Joseph Bou-Younes's Website

Category: quotes

  • Jevon’s Paradox and AI

    Jevons paradox is coming to knowledge work. By making it far cheaper to take on any type of task that we can possibly imagine, we’re ultimately going to be doing far more. The vast majority of AI tokens in the future will be used on things we don’t even do today as workers: they will be used on the software projects that wouldn’t have been started, the contracts that wouldn’t have been reviewed, the medical research that wouldn’t have been discovered, and the marketing campaign that wouldn’t have been launched otherwise.

    — Aaron Levie, Jevons Paradox for Knowledge Work

    Via Simon Willison’s Webblog.

  • Banks are slow-rolling open banking to protect payments revenue 🤯

    Financial institutions offer their customers a complex bundle of services.

    You might reasonably expect that Open Banking is a fight over the budgeting app space. The banks have, via the magic of account records, a large portion of the underlying data about a household’s finances. You could imagine software using Open Banking to allow it to slurp in transactions and then categorize them. That would compete against the lackluster offerings the large banks have in their apps.

    But Open Banking is not actually a fight over budgeting apps. Banks don’t make money on them and the best known standalone budgeting app, Mint, was acquired for a relatively small amount of money.

    Payments, on the other hand, are an enormous business. They are monetized both by banks and by a diverse ecosystem of fintech providers.

    The data banks find it annoying to make Open are, principally, account numbers. This is because, due to the long shadow of checks, possession of an account number (plus the routing number, identifying the bank) is sufficient to attempt to debit a bank account. Direct account-to-account transfers, including “pulls”, are a common payment method in many countries, but they are not a large share of consumer to business payments in the United States.

    Why not? One reason is that the user experience of asking someone for their account number is pretty awful. There is no way to check in real time whether an account actually exists. Credit card numbers, in addition to having infrastructure which allows you to query them in real time, are specifically formatted so that typos in them are easily catchable.

    Since you can’t know whether the account exists you certainly can’t know its current balance or whether a transaction posted against it today will succeed in a few days or be reversed for insufficient funds (or another reason). This means that businesses which use account transfers as a payment method would frequently suffer credit losses if they released goods or services at the time of “payment.” For many businesses, that isn’t a worthwhile tradeoff.

    So they keep using cards. Cards give much stronger (but not foolproof) real-time guarantees of funds availability and likelihood of a transaction going through successfully. The ergonomics of card acceptance, at the register, through your phone, or in a web browser, are also much more palatable to most customers.

    Several fintech companies, including Stripe, realized that they could use Open Banking to make account-to-account payments something customers would actually enjoy. The user is prompted at checkout whether they’d like to pay directly from their bank account. They log into their bank account and grants the fintech read access. This is a much stronger signal of authorization than simply knowing an account number. (We print those on every check, after all, and a check is designed to be handed to a cashier or waiter you’ll never meet again.) The fintech then grabs the account number and perhaps e.g. looks up the current balance.

    Then, they can pull money from the account, through an ACH debit.

    The ACH debit itself is not Open Banking. It is the ordinary operation of existing payment rails in the financial system. The ACH debit was just made much more convenient by Open Banking.

    Open banking and payments competition, Bits about Money

  • Make your ego your ally

    There’s no greater source of renewable energy in the world than when you’re defending your own self-image.

    – Shane Parrish: Clear Thinking – Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results

  • Iterate, always iterate

    The people who design easily gameable systems belong in the lowest circle of hell.

    – Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack

  • Check yourself

    The scientific literature shows that hunger, anger, loneliness, tiredness, pain, and stress are common “preconditions for poor decision making.” So Shubin Stein uses an acronym, HALT-PS, as a reminder to pause when those factors might be impairing his judgment and postpone important decisions until he’s in a state in which his brain is more likely to function well. This is our seventh technique for reducing avoidable stupidity.

    -William Green in Richer, Wiser, Happier

  • Avoid Idiocy

    “I don’t have any wonderful insights that other people don’t have. I just have slightly more consistently than others avoided idiocy. Other people are trying to be smart. All I’m trying to be is non-idiotic. I find that all you have to do to get ahead in life is to be non-idiotic and live a long time. It’s harder to be non-idiotic than most people think.”

    -Charlie Munger, as quoted by William Green in Richer, Wiser, Happier

  • On Communicating

    6. Prepare your intent.

    A little preparation goes a long way toward saying what you wanted to say and having a conversation achieve its intended impact. Don’t prepare a speech; develop an understanding of what the focus of a conversation needs to be (in order for people to hear the message) and how you will accomplish this. Your communication will be more persuasive and on point when you prepare your intent ahead of time.

    2. Talk so people will listen.

    Great communicators read their audience (groups and individuals) carefully to ensure they aren’t wasting their breath on a message that people aren’t ready to hear. Talking so people will listen means you adjust your message on the fly to stay with your audience (what they’re ready to hear and how they’re ready to hear it). Droning on to ensure you’ve said what you wanted to say does not have the same effect on people as engaging them in a meaningful dialogue in which there is an exchange of ideas. Resist the urge to drive your point home at all costs. When your talking leads to people asking good questions, you know you’re on the right track.

    – Travis Bradberry, 8 Secrets of Great Communicators

  • Fixing our Unhealthy Obsession with Work Email

    “Creative thinking requires a relaxed state, the ability to think through options at a slow pace and the openness to explore different alternatives without fear.”

    – Fixing our Unhealthy Obsession with Work Email

  • The single greatest danger

    The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom. 

    -Peter Thiel, Zero to One

  • The Compass and the Clock

    Our struggle to put first things first can be characterized by the contrast between two powerful tools that direct us: the clock and the compass.  The clock represents our commitments, appointments, schedules, goals, activities — what we do with, and how we manage our time.  The compass represents our vision, values, principles, mission, conscience, direction — what we feel is important and how we lead our lives.  In an effort to close the gap between the clock and the compass in our lives, many of us turn to the field of ‘time management.

    – Steven R Covey, First Things First