumors and you may have an interesting platform for immune cell therapy in solid tumors.

    The devil’s in the details and requires more clinical study on more cancer types, but suffice to say, I think this is incredibly exciting!


  • Another Italian merchant invention: the decimal point!

    I’ve always been astonished by how many things we use now came from Renaissance Italian merchants: the @ sign, double-entry bookkeeping, banking, maritime insurance, and now the decimal point


  • Wind and solar closing on fossil fuels in EU power generation

    This one chart (published in Canary Media) illustrates both the case for optimism for our ability to deal with climate change as well as a clear case of how geopolitical pressures can dramatically impact energy choices: the rapid increase in use of renewable energy (mainly at the expense of fossil fuels) as source of electricity in the EU.


  • Don’t Pay for Adobe Acrobat to do Basic PDF Things

    If you’re like me, every few months you have to do something with PDFs:

    • Merge them
    • Rotate them
    • Crop them
    • Add / remove a password
    • Move pages around / remove pages
    • Sign them
    • Add text / annotations to them

    This ends up either being a pain to do (via some combination of screen shots, printing, scanning, and exporting) or oddly expensive (buying a license to Adobe Acrobat or another pay-PDF manipulation tool).

    Enter Stirling PDF tools, a set of free web-based PDF manipulation tools which can also be selfhosted on any server supporting Docker. Given my selfhosting journey these past couple of months, this seemed like a perfect project to take on.

    In the hopes that this helps anyone who has ever had to do some PDF manipulation work done, I will share how I set up Stirling PDF tools (on my OpenMediaVault v6 home server)

    Stirling PDF

    Stirling tools started as a ChatGPT project which has since turned into an open source project with millions of Docker pulls. It handles everything through a simple web interface and on the server (no calls to any remote service). Depending on the version you install, you can also get access to tools converting common Office files to PDF and OCR (optical character recognition, where software can recognize text — even handwriting — in images).

    And, best of all, it’s free! (As in beer and as in freedom!)

    Installation

    To install the Stirling Tools on 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 Stirling and under File, adapt the following (making sure the number of spaces are consistent)
      version: "3.3"
      services:
      stirling-pdf:
      image: frooodle/s-pdf:latest
      ports:
      - <unused port number like 7331>:8080
      environment:
      - DOCKER_ENABLE_SECURITY=false
      volumes:
      - '<absolute path to shared config folder>/tesseract:/usr/share/tessdata'
      - '<absolute path to shared config folder>/Stirling/configs:/config'
      - '<absolute path to shared config folder>/Stirling/customFiles:/customFiles'
      - '<absolute path to shared config folder>/Stirling/logs:/logs'
      restart: unless-stopped
      Under ports:, make sure to add an unused port number (I went with 7331).

      Replace <absolute path to shared config folder> with the absolute path to the config folder where you want Docker-installed applications to store their configuration information (accessible by going to [Storage > Shared Folders] in the administrative panel). You’ll notice there’s an extra line in there for tessdata — this corresponds to the stored files for the Tesseract tool that Stirling uses for OCR

      Once you’re done, hit Save and you should be returned to your list of Docker compose files for the next step. Notice that the new FreshRSS entry you created has a Down status, showing the container has yet to be initialized.
    • To start your Stirling container, click on the new Stirling entry and press the (up) button. This will create the container, download any files needed, and run it.

      And that’s it! To prove it worked, go to your-servers-static-ip-address:7331 from a browser that’s on the same network as your server (replacing 7331 if you picked a different port in the configuration above) and you should see the Stirling tools page (see below)
    • You can skip this step if you didn’t (as I laid out in my last post) set up Pihole and local DNS / Nginx proxy or if you don’t care about having a user-readable domain name for these PDF tools. But, assuming you do and you followed my instructions, open up WeTTy (which you can do by going to wetty.home in your browser if you followed my instructions or by going to [Services > WeTTY] from OpenMediaVault administrative panel and pressing Open UI button in the main panel) and login as the root user. Run:
      cd /etc/nginx/conf.d
      ls
      Pick out the file you created before for your domains and run
      nano <your file name>.conf
      This opens up the text editor nano with the file you just listed. Use your cursor to go to the very bottom of the file and add the following lines (making sure to use tabs and end each line with a semicolon)
      server {
      listen 80;
      server_name <pdf.home or the domain you'd like to use>;
      location / {
      proxy_pass http://<your-server-static-ip>:<PDF port number>;
      }
      }
      And then hit Ctrl+X to exit, Y to save, and Enter to overwrite the existing file. Then in the command line run the following to restart Nginx with your new configuration loaded.
      systemctl restart nginx
      Now, if your server sees a request for pdf.home (or whichever domain you picked), it will direct them to the PDF tools.

