Category: links_read

“Some of Substack’s largest publishers earn well over $1M annually; stuck paying Substack hundreds of thousands of dollars for what amounts to a simple API call to Stripe (something any junior developer could build in just a few hours).

Building within a walled garden has its limitations. Besides the lack of ownership, brand identity, audience data, and control of distribution… you’re locked into a closed ecosystem.

Substack doesn’t offer an API, webhooks, or integrations with any third party platform. That’s right — all of the incredible tools and platforms that make up the modern creator ecosystem are entirely shut off to those on Substack”

https://mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/death-by-thousand-substacks

“Bluesky follows the classic crypto marketing strategy of rallying users behind a cause while downplaying their profit-driven motives. They make a big deal about filing as a Public Benefits Corporation, which means next to nothing.

Bluesky claims to be billionaire proof, which is either hopelessly naive or deliberately smarmy. Claims that their platform is open and decentralized are mostly bullshit. Nothing prevents the company from cutting off access to the network, just like Twitter did to third-party clients, and the option of spinning up your own Bluesky clone means nothing when the value a social network is the users and their network effects, not your tech stack.

You’re welcome to think I’m overly cynical, but when someone talks like a grifter, builds like a grifter, and raises money from grifters, they deserve all of the scrutiny of grifters”

https://www.sandofsky.com/end-of-twitter/

“Austen pitched investors that the real problem in higher education is how schools make money regardless of whether or not you get a job. If schools only got paid when a student makes money, there’s “Incentive Alignment.” VCs like Graham fell for it because if all you know is capitalism, everything looks like a free-market problem”

https://www.sandofsky.com/lambda-school/

“This, then, is the knot for Liverpool and Manchester City to unpick. Convention says one thing; science might indicate another. Some of that might apply to Salah and De Bruyne, or all of it, or none of it. They are both at the peak of their financial powers; they are likely both past the peak of their physical ones. Quite how far down that particular slope both have travelled is possible to estimate, but not to know for sure”

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5955088/2024/11/29/salah-de-bruyne-new-contract/

“In direct lineage, it was the father of the globally successful Command & Conquer franchise, in that its code was used as a basis of the first game of the series. Yet in terms of wider influence, the battles first fought out on the vibrant sands of Arrakis continue to echo through modern videogaming. While Dune II’s designer and programmer Joe Bostic humbly maintains that RTS games would have evolved eventually, with or without Dune II, the fact remains that he was instrumental in creating them. No Dune II, no Warcraft, no StarCraft and, arguably, a completely different timeline for global esports.Yet Dune II actually invented very little and its key elements had already been seen across a handful of existing titles. The genius of the development team at Westwood Studios was to stand on the shoulders of giants to perfectly balance the tactics of wargaming against the time-critical awareness of arcade games”

https://readonlymemory.com/the-making-of-dune-ii/