PicoBlog

While the business of making movies can be morose and full of betrayal (check out that ongoing strike), that feeling should never enter a viewer’s experience. They should leave entertained, smarter, or inspired. One of the three is great; three at once can be the rarest of cinema sightings. But at the very least, inspiring me in a harsh, real world can be good enough. Three new movies offer a form of inspiration, all drawing from true (enough) stories.

1/ Mark Twain famously said, “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Despite its lack of brevity, the 313-page Instacart S-1 tells me very little of what I truly want to know. What I see is a business with a flat customer base and order counts, declining cohort purchase behavior and the opportunity to drive accretive value largely via advertising and operational efficiency.  2/ Given how overly covered this IPO filing is (not to mention dealing with a poor kid with an ACL tear at home), rather than doing a comprehensive teardown, I will raise a list of observations and questions that came to the forefront for me.

Companies mentioned: INTC 0.00%↑, IBM 0.00%↑, AAPL 0.00%↑ I find semiconductor engineering conferences particularly fun: there's IEDM for silicon devices, ISSCC for circuits, and VLSI that kind-of combines both. It's a chance for companies and academics to show off their latest research to a field of like-minded people. That includes Apple, who attend en mass every year, but never seem to present anything (leave me a comment to where I can find Apple’s presentations!

Fabian Giesen posts on Mastodon on the use of Intel’s AVX-512. We analyse and explain these one by one: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@rygorous/110572829749524388 In computing, an "unsigned integer compare" operation refers to comparing two unsigned integer values. Unsigned integers are numbers that represent non-negative values only, ranging from 0 to a maximum value determined by the number of bits used to store the integer. On a normal CPU, unsigned integer comparison typically takes 2 or 3 instructions.

Let me hit you with an incredibly obvious statement Everything you do at work should tie back to improving outcomes for your customers or the performance of the company.  That’s what work is, right? That’s why your job exists. If you think about how to advance in your career, “get better results for your customers and your company” is probably near the top of the list. I’d argue — and I am arguing — that most work is actually not about this statement at all.

The Book of Clarence came out over a week ago, and I keep getting news alerts about interviews with the filmmakers. So, rather than keep adding to the round-up I created just before the film’s opening weekend, I figured I’d start a new round-up. First, a few news items: Deadline says the film was going to open in the UK last Friday, but it got yanked at the last minute and is now aiming for a release in March.

Good morning, Tuesday. Welcome to The Small Bow.  Today, we have another Sober Oldster interview featuring one of my favorite people on earth, writer, comedian, and producer Claudia Lonow. Claudia has appeared in The Small Bow Universe as a contributor to the newsletter and guest on Really Good Shares. I interviewed her in TSB in 2020, and she had this gr… ncG1vNJzZmismJrArq3LpZmor16owqO%2F05qapGaTpLpwvI6ipa2doqu2psOMsKCtoF2Wend8jLKcmqpdpLmledKomZ6q

Augustin Hadelich is one of today’s supreme violinists, perfectly balancing intellect, emotion and soul, all with a vast palette of sound and superb taste. It’s not surprising, therefore, that he’s also the busiest, according to Bachtrack, or that he references Norbert Brainin and David Oistrakh among his influences. I interviewed him for the front cover of the March issue of The Strad, and even in an hour over Zoom, he had so many interesting and thought-provoking ideas that I had far too much material for the print article, so here are the quotes I couldn’t fit in.

by Ed Irving Blowback is a podcast about the fuse trailing up to the bomb. Meetings between future revolutionaries, midnight airlifts of rifles and bullets, and page-inches of yellow journalism. Through first-hand accounts and publicly available sources, Brendan James and Noah Kulwin move along the timeline of American empire to show how our actions have reactions and nothing is ever as cut and dry as it is presented. The path they’ve chosen to tread is well trodden, but their footsteps stand out due to the sheer quality of their production, and their dedication to acquiring those firsthand accounts.