“Thus most humans develop their most important and original ideas between their late twenties and early forties. With the teens and twenties spent gaining the intellectual tools and foundational knowledge needed to take on big problems, the sweet spot for original intellectual work is a person’s 30s: these are the years in which they have…
Month: February 2024
“A Trilli – AI, Green Energy, Uber, and Reading” – A Scammer Darkly
“It allows Uber to control drivers by forcing them to take lower-paying rides to hit ‘utilization’ metrics or face consequences. Like the advertising auctions we talk about around here sometimes, creating opaque markets where the company in charge sets prices on both the buy and sell side means Uber can pay itself more with no…
“It’s Apple’s Vision Pro, The Rest of Us Just Live Here” – BIG
“Scientific and engineering development isn’t a function of corporate size and power, but the collective knowledge of our society and how we organize it. The internet is a massive scale network, the biggest in human history, and no one owns it. By contrast, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have control over immense swaths of…
“February 15, 2024” – Letters from an American
“True the Vote, the right-wing organization that insisted it had evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, has told a Georgia judge that, in fact, it has no such evidence. Their claims provided the basis for the arguments about voter fraud highlighted in right-wing pundit Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2000 Mules” https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-15-2024
“Issue 51 – It’s quiet… too quiet” – Citation Needed
“Fairshake superPAC (funded by Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz, and others [I47]) has just spent around $2 million of the $80 million in its war chest on attack ads against California Senate candidate, Democrat Katie Porter. The ad attacks Porter for receiving three contributions of $500, $2,000, and $2,900 from individuals who are executives at a pharmaceutical…
“Bluesky opens up to the world – but can anything really replace Twitter?” – Alex Hern (TechScape, Guardian)
“Threads is massive, but its user base is lurkers and influencers. Like being in the audience of a Marvel movie, you may consume some professionally produced content, but you’re certainly not going to form any lasting memories. For the past year, Bluesky has been pure posters, locked in a room with each other, deprived of…
“The people who ruined the internet” – Amanda Chicago Lewis (The Verge)
“the reality is that most people running a company will break whatever rules they are able to get away with breaking. While Ray herself said she has left behind the guideline-violating tactics of her past, choosing instead to do as Google asks and make high-quality websites that will “make the internet a better place,” as…
“Raging Bill” – Reeves Wiedeman (Intelligencer)
“Ackman’s senior thesis, submitted in 1988, looked at how admissions quotas to limit the Jewish student population in the 1920s echoed what some saw as the unfair treatment of Asian Americans in the ’80s. Ackman concluded that Harvard was admitting more students from other minority groups simply because “it has been pressured to do so.”…
“February 11, 2024” – Letters from an American
“Lincoln saw clearly that if we give up the principle of equality before the law, we have given up the whole game. We have admitted the principle that people are unequal and that some people are better than others. Once we have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, we…
“We need to talk about digital ownership” – Molly White (Citation Needed)
“The topic of resale is also more complex. If you buy a movie as a physical DVD and then decide you’re finished with it, it’s perfectly legal to resell it as long as you don’t make copies. If you buy a movie as a digital download or as an item in your online library, it’s…