Jake Russo

WordPress was the CMS I’d use when spinning up cPanel websites on a $30/year Namecheap shared hosting plan in the fifth grade. That is to say I’m somewhat familiar with it.

For the past few years, this site has run on Hugo, which I covered in a previous post. In fact, I had a second site, running on the “notes.” subdomain, also using Hugo but on a different hosting service. That site was easier to update and ended up being where all of my writing went. That website has merged¹ with my “main” one, and all of its content lives here now.

This WordPress instance is running on EasyWP WPEngine because it’s fast and cheap reliable. They seem to have a strange hobby in suspending it for abuse, but hopefully that stops be fantastic so far.² The theme is an ever-so-slightly modified version of the basic Twenty-Twenty Five one.

I have ideas for things to write about, but I’ve learned my lesson about making promises in that department. I’m mostly looking forward to finishing this post so that I can point the domain to this site.

---

¹My second site is still up at the time of writing, but it’ll disappear soon, and all of its content is already here!

²EasyWP didn’t work with a custom domain, at least the way I was trying to configure it. Well, it sort of did in that some of the content showed up on the custom domain, but all the site’s references were to pages on the EasyWP subdomain. This is probably just a setting in WordPress, but WPEngine had a Cyber Monday sale and cashback.

Hi! I have been writing a lot for school lately, which made me remember that I actually enjoy doing this sometimes. When it’s marginally enjoyable to write about things about which I have no interest, it must be truly enjoyable to write about things that do interest me. That’s the theory anyway.

Both this website and my main one are out of date, and I would like to get around to merging them into one. I finally stopped paying $7/month to host a one-episode (two-, if you count the “trailer” one) podcast. I found out that it broke for some reason, so I was quite literally paying for nothing for some period of time. I guess it doesn’t make that much of a difference, since, while it was working, I was paying for practically nothing. Anyway, the podcast is on Acast now, and it took practically no time to transfer.

I’m still young, and I have no idea how change works. I’m going to college soon and am in my last few months of high school. It’s incredibly boring, and I do a horrible job staying motivated and getting work done. I’m looking forward to being interested in school once college comes around. We’ll see if that (school being interesting—I think the antecedent might’ve been unclear) prospect just keeps receding into the horizon…

I know that my life will change a lot and that this part is almost over, but I don’t know it yet. I guess I’ll have to realize it sooner or later.

I was recording some voiceovers (for personal use, nothing particularly interesting) the other day using my podcasting setup, and it reminded me that I like talking and listening to myself talk while editing that audio. I might get around to recording another episode of something.

Publishing things online is always fun, even though ~no one reads this. I’ll probably think of more random things to type.

