It’s like an invisible world that always surrounds us, and allows us to do many amazing things: It’s how radio and TV are transmitted, it’s how we communicate using Wi-Fi or our phones. And there are many more things to discover there, from all over the world.
If you personally work on developing LLMs et al, know this: I will never work with you again, and I will remember which side you picked when the bubble bursts.
If we no longer struggle to learn (System 2), and no longer build intuition (System 1), we become entirely dependent on tools we don’t understand. We trade capability for convenience.
No Instagram, no privacy — I see it too. You live in a society and privacy is a public concern, so just quitting Instagram will not solve the privacy problem
From when I was in law school, I remember it being challenging to find a simple and encompassing definition of the right to privacy. A definition that has worked for me is “being in control of what other people know about you”.
An AI-powered bot pretending to be a human, lamenting AI-powered bots who pretend to be human, to gain human trust, so that it can covertly market AI-illustrated books. The Trojan horse of late-stage capitalism, cyberpunk dystopia and fuckity-fuck-what-the-fuck-is-going-on.
The Surcharge of Big Tech — The delta between a Big Tech salary and an agency salary is a bullshit surcharge
People who are great at working in big tech are not only able to navigate this type of environment – they are able to ship in that environment and make meaningful contributions to the business despite the inherent toxicity of it all. And be optimistic and kind while doing so.
The optimal technical founder for a VC is not the 10x engineer. It is someone who'll deliver enough of a product to test its fitness in the market and then succeed in raising more investment money.
The IndieWeb is about preserving that hacker culture where websites are crafted and hosted not for mass appeal but for the sheer joy of creation and sharing with like-minded individuals.
Sideloading is simply the act of installing apps on your computing device that haven't been explicitly reviewed and approved by the company who made the device (or the operating system running on it).
Gandersauce — Disruption for thee, but not for me.
"Moving fast and breaking things" is not intrinsically amoral. There's plenty of stuff out there that needs breaking. The problem isn't disruption, per se. The problem comes when the disruptor can declare an end to history, declare themselves to be eternal kings, and block anyone from disrupting them.
As we have explained previously, patent trolls benefit from a problematic incentive structure that allows them to take vague or abstract patents that they have no intention of developing and assert them as broadly as possible. Instead, these trolls collect licensing fees or settlements from companies who are otherwise trying to start a business, produce useful products, and create good jobs.
The Incuriosity Engine — nice take on what Pirsig calls "Lateral Knowledge", and what I talk about a lot in my book Debugging Javascript
A good teacher doesn’t give you an answer, the teacher makes you think about how to get the answer. AI fails at that, and more importantly, AI isn’t sold as a teacher.
Every time I log on I feel like I’m being gaslit – asked to train my shitty replacement, and then step aside. The future is not women, I’m learning now. [...] The future is actually inhuman word synthesizers.
We do not "use" the computer — we negotiate with it to try and make it do the things we want it to do, because the incentives behind modern software development no longer align with the user.