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The deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise
"You’ve taken this idea way too far," a mentor told Prof. Fei-Fei Li.
Ticketmaster’s attempt to game arbitration services fails
In an effort to curb mass arbitration, Ticketmaster sought to switch arbitration service providers to New Era ADR, including for past ticket purchases. New Era incorporated some defense-favorable provisions to its mass arbitration provision. The Ninth Circuit holds those provisions...
Albertsons kills rural grocers with land use restrictions
Albertsons uses land use restrictions in Mammoth, CA to stop competition so it can be the only store in town.
We're Leaving Kubernetes
We are moving away from Kubernetes for cloud development environments after 6 years of experience at scale. Learn about Gitpod Flex and our new approach to development infrastructure for developers.
Facebook building subsea cable that will encompass the world
Facebook building subsea cable that will span the globe. Biggest project ever.
My Time Working at Stripe
Jon's personal site.
The rise of the U.S., the rise of China
I spend a lot of time reading about manufacturing and its evolution, which means I end up repeatedly reading about the times and places where radical changes in manufacturing were taking place: Britain in the late 18th century, the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Japan in the second half of the 20th…
Apple acquires Pixelmator
Pixelmator Pro is a powerful, easy-to-use image editor that brings professional tools and powerful AI features to everyone across Mac and iPad.
Antibody Drug Conjugates: A frontier in cancer treatment
Learn how antibody-drug conjugates work as a “magic bullet” cancer treatment, combining targeted antibodies with chemotherapy to attack tumor cells more precisely.
Sorry, Gas Companies – Parody Isn't Infringement (Even If It Creeps You Out)
Activism comes in many forms. You might hold a rally, write to Congress, or fly a blimp over the NSA. Or you might use a darkly hilarious parody to make your point, like our client Modest Proposals recently did. Modest Proposals is an activist collective that uses parody and culture jamming to...
CFPB finalizes personal financial data rights rule
The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) has just finalized a rule that makes it easy and safe for you to figure out which bank will give you the best deal and switch to that bank, with just a couple of clicks. We love this kind of thing: the coolest thing about a digital world is how easy it...
Democratising publishing
Thoughts on open source governance and how to create trust within technology, communities, and media.
Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction
Today, our cofounder and CEO Drew Houston shared the difficult news that we’ll be making reductions to our global workforce. Here's the email he sent to all employees.
Gross Apple Marketing
I’m not sure what’s going on over in Cupertino for them to …
Swift – A great language strangled by governance?
A great language strangled by governance
Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem
My best guesses as to why our early stage data startup failed. This isn’t a retrospective, but something closer to advice for past me. Or maybe just exorcism.
Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
There's a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion about the topic I've seen and it's a commonly expressed belief "in real life" as well. While I don't have anything…
Why so few Matt Levines?
Why are popularizing educational newsletter-frequency writers of important fields like Matt Levine for finance so rare? Because most fields are too slow or ambiguous, and writers of the right combination of expertise, obsession, and persistence are also rare.
Buy payphones and retire
Dropshipping AliExpress watches, AI-generated SEO spam websites... marginally legal and ethical passive income schemes, that serve to generate that income mostly for their promoters, can feel like a modern phenomenon. The promise of big money for little work is one of the fundamental human weaknesses, though, and it…
They want your ethics for $105
If you have a blog, you've probably gotten those emails that want to "collaborate" on a guest post—which often means "let us post sketchy links for SEO purposes." Recently, I got one which was a little different flavor than the usual spam, so I bit and replies. The end result was at the same time fascinating…
Psychological safety vs. high standards: A misunderstood dynamic
The term “psychological safety” is often misleading. When managers hear safety, many dismiss it as a soft style that implies complacency. Meanwhile, psychology implies too much mumbo jumbo. High-profile figures like Elon Musk advocating for a “hardcore” style perpetuate this misconception. But this is a fundamental…
Platform Strategy and Its Discontents
Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.
Up to $41B in World Bank climate finance unaccounted for, Oxfam finds
Up to $41 billion in World Bank climate finance —nearly 40 percent of all climate funds disbursed by the Bank over the past seven years— is not being properly tracked due to poor record-keeping practices, reveals a new Oxfam report published today ahead of the World Bank and IMF Annual Meetings in Washington D.C.
Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
Now that we’re increasingly concerned about the dominance of ‘big tech’, Open Source is often mentioned as an alternative, especially since our governments are carrying out a Total Migration to Microsoft. This is the English version of this Dutch piece. In Dutch we say you can’t compare apples and pears, but that’s…