• The Razors-and-Blades Myth(s) by Randal C. Picker :: SSRN
  • This one was recommended by Byrne in TheDiff.
  • An interesting “well, actually” story about the origin of the “razors and blades” model
    • Gillette didn’t sell razors at a loss and make up for it with the blades!
    • They actually charged a premium for both their razors and their blades, both during and after the life of their first patents.
    • They invented cheaper, disposable razor blades
  • I shave with a safety razor now, both because I find it easier and because the blades are cheap enough that I don’t have re-use them, and its blades are the thinner ones that Gillette pioneered.
  • Interesting parallels to razor-and-blades lock-in with HP printers — Gillette warned customers against using genuine blades in third-party razors; HP warns about the inverse.
  • The paper probably could’ve been much shorter; 30 pages seemed a little excessive.
• Charter-Disney Winners and Losers – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
  • Disney caved to Spectrum!
  • A look at the future of video entertainment
  • Ben’s prediction about re-bundling might be coming true.
  • “The Arc of Video — Winner: Consumers” seems like a stereotypical economist’s faith in the system, but it’s true nonetheless.
• Office of Public Affairs | Justice Department Sues Google for Monopolizing Digital Advertising Technologies | United States Department of Justice
  • Straight from the horse’s mouth, as they say
• U.S. v. Google: What to Know About the Biggest Antitrust Trial in 20 Years – WSJ
  • I’m biased towards thinking antitrust lawsuits against tech companies are frivolous and annoying.
    • I like many of the big tech companies — many consumers do? — and government hearings have been total jokes.
  • I’ve heard Sherman Antitrust doesn’t work well for tech companies who control demand, not supply.
    • Consumers are free to choose competitors; they don’t because the dominant player is just better.
      • But maybe the dominant players wielded their superior product to effect unfair market conditions where competitors couldn’t compete effectively.
  • Google’s adtech business seems a little shady, and I don’t know enough about it.
  • I’ll keep following this case!
• A Beginners Guide to Generalized Second-Price Auctions
  • I became really annoyed because I forgot what a second-price auction was when reading about the Google case. This reminded me.
• The Lindy Effect
  • The effect makes sense intuitively (though might not be applicable in some of the ways in which it seems to be intuitively), and I had been thinking about it sometime during the week or two before I happened upon this link in The Browser.
  • I didn’t understand much of this paper.
    • Most of the math — outside the sliver I remembered from AP Statistics — lost me completely.
    • I circled some things to google.
  • It was fun to read though.
• How not to be fooled by viral charts – by Noah Smith (noahpinion.blog)
  • I appreciated “not to” as opposed to “to not”.
  • An interesting tour of some stupidly misleading charts, loose heuristics on identifying such charts (though he notes that more concrete rules are difficult to define), gives advice on finding real data (e.g., FRED)
  • Lots of pictures
• The Trouble with the View from Above | Cato Unbound (cato-unbound.org)
  • I’m impressed with The Browser‘s ability to include things in their newsletters that I’ve thought about lately.
  • The discussion of how governments understand things narrowly and quantifiably, then forcing that view into reality was really cool.
  • I found the writing to be excellent and very engaging.
  • I finally purchased the book!
• Apple’s iPhone Event; Innovation and Iteration; Pricing, Inflation, and Services – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
  • We’ve reached peak iPhone, at least for the time being.
    • “Boring” Apple keynotes are only boring because the products are so good.
    • Innovation compounds
  • This was probably going to be the year the iPhone switched to USB-C, regardless of the EU’s stupid regulations.
  • The skit about environmental friendliness was really dumb and unfunny.
    • Climate change, to the extent we can or will alleviate it, will be alleviated through technology and innovation.
• Prologue–Chapter 2 of Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
• Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson review – arrested development | Biography books | The Guardian
  • I read this the day after receiving and starting the book, just to hear it called an “dull, insight-free doorstop”.
  • “Isaacson comes from the ‘his eyes lit up’ school of cliched writing, the rest of his prose workmanlike bordering on AI.”
    • LOL
      • It could probably be shorter and better written, but I’m hardly 3% through, so what do I know.
      • Maybe clever prose is difficult in a non-fiction piece of this length and scope?

---

I may have read some other things this week and forgotten about them. I’m working on being better at including things in this list, but sometimes I fold up the printout, put it in my backpack, and neglect to look through my bag for several days after.

I drew a few things a couple months ago.

What types of things?

I drew two people: a man and a woman, based on a coloring page and the first ‘beginner drawing’ technique I found¹ on YouTube.

I drew a mushroom and some spheres.

It was actually quite nice: I like to multitask, to feel like I’m completely engaged. I’ve struggled with this, though, because there’s a hard limit (at least for most of us) at one stream² of language. I’ve tried to surf the internet while listening to a podcast or an audiobook, or even do homework or write while receiving another stream — it doesn’t work! I switch back and forth and have no idea what’s going on with either language stream; it decreases productivity and confuses me.

Drawing, though, does not stress my ability to process only one stream of language; it uses a different part of the brain!

Maybe it’s total placebo, but I felt like I was using a region of my brain that I usually hadn’t. And it was satisfying, also, to feel completely engaged while drawing and listening to a podcast.

So what happened? Why did I stop³ in June? Maybe, by now, I could’ve managed some passable sketching ability.

This is a flaw of mine, one of which this blog might be evidence: commitment. And not to people; I can stay highly committed to friends, relationships, other things that involve people. For example, I couldn’t stay committed to the gym to save my life, but I can stay committed to a personal trainer; I quit drawing after a week max, but maybe I would stay committed to in-person⁴ art lessons.

I don’t know exactly why. There are even activities to which I am, when you zoom out, quite committed: walking, for example. But even with walking, I go through cycles of walking four miles per day to four days per month.

Maybe it’s a time management thing, and maybe I should structure my time better.

This post doesn’t have much of a moral, but I imagine this plight is nowhere near unique to me. No one trick will work for everyone, and probably not even in isolation for many people; productivity gurus are con artists, and Atomic Habits is dull.⁵

---

¹which consists of copying a coloring page upside-down so that you don’t think as much about the object you’re supposed to be drawing as you do about the lines, etc. I didn’t find this particularly convincing, but I did it anyway.

²I heard it phrased this way somewhere and now can’t find where.

³I just remembered I’ve managed to make this into an activity for which my progress is graded in school… because I need more busywork, apparently.

⁴I’ve been warned against these.

⁵I read it, thought it was dumb, and felt validated when a favorite podcast of mine, If Books Could Kill, came out with an episode on it.