The Swyx Mixtape

By SwyxBusiness Entrepreneurship Technology

The Swyx Mixtape episodes

February 22, 2021 Audio's Dunbar Number
Audio source: https://swyx.io/podcast/learn-in-podcast/rss.xml
Do you have a question you'd like me to address? Email me (sound files welcome!) swyx @ hey dot com!
5 min
February 19, 2021 Jay Acunzo on Starting and Ending a Podcast
Warmup questions:
- Do you have any pets at home? Why? If X were a person, what would he be?
- What would be your last meal on Earth? If you had to choose between two, which do you pick: pizza or ice-cream?
Leaving:
- Say something profound, and leave.
Source: Jay Acunzo — Podcasts, Storytelling, and How To Make Your Audience's Favorite Show
6 min
February 18, 2021 Stop Worrying About Cold Starts
Sources (both podcasts are fully transcripted)
- Serverless Properties with Johann Schleier-Smith: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2021/02/11/serverless-properties-with-johann-schleier-smith/
- Azure Functions with Jeff Hollan: https://www.serverlesschats.com/88/
- This is all you need to know about Lambda cold starts by Yan Cui: https://lumigo.io/blog/this-is-all-you-need-to-know-about-lambda-cold-starts/
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Serverless Properties with Johann Schleier-Smith: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2021/02/11/serverless-properties-with-johann-schleier-smith/
"The cold start problem got a lot of attention early on. And I'm happy to say that I think that for a lot of practical purposes is something that people can either consider resolved or worked around sufficiently that they don't need to worry about it so much. But let me go into
a little bit more detail on that. So what is the cold start problem? Well, in order to provide these secure execution environments, the cloud provider needs to create a VM for your workload, because that's really how you can guarantee that you're not going to be exposed to other
clients, other tenants.
And so booting a VM traditionally means booting and operating system. Operating systems just simply aren't designed to boot up super-fast. It's not something that really matters. You're usually happy, or traditionally you'd be okay if a server booted up within a few minutes,
because it's going to run for days. So what does it matter? And traditionally also the things that happen during boot up time involve things like probing for devices and figuring out whether you've upgraded the hardware and other things that have just no role in a serverless
environment. You know what the hardware is and you want to get going as quickly as possible because you want to be able to have that ability to expand elastically. And similarly in order to keep costs low you want to have that ability to just shut things off and effectively power down.
And so what the cold start is really about is it's about that time that it takes. And to be clear, also, what's important about a cold start versus a warm start is that when you have a – Once you start it up, what you can do is you can just leave that function instance you. Can just leave it running so that it can do more than one request so you get to amortize your startup cost over many, many requests. So sort of two reasons why this startup time is becoming less of an issue, and they're actually both related to the technology that's in Firecracker.
So Firecracker makes it much, much faster to boot up the VMs in part because it sort of strips down that kernel so that it has just simply has a much faster boot time. And so the boot times are, instead of seconds, they come down to something like 100 milliseconds or so. And there are a number of other techniques. Some of these are in Firecrackers. Some of these are in research papers that are about making these boot up processes much faster. For example, one thing that you can do is once you have booted an image of a virtual machine, what you can actually do is you could just save those pages essentially, save a state of the memory. And then when you need another one, you can simply clone that and you can use sort of copy and write semantics for that as well so that really you're just creating a new set of page tables to reference that underlying image."

