Sunday Snapshots (16th August, 2020)

The Spy and The Traitor, Tennis during COVID-19, LinkedIn's unbundling and Slideshare, Speechwriting, Hotelling's Law, and my public notes

Aug 16, 2020

Hey everyone,

Greetings from Washington D.C.!

It's been a raining weekend on the east coast filled with chores, reading, and of course, pouring my cold brew over a couple of ice cubes and writing this edition of Sunday Snapshots.

In this shorter-than-usual edition of the newsletter, I want to talk about:

The Spy and The Traitor by Ben Macintyre
Re-creating tennis gameplay in the era of COVID-19
LinkedIn unbundling and Slideshare
Speechwriting, Hotelling theory, and my public notes

Book of the week

Espionage is an interesting profession. Why do people spy? Some spy for money, others do it for ideological reasons. Above all else, people do it to differentiate themselves from the rest of their peer group. There is something extremely enticing about knowing something that you know the person you're talking to doesn't know. Seen through that lens, secrets are the currency of the trade of power.

This week, I learned about this trade in The Spy and The Traitor by Ben Macintyre about how Oleg Gordievsky, a former Soviet KGB agent was recruited by the British MI6 to spy on their behalf during the late 1970s and early 1980s. It's a story that will undoubtedly have a film adaptation sooner or later – if any aspiring screenplay writers are interested, I'm happy to share my thoughts on what this could look like (including key montage moments) and casting.

The appetizer is a story about disillusionment from the stifling Soviet regime during Oleg's childhood, exposure to the ultra-liberal Danish culture during a posting at the Soviet embassy there, and an open exploration of literature and music for the very first time.

The main course is courtship and companionship by the British MI6. A companionship that showed a remarkable capacity for restraint in terms of acting on the intelligence shared by Oleg. If MI6 was too active, the KGB would know there was a mole amongst them. It was a dance of truth and ignorance. While I was reading the section about MI6 not acting on intelligence that would have saved lives, I was reminded of the famous Churchill quote: "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." Oleg Gordievsky is one of the most important people who decided the course of the Cold War and averted imminent nuclear holocaust.

You'll have to be back for dessert next week. I'll be talking about Oleg's daring escape from the Soviet Union, the "traitor" in the story, and the relevance of espionage in an increasingly digital world. In the mean time, check out the book.

Thanks to Snapshots reader and fellow Northwestern alum John Cowgill for the recommendation.

Long read of the week

Vid2Player: Controllable Video Sprites that Behave and Appear like Professional Tennis Players

I giddy up every summer, put on my golden colored Nike RF cap and stay awake for Wimbledon. This year, Wimbledon was cancelled due to COVID-19. Fortunately, that doesn't mean that I can't see some exciting matchups.

Researchers at Stanford encoded weeks worth of game footage to create game behavior models for the most popular tennis players. They do this by translating game footage into probability distributions in order to predict shot placements (based on linear velocity, spin velocity, and timing) and recovery behavior given game state.

Going beyond just the physics, they then create a rendering of this behavior that normalizes across lighting conditions and eliminates errant behavior. This means that you can watch the actual gameplay in a fantasy matchup.

All I'm taking away from this is that I can watch Roger Federer play tennis even after he retires.

Business move of the week

Scribd acquires presentation-sharing service SlideShare from LinkedIn via TechCrunch

The Microsoft that is vowing to acquire one of the most controversial companies of all time – TikTok – is selling off one of its other famous acquisitions. LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft) announced the sale of SlideShare to Scribd, a content hosting site.

It's really a shame because the synergies between LinkedIn and SlideShare were obvious. Allow users to demonstrate their thought process and storytelling abilities through slide decks – skills which makes them valuable in the job market. Give them the tools to anonymize/randomize/hide any proprietary data and share the rest of the tools. Offer better integration with platforms you own like native integration of SlideShare into Skype. With a portfolio of product as large as Microsoft, the possibilities were endless.

The acquisition was ultimately not successful and Scribd is essentially buying SlideShare for its nuts and bolts – user-generated slides that bring people into Scribd's content ecosystem.

LinkedIn has left so much value on the table. Offer integrated messaging services through GroupMe (also owned by Microsoft). Show the hot map of Github commits on the profiles of software engineers and developers. I'm guessing much of this is because the way they make money – through recruiters positing jobs and timeline ads – is not that related to the end user experience. Ultimately, a large sales machine powers the organization on the backend and the network effects ensure that most people instinctively check someone they are going to meet professionally for the first time on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn's unbundling across verticals will happen. How fast it will happen and to extent it will happen depends on the ability of the company to offer promising services for end users on top of the existing social graph in which its dominance remains unchallenged.

Odds and ends of the week

Three quick things this week:

🗣️ Analyzing political speeches: The world can turn on a few words – "I have a dream..." The right turn of phrase can inspire a revolution – "We shall overcome..." A good speech can galvanize a world war – "a date which will live in infamy." In this new show by former Obama speechwriters, political speeches are dissected into the ideas, origin story, and the response they elicited.

🥘 Hotelling's Law: I got introduced to Hotelling's Law this week by a friend of mine. It's the idea that producers keep their products similar to each other and move it towards the taste of the median consumer in order to capture as much of the market as possible. The theory has interesting applications in real life (imagine key pairs of companies like Coke/Pepsi, McDonalds/Burger King, etc.) and politics.

✍️ My public notes: If you haven't checked out my public notes website, you can take a look here. I dissect podcasts and essays that I come across every week. New ones coming this week.

That wraps up this week’s newsletter. You can check out the previous issues here.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas mentioned above or have any books/papers/links you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of Sunday Snapshots, please reach out to me by replying to this email or sending me a direct message on Twitter at @sidharthajha.

Until next Sunday,
Sid