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Planning and estimating large-scale software projects
This weekend I was talking with a friend about how I'd planned and estimated a huge software project in one of my previous jobs. By that I mean not something which can be done by a single team in a sprint or two, but something which requires several teams, across several quarters of effort, involving many other…
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T-Mobile: Breach Exposed SSN/DOB of 40M+ People
T-Mobile is warning that a data breach has exposed the names, date of birth, Social Security number and driver’s license/ID information of more than 40 million current, former or prospective customers who applied for credit with the company. The acknowledgment came less than 48 hours after millions of the stolen…
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The Bit Short: Inside Crypto’s Doomsday Machine
This is the story of a Bitcoin trade — the most financially impactful trade I’ve ever made in my life. It’s also the story of the…
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Gift card gang extracts cash from 100k inboxes daily
Some of the most successful and lucrative online scams employ a “low-and-slow” approach — avoiding detection or interference from researchers and law enforcement agencies by stealing small bits of cash from many people over an extended period. Here’s the story of a cybercrime group that compromises up to 100,000 email…
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Google is now telling users its apps are out of date. No updates are available
[ Update: Users can’t reproduce this any longer, as they have pushed a server-side fix for this issue. It still counts as an embarrassing failure by Google. If you would like to see what the bug looked like, there’s a video at the bottom of the article.]
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OKRs masquerade as strategy
Desire is not a Strategy
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How this Ends
We are in the middle of one of the great asset bubbles of modern times. It has been brought on by the easy money policies of central banks around the world aimed at weathering the global Covid 19 pandemic. Interest rates are near zero or negative in most developed economies and asset prices have gone […]
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Why is China smashing its tech industry?
Maybe because what countries think of as a "tech industry" isn't always the same
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Starship is still not understood
Another entry into my blog series on countering misconceptions in space journalism. I discussed this post on The Space Show on November 5 2021. It has been exactly two years since my initial posts …
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End of the line for Uber?
Uber is a bezzle ("the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it"). Every bezzle ends.
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Google Joins Apple to Opt-out of Mobile Advertising IDs
Android 12 makes interest-based advertising obsolete to set off an irreversible collapse in Facebook’s ad ecosystem
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A catalog of wealth-creation mechanisms (2009)
One of the guest lecturers aboard the ship [1] (Donald Gibbs, of Pearl-Harbor conspiracy-theory infamy) gave a very interesting talk a few ...
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Move fast, but understand the problem first
Software engineer, etc etc
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We need a new media system
If you sell culture war all day, don’t be surprised by the real-world consequences
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The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple
*If you’re the owner of this website and have questions, reach out to Bluehost. We’re happy to help.
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Screw You, Microsoft Edge
Recently while searching for a book on Bookshop.org, I was interrupted by a popup apparently generated by Microsoft Edge advising me of an alternative:
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Debit cards are hidden financial infrastructure
Debit cards are a core piece of financial infrastructure and drive much of the innovation happening in fintech.
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I Shipped, Therefore I Am
“Who are you and why are you here?” –Dave Cutler (DaveC)
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Big Tech are supposed to be the plumbers, not patricians of internet discourse
When tech companies take it upon themselves to arbitrate what is or isn't misinformation they think they're the patricians of internet discourse. The reality is they're the plumbing. Meanwhile, most of the mainstream media coverage around the pandemic can be classified into five logical fallacies.
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Financial innovations brought by technology
Tech firms and financial institutions, working together, have in the recent past made core financial services much better for consumers.
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The Texas power outage is a nation-wide problem
History is bound to repeat itself and it has almost every year
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Management by metrics leads us astray
Let’s say my goal this year is to get to 10k monthly recurring revenue (MRR).
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Windows 11 will create heaps of needless trash
The latest announcements for Windows 11 have revealed that the next version of the Windows operating system will have very stringent hardware requirements. Some of them are, in my opinion, quite reasonable. For example, they’re finally dropping support for 32 bit X86 and legacy BIOS boot. These make sense, because…
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Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
A collection of my personal work, including essays, projects, and photos.