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What does it mean that MP3 is free?
The MP3 format, once the gold standard for digital audio files, is now free. The licensing and patents on MP3 encoders have expired, meaning you can now include them in your applications without payin
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Section 174 is reversed, mostly
Finally, relief: tax regulation hurting the US tech industry is striked off for good - for the most part, that is.
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Canonicals Interview Process
Personal blog of Julien (jvoisin) Voisin
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The gaslit asset class
James Grant invited me to address the annual conference of Grant's Interest Rate Observer . This was an intimidating prospect, the previous...
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I'm a Tech Lead, and nobody listens to me. What should I do?
In June 2018, I joined mytaxi (FREE NOW), a competitor of Uber in the ride-hailing space, as Backend Chapter Lead. I was looking for an opportunity to grow in technical leadership. Honestly, I did not even fully understand what “Chapter Lead” meant. After some research, I learned it was part of Spotify’s squad (team)…
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The kind of company I want to be a part of
'aight, hear me out guy(s) (👀 👀 👀)
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ICEBlock handled my vulnerability report in the worst possible way
Last week, I wrote about how Joshua Aaron's ICEBlock app, which allows people to anonymously report ICE sightings within a 5-mile radius, is – unfortunately, and despite apparent good intentions – activism theater. This was based on Joshua's talk at HOPE where he made it clear that he isn'
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The Gorman Paradox: Where Are All the AI-Generated Apps?
In 1950, while discussing the recent wave of flying saucer reports over lunch with colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, physicist Enrico Fermi asked a simple question. There …
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Whatever happened to cheap eReaders?
Way back in 2012, The Guardian reviewed an eInk reader which cost a mere £8. The txtr beagle was designed to be a stripped-down and simplified eReader. As far as I can tell, it never shipped. There were a few review units sent out but I can't find any evidence of consumers getting their hands on one. Also, that £8…
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Personal aviation is about to get interesting (2023)
FAA is getting one enormously consequential thing right
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Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work
When I make something good, I often spend most of my time making thousands of high-precision edits on an artifact that I thought should have been finished hours ago.
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Why friction is necessary for growth
Why I think comfort leads to stagnation and overcoming friction leads to growth.
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Maintaining an Android app in Google Play Store is a lot of work
Lessons on maintaining a hobby Android app
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Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent
On making use of large thinking models.
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Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership
This tension of what customers are asking for vs what customers really need shows up in areas like resilience. Amazon's "Well-Architected Framework" strongly exhorts customers to avoid building production workloads in a single Availability Zone — but Amazon's cross-AZ bandwidth pricing is painful, and Amazon doesn't…
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Open Banking and Payments Competition
Why the banks really hate fintechs that allow businesses to learn your account number easily.
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Shifting Cyber Norms: Microsoft security POST-ing to you
tl;dr: Microsoft and other email security scanners will visit the links in email you transmit, and run the JavaScript in those links, including calls that lead to POSTs going out. This used to be unacceptable, since POSTs have side effects. Yet here we are. This breaks even somewhat sophisticated single-use sign-on /…
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How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you...
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What happens when housing prices go down?
A reflection on affordability, finance, and the deep contradictions we struggle to face.
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Mag Wealth (2024)
Mag World: an intuitive sense of scale, using orders of magnitude
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Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap
Could we halve aviation's climate impact at a fraction of the cost of sustainable aviation fuels?
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"Big 3" science fiction magazines including Asimov's and Analog acquired
For other news from February, see my previous grapevine. This report is available free to the public. If you like my writings on genre issues, consider backing my Patreon.
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Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved
The internet has been speculating the past few days on which crypto company spent $65M on Datadog in 2022. I confirmed it was Coinbase, and here are the details of what happened.
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Europe is locking itself in to US LNG
The US energy secretary says the quiet part out loud: the tributary $750 billion in energy purchases the EU has promised in its Trump deal is meant to lock Europe into "long-term" energy dependence.
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On DeepSeek and export controls
A few weeks ago I made the case for stronger US export controls on chips to China. Since then DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, has managed to — at least in some respects — come close to the performance of US frontier AI models at lower cost.
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Not Buying American Anymore
I feel like I need to first defuse any idea of antagonizing Americans themselves. The people are never to blame. This isn't a post criticizing the American people, it's criticizing the state of things that makes it impractical to have any sort of economical relation with the country if you are an average Joe like me.
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The App Store was always authoritarian
Apple bent the knee for months, leaving many commentators to ask why. But the reasons are not mysterious: Apple wants things that only the government can provide, things that will defend and extend its power to extract rents, rather than innovate. Namely, selective exemption from tariffs and an end to the spectre of…
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Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse
How a video game company built an empire by inverting the playbook
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Modular monolith and microservices: Modularity is what matters
Modularity is a crucial concept when designing and creating software. Independent of whether our chosen architecture style is to have a single unit of deployment - Monolith or multiple units of deployment - Microservices/Services. It is a quality that should be treated completely independent of how many deployable…