"With Dia, we started fresh from an architecture perspective and prioritized performance from the start. Specifically, sunsetting our use of TCA and SwiftUI to make Dia lightweight, snappy, and responsive."
In my limited experience, SwiftUI is excellent for iOS development, but it requires a lot of extra effort to get good results on macOS. I suspect that’s why.
Yes, "The Little Kingdom" is a great book (the very slightly updated edition is called "Return to the Little Kingdom" but really just adds a short epilogue), and in my opinion (having read most of them), the best book on early Apple. It gives you more insight into some of the other characters at the early company (Mike Markkula and Mike Scott for example) than some of the other books. Interestingly, the author, Mike Moritz (a lot of Mikes), went on to be a highly successful venture capitalist. So he must've had some keen insights about the tech industry.
I was a guest on a podcast called "CFO Bookshelf" to discuss that book if you want to hear a discussion of it before making the commitment to dive in:
I've read over 100 business books. Why? Because I enjoy the genre and its many sub-genres. From both an entertainment and a practical perspective. And that's also why I co-host the podcast Business Books & Co. [0].
In my opinion, the author of this post is correct about his criticisms of the specific books in the post (we did several of them on the show). Many business books overly generalize, are not empirically rigorous, and are better seen as anecdotal and/or entertainment.
But you also need to understand that "business books" is a very broad category that includes many sub-genres like entrepreneurial storytelling (Shoe Dog), "big idea" books (Zero to One), career up-skilling (Radical Candor), economic history (Titan), and self-help (How to Win Friends and Influence People). Many of these cross over into non-business genres as well.
So, in some sense the author here is doing the same kind of over-generalization that many of the books do. He's mostly speaking about the "big idea" books as if those are the whole genre. What is a business book? It's ill-defined but I think there are many great ones outside the "big idea" space. For example, we just interviewed John Romero on the show to discuss his 2023 autobiography Doom Guy[1]. In my opinion, it is absolutely a wonderful business book from the entrepreneurial storytelling sub-genre. But it doesn't fit the mold that this post talks about.
I'm skeptical of overly empirical arguments. It's a lot easier to fool someone by citing some unreproducible study or misinterpreted statistic. Tell me a story and I understand it's one story but it might have some kind of meaning or resonance.
The best thing I learn from business book and bios is that it can be done. The people are often very human and flawed. Half of it is just believing you can do it and working hard.
If you look at empirical data you quickly come across efficient market and no free lunch. But it's important to note you are not a statistic and what you do determines your fate. Or at least that's the most productive way to go through life
This kind of underscores the author's point, though. These books in question give the impression that they supply concrete business advice, but much of it is highly non-transferrable. Or at least requires significant discipline to separate the concrete from the self-aggrandization, survivor bias, confirmation bias, etc. They don't get at the heart of the technical, social and political challenges facing an average Joe starting a company. Sure, their journey may inspire you to get moving, but so could Frodos. This doesn't make them a bad book, but they are not scholarly. Realistically, since Frodos story based on a much broader familiarity with human history, it may be significantly more cross-applicable despite being set in fantasy world.
My comment was probably something similar. Are there some general principles? Sure. And I'm glad that Harvard Business School professors, consultants, and successful execs (or their ghostwriters) can elaborate on them as food for thought especially when backed with some data. But I've also heard/read seemingly super-logical cases for various outcomes that ended up simply not happening.
Quite a few pop-non-fic books, especially business, self-help (tons of overlap in form and technique there), and both business and non-business (these latter usually get adopted by the business-side anyway) “big idea” books, not only cite studies of dubious value, but cite sources that don’t include their claim at all, or contradict it.
I enjoy “business fables” like The Goal or The Phoenix Project. Since you must know a fair chunk of the business books - any other good ones in this genre?
I think you're referring to novels that have strong business themes? Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding. That's an interesting sub-genre that we have not yet explored on the show but have discussed doing in the future. In the six years of the show, we have done exclusively non-fiction and I read myself mostly non-fiction. Sorry, therefore no recommendations yet! I'll checkout the ones you mentioned.
