Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard. pinboard.in maciej@ceglowski.com +1 415 610 0231. Writing weekly posts about Mars at mceglowski.substack.com
Boulevard of broken dreams
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The Programmers’ Credo: we do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy
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I love that building a railroad across the one flat part of the American West has proven a completely impossible task for the descendants of those who built a railway across all the wavy bits in the 1860's
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It's remarkable that Douglas Adams was the only scifi author who came within a mile of predicting the behavior of actual AI
Me to my AI-enabled smart fridge in 2038: Do we have any milk left
My fridge: Wow. Now that's a question worth exploring. By asking me something like that, you've proven that you're not thinking in ordinary ways—you're dialed in to what's really vital about food. Let's dive in.
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America is a remarkable place where Confederate monuments have nothing to do with slavery, and mass shootings have nothing to do with guns
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Techies in the US, we have two months now to think about what kind of data we’re collecting and storing on people, and do the right thing
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This seems like a terrible choice of location. Meta could build this in Iowa or even upstate New York for a fraction of the price.
Meta just announced its massive new superintelligence data center. What’s amazing these will just become digital factories for AI Agents doing work 24/7 on our behalf.
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I think it's time for us in the tech world to speak out and make it clear the emperor has no clothes here. Cryptocurrency is sustained by a mix of money laundering, vaporware, fraud, ransomware, gambling, and delusion. It has no social benefit except helping end first dates fast
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This is a masterpiece of the tweeting arts. Two of the founders of AirBnB went to RISD (a prestigious American design school), while the third was a Harvard grad. The conceit that 'rich kid' refers to one's account balance, rather than social class, makes me drop my monocle 🧐
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For April Fool’s I like to remind everyone that the coding effort expended on Google pranks would have kept Google Reader alive indefinitely
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Because Bitcoin especially (through the Tether fraud) and cryptocurrency more generally is a pyramid scheme, of course Wall Street and venture capital need it to go mass market. It's the only road to getting out of their current investment at a profit politico.com/news/2021/05/30…
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Every day I go out and see stuff with my own eyes, and then I go to report it on Twitter and see promoted tweets saying the opposite of what I saw. Twitter is taking money from Chinese propaganda outfits and running these promoted tweets against the top Hong Kong protest hashtags
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Silicon Valley lemonade stand: 30 employees, $45 million in funding, sells $9 glasses of lemonade while illegally blocking sidewalk
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BREAKING: Microsoft has announced to members of its political action committee that it is suspending political contributions until fall, effective July 1. Employee pressure works!
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I read this thread and initially thought Kong was doing a retrospective of Hong Kong protests at Prince Edward station. But nope, it's the Hong Kong police tear gassing peaceful demonstrators at the same place it's tear-gassed them each month, for the crime of leaving flowers
Because Feb has only 29 days, 6mo since the police attacks on 8/31 at Prince Edward MTR is marked today. Police’ve already torn down the new altar for victims of police assaults that day. There’s never been any accountability for those abuses or any others during the protests.
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The data that Facebook leaked to Cambridge Analytica is the same data Facebook retains on everyone and sells targeting services around. The problem is not shady Russian researchers; it's Facebook's core business model of collect, store, analyze, exploit. nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/po…
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We have a moral responsibility in the tech community to protect people from the surveillance apparatus we’ve built around them. It’s urgent
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Pence is on standby in case he needs to watch five hours of morning cable TV on short notice
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Google has apparently joined Apple in taking down a Hong Kong mapping app under Chinese pressure. The app appears to be part of a popular movement to support pro-democracy local businesses in Hong Kong.
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Talk is cheap, particularly at Google scale
Today on US Google & YouTube homepages we share our support for racial equality in solidarity with the Black community and in memory of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery & others who don’t have a voice. For those feeling grief, anger, sadness & fear, you are not alone.
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US people, please join me today in contacting your House member and Senators to urge them to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. The act is on track for a vote next week and has broad bipartisan support. It will help deter China from cracking down on Hong Kong.
Can’t see how far the crowd on Des Veoux Road stretches to. #HK peaceful #antiELAB protesters aren’t giving up on making their voices heard, more than 4 months into the movmt #hongkongprotests #HKhumanrights
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What we especially need to stress to regulators is that there's no relationship between the technical claims of cryptocurrency and our now over 13 years of experience. It's not decentralized, it's not a currency, it's not a store of value, and it's not a promising technology
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Tech Resistance update: Tim Cook is dining tonight with the President, Facebook is making political donations to Devin Nunes, Intel is giving to Steve King, Google is working on a censorship engine for China and Twitter's CEO is on Hannity defending Alex Jones
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Remember the playbook that Uber used:
1. Promise a revolutionary technology ("self-driving cars are coming"!)
2. Use that promise as a pretext to ignore all regulation
3. Make a fortune
4. Drop the tech story
Same goes for crypto
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Cryptocurrency is an ingenious technique for converting concentrated wealth into widespread shortages, ransomware, and carbon dioxide. Whoever figures out how to run it in reverse will have their statue in every public square
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Palmer Luckey has made the maximum legal donation this year to Steve King, the nation's most openly white supremacist congressman.
