The Invisible Layer
*On the layer of craft you can't see.*
Dafacto
I’ve been writing here since 2003, covering investing, business and technology.
Latest posts
BJJ Fanatics Is Spamming You — And They Know Exactly What They're Doing
*A case study in systematic email abuse, ignored GDPR requests, and how one company treats your unsubscribe button as a suggestion.*
The agent-to-agent organization
Right now, AI agents help individuals become more productive. But the real shift happens when agents interact with each other on behalf of their owners — handling the coordination overhead that makes organizations slow despite being full of capable people.
Product feedback — problems vs solutions
When providing feedback to a product team, it’s infinitely more helpful to communicate *problems* rather than *solutions*.
Design principles vs tenets
Many organizations declare design principles:
How Pendle Finance works, in a nutshell
Pendle Finance is a “yield-trading” dApp in the decentralized finance ecosystem, that is tremendously useful but not well understood. Back in 2023, I posted a technical explanation of how Pendle works, and today I want to post a simpler example.
The infallibility of official, open-source and audited software
The purpose of this article is twofold:
How to run multiple Spacemesh nodes in MacOS, using a cloud provider to create your postdata
In this article, I will describe:
How to display category and tag counts in Jekyll
After two decades, I recently migrated my blog from WordPress to Jekyll, a static website generator. I’ll write another article soon on why and the process, but as I continue to tweak the site, I wanted to quickly post how to do something that was surprisingly difficult to find.
How to change the battery of a 4iiii power meter
I own a Specialized Roubaix bike that came with a 4iiii power meter installed on the Dura-Ace crankset. I also have a Garmin Edge 830 bicycle computer, which alerted me the other day that my power meter batteries were almost empty. This article explains how to access and change the batteries.
Pendle Finance
One of the use cases of smart contract blockchain networks that has always excited me most is programmable, composable finance. In that domain, an interesting project I’ve been paying attention to recently is @pendle_fi — Pendle Finance.
International attitudes
So true! 😂
Review of the Waterfield Essential Cross-body bag for the iPad Pro
As a bag addict in continual pursuit of the optimal setup, I’ve recently updated my daily carry to include a Waterfield Essential Cross-body bag.
How Americans spend their money
!
First principles
1. THREAD — On understanding the fundamentals. When I was at university, I took a three-semester course on radio-frequency (RF) engineering, which taught me the profound importance of understanding things from first principles. 2. When two electrical systems are interfaced, each one, looking towards the other, sees a certain “impedance”, or resistance. Only when the two impedances are “matched”…
Introduction to Bitcoin futures and daily settlement
This is the first in a series of articles in which I explore cryptocurrency futures trading, available on platforms like Bitmex and Deribit.
Basis trading — Earning contango premium with Bitcoin futures
This is the second in a series of articles that explore cryptocurrency futures trading, available on platforms like Bitmex and Deribit. The first, and introduction to Bitcoin futures trading is found here, and in this article I’ll discuss “basis trading”.
The Dummies Edition of The New, New World Order
In the midst of this possibly one-in-a-lifetime shock, I’ve been very interested in thinking about and imagining what life will look like moving forward. As input to that thinking, I’ve been summarizing interesting essays and interviews of others, including Raoul Pal’s gloomy economic forecast and Ray Dalio’s socioeconomic outlook.
Ray Dalio on COVID-19
Ray Dalio of Bridgwater Associates made a virtual TED appearance to discuss the context and consequences of this current COVID19 crisis. I’ve tried to paraphrase his ideas in this article.
The case for owning Bitcoin
In this article, I’m going to make the case for considering to allocate a small amount of your savings to Bitcoin. I’ll do that by explaining what Bitcoin is, along with how and why it might become valuable.
The Unfolding — Anatomy of the COVID-19 financial crisis
In 2020, I learned about the macro economist Raoul Pal through a number of podcasts, and his pessimistic view of the global macro situation resonated with me prior to the COVID-19 crisis. He believed a nearly perfect-storm of characteristics existed that pointed to the coming of a deep recession. And then COVID-19 happened.
iCloud Drive stuck uploading and downloading files in Mac OS X Mojave
Recently, my MacBook Pro, running Mac OS X Mojave, got into a state in which the Finder wasn’t uploading or download files to and from iCloud Drive. Since I couldn’t find any solution to this through Googling, I wanted to document how I solved the problem for others who may be experiencing the same.
Fake profiles on Upwork
When sourcing work at Upwork, we tend to look for staff who are located in Europe, so that we have the chance to work in our timezone and have face-to-face meetings. A big problem, however, is fake profiles—people who are obviously not from Europe, posting profiles pretending they are.
How to selectively run Keyboard Maestro macros in a synchronized environment
A challenged I’ve always faced in running Keyboard Maestro on multiple Macs, is the maintenance of macros that are common to all, i.e. when updating a macro on one machine (say, changing the API keys of a service I’m accessing), I have to remember to go make the same updates on the others.
How to perform a currency lookup in a Numbers spreadsheet
Apple recently introduced in the Numbers spreadsheet the ability to pull live stock prices from the internet, making it now possible to track portfolio performance.
Startup Survivorship Bias
One of the best, and most spot-on, comics from xkcd:
The case against identity politics
In episode 45 of his “Waking Up” podcast, I loved this piece by Sam Harris on **identity politics**, and wanted to capture it here for future reference:
Email Verification
I’m the owner of a Gmail address that bears my name, in the form **first.last**@gmail.com.