      Login to your Pihole administrative console (you can just go to pi.hole in a browser) and click on [Local DNS > DNS Records] from the sidebar. Under the section called Add a new domain/IP combination, fill out under Domain: the domain you just added above (i.e. pdf.home) and next to IP Address: you should add your server’s static IP address. Press the Add button and it will show up below.

      To make sure it all works, enter the domain you just added (pdf.home if you went with my default) in a browser and you should see the Stirling PDF tools page.
    • Lastly, to make the PDF tools actually useable, you’ll want to increase the maximum allowable file upload size in OpenMediaVault’s default webserver Nginx (so that you can use the tools with PDFs larger than the incredibly tiny default minimum size of 1 MB). To do this, log back into your server using WeTTy (follow the instructions above) and run:
      cd /etc/nginx/
      nano nginx.conf
      This opens up the text editor nano with the master configuration file for Nginx. Use your cursor to go to some spot after http { but before the closing }. This configures how Nginx will process HTTP requests (basically anything coming from a website). Enter the two lines below (making sure to use tabs and end the second line with a semicolon; to be clear "... stuff that comes by default..." is just placeholder text that you don’t need to write or add, it’s just to show that the two lines you enter need to be inside the {})
      http {
      ... stuff that comes by default ...
      ## adding larger file upload limit
      client_max_body_size 100M;
      ... more stuff that comes by default ...
      }
      And then hit Ctrl+X to exit, Y to save, and Enter to overwrite the existing file. Then in the command line run the following to restart Nginx with your new configuration loaded.
      systemctl restart nginx
      Now, the PDF tools can handle file uploads up to 100 MB in size!
    • Lastly, to make full use of OCR, you’ll want to download the language files you’re most interested in from Tesseract repository (the slower but more accurate files are here and the faster but less accurate files are here; simple click on the file you’re interested in from the list and then select Download from the “three dot” menu or by hitting Ctrl+Shift+s) and place them in the /tesseract folder you mapped in the Docker compose file. To verify that those files are properly loaded, simply go to the PDF tools, select the one called OCR / Cleanup scans (or visit <URL to PDF tools>/ocr-pdf) and the language files that you’ve downloaded should show up as a checkbox.

    And now, you have a handy set of PDF tools in your (home server) back pocket!

    (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)

  • The Opportunity in Lagging Edge Semiconductors

    While much attention is (rightly) focused on the role of TSMC (and its rivals Samsung and Intel) in “leading edge” semiconductor technology, the opportunity at the so-called “lagging edge” — older semiconductor process technologies which continue to be used — is oftentimes completely ignored.

    The reality of the foundry model is that fab capacity is expensive to build and so the bulk of the profit made on a given process technology investment is when it’s years old. This is a natural consequence of three things:

    1. Very few semiconductor designers have the R&D budget or the need to be early adopters of the most advanced technologies. (That is primarily relegated to the sexiest advanced CPUs, FPGAs, and GPUs, but ignores the huge bulk of the rest of the semiconductor market)
    2. Because only a small handful of foundries can supply “leading edge” technologies and because new technologies have a “yield ramp” (where the technology goes from low yield to higher as the foundry gets more experience), new process technologies are meaningfully more expensive.
    3. Some products have extremely long lives and need to be supported for decade-plus (i.e. automotive, industrial, and military immediately come to mind)

    As a result, it was very rational for GlobalFoundries (formerly AMD’s in-house fab) to abandon producing advanced semiconductor technologies in 2018 to focus on building a profitable business at the lagging edge. Foundries like UMC and SMIC have largely made the same choice.

    This means giving up on some opportunities (those that require newer technologies) — as GlobalFoundries is finding recently in areas like communications and data center — but provided you have the service capability and capacity, can still lead to not only a profitable outcome, but one which is still incredibly important to the increasingly strategic semiconductor space.


  • NVIDIA to make custom AI chips? Tale as old as time

    Every standard products company (like NVIDIA) eventually gets lured by the prospect of gaining large volumes and high margins of a custom products business.

    And every custom products business wishes they could get into standard products to cut their dependency on a small handful of customers and pursue larger volumes.

    Given the above and the fact that NVIDIA did used to effectively build custom products (i.e. for game consoles and for some of its dedicated autonomous vehicle and media streamer projects) and the efforts by cloud vendors like Amazon and Microsoft to build their own Artificial Intelligence silicon it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that they’re pursuing this.

    Or that they may eventually leave this market behind as well.


  • Which jobs are the most [insert gender or race]?

    Fascinating data from the BLS on which jobs have the greatest share of a particular gender or race. The following two charts are from the WSJ article I linked. I never would have guessed that speech-language pathologists (women), property appraisers (white), postal service workers (black), or medical scientists (Asian) would have such a preponderance of a particular group.