lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

structure should follow strategy

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 15:47:23 +0000

Jason Zweig has a very interesting observation about Warren Buffet:

I like to talk, instead, about structure.
In 1962, three years before Buffett took over at Berkshire, the business historian Alfred D. Chandler wrote that “unless structure follows strategy, inefficiency results.”
What did he mean? Businesses that design themselves around what they’re trying to achieve are the most likely to succeed. That’s structure following strategy. Instead, at all too many businesses, it’s the other way around: What they can achieve is constrained by how they’re designed. That’s strategy following structure.

I had not heard the line “unless structure follows strategy, inefficiency results.”

Buffett made structure follow strategy instead of the other way around.
His strategy was to earn the highest possible net after-tax return on the assets investors entrusted to him – nothing more and never anything less.
From that, structure had to follow.

A counter example to what Buffett did is seen in many Silicon Valley companies. Take, for example Google’s 2013 decision to require Google+ for YouTube comments. Google said the redesign would make comments more useful through better sorting, moderation, and conversations tied to people’s Google+ circles. Users objected to being required to use a separate social profile to comment, and the new system faced problems in adoption. In 2015, YouTube said a Google+ profile would no longer be required to comment, upload, or create a channel.

Some vitamix hacking

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:01:27 +0000

Had to work around the "SmartDetect" feature that Vitamix has to make it work again. Documented the steps here

Start With What You Know

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:27:04 +0000

Quoting Daniel Stenberg

I decided that instead of trying to do this the best and optimal way – I shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good – I would start out by doing the things I know how to do and take it as far as I can one step at a time. Something should be better than nothing.

Interesting thought process from a great hacker and engineer.

Good Engineering Requires Failed Experiments

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sat, 09 May 2026 01:27:30 +0000

Interesting quote from a John Carmack tweet (xcancel link)

When failure is not an option, success can stay very expensive. You need to experiment to improve, and that fundamentally means being comfortable with failure. If you know it is going to work, it isn’t an experiment.

the moat is the system, not the model

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 17:41:11 +0000

An interesting comment from hacker news in the discussion on Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found

This is from the first of the caveats that they list:

> Scoped context: Our tests gave models the vulnerable function directly, often with contextual hints (e.g., "consider wraparound behavior"). A real autonomous discovery pipeline starts from a full codebase with no hints. The models' performance here is an upper bound on what they'd achieve in a fully autonomous scan. That said, a well-designed scaffold naturally produces this kind of scoped context through its targeting and iterative prompting stages, which is exactly what both AISLE's and Anthropic's systems do.

That's why their point is what the subheadline says, that the moat is the system, not the model.

Everybody so far here seems to be misunderstanding the point they are making.

Link to the comment

BlackRock Steps Back from ESG Push

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:34:55 +0000

In a recent interview, Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, signaled a shift in tone. The firm, once a strong advocate of ESG and DEI, is now taking a more “pragmatic” approach. Fink described the “woke” phase as part of a cycle and suggested it may have gone too far.

Looking past the word soup: what does it even mean for a financial firm to lead “environmental and social activism”?

As one Reddit commenter put it:

“None of this even touches on the absurdity of the proposition that an entity such as BlackRock could be considered an interlocutor for ‘environmental and social activism.’”

Another commenter sharpened that critique:

There’s a reason finance capitalist environmental and social plans focus so much on ‘consumerism’ and envision saving the world through a reduction of people and production, and in rent seeking, not a change in property ownership.”

The power of trust in global Influence

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:02:43 +0000

From the Bloomberg opinion piece: America Is Depleting a More Powerful Weapon Than Its Missiles (the answer is: belief in the truth of what the leader of the US tells the world about the war, peace and everything else.) an interesting tit-bit:

Contrary to the illusion held by many Americans, the BBC is not a government-run body, it is an independent corporation administered by trustees and funded by public subscription. Throughout World War II, millions of people in occupied Europe risked their freedom to hear its news. The penalty for those caught listening by German detector vans was deportation to a concentration camp.

The magic words with which its impeccably modulated announcers began their reports — “this is London” — resounded across the globe. After 1945, the BBC habit persisted. Tens of millions of people — especially in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia — even now prefer the Beeb’s foreign language news to the local variety, rigorously censored by their own governments. Voice of America has never achieved quite the same authority or reputation for impartiality, but it has been nonetheless useful and influential.

Tiny transmitter could help scientists understand surprisingly social wasps

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:42:03 +0000

https://spectrum.ieee.org/rf-tags-wasps

An ultralightweight radio-frequency tag designed to be worn by a paper wasp may help scientists get a glimpse at some basic behavioral information that’s long been missing: where do the animals go when they leave the nest?

