357 entries under "article"

📢 Introducing Really Good Business Ideas

The search landscape is changing with generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT). A newsletter lets me keep my content gated from these tools in order to preserve the value of my work.

The Benefits of Bubbles

[Current AI investment is dominated by GPUs, which deprecate within years and are superseded quickly; the more speculative spending goes here, the less likely this bubble leaves us with potent foundation for cheap use over the long-term.]

How Bible Sales and Chipotle Explain the Economy

Automation erases the “training ground” work that once created experts. When machines do the junior tasks, no one learns the senior ones. Apprenticeship collapses. CEOs, driven by short-term preservation, hype AI as salvation because it buys them another quarter.

A regulação do streaming e a invenção dos cineastas de aplicativo

['motoboys' are both victim to a high rate of fatal accidents in Brazil as well as the country's largest organ donors, but a universal healthcare system pays the bill and not iFood.]

Move your FOSS project to an org!

[When you're the only owner of the repository, people are] more likely to see you as the (only) person responsible for fixing things when they break, or reviewing external contributions.

users are able to advertise their membership to the project, shown both on their profile and on the organization’s profile

the project is more identifiable as a team endeavour, as the association to your account is visually less prominent

Bufferland

To countless low-wage employees across the world, low-cost products will seem attractive - even ‘liberatory’ - but, when you zoom out, they are the ones cheaply producing the cheap things that are being sold back to them.

whenever a company is claiming to ‘democratise’ something, they’re basically saying that they will drive down costs on the production side of the equation to get the consumption side hooked on the resultant cheap thing, after which they will be in a position to extract.

It sometimes feels like easyJet’s management presents customers with a devil’s bargain: we’ll give you cheap travel if you agree to hand over your dignity and be treated like the crap you are.

[In business models squeezing both customers and employees, senior management plays them against each other as enemies.]

Bufferland exists to provide a shallow layer of human care within an otherwise bureaucratic profit machine, but today easyJet is also using it to recoup its losses from yesterday’s cancelled flight.

Companies like easyJet drive down prices through so-called ‘economies of scale’, but they also make heavy use of Economies of Silence: the frontline employees act as punching bags for customers, like an emotional shock-absorber, but this also serves as a system of noise-cancellation for management, freeing them from the emotional responses that would come from actually hearing the customers’ voices.

Smartphones and being present

if you're trying to lose weight, you shouldn't carry cookies around in your pockets. And my phone is the bag of cookies in this metaphor.

OpenAI's inflated valuation, as I understand it

[The only way for labs to capture enough value would be to either invent superintlelligence or have a monopoly.]

[this study claims] that the length of tasks LLMs can complete is doubling every 7 months

[Models are currently commodified, but their labs are not priced as such.]

[If all 163 million working Americans bought a ChatGPT subscription at $20/month, it would provide 40 billion in annual revenue, which is only about 10% of what would justify the current valuation based on more the traditional method using price to earnings ratio.]

AI Is the Market, and the Market Is the Government

The stock market has never been the economy - it’s really a reflection of what the economy dreams it could be in a world where share buybacks translate to meaningful productivity.

as AI swallows up more and more capital, it is both the economy and the stock market - and the government.

As long as portfolios are green, the electorate stays somewhat calm. The administration is effectively borrowing confidence from the AI bubble. Speculation has become governance.

The equity market believes the AI story overrides everything else. The gold market believes something is fundamentally breaking. They’re both reacting to the same underlying reality, but they just have different theories about what happens next.

Both gold and equities are surging because they’re hedging different kinds of collapse. Gold trades on fear of the system. AI trades on faith in the story. That both are rallying tells you something about where we are.

This is what it means to live in the United States of AI. Democracy as an asset class or something. For now, the line keeps going up. But speculation isn’t stability, and the permission government borrows from investors is never really its own.

