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Here is my review of 1729’s The Billion User Table . I do like the unique take for measuring when a company is too big, with too much potential direct impact on individuals, based on the size of their Users table. I think one really positive benefit of this measure, even if it is not used actually used for anti-monopoly legislation and just for tax or other some other relatively minor regulation, is that it will force companies to ensure their Users table actually reflects real users and not bots and duplicates. It will force a lot of companies to keep their Users table clean and avoid misleading investors about their metrics and projections, most of which are extrapolated from the size of their Users table. One caveat, even though obvious but important to mention for those with an enterprise architecture background, is that when the article mentions Users table, in essence it is only talking about it from a logical architecture perspective and not from a technical / implementation arc

Trying to list everything that can have an existential risk to everyone’s investments and portfolios. These risks are probably difficult to hedge as probability of counterparty default on the hedge would be extremely high. What would you add to the lists below? Existential risks to portfolio: Military confrontation due to China-Taiwan issues: Whether the confrontation is local or global, the economic impact will be long lasting. This will be further aggravated by second order impacts such as restrictive investment policies between West and China, restrictions on semi conductor chip exports from Taiwan, etc. US civil war triggered either by proposed changes to second amendment or wealth inequality. US debt default due to political impasse or reduced reliance on USD as a global currency. Financial or accounting fraud or some sort of fatal data breaches at Vanguard, Blackrock or one of the bigger ETF managers wiping out trillions of dollars. Probable but not existential as the risk can be

A year or so back, while doing some courses on Azure, I ran in to a nagging "Platform Image Not Found" issue. The basic gist of the problem was that there was discrepancy between the Azure portal's VM set up screens and the actual config file that was getting generated behind the scenes.  In case you're running into this issue, I documented all the steps to work around this issue on Medium a year or so back. Here's the link:  Azure Virtual Machine — Visual Studio Platform Image Not Found

 A few thoughts... American Kingpin by Nick Bilton  is an extremely well written book, and details the gripping story behind the infamous Silk Road marketplace - its beginnings, parabolic rise and precipitous decline. Along the way, the author provides colorful and intriguing commentary behind the people involved and their life stories. Reading this book, reminded me of the famous Balzac quote from one of my favorite books The Godfather - "Behind every great fortune there is a crime". The book starts with the seemingly innocuous Libertarian ideals behind the foundation of the site but quickly turns extremely dark with references to hard drugs, guns, organ selling and murders. The type of dark that if you read a few chapters before going to bed, like I did, some of the characters and references show up in your dreams and you wake up with a racing heartbeat! :) Favorite line from the book... "What a country...one minute you're the nobody son of an Armenian immigrant, w

No blog can be complete without the mention of Bitcoin. Let me start my blog with it and be done with it right away. There's a plethora of information out there on Bitcoin, in terms of how it works and what the current and potential use cases are. Unfortunately, there's also a lot of contradictory information about it all over social media and web in general. This is exacerbated by the fact that both the proponents and the opponents are extremely fanatical about their position and mentioning a counter-argument to either group invites a lot of flogging and insults, usually unsupported by any tangible facts.  The other challenge in weeding out noise from signal is that in many cases our opinions and eventually our stand on any issue is influenced by the profile and reputation of the person making the argument rather than the actual argument 1 .  So instead of getting influenced by group-think or anything like that, my approach is to take step back and analyze it in an analytical