Getting the right combination of light weight, long range, and positional accuracy was key. Jettisoning the battery was the first step. “Batteries don’t scale,” says Blaauw. A miniaturized battery can’t provide enough current to generate a strong radio signal. Capacitors, which store energy by accumulating charges on surfaces, do better at small scales, Blaauw says. “Really small capacitors can store enough charge now to send a radio pulse,” he says. The capacitor used in the wasp tag weighs just 0.86 mg. A tiny photovoltaic array slowly charges up the capacitor until it has enough energy to generate a radio signal.

Job reports

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 17:21:14 +0000

From https://ritholtz.com/2026/03/10-friday-am-reads-487/

ADP Jobs Report Shows White-Collar Losses in February: The professional and managerial class is getting hit hardest in the latest hiring data. The college-educated job market continues to deteriorate even as GDP holds up. (Quartz)

Checking on the Quartz article

The topline number — 63,000 private-sector payroll jobs added in February, for the best showing since July 2025 — appears, at first, to be good news.

But glancing even just a few lines down the report changes the story and brings something alarming into view, with the ADP table showing that professional and business services shed 30,000 jobs last month. This is the category encompassing lawyers, consultants, accountants, marketers, and administrative positions — a broad swathe of the white-collar knowledge economy, at least within this type of reporting.

The ADP report is gone, but it's available on archive.org

AI is for humanity

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 08:06:07 +0000

Interesting reflection from , John Palfrey after attending the AI summit in Delhi:

In Delhi, the big sessions had thousands. And the man who ran the event told me that more than a million people, mostly from India, had passed through the gates of the massive convention center during the week.

This may sound symbolic but I think it is an important symbol: that AI is about and for all humanity. It is not something that is magical and only to be shaped by wizards. It is a technology that is general — it touches everyone on the planet one way or another, already, with implications for nearly every aspect of human life. I’m not hyping it up; I think this is fact at this stage. The Internet was the same way, sort of, but I think AI will prove another step more consequential.

Don’t let the llm rush you

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:47:43 +0000

Sage advice from scripting.com

A bit of general advice about using ChatGPT et al, never let it rush you. You do the thinking, it does the stuff you ask it to do. If you’re not careful it’ll quickly start giving you orders.

Postmortem from 2028

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 23:03:46 +0000

From The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis: A Thought Exercise In Financial History, From The Future

What follows is a scenario, not a prediction.

[...]

A competent developer working with Claude Code or Codex could now replicate the core functionality of a mid-market SaaS product in weeks. Not perfectly or with every edge case handled, but well enough that the CIO reviewing a $500k annual renewal started asking the question “what if we just built this ourselves?”

[...]

The interconnected nature of these systems weren’t fully appreciated until this print, either. ServiceNow sold seats. When Fortune 500 clients cut 15% of their workforce, they cancelled 15% of their licenses. The same AI-driven headcount reductions that were boosting margins at their customers were mechanically destroying their own revenue base.

Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 16:20:35 +0000

Mind blown by this sneakiness

Wikipedia editors are discussing whether to blacklist Archive.today because the archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blogger who wrote a post in 2023 about the mysterious website’s anonymous maintainer.

Checking on the In a request for comment page on Wikipedia

Over 400,000 pages currently contain over 695,000 links to Archive.today

In January 2026, the maintainers of Archive.today inserted malicious code in order to perform a distributed denial of service attack against a person they were in dispute with. Every time a user encounters the CAPTCHA page, their internet connection is used to attack a certain individual's blog.

The Governor is Gone

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:26:18 +0000

From AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

Here's the thing that broke my brain for a while: AI genuinely makes individual tasks faster. That's not a lie. What used to take me 3 hours now takes 45 minutes. Drafting a design doc, scaffolding a new service, writing test cases, researching an unfamiliar API. All faster.

[..]

But my days got harder. Not easier. Harder.

[..]

Before AI, there was a ceiling on how much you could produce in a day. That ceiling was set by typing speed, thinking speed, the time it takes to look things up. It was frustrating sometimes, but it was also a governor. You couldn't work yourself to death because the work itself imposed limits.

AI removed the governor. Now the only limit is your cognitive endurance. And most people don't know their cognitive limits until they've blown past them.

ops is not a dirty word

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 02:24:11 +0000

From https://charity.wtf/2026/01/19/bring-back-ops-pride-xpost/

What’s wrong with operations? Ops is not a synonym for toil; it literally means “get shit done as efficiently as possible”. Every function has an operational component at scale: business ops, marketing ops, sales ops, product ops, design ops and everything else I could think of to search for, and so far as I can tell, none of them are treated with anything like the disrespect, dismissal and outright contempt that software engineering