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This is all you need to know about Lambda cold starts by Yan Cui: https://lumigo.io/blog/this-is-all-you-need-to-know-about-lambda-cold-starts/
---
Azure Functions with Jeff Hollan: https://www.serverlesschats.com/88/
In the last six months, we actually have been rolling out some machine learning, too. So we've got some folks in Microsoft Research who worked at looking at a bunch of historical data for functions. It's actually all open source. It's anonymized. But if you go to GitHub, you can actually see a bunch of Azure Functions anonymized data.
And they trained a bunch of models. So that hopefully, Jeremy, if you were using Azure Functions and it's Monday at 8:00 AM, that our model, hopefully, would get smart enough over time to say, "Oh, there's a 70% chance that at Monday at 8:00 AM. Jeremy's about to hit this thing. We're actually just going to warm it up before he even executes it." So that's something that we've been rolling with for a while. But even then the ... And then just trying to make progress on the underlying technology, the underlying platform. There's a lot of components to building a multi-tenant secured service that all add a little bit of a national latency.
So something we're aware of. And then I guess to the second part of that question is, we do have some options to fully mitigate it or partially mitigate it. The one is the fateful pinger. We have folks, I mentioned, you can create this Function app concept. You can have multiple functions in there. One thing that even I have done, and I would say don't quote me on this, but I'm on a podcast. Now, my name's right there. You can create another function in that same app that triggers on a timer. So a timer is a first-class concept in Functions. Just have that thing trigger once every 10 minutes, and your whole app is going to get poked every 10 minutes by us. You don't even have to poke it. We'll poke it ourselves on that interval and keep it warm.

6 min
February 17, 2021 The Princess Bride: Home Movie
If you're a fan of The Princess Bride, you can watch the star-studded 2020 Quibi home video remake here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1494&v=lR8pA_WV9QI&feature=youtu.be (cast guide: https://screenrant.com/princess-bride-remake-cast-guide-who-plays-each-character-in-quibis-movie/)
If you haven't seen The Princess Bride before, I recommend starting with the original first, it is a classic.
5 min
February 16, 2021 Estée Lauder
From Business Wars, which is very good for historical narratives..
Audio source: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/business-wars/est%C3%A9e-lauder-vs-lor%C3%A9al-do-or-zqlYDhenOJA/
More on Estée Lauder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Est%C3%A9e_Lauder_(businesswoman)
6 min
February 15, 2021 Beyoncé Unplugged
In 2011, Beyoncé visited the child cancer ward at the National University Hospital in Singapore and performed three songs. Her ridiculous talent shines through here, and she looks even better on video.
Audio source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5rKKL37kHQ
Intro and context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ItX3_mh0e8
Alternative Capture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-NZB-riaQo
Irreplaceable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Tib3l7vJX4
Radio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eBoAlHnttY
5 min
February 14, 2021[Weekend Drop] Digital Gardening w/ Maggie Appleton
Maggie and swyx hosted a Clubhouse chat this weekend on Digital Gardens. Here are show notes for ongoing conversations so you can dig in further!
Maggie’s garden: https://maggieappleton.com/
Swyx’s garden: https://www.swyx.io/ideas, http://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy (and other repos)
Comments and extra questions welcome!