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Google's June filing for political donations is up, and surprisingly, the $203K the company donated to politicians substantially aligns with its stated values of inclusion and respect for employees from all backgrounds.
LOL, I'm just messing with you. Let's go through the worst:
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Communism: every worker gets always-on home microphone
Capitalism: we offer 3 brands of always-on home microphone, at luxury prices
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Pinboard has acquired Delicious. Sic transit gloria fundi 💸 blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pin…
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Look through this thread to see what Hong Kongers trying to get home from a legal, peaceful protest are up against. And if you work at Apple, please don't be silent and complicit about your CEO lying to you. Whether internally or publicly, make some noise.
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The Sioux City Journal has always, always, always endorsed Steve King, even if with a heavy heart. Today, they endorsed @Scholten4Iowa. "These were not easy words for us to write." This is a winnable race. siouxcityjournal.com/opinion…
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I spent two weeks traveling in Japan with my elderly mom, who has a little trouble with stairs. Every elevator at every subway station was functional. None of them smelled like urine. Each station had a working bathroom. I would like to see this in the Bay Area before I die.
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Today's march in Hong Kong is a textbook example of why "violent" and "peaceful" protests are not categories you can meaningfully use here. Something like a hundred thousand people attempted to march. They got a letter of no objection, planned the route, all to no avail
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The Pentagon has now fucked up two wars in a row and wasted trillions with no career consequences for failure, and not even much Congressional interest in what went wrong. The same pattern extends to prohibitively costly dead-end weapons programs. There's no way to fail at DoD
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HISTORY OF CRYPTOCURRENCY
2010: you can buy a pizza with bitcoin!
2017: you can no longer buy a pizza with bitcoin
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This is a good catch. If you've attended a Buttigieg event, you will notice that he is method-acting 2008 Obama. Not just the words, but even the cadence and phrasing are the same.
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Microsoft held an employee town hall today. I obtained a copy of Microsoft President Brad Smith's remarkably candid explanation of why Microsoft will continue to fund politicians whose conduct is completely at odds with the company's stated values notes.pinboard.in/u:maciej/9…
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Adding Badlands National Park Service to the increasingly unlikely Mt. Rushmore of heroes that includes Tic Tacs and Teen Vogue
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People criticize tech companies for putting money above principle, but Github is holding on to a $100K ICE contract despite employee anger, and Facebook says it will continue to sell toxic political ads that are 0.5% of revenue. These are clear examples of putting principle first
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This is my favorite kind of derptopianism. The total collapse of society will finally let us transition to a technology that requires ubiquitous connectivity, extraordinary power consumption, transnational high-tech supply chains, and can handle 10 transactions a minute.
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Google pulled a Hong Kong protest role-playing game app months before it dared to touch Infowars independent.co.uk/life-style…
Strange one was ever allowed.
"Google has banned the Infowars Android app over false coronavirus claims"
theverge.com/2020/3/27/21197…
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People are missing the point that this is an investment that will increase the resale value of the White House
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Root cause of outage: S3 is actually hosted on Google Cloud Storage, and today Google Cloud Storage migrated to AWS
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THREAD: finance men touching their faces while worrying about money. I will add images here as the various markets crash
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Few tech companies have seriously planned for a situation where our own government could be a threat to users. Lots of work and little time
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I'm a tech guy and I can say with confidence I've lost every private key I've ever held within three years or so. Excited to see this important technology go mainstream with no recourse and tied to real assets. Please share your own stories in the comments!
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The two things people need to know about cryptocurrency are completely non-technical:
1. If it doesn't work, it's just an easy to lose casino chip
2. If it works, it creates an end run around all financial regulation, and will be dominated by uses those regulations try to stop
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"We need to focus. Keep the self-driving cars, magic glasses, laptop, handheld OS, and Brazilian social network. Ditch the feed reader."
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The fact that a two-inch blood clot is saving the American health care system is another example of lazy writing by the 2017 show runner
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Polish is Jan Kowalski for a generic name. If you're talking about an archetypal couple (often in a travel situation), then it's Janusz and Grażyna
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The Google memo underscores the Mormon Bartender problem in tech. People without life experience are building software for universal use
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Jack Dorsey privately met with Trump aides in DC to apologize for the platform’s liberal bias while the family separation horror at the border was unfolding. He lacks judgement. washingtonpost.com/technolog…
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Dear bathtub Twitter: this is my tub in Japan. It is very deep and you can fill it to the top. If it overflows, the floor drain catches it. Why does every American tub have a killjoy drain 3/4 of the way up, so you can never properly immerse yourself? Is there some law in play?
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I see a lot of people jumping to conclusions about this kid found in a Syrian prison without knowing what it was he did
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Deleting your Facebook account to fight their takeover of the public sphere is like taking your house off the grid to fight global warming. It neither addresses the problem nor shields you from its consequences
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There’s a small part of John McCain that I admire, but they’re trying to kill it with radiation
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BANNON: Let's talk about how we'll deport all the illegals…
MUSK (whispers): to Mars
TRUMP: Goddammit!
