Matt Edwards

Everything about this study is interesting: Contentedness does increase steadily in line with incomes and even accelerates as pay rises beyond $100,000 a year — as long as the person enjoys a certain baseline level of happiness to begin with. That’s according to the authors’ study of 33,391 people living in the US, published March 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. They say the effect can be observed in salaries up to $500,000, though they lack conclusive data beyond that level....

Just like last year, spent another winter weekend in Stowe, Vermont back in January. It was a great time of skiing, beer, and hot tubs - all of my favorite winter activities. Below is the video summary of the trip. Compared to last year, I have upped my GoPro game to include additional angles that create more variety in the final product. This 3 minute video was made from tens of hours of footage, and I think I only just had enough to make it interesting....

What a great story this is: For those who stay the course to become Cravath partners, it is a lifetime career that comes with a guaranteed annual salary of several million dollars. Underscoring the “lifetime” part are traditions such as the Cravath Walk: every partner is entitled to a procession of past and present partners at their funeral, after which the assembled lawyers chant: “The partner is dead, the firm lives....

Of all the things Twitter could do to drive me away, they’ve done two of the top-tier items over the past week or so. First up, we have “Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first”: When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s....

From Thomas Rid at the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies: Last week brought two related features of artificial intelligence in education into sharp relief: the first is that all that talk about plagiarism and cheating and abuse is uninspiring and counterproductive. Yes, some unambitious students will use this new tool to cover subpar performance, and yes, we could talk about how to detect or disincentivize such behavior. The far more inspiring conversation is a different one: how can the most creative, the most ambitious, and the most brilliant students achieve even better results faster?...

While listening to the latest Stacktrace podcast today during an indoor bike training session (nothing like Apple Tech and a high heart rate!), the guys were discussing the latest rumors from Mark Gurman that broke a few days ago: A high-end configuration of the Mac Pro, a model with 48 CPU cores and 152 graphics cores, has been canceled. Instead, Apple plans to release a version with the M2 Ultra, making it unclear — beyond the machine’s expandability — why most users would buy it over the cheaper and smaller Mac Studio....

It appears I forgot to write a 2022 November Month in Biking post. Oops. Regardless, it’s the final day of the 2022nd year here and in the spirit of reflecting and resolutions and all that, I can dig up some stats1 across the entire year. 2,453 miles This is 22% more than last year where I eeked out a paltry 2,012 miles and only just crossed the 2k mark. Comparing to 2020 and 2019, though, it’s was not enough to beat out the 2,955 and 3,062 miles I pulled out those years, respectively....

Perhaps best to call it the “Last warning you’ll ever need to flee LastPass” breach. Best summary and take I’ve seen is from Wladimir Palant: Right before the holiday season, LastPass published an update on their breach. As people have speculated, this timing was likely not coincidental but rather intentional to keep the news coverage low. Security professionals weren’t amused, this holiday season became a very busy time for them. LastPass likely could have prevented this if they were more concerned about keeping their users secure than about saving their face....

Launched is a podcast by Charlie Chapman, where he interviews mobile app developers about their ideas and how they launched their products. Great show! I particularly enjoyed this episode, from last December 2021, with Ryan Jones the founder of Flighty and Weather Line. Both are great apps which I have used extensively. Ryan digs into how he transitioned from petroleum engineering to being an app creator, and the entire episode provides excellent content for anyone thinking of starting their own mobile app business....

I apologize in advance if you don’t give two hoots about social media conventions and norms. Saw this post by Taylor Lorenz over on Mastodon.social: Journalists will never stick around this app long term sadly unless it adds quote posting. We desperately need it to communicate effectively, build on each others ideas, and add crucial context to posts. These are things replies simply do not accomplish. Also quote posting or reblogging does not = harassment!...