## Recording
YouTube Recording Here and Commentable Transcript is Here!

This podcast audio was automatically edited for pauses and filler words via Descript. It gets a little choppy about 45mins in, but otherwise seems ok?
## Things we talked about
Nikita’s Everything I Know garden: https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/
Maggie's list of Digital Gardeners: https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners
Penn Course on the Literature of Success: https://apps.wharton.upenn.edu/syllabi/?course=LGST227
Devon Zuegel on Epistemic Statuses: https://devonzuegel.com/post/epistemic-statuses-are-lazy-and-that-is-a-good-thing
Digital Garden Terms of Service: https://www.swyx.io/digital-garden-tos
Neil Postman:
The Medium is the Metaphor: https://people.wou.edu/~visuanod/visuano_amusing_ourselves_to_death.pdf
Amusing Ourselves to Death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
Building A Second Brain: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/
Andy Matuschak: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes
Gatsby Theme Andy: https://github.com/aravindballa/gatsby-theme-andy
Transclusion: https://maggieappleton.com/transcopyright-dreams
Nonlinear tools for thought:
Roam of course :)
Muse App https://museapp.com/
Kosmik App https://lithium.paris/
Google Docs as Collaborative Digital Gardens
Chris Paik’s Frameworks Google Doc (tweet, doc) has ongoing comments that help shape the garden
Swyx on Webmentions: https://www.swyx.io/twitter-metacommentary/
Swyx Three Strikes Rule: https://www.swyx.io/three-strikes/
Tiago Forte on Progressive Summarization: https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/
Drawing tools: https://excalidraw.com/, https://miro.com/, https://figma.com/
How To Create Luck: https://swyx.io/create_luck
Lisa Hardy’s Hyperfine Village concept
1 hr 8 min
February 13, 2021 The Race of Our Lives
Audio source with transcript: Jeremy Grantham on the Meb Faber Podcast
Read the full paper: (which is investment focused) The Race of Our Lives Revisited
Clip 1:
The point is that we are not winning what we call the rest of our lives. The amount of carbon dioxide extra in the air last year was the highest ever increment. And we don’t start winning until A, that gets to 0. And then we have to backtrack and we have to find a way of pulling it out of the air to take it over the following several decades back down to 280 parts per million. We’re currently at 415 and we’re surely heading for 550, 600, and I hope not 700, 750 but something like that. And we’re going to have to take it out of the air by direct air capture or by biological means by planting trees and by growing seaweed and doing many exotic things, and hopefully, getting paid a carbon credit for doing it, and hopefully, having technological breakthroughs so that the credit we need is only $25 a ton and not $250 a ton because we can afford $25 a ton to get the job done. But we are going to have a lot of pain from the damage we’ve done to the environment, mainly in terms of greenhouse gases. And it’s going to be very expensive and very difficult and highly probably a big chunk of the world, something like 15% will basically become uninhabitable that currently is habitable, which a lot of it is the kind of Saudi peninsula and parts of the Sahara and so on, sub-Sahara, which are bad enough. But the really bad news is that it’s most of the Indian subcontinent, which will in 50 years when the really bad news occurs, will have 2 billion people on it. And a big chunk of the world’s population, which will probably be about nine by there. And then parts of Indonesia, that just unlivable, that the combination of humidity and heat will mean you can’t go out and do your farming, and how much that will stress out the rest of the Indian subcontinent where they still can’t function, I don’t know, but it won’t be pleasant. And Africa is already being stressed, has the worst soil and the worse governance and so on.

Clip 2:
I got to tell you a story about the Manhattan Project, which is a perfect example for people who think government can’t do anything. Listen, guys, if government couldn’t do anything, we would not have won World War II. America went from producing cars to producing tanks, and jeeps, and destroyers pretty damn effectively. And it was all done at the top. It was all planned. It was Galbraith, the economist was minister of this and that, you know. It was done by a heroic effort. But the Manhattan Project is unique because I knew a fellow who was on an Investment Committee of a mutual fund that we ran. And we used to meet them four times a year as obstreperous committee of scientists and so on used to grill us. And eventually, I discovered that one of them had won the Nobel Prize, I’d met him through the fund, for working done decades before I even met him. So he got the prize after six or seven years of working together for work he’d done decades earlier. He’s been taken out of Harvard, as an undergraduate physicist, and he’d been stuck in the desert as a 19-year-old or a 20-year-old, working side by side with Italian Nobel Prize winners and things. What amazing demonstration of out of the box thinking and risk taking that was going on in the Manhattan Project, I had no idea. And to prove how good it was, he did indeed get a Nobel Prize himself, you know, 50 years later for work he’d done 30 years later. The Manhattan Project took a job that would have taken 15 years easily and then crammed it into three-and-a-half years by dint of money and brilliance and gathering these people together and using any talent they could get their hands on, like this kid. And if we could do half as well, we would be in great shape. We would definitely make the cut. And the fact is that governments can do it if they get their brains together, if they get their act together. The race of our lives will be decided by the difference between what humans are capable of doing and what we will actually do. We can win this race and along the way, get rid of poverty and so on, if we put our best foot forward. But given half a chance, we mess it up. That’s what they say, never underestimate the power and creativity of the homosapiens, and never underestimate his ability to foul it all up.
5 min
February 12, 2021 The Elicitation Technique
Clip Source:
- Jordan Harbinger Show: jack Schafer | Getting People to Reveal the Truth
6 min
February 11, 2021 [Music Friday] P!nk

- Raise Your Glass Official Music Video
- There You Go Official Music Video
- Just Give Me A Reason ft. Nate Ruess but do me a favor and MAKE SURE to check out the live version
5 min