Welcome to the first issue of The Cactus Report, a sporadic memo about whatever currently interests me. Who am I? My name is Alec, and I’m a data scientist in the Bay Area. I’m interested in technology, business strategy, the typical American sports, and a variety of other stuff that TCR might make apparent.
Some housekeeping:
I started The Cactus Report to reduce the activation energy for me to write, so for now, there won’t be a consistent theme or posting schedule, but that may change. My current plan is to start by posting links with some commentary and experiment from there.
I have paid subscriptions turned on, but right now I am not offering any commitments to paid subscribers and I do not expect anyone to start paying me. While this may change, I want to make it clear that any paid subscription is essentially a donation to me. It may motivate me to write more though!
A major reason I want to write more is to explore what I don’t know. That means it’s likely that I’ll frequently ask questions that might have answers that are very obvious to people that work in the space or have done some research. It also means that I’ll likely write things that are wrong because I haven’t done enough research. In both cases, please share your answers and where I am wrong! Paradoxically, it may be that the more sure I am about something, the less likely I am to write about it.
On to the links!
Tritium is becoming a bottleneck for nuclear fusion (via Marginal Revolution). I’d almost certainly have just skimmed the headline on this, but I had COVID two weeks ago. While I was sick, I rewatched the old Spider-Man movies, and the rarity of tritium happens to be a key plot point in Spider-Man 2! The article discusses various plans for producing tritium (it appears the main source of it, ironically, is nuclear fission and nuclear weapons testing), but I’m curious if there are any plausible alternatives to it. I’m also curious if in the future, a company doing robotic manufacturing in space (a la Varda) could be powered by a nuclear reactor from which tritium is harvested.
Citi has more software engineers than Meta, and more software engineers than Uber has employees. This sounds crazy at first, but doesn’t actually surprise me. Citi is much older than Meta, deals with banking software (and regulations), and has made a variety of financial services acquisitions. They have to rebuild their consumer facing services to be competitive with neobanks (not to mention the improvements their peers make) while maintaining complex legacy codebases for which reliability and data consistency are simply mandatory. Citi’s framing of their 30,000 engineers seems misleading to me - what proportion is working on building anything new and what proportion is dealing with their legacy codebases? How many primarily write COBOL? But a multinational, legacy banking company really does seem like they’d need a massive number of engineers. [Disclosure: I worked at Meta from 2017-2019)
Sports Corner
I’m a big sports fan, so I’m going to experiment with a “Sports Corner” section of the newsletter. This will primarily be personal opinion, and will likely heavily skew towards the NBA, my favorite league. If sportsball doesn’t interest you, just skip it! I may experiment with other versions of this as well.
Andrew Wiggins has simply been excellent during the playoffs. I was not a huge fan of his game in Minnesota (though the Warriors trade for him was a no brainer to me). His problem is that he sometimes looks like he should be an absolute superstar, as he did when he dunked on Luka, so it seems like he is an underachiever. Held to that standard, he pushed his game away from his strengths: he’s not a bad shooter, but he’s not great, he’s not a terrible scorer, but at high volume he’s inefficient, etc. Seeing his game grow with the Warriors makes me wonder what his career could have looked like if he’d been a mid first round pick instead of the top pick. Comparing him to Kawhi Leonard is unfair, as he’s a once-a-generation development story, but developing on a team that just asked him to play defense and develop his outside shot could have drastically improved his chances at reaching his peak. He’s still only 27 and has clearly developed with the Warriors, particularly defensively (he’s enthusiastically embraced the Luka assignment, which GSW desperately needed from him). It may ultimately make more sense to trade him given his contract and the Steph/Klay/Dray trio being essentially untouchable, but I’d really like to see him stick around.
I don’t understand why Giannis doesn’t have as many endorsement deals as Chris Paul, Jimmy Butler, etc. He’s astoundingly likable and has really matured over the past few years. He also seems genuinely happy with his life! I’m not sure I buy that most NBA players are unhappy, but Giannis certainly seems happier than most.
Thanks for reading!