DevOps is one of the weird ones because the details are so situational. No one likes to emphatically throw communications between Dev and Ops (and security) under the train. But the reality is that, for large organizations, making it so that different functions don't have to communicate is often the best approach.
I have yet to see DevOps actually executed well. IME, it always winds up with half-assed infrastructure, because devs often have little interest in ops, and even more rarely have any kind of background in it.
The entire concept seems to me like devs noticed that ops folks were often automating large portions of their jobs with shell scripts, and haughtily thought, “we could do so much better with proper tooling and a better language,” completely disregarding the fact that the ops team had decades of combined experience and trauma from past incidents.
I sort of lost interest in a lot of the DevOps culture.
I think when Kubernetes came in for larger orgs (and even before such as OpenShift that I was involved with), the set infra up and get out of the way mindset made a lot of sense. I think there was an attempt to overlay DevOps on what would become Platform Engineering but I'm not sure it ever really made sense.
Content like this has to choose the point they're targeting on a rigorous-education-to-entertaining spectrum.
Chess teaching content that's only for people at ~2300 ELO on how to get from there to 2400 ELO? Potential audience of perhaps 10,000 people worldwide.
Chess-themed entertainment content, with educational content mixed with lots of jokes and memes, accessible to players at all levels? Potential audience of 10,000,000 people.
Likewise, you don't become a bestselling business author if your book on how to be a Fortune 500 CEO only has an audience of 500 people. If your book succeeds, 99.95% of your sales will come from people who don't ever plan or expect to become a Fortune 500 CEO.
It's interesting you use that analogy because my dad was an author of chess books. Yes, many were a niche within a niche and only sold a few thousands copies.
My observations about business books match your intuition—the more popular business books tend to be popular for reasons beyond their educational content. They usually include great storytelling, are meticulously crafted and edited, and are about societally interesting subject matter beyond the pure educational aspects.
But that really makes a difference in your experience as a reader. I'm not saying popular means good. I am saying that on average with all things considered the popular business books tend to be better experiences to read than the unpopular ones. Of course there are exceptions.
One difference is that the chess content you talk about does have educational value - it will make you better chess player although in time ineffective way.
> So, in some sense the author here is doing the same kind of over-generalization that many of the books do.
I read most of the main books in the "ideation/innovation/startup/scale-up/ entrepreneurship/business plan writing" available at a certain time, and had to sift through a lot of useless or redundant material to extract very little wisdom from it.
(Of course what is really useful emerges only when you then execute your own start-up idea later.)
The grandparent post cautions from "overgeneralization", so let me add a comment in the opposite direction, namely "undergeneralization": it is not only business books that are more for entertainment (and perhaps reflection) than hard facts; even the category of formal economics/business studies academic literature includes large quantities of claims that do not hold, were not properly assessed, hold no predictive power etc.
I recommend one that positively stands out, Philip E. Tetlock and his studies on forecasting abilities of so-called "experts" versus average person in the street: he wrote several critical studies that found academics (economists/business in particular, hence relevant for this post) and other experts to be lacking, and then developed a methodology for more systematic prediction (e.g. see the book Superforecasting: The Science of Prediction (2016, with Ben Gardner, https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction-P...).
Even the reputable books tend to resort to anecdotal evidence and do not evaluate any of their claims. I'd go crazy if I had to read 100 of them but the ones I read were based on 100% survivorship bias and 0% scientific studies.
Personally, it seems to me that general business books --- that is, the ones that aren't textbooks (accounting, microeconomics, etc.) --- are merely a sub-genre of the self-help category and that these books may provide value by giving some motivation and inspiration at best and, at worst, provide huge disvalue by misinforming.
If you’re that keen on business books, I have one that you might enjoy: https://www.sallery.co.uk/lessons. I’ve tried to avoid some of the pitfalls listed in the article, but feedback from someone with broad knowledge of the genre would be most welcome!
You're right. I know! It's our podcast host, Pinecast. They don't provide HTTPS to customers for the website. Luckily very few people find us through the website. The vast majority are followers on Spotify. Thanks for the feedback.
