joshe

Pretty funny that a substack called "Honest broker" has this paragraph:

"Do you think I’m exaggerating? Trust me, the people who run the company believe in 24/7 surveillance as the single most important feature on the platform. They absolutely must monetize your participation, and can’t do that without putting you under observation (as law enforcement officials call it.)"

There is also a graph lie. Even though the article was printed today, it shows that stock price from about Nov. 3 the price nadir at $90. It's been above $110 for 3 weeks.

I don't suggest that Facebook is a good way to spend time (it's boring). But the idea that it's even in the top 100 worst things in the world is crazy.

Anyway Ted was a decent music journalist who has been driven mad by tech hurting journalism. Tech derangement syndrome.

A new reason to write more or at least record more of yourself so that you can create things like this. Save your emails!

The progression of greys is fun. In order:

  Black
  Dimgrey (hmm)
  Grey
  Darkgrey (huh, darkgrey is lighter than grey)
  Silver (all righty)
  Gainsboro (of course)
  White

That's 3 out of 7 making sense.

Would be wonderfully ironic if Elon saves downtown SF.

our malnourished cavalry horses!

You can, you can go to a bank and ask for a loan for an ice cream truck to start a business. It will help a lot if you already have money and just want to finance it.

They'll give the loan to a new company you create and that company will be responsible for paying it back.

A buyout is just an extension of that.

Here's a good explanation about why gdp is important.

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/four-reasons-why-gdp-is-a-...

It is only one measure of success, but it is not misleading. You can just use it and 6 other measures. Then if infant mortality goes way up you can still say let's figure out how to manage that and if it costs some gdp, that's fine. In fact real policy is saying we should spend more of that gdp on prenatal care for example. Doing that will neither make gdp go up or down.

And it's unclear who they're even talking about here. In the democracies politicians hardly talk about it at all. It's usually healthcare, some group is bad, or something should be regulated differently (like energy).

Here's even more depth: https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-economic-growth

I've been curious, with the EU "cookie banners everywhere" and Apple iOS privacy moves, is there a new first party analytics startup scene? Is it big and healthy?

Anyone have some favorite companies doing this?

Interesting and thanks! I'll give this a shot.

Another big myth is that money is stopping all your ideas from being accepted. The truth is that you haven't convinced people.

This is true even for entirely correct ideas.

None of those were going to pass anyway, so it's no price at all.

WhatsApp also doesn't get screwed up by weird carrier sms integration like iMessage does.

Just traveled overseas and used a different sim card with my phone. Not only does this screw up iMessage while overseas (it shouldn't), but for 2 weeks after getting back iMessage would occasionally just not receive texts. Did 3 Network resets and the last one (at 2 week mark) finally fixed it.

I'm sure this is more verizon's fault, but Apple needs to work around it.

It's funny how angsty 2018 era San Francisco was about ride sharing. Everyone thought it was "big tech is crushing the world", when really it was "vc's and endowments are going to subsidize your rides for 10 years because they are terrified of missing out". Thanks Yale!

Rides were $5 cross town in SF. Those losses? They are still subsidizing them, just by less.

Great nuance, thanks for commenting.

DX to me is reduced cognitive load. We are all operating at the limits of abilities, better DX expands the scope of what we can accomplish in our weeks and months.

Often things sold as DX are absolute garbage dead end schlock, like a Flash to iphone app builder or something. So I get some of the indifference (google's not yours). But I don't think we should think of it that way.

Just on your last paragraph, I think it started that way. That Firebase would be the competent general problem solver that you might need to break out of. Firebase and App Engine have tended to weaken over time, so that you needed to move to GCP more often. Ideally Firebase would get more powerful, cover more cases, and have higher quota limits. Instead it feels like they are being degraded or abandoned rather than embraced.

I've never gotten the impression that at google DX was lionized. Examples of doing this well culturally are pre-Salesforce Heroku, Github, vscode, and Stripe.

A github/heroku style culture doing GCP would crush all competitors. Instead if anything GCP is a little worse than AWS.

Google's internal developer hazing and poor DX surely have something to do with this. I've talked with multiple ex coworker developers at Google about the 3 to 6 months it takes to actually figure out how to deploy something. Also the constant overhead of approvals and oddball systems (gerrit!) thereafter.

Eventually good DX seems unimportant and even associated with failure. Real programmers grovel to weird dependancies and find out stuff the hard way.

There's a better alternate universe where Firebase and 2010 era Google App Engine are the template for GCP.

What is too aggressive about this is the taking a normal english word and restricting its use to preserve a guild's privileges. The original sorta useful aspect of this was that in the days before the internet, you could keep records of the person doing the survey or signing off on the structural engineering. Now it's not even useful for that.