Interfaces are languages

Look at any modern software application: buttons are verbs, boxes with drop-shadows are nouns, API requests are grammatical structures. We’re not “using” interfaces so much as speaking them. When you pick up a new piece of software you can usually operate it but you lack fluency, you’re still learning the dialect.

Fallacies of distributed computing

1. The network is reliable;
2. Latency is zero;
3. Bandwidth is infinite;
4. The network is secure;
5. Topology doesn't change;
6. There is one administrator;
7. Transport cost is zero;
8. The network is homogeneous;

personal mark

There are 9 circles shaping the rocket. The circle count can be further reduced to seven or even four, but this yields shapes that are too simple and not very interesting.

It is easy to simplify things, the trick is to know when to stop.

Rethinking the Future of Bluesky: Challenges and Possibilities of a Decentralized Social Network

The fact that a banned account in one unit can simply join another underlines both the promise and the difficulty of decentralization. What one person sees as resilience, another may see as irresponsibility.

Open Social

in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.

['Social aggregation' features like global search, notifications, feeds, and shared moderation are what] blows the “personal sites” paradigm out of the water. People are social creatures, and we want to congregate in shared spaces. We don’t just want to visit each other’s sites—we want to hang out together, and social apps provide the shared infrastructure.

The web Alice created—who she follows, what she likes, what she has posted—is trapped in a box that’s owned by somebody else. To leave it is to leave it behind.

Those megabytes of JSON you got on your way out are dead data. It’s like a branch torn apart from its tree. It doesn’t belong anywhere. To give a new life to our data, we’d have to collectively export it and then collectively import it into some next agreed-upon social app—a near-impossible feat of coordination. Even then, the network effects are so strong that most people would soon find their way back.

Open social frees up our data like open source freed up our code. Open social ensures that products can get a new life, that people can’t be locked out of what they have created, and that products can be forked and remixed. You don’t need an “everything app” when data from different apps circulates in the open web.

Observations on 6 years of journaling

["Rubber-ducking" is a programming term referring to people solving their own block by explaining it to another person; the lister can be replaced with a rubber duck.]

my journal is my rubber duck.

Slow social media

the current form of social media is bastardised, and not social at all. Instead of improving relationships and fostering connection, they're advertisement-funded content mills which are explicitly designed and continually refined to keep you engaged, lonely, and unhappy. And once TikTok figured out that short-form video with a recommendation engine is digital crack, all other social media platforms quickly sprang into action to copy their secret sauce.

pagination is more humane than infinite-scroll since it gives users a natural breathing point where they can decide whether they want to keep going

How I coined the term 'open source'

I am the originator of the term "open source software" and came up with it while executive director at Foresight Institute. Not a software developer like the rest, I thank Linux programmer Todd Anderson for supporting the term and proposing it to the group.

I said little, but was looking for an opportunity to introduce the proposed term. I felt that it wouldn't work for me to just blurt out, "All you technical people should start using my new term." Most of those attending didn't know me, and for all I knew, they might not even agree that a new term was greatly needed, or even somewhat desirable.

Instead of making an assertion that the community should use this specific new term, he did something less directive—a smart thing to do with this community of strong-willed individuals. He simply used the term in a sentence on another topic—just dropped it into the conversation to see what happened.

Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

[The term "barefoot developers" is a riff on the Mao government's 1960s "barefoot doctors" initiative to train people from rural villages so they can serve as healthcare providers in their undeserved communities.]

[Barefoot developers] are technically savvy and interested in solving problems for themselves and people around them, but don’t want to become fully-fledged programmers. They still live within the world of end-user-facing applications.

they rely on low and no-code tools. And they do wildly complex things within them, pushing these apps to their limits.

This describes my technical capacities well. Though sometimes I can surmount the "command line wall", I almost always prefer other ways.

Vance is Worse

[If the thought of him dying pleases you] because you think it will end our present horror, you are the problem.

Have you heard the expression self-defeating prophecy? It's a prediction that prevents what it predicts by predicting it.

You no longer need JavaScript

CSS can do nesting now!