Patrick McKenzie

Take GDPR, for example. You might think "Well, that's certainly a big ball of mud, but thankfully I am too small to worry about it." BigCo is not too small. BigCo will hire a department to worry about it. Someone in BigCo will put "Vendor attests to GDPR compliance" on checklist.

Regulations often end up incorporated by reference in contracts, sometimes organically and sometimes because they were explicitly designed to be viral. This lets regulators conscript the regulatees as surveillance regarding their business partners.

That sounds like a parody of "stupid bureaucratic box ticking" but the nature of bureaucracies is that you really, really don't want to have to say "Look I know 45 CFR § 164.308(a)(5) says all members of the workforce, explicitly including management, need training, but come on."

A fun example: a regulated business has to train all of their employees annually on their responsibilities under the regulations and keep a record of them having attended the training. I had a very surreal discussion (with myself, alone in a room) and recorded that I had had it.

I operated under a relatively high-ceremony US regulatory regime (HIPAA, for healthcare information privacy) for several years. I sympathize with the general normative direction for the regulations, but the compliance steps themselves very rarely added value for anyone.

No dog in this fight, as an American who has spent his entire adult life in Japan, but if I had been subject to this regulatory suite when founding my first business I would have just opted not to start.https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1014367940148260864 …

Technology is amplifying the effectiveness of this advice because it is far more likely by default that a thing that is written down survives for an arbitrarily long amount of time, & because search reduces the "If you don't throw away 90% of input the output is useless" effect.

"Write more things down" is scandalously underrated advice, for people, companies, and all sorts of institutions.https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1014744551708340225 …

(I have often thought, when answering a specific question from someone, "This would actually make a reasonably decent blog post" but differences in the form factor and the sheer lift required to make it happen usually mean I hit Send and forget about it.)

This is pretty genius, given the proportion of professional output which is a) preserved for all time by computers but b) achieves only a tiny fraction of its possible impact because it is siloed into inboxes. https://fwdeveryone.com/ 

Narrator: It was. http://online.wsj.com/documents/Madoff_SECdocs_20081217.pdf …

I have a weird hobby interest in investment scams (much like cryptocurrencies, but I repeat myself) and sometimes the writing about them is just striking. Example: 17 page memo to the SEC from an uninvolved bystander titled The World's Largest Hedge Fund Is A Fraud.

"Skeuomorphism isn't just whether a UI has wood or not; it is also whether a UI looks like and reads like an interaction you're familiar with and comfortable with. This is particularly important for low tech literacy users." @poswald

"Just because you are working on a document written in language X does not mean you want your software UX in X as well." <-- @poswald on a very important UX principle for software used by international teams *cough* Google *cough*

I think I remember a dinner which included the phrase: "You're going to tell me to charge more aren't you." "I am."

. @pwim doing a really interesting talk at Stripe Tokyo on taking his side project into a full-time business. Ran it as a labor of love for 6 years; not nearly enough revenue to justify opportunity cost so considered nixing; started charging, became sustainable ~immediately.

Quoted because professionally relevant to lots of folks on both sides of startup offers. (I endorse the representations here regarding relatively routine offers made by AppAmaGooBookSoft.)https://twitter.com/andrewchen/status/1013877290726502400 …

Yet another reason in favor of having a tolerance for following up calibrated like being a sales professional.https://twitter.com/lethain/status/1013933796209487874 …

The solution to last-quarter-mile infrastructure is either a) be Japan or b) cheat the problem. (This particular cheat is in widespread use in Japan and it’s magic.)

If I were Amazon I’d be SQLing up a storm then pitching apartment complexes on “We will pay for a delivery box system for you and pay $1 for each successful delivery to it. Your tenants will love it. Estimated revenue per month: $642.”