Links

Interesting stuff that has crossed my feed lately:

• Eli Dourado’s written an encyclopedic survey of reasons for techno-optimism over the next decade: Health, energy, transport, space, just a little bit on IT. You’ve been looking for reasons to be cheerful. Eli’s got you.
• Lots of well-deserved congratulations aimed at Stacey Abrams in Georgia after the November and January elections. But what did she do, and what can we learn?
• For my nerds: Redmonk measures programming language popularity by, more or less, the amount of work programmers do in different languages. TIOBE measures language popularity by counting how many programmers in the world know different languages. Different sources and different methodologies yield, unsurprisingly, different results. Two take-aways: There’s a huge amount of closed-source, legacy code in C and Java; and TIOBE programmers are badly misallocated in Redmonk’s world.
• Matt Levine’s running a master class on SPACs over on the Bloomberg website.
• “Cage has made money every time QAnon has been wrong — which they have been on every bet he’s made so far.” The dark reality of betting against QAnon.
• I like quirky side-effect-of-the-pandemic stories. Lots of them are about supply chain failures. For example, The Sperm Kings Have a Problem.