Recent content on Tal Globus
What does the worst possible intern look like? You give them a task, they run off, and return hours later with something entirely wrong. You nudge them on why it’s wrong, send them off again, and they return with something wrong in a different way. After enough rounds of correction, they finally produce what you wanted — with dramatically more time spent correcting them than you’d have…
I’ve found recently that I’ve been a bit hesitant to take on new projects, especially of the interesting variety, largely out of a fear that I’m doing something unoriginal. As anyone who has spent any substantial amount of time in the markets will tell you, being second to an idea isn’t necessarily terrible, but being 50th generally is, and I’d really rather avoid being 50th whenever possible. How…
I wanted to give a bit more information on how I wrote that piece . I wrote it in a very different way from how I usually write, and I want to try out this new method to see how it works. I’m sharing my process for anyone interested in writing, or just curious about how I’ll probably be doing this going forward. I started, as many of these posts do, by talking to myself and realizing within a…
The US national debt is not a hard problem to explain. It’s actually a fairly easy problem to explain, but it’s going to take some tough solutions. The cause is that we’re spending a very large amount of money on exactly four things. Almost everything else in the budget doesn’t really matter. One, health care It used to be that if you were poor and got sick, you died, and people didn’t really care…
Since SaaS 1 became a business model in the [mid 2000’s], the primary way by which companies integrate third party tools into their software has been via API. This is such a common and boring fact that most software people don’t give it much thought. Whether connecting a database, an analytics service, or sending notifications to a user’s phone, the languages is essentially the same: send an API…
Every few months, an article appears in some news source or another announcing the discovery of a new species. Sometimes the specimen discovered is something never before seen, but seemingly far more often, the announcement is something a bit more subtle. Members of one species were found to actually be something new. The operative word here is “found” and the reason why is the reason I’m writing…
Random Pertubations Imagine M&Ms divided into four groups by color on a sheet of graph paper. The brown M&Ms sit on the positive side of the Y axis, the reds sit on the negative side of the Y axis, the blues sit on the positive side of the X axis, the greens sit on the negative side of the X axis. All other colors are absent. This model represents any structured system. A human cell, a car engine,…
When designing forms to collect custom data types, you’ll sometimes have a regular expression for what you’re trying to collect, and for easy visual spacing you’d like to automatically inject separators into the form where appropriate, like this example for phone numbers: >> user_input = "415" >> phone_number = " \\ d {3} - \\ d {3} - \\ d {4} " >> append_separators ( user_input , regex =…
I’m starting a new series on things I will pre-commit to paying for if someone builds it, or points me to one that meets my stated needs. For the first run of the series, I spent several minutes looking through our API trying to guarantee there was no way a user could ever see data from a different organization, except if the data has been shared publicly. There are a few common solutions for…
I often wonder what things I’m wrong about. I sometimes notice wrong things said by friends and colleagues, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that regard. I’d have to imagine at least 10% of what’s in my head is wrong, and that’s likely an optimistic estimate, but after seeing a sufficiently large number of wrong things published in prestigious places in a given week, I’m apt to wonder how this can…
For today’s episode of “Really Important Concepts That Don’t Have Names,” I’d like to briefly introduce two words shamelessly stolen from the esoteric biological field of taxonomy. Carl Linnaeus made his place in history through his system of organizing every material, living or dead, into species, branching from a taxonomic tree initially divided into the three classes of animal, plant, and…
1. Measure your progress, and be relentless about growing it over time. You should probably use week-over-week revenue growth rate as your metric for this 2. Keep the customers happy, whatever it takes If you can’t keep a given customer happy, maybe they shouldn’t be your customer 3. Things don’t change unless and until someone changes them Either someone else changes something, or you do,…
In conversations with founders, engineers, and enthusiasts of ChatGPT-enabled academic dishonesty, one point of confusion about LLMs that frequently surfaces is how, on a technical level, services that give LLMs access to information from databases, Wikipedia, or even the Weather Channel actually work. How do you take an AI-powered chatbot that takes in words and spits out words and give it access…