It would be far better if only "Licensed Software Engineer" was restricted. Most hiring managers would also, of course, be less likely to hire that person, just as "Certified Scrum Master" is a negative signal.

The normie/excitable journalist take is that you want everyone to be a "professional", but there are strong arguments against occupational licensing. https://www.mercatus.org/publications/corporate-welfare/effe...

It just reduces competition, driving up prices and reducing innovation with no increase in quality.

Temp DB's feel like a slightly underused technique too. (Not saying it's always better.)

Ie, just a quick script that adds a serial id as the first column. Then imports to postgres/mysql based on header names (column names) and file name (becomes table name) to a brand new db.

Usually DBs are so long lived and carefully designed that there's a bit of mental block to just importing trash data and dropping the whole database later. I'm always 15 mins into awk before i remember.

Also in postgres you can do it as a new schema in an existing database, and join with the existing data. Probably safest to not do that in production :-).

Like so: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5712387/can-we-join-two-...

Then just drop the whole schema when you are done screwing around.

The quick answer is that we are not short of any of those materials. We might not be producing enough right now, but there's far more than enough that can be mined or recycled inexpensively.

Increased prices will cause more mining and recycling, eventually the price will settle at the cost of production + something for profit. The something for profit is quite small, the coast for low risk capital is ~5% a year.

There might be a 5-10 period when profits are high for miners, but eventually the profits will be competed away by new entrants. (Except if you have a mine that produces very cheaply because it is so rich or easy to operate, these people will stay high profit. The most expensive mines will just make back they're capital costs + return).

You can see this with fracking which is horribly unprofitable. Hedge funds have lost billions over building fracking wells.

Maybe 15 years ago I ended up fencing the CC stuff off with firewall rules because it was the fastest way to deal with its awfulness.

With the next computer for half a year it was always this queasy, i should probably install illustrator now, but once I do I can never go back. Maybe I can hold out another few weeks. This is for a corporate paid for version that would make my work easier. Eventually I buckled and it ruined another computer.

10 years free though!

I think for all the tech he's bored of, he's reading cynical media accounts instead experiencing them himself. And this is how you age into old man shouts at cloud.

Why his boring stuff is actually cool:

Block chain is cool, I agree that we haven't figured out what to do with it. In the papers you read about NFTs and using too much energy. But if you listen to interviews with Vitalik Buterin instead you can realize that there are smart people trying to figure out what to do with this cool new thing. (I hold no crypto btw).

I remember the first VR too. They've fixed a lot of the problems. I've had amazing artistic experiences just sitting in a little tiny apartment in Hong Kong. Beat Saber is fun, and different from other video games. Flight simulator is much better with it. I don't get the Meta/Zuckerberg media push, but if you avoid taking journalists seriously then it is a cool new thing. Also I'm more excited about AR than VR, will love to have the world annotated.

Self driving cars are amazing. After about 15 minutes using a Tesla on the Highway, you realize you don't have to monitor it. You get to relax and be a passenger. It works pretty well in towns too, but you have to monitor it. Again don't listen to journalists and it seems like a miracle.

I don't like voice assistants either, but it's cool that they kinda work. Five year old kids can play songs they like.

I don't understand 5G in phones either. But! It turns out that it's a great way to get internet service in your house. Now you have a competitor to your awful cable company. Even if you never use it, your price for high speed internet will go down. When sonic fiber optic came to my neighborhood in SF, I couldn't get it. But my cable internet bill came down $25 per month and they upgraded the speed.

Anyway stop reading dumb cynical journalists, experience things for yourself and you will age gracefully.

This is probably the only tech acquisition that's ever made me sad. I just hate Adobe so much. The nightmare of their installer, the weird store with horrible designs popping up when you activate normal ui stuff, the difficulty in canceling a subscription, and the stasis in their product and ui. Oh and the sloppiness of Lightroom on mac with it's weird ui and that it didn't even import and manage photos well.

I've been so happy to have Adobe out of my life these last 10 years. I never even cared about the cost.

And figma has been so admirable, one of the best browser based apps. Always squeezing incredible performance out of the web with their crazy c++ engine. And their fast pace of delivering new features, often reworking ui just for the craft of it. It's been fun to just read the release notes.

https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

Perhaps the silver lining will be the talent scattering, moving to and founding other companies, but for today this sucks.

No this is just lore, there is a great deal of pseudo science around this. They are slightly different chemically so it's not impossible but there is no evidence to that effect.