Follow-up thoughts about Goldmoney
On December 1, the Canadian company formerly known as BitGold, sent an email to their customers, announcing a change that fundamentally affects how their customers use and experience the service.
Decommissioning old email addresses with FastMail
The first business email address I used, matt@makalumedia.com, now almost twenty years old, is the source of 95% of the spam I receive. I no longer use this address, and would simply like to kill it, but every now the arrival of an important message reminds me that decommissioning it could result in missing something important.
Support Authentication
When I signup for an online service, I like to use an email address that’s unique to that service, i.e. something like **service@my-special-domain.com**. Email for **my-special-domain.com** is then configured to forward all incoming mail to my personal email address.
A botched change of policy at Goldmoney
This is the story of how Goldmoney botched the communication of a fundamental change in policy, that ultimately may lead to me taking my business elsewhere.
Disappointing interaction design at Apple
Long-time Apple customers became accustomed over the years to thoughtful and delightful interaction design. As Apple has grown—and perhaps as Steve Jobs has passed, and Jony Ive’s involvement seems to be sunsetting—cracks have begun to appear.
Email, please
Because every WhatsApp “informational” group eventually devolves into a water cooler chat, my app badge currently shows 1,457 unread messages. Because I rarely open Facebook, its app badge shows 312 unseen notifications. Because I participate in seven Slacks, with several “channels” in each, there are currently 117 unread messages in there.
The difference between developers and product designers
Our company is bidding on the re-development of an existing product that has outgrown the technical framework on which it was originally built. The customer has received a handful of offers, and the range of costs and technologies found in those proposals is causing him considerable uncertainty in his choice.
Why keeping it simple would be a better choice for TransferWise
In the world of web application development, we sometimes face technical decisions whose trade-offs extend beyond the technical. Those _non-technical_ trade-offs can be subtle, and perhaps difficult to identify, yet critical to the business. In this article, I want to highlight as an example my experience with the TransferWise payment system, in which technical decisions ultimately work contrary…
How to manage a Tomato router via the CLI using Keyboard Maestro
As I wrote about a few weeks ago, I have my home network connected to the internet through a VPN router, running the Tomato firmware. Although the setup works great, I did run into two issues which I needed to detect and resolve programmatically, using Keyboard Maestro (KM):
SendGrid made things right
**Update** Readers will note that I’ve changed the title and URL of this article, and that’s because shortly after posting it, representatives of SendGrid reached out, apologizing for the situation, explaining that my situation isn’t what they intend, and offering to make it right.
How to switch wifi networks with Keyboard Maestro
In a recent blog post I explained how I secure my home network with a VPN. In that article, I also explained how I enabled external access to my home network, using the Slink software running on a Mac mini server, whose primary network interface is wifi connected to my ISP router, and second network interface is ethernet connected to my home gigabit switch.
Spam from Spencer Mains and LiveRamp
Continuing in my spammer Hall of Shame series, here’s an persistent (and ongoing) series of spam from Spencer Mains at a company called LiveRamp. Spencer, being the hipster type, is fond of “bumping his way to the top of my inbox”, in an effort to just “circle up” and “hop on a call.”
Milton Friedman on Greed
In this interview, Milton Friedman responds to Phil Donahue’s concerns about greed.
Spam from Designstraw
Since 2011, I’ve been receiving spam from this company, Designstraw, and always with the same, “We’re looking to take on a few extra projects...”
How to protect your home network with a VPN router
In this article, I describe how I added security to my home network by installing a router that directs all internet traffic through an encrypted VPN connection. The adventure includes my experience with the FlashRouters company, the Tomato router firmware software, an OpenVPN connection to the Cloak network, the Linksys E2500 router and the Netgear Nighthawk R7000 router.
Using WordPress redirection plugins to create easy-to-remember social links
I’ve never been good at remembering my social media URLs. Am I “dafacto” there or “mhenders”? At Facebook, where neither was available, what was that URL stub I chose? And doesn’t LinkedIn include something like /i/ or /in/ in their URLs?
Just another day in Spain
To give you a sense of life in Andalucia Spain, I present to you the short journey from my office in Marbella, to the small restaurant where I frequently have lunch.
How I migrated my snippets from TextExpander to Keyboard Maestro
TextExpander is a Mac utility for creating auto-expanding text shortcuts—“snippets”—that can save you time on things you repetitively type, such as email signatures, your telephone number or boilerplate responses to support emails. With version 6, Smile decided to move away from paid upgrades, to a subscription plan that would cost roughly $5 per month. The move was controversial, a situation…
Paying one’s “fair share” of taxes
In this article about Roger Ver’s $100,000 bitcoin bounty to Bernie Sanders for a debate on the topic of patriotism, we come across this quote (emphasis added by me):
Inna Demianova is a persistent woman
Inna Demianova is doing her best to overtake Ronak Parker’s persistency record. Looking for a way to migrate WooCommerce data, I ran across her company’s Cart2Cart service, and pinged them in chat to ask if they do what I need. Inna responded, confirming they do, but I got a sense she really didn’t understand what I was asking for, so I didn’t proceed with Cart2Cart.
Disappointing support from WooThemes
Makalu was recently hired to redesign an e-commerce site running on WordPress, and implementing its shop using the WooCommerce system.
The Man in the Arena
> It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does…