But let’s go back to my original point. The divide between Silicon Valley and the rest of the country is wider it has ever been. Half my Twitter is people looking to angel-invest their millions in apps, and the other is reporters documenting the latest lows America has hit. This doesn’t bode well for the country, and will become a political and social flashpoint sooner than later. It surely is not sustainable. If the tech industry wants to enjoy its relative welcome, it should do more.
how venture capital, in its essence, is a call option and how that explains the odd ways startups sometimes behave. I’d write about, in my most financially-ambitious piece, how the maniacal focus on the upside is why companies build their technologies as generally throw-away, how people constantly change jobs after 2-3 years, and other such things. But one of the reasons I had moved to the U.S. more than 15 years ago was [...] a sense of sanity. A place to not just live, but breathe.
This piece reminded me of a [recent addition](https://github.com/jasdev/thoughts/commit/4103afc7ee992e86b52ecfe28b14549ef1287e5a) to my Daily List, “write for yourself and Distillations.” By keeping Twitter usage ephemeral, it might be easier to [keep stock](http://snarkmarket.com/2010/4890) on my own domain.
Facebook’s deflection of responsibility is merely the latest instance common line of argument that social media companies like Facebook put forward is that their work exists on a different plane of reality. The digital realm ties into the analog, but the relationship is not a two-way street. Rather, they claim, it is a set of two one-way streets. One of these streets is from computers to the real world, where only the good stuff travels, enabling free speech, liberating the oppressed, democratizing the internet. The bad stuff, however, only goes the other way, where bad individuals misuse and abuse internet platforms. In other words, Facebook argues the good things happen on Facebook, but the bad things happen to Facebook. Most other fields of engineering, like civil engineering, already have this built into their culture, but software engineering is lagging behind. Tech employees need to realize that their responsibility doesn’t end at the last line of code — that’s just where it starts.
The long-term effects of GDPR is yet to be seen, but it also did have a slight Balkanizing effect where some US firms like LATimes and Instapaper simply stopping to operate in Europe.
“Maybe the credential store (culprit 1) is so cumbersome, that the growth oriented team (culprit 2) had to build something sketchy to meet their managers’ (culprit 3) KPIs!”
Maybe the credential store (culprit 1) is so cumbersome, that the growth oriented team (culprit 2) had to build something sketchy to meet their managers’ (culprit 3) KPIs!
How does anyone write anything for online, where you have to assume everyone is going to read everything you write in bad faith? I am so tired of wrapping every sentence in qualifiers and building the context for every statement. This could be 100 words, yet I am at 1500.
“This is an under appreciated point. Privacy preserving / improving solutions have to be rewarded, not simply ‘checkboxed’ for them to thrive in tech companies.”
“The fact that you can fool yourself, for the most part, into thinking that you have done something really valuable with your time is really dangerous.”
