Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost
People aren't incompetent or lazy, just busy doing other things.
What Was TON And Why It Is Over
For the last 2,5 years some of our best engineers have been working on a next-generation blockchain platform called TON and a cryptocurrency we were going to name Gram. TON was designed to share the principles of decentralization pioneered by Bitcoin and Ethereum, but to be vastly superior to them in speed and…
Eight Years at Roblox
I joined Roblox at the end of 2012 as a rendering engineer; I had just spent more than a year working on various titles from FIFA franchise after years of console game development and was becoming a bit tired of the “big game development”. My work on FIFA was as a contractor and I got an offer for a full-time…
Signs that a business idea will probably fail
After 14 years running my own businesses, I’ve failed a lot. I haven’t kept count thankfully, but I’d say I’ve started at least 50 businesses / ideas and out of those, 3 have worked. And when I say worked I don’t mean staying in business, I mean resulting in either a decent income for me […]
Omni Group Layoffs
Omni’s been around for almost 30 years, and I hope it’s around for another 30. It’s one of the great Mac and iOS shops — they will sing songs about Omni, at maximum volume, in the great halls.
Yahoo, AOL results biased in favor of parent company Verizon’s websites
Verizon Media’s search engines promises “unbiased” search results, but serves results clearly favoring the company’s media websites over competitors.
AWS Ruins Own Attempt at Sabotage
This week’s analysis on multi-cloud being a bad idea is once again pushed back by breaking news. In this case, AWS is suing a former executive, Brian
Don’t pay for 95% (2016)
Your car sits idle over 95% of the time. Your guest bedroom is occupied one week out of every 52. Your kids use the yard less than 40 minutes a week. Yet we consumers love to envision the maximum usage for a particular item - like a house or a car…
The Tech Monopolies Go Vertical
Some classic (non-aggregation) monopolization!
A simple way to get more value from metrics
We spent one day 1 building a system that immediately found a mid 7 figure optimization (which ended up shipping). In the first year, we shipped mid 8 figures per year worth of cost savings as a result. The key feature this system introduces is the ability to query metrics data across all hosts and all services and…
Nvidia’s Integration Dreams
Nvidia’s acquisition of ARM only makes sense from a financial perspective, unless you buy Jensen Huang’s datacenter dreams.
Dust in the Light
The Internet ends gatekeepers and increases transparency, which has world-altering effects — both good and bad.
The AMA is a tax-exempt hedge fund and licensing corporation
The American Medical Association is not a charitable organization. The American Medical Association is not an educational organization. The American Medical Association is a tax-exempt hedge fund and licensing corporation, designed from the ground up to enrich its executives and serve its own bureaucratic interests…
How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right
A powerful approach to nonviolent communication at your company
Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)
‘Cutting-edge’ is the term usually associated with blockbuster product releases, yet the philosophy of product development central to the…
I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left
_The company’s motto used to be “Don’t be evil.” Things have changed._ ![Ross LaJeunesse, Democratic Candidate for U.S. Senate in Main...
No Recent Automation Revolution
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that for many years the media has been almost screaming that we entering a big automation revolution, with huge associated job losses, due to new AI tech, especially deep learning.
Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX
Dec 14, 2020 I’ve been writing for probably a decade about how bad Google’s GUI is for Google Analytics, Google Apps, and countless of their other p
Anatomy of a Scam
There is a lot of material about the not-so-nice VCs who take advantage of young and inexperienced founders. But the reverse also happens, founders that try to get money out of VCs for projects that have zero chance of every coming to fruit. Or worse still, founders that pretend to have something on the go when they…
Google, the Stupidity Amplifier (2016)
Google, the Stupidity Amplifier by Greg Egan
How We Institutionalized Incompetence
And so we face the ultimate irony: 'bailing-out-everything' destroys the entire rotten system. You've probably noticed things no longer ...
Let employees sell their equity
Sometimes people choose to work for one company over another for reasons related to the work environment, for example what the company does, and whether the other employees create a place that's pleasant to work at. But a major factor is compensation. If Company A and Company B are largely comparable, but Company A…
Tempering Expectations for GPT-3 and OpenAI’s API
GPT-3 is indeed a large step forward for AI text-generation, but there are very many caveats with the popular demos and use cases.