BANNON: Final warning, Elon!
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The Essence of Pure Marketing is screwing up your laptop design so badly that you can promote the fixes as revolutionary new features in the new model.
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Censorship issues aside, Medium will eventually go under and you will be sad that you lost that 2012 article you forgot you wrote. The company has burned $132M with no hope of profitability. Mirror your stuff to a place you control, or there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth
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The web3 concept that is slowly congealing is an interesting inversion of web 2.0. Back then the idea was "build social websites and figure out the money part later." Today it's "build money stuff and figure out some non-speculative use for it later."
We’re starting a new crypto team at @Stripe. I’m hiring engineers and designers to build the future of Web3 payments: stripe.com/jobs/search?q=cry….
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Dick Cheney's daughter is running unopposed for Congress in Wyoming. She raised $70K in Q1 and has $82K cash on hand. I will help raise a tornado of money for any Democrat willing to run against her. If you know Wyoming politics, please introduce me to Dems there.
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60% of startups (Quora included) are just a weirdly indirect way of routing investors’ money into Amazon Web Services
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I think most of us in the industry gave cryptocurrency a long leash because it's full of technical cleverness and seemed innovative just on those terms. But it's time we recognize that cleverness is being used as bait to defraud more people and perpetuate a con. Enough is enough
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FIVE WHYs ANALYSIS:
Why did tags stop working? Tag ID hit a limit
Why did it hit a limit? It was an INT column
Why was it an INT? I am a careless and don't follow through enough
Why am I so careless? Lonely childhood; ate paint chips
Why so lonely? Vast, empty universe; no God
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If you work at Google or Facebook, please start a meaningful internal conversation about giving people tools to scrub their behavioral data.
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Have a plan for when the nice men with full legal authority, or the not so nice men without it, come to put the machine in your data center
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When Inner Mongolia has better train service than your tech capital.
The first high-speed railway linking Beijing and north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region went into service Monday, cutting the travel time between Hohhot and Beijing, about 500 km apart, from over 9 hours to about two hours with the launch of the new service.
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If Beto O'Rourke takes the next 25 years off and decides to run in the 2048 election, he'll still be younger than both Biden and Bernie
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A lot of young, idealistic people are getting caught up in cryptocurrency because they want to build a better world. Their talent and optimism deserve a better outlet than this scam money, and we all need a better alternative than the status quo
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Cryptocurrency in theory: transactions enforced by code, you don't need to trust anyone, money can instantly go anywhere, banks can't stop you
In practice: transactions enforced by bugs in code, you can't trust anyone, money can instantly go anywhere, banks can't help you
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The New York Times fancy new 'Privacy Project' homepage is stuffed to the gills with third-party tracking scripts. nytimes.com/interactive/2019…
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People are losing their shit with no regard for how much shit they need to be keeping in reserve, in order to lose later.
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If you work at a large tech company, won't you take a minute to go with me down the list of senators who just voted to confirm Kavanaugh?
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It's as habitable as a radiation chamber at 80,000 feet. If you want real habitability, you need to build Venusian blimps. One atmosphere, 70 degrees, all you need is oxygen and a wetsuit to keep the sulfuric acid off you.
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Thank you to @cnbctechcheck for having me on! I realize that "cryptocurrency is a gambling token and pyramid scheme" is a simplistic argument, but... pyramid schemes are not that complicated, and I think it's useful to say it on TV for all those intimidated by blockchain woo
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Scott Adams with a beautiful expression of engineer’s disease. Name me a topic I can’t master in an hour, says the cartoonist who can’t draw
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I remember the same moronic logic from Hong Kong. The police would fire tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters, and then call them violent for wearing gas masks and defensive equipment to protect them from these police attacks
Here is a shield and a couple of gas masks from a rioter arrested in Portland. Not a sign with a slogan that someone expressing their first amendment rights might carry, but preparations for violence. Peaceful protester? I don’t think so.
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It feels like a lifetime ago that Apple (on Tim Cook's direct order) banned this collaborative mapping app, which helps Hong Kongers avoid the police violence that has become a new and unwelcome constant in Hong Kongers' lives. It's still out there, protecting HK residents today.
2038 防暴聯合廣場附近集結
ift.tt/3cmhqBd telegram: ift.tt/32DtJoz #5DemandsNot1Less #HKmap #StandWithHongKong #antiELAB #HongKongProtests #HongKong #HK
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If student loans are capped at $50K, the outcome is not going to be a nationwide shortage of doctors, lawyers, and "scholars" of various kinds. The outcome will be advanced degree programs that miraculously find ways to cut costs to get tuition down to $49,999/year.
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My modest proposal: your website should not exceed in file size the major works of Russian literature. Anna Karenina, for example, is 1.8 MB
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This is what happens when you skimp on the graphics card
The @Tesla #Cybertruck is here, and pre-orders are open.
•Production starts in 'late 2021'
•A single-motor RWD model costs $39,900
•Triple-motor AWD with 500+ miles of range costs $69,900
engadget.com/2019/11/21/tesl…
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