"Business" is so broad it's hard to give you recommendations without knowing what you're looking for. That's kind of the point of my post. But as one example, as I mentioned in my post, I loved Doom Guy. If you're building a business in the video game industry you should definitely check it out.
I would also recommend all of the other books in my post that I mentioned by different sub-genres (Shoe Dog, Radical Candor, etc.).
She didn't respond, which is fair enough, it's probably not big enough to be interesting to her. But then I got auto-added to her PR mailing list. I didn't ask or consent to be on the PR mailing list (all the page says as of now is "To contact Sarah, please complete the form below"). Seems I was just added because I used the "contact" form.
Auto-adding someone who contacts you to a PR mailing list is a dark pattern. Seems she learned something at Facebook. I found it ironic.
This a very specific situation where someone comes to my website/company, takes an action they believe is safe, and gets a bunch of spam. That would absolutely be my responsibility - it’s where the buck stops.
If you're looking for a late PPC Mac to run esoteric PPC operating systems or PPC Mac stuff, the MDD G4 is a great machine if you need dual processors, expandability, and more than 1 GB of RAM.
But if you don't, you're much better off getting a Mac mini G4. I'm biased because I have a hobby business selling SSD upgraded ones running a hacked Mac OS 9 [0]. But compared to the MDD G4, the Mac mini G4:
- Uses a fraction of the energy
- Takes up a fraction of the space
- Largely can run the same operating systems
- Is much quieter (as the article alludes to, the MDD G4 is loud)
- For single core can actually be faster going all the way up to 1.5 GHz (MDD can go there with an accelerator)
- Has more integrated parts so has less parts that can fail
There are some cons to the G4 mini versus the MDD G4 though:
- Almost no expandability
- Limited to 1 GB of RAM
- No dual processors
- The hacked version of Mac OS 9 needs USB sound and some models can have some display incompatibilities at high resolutions
But for the vast majority of applications these don't matter much.
I'd say the best PPC Mac will depend on exactly what you want to do on it.
Fastest that can natively run OS 9 with full driver support is going to be the MDD.
Best low cost and low space for tinkering is going to be the mini with the caveats you mentioned.
Best price to performance on the used market for PPC OS X software is probably an iMac G5.
Absolute best performance for PPC OS X stuff is going to be the PowerMac G5.
Honorable mention to the eMac, which can be be found for ~$100, 1ghz combo drive models and below can natively run OS 9 with full driver support or you can go with up to the 1.42 ghz model which is going to be similar to the fastest G4 minis, and comes with a beautiful built in CRT, with the caveat that it takes up as much space as a CRT.
No, it's just a hobby and I'm way too far into this niche having purchased the particular parts for the mini G4 in bulk. Plus there is the built-in know-how of having done nearly 100 of these refurbishments/upgrades that I don't have the time to build up for another model.
Eddy Cue did an amazing job with the original Apple.com online store in the late 90s, the first version of the iTunes Music Store, and the early App Store. Interestingly these were all big WebObjects apps.
I wonder if there’s some interesting server-side technology culture story here and how it trickles down to the way services operate for consumers on the client side. Just pure speculation.
Edward Mendelson does an amazing job packaging Sheep Shaver with a bunch of built-in utilities and interfaces to your outer system that makes it much more usable out of the box:
I am looking for roles at the intersection of business and software. I'm an experienced technical communicator, mentor, software developer, and administrator with a background as CS faculty, programming book author, software developer, and startup co-founder.
I currently work as an associate professor at a teaching college where I am also the co-program director of computer science. On the side I build indie apps and have a small business restoring a very specific model of vintage computer. I also just released my fifth programming book with a publisher, Computer Science from Scratch: Building Interpreters, Art, Emulators and ML in Python:
In the technical community I am probably best known for writing the book Classic Computer Science Problems in Python which has been translated into 8 languages. But I am also an avid podcaster with a semi-successful podcast I co-host now on its fifth season called Business Books & Co.:
What is TCA?