Note also that Sucrose is 50% fructose, so saying sucrose isn't processed like fructose is very unlikely.

There is lots of speculation even in the mainstream, but our best understanding now is that they are similar.

Table sugar is also high fructose. Sugar is also called sucrose, it is 50% fructose and 50% glucose.

High fructose corn syrup is "available at various fructose levels. HFCS 42, used in beverages, processed foods, cereals and baked goods, comprises 42 % fructose and 53 % glucose. HFCS 90 comprises 90 % fructose and 10 % glucose... HFCS 55, which is used in soft drinks."

-https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5983097/#:~:tex....

I think sucrose tastes better but it seems to be processed in the body the same way as corn syrup.

Btw, fruit juice or honey are also high in fructose. Most likely they are all equally bad. All stored in the liver and all build insulin resistance.

The super silly thing about this is that if you actually make everyone (in the whole world!) identify content for over 18s, you could just have a browser setting that a parent could set.

It layers on to that non existent technology to perfectly identify age from video and with the bonus of a huge dataset matching faces to internet browsing.

Here's a list of social panics that turned out to be nothing:

  Kids being poisoned by halloween candy (no child was ever poisoned by a stranger on Halloween)
  Kids being latchkey kids
  Violent video games
  Jazz
  Hip hop
  Rap
  Heavy Metal
  Satanists meeting up to cut up animals
  Marijuana
  Dungeons and dragons (really https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-1980s-media-panic-over-dungeons-dragons)
  People gassing Euro trains and removing everyone's kidneys
  The internet
  Email (really)
  Text chat like aol and yahoo messenger
  Sms messages
  The dark web
  Jelly bracelets (really, on Good Morning America https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/the-great-sex-bracelet-scare-and-other-teen-myths/2197833/)
  Most songs sung by black people
  Many songs sung by Italian Americans
  Homosexual men
  Africanized Honey Bees
  Facebook
  Myspace
  Pinball arcades
  Video game arcades
  Pool halls

You will probably die after 70 of old age stuff. If not then a car crash or falling. Your kids might get screwed up but we have no idea why and avoiding all the above won't change the odds at all.

This will be interesting, one advantage Verizon has had is more area coverage in many states. In Northern California I switched from Tmobile -> Verizon just for this reason. It has been much better. This is for stuff like on a random beach, at a camping spot or just driving around in hills in the North Bay. I've never noticed any difference in SF.

I thought competitors would never catch up, because tower buildout is so difficult. This has the potential to leapfrog over that. To me a reliable 2/3G experience everywhere would be superior to higher speeds in suburbs (if that's Verizon's benefit).

Also I miss the Tmobile travel experience, you just land and it works for free in many countries. I'd happily switch back.

“Let's be honest here: Europe's a museum, Japan's a nursing home and China's a jail. We don't need to worry about those currencies being some kind of major threat to us.” - Larry Summers

Equal earth (https://equal-earth.com/) is a good well designed map. I printed the pacific ocean centered version and have it on my wall.

There is a lot of conspiratorial woo about this topic, but it is genuinely useful to get a sizes right at a starting point for thinking clearly about the world.

For example (orthogonal to the usual conspiracy talk), it's commonly thought that Russia is super important and unbelievably vast. But a good equal area map shows it's only a 1/3 bigger than Canada + Alaska (and considerably poorer).

Likewise we are much more likely to travel at the world scale by plane with great circle routes. The mercator map is actually a less accurate guide to that type of navigation.

That said it is still useful to have north be directly up and south, east and west be straight lines too. Hence google maps using an mercator-ish projection, to make the zoom from local navigation to the world size continue to preserve straight lines and angles. Mercator is overused but is useful.

I miss this old school straightforward writing style.

I'd love to have a search engine that just searches writing like this.

One practice that's helped me is to always cancel immediately, which translates to only paying for one month. Ie. for spotify, netflix pay for the subscription, immediately jump through the hoops to cancel.

Forgetfulness turns into money savings, and as a bonus I get to review whether I am getting much out of it. Especially for tv like disney/netflix/apple tv, I often run though everything interesting and don't have much else to watch with them.

Also psychologically there's resistance to a boring to do that involves loss. I will put off "go to netflix and figure out how to cancel." So do that work when you are excited to see the new show.

Here's an interesting article about the economics, it sounds like Helium won't be economical at scale, because we have so little of it. Hydrogen could work though.

https://www.thecgo.org/benchmark/bring-back-hydrogen-lifting...

Here's a startup focusing on Hydrogen:

https://newatlas.com/aircraft/h2clipper-hydrogen-dirigible-c... https://h2clipper.com/faqs/