Thanks for all the tech in 2019
As we get to the end of the year, the days get short and dark, and the post-Christmas kipple offer emails start flooding my inbox, I get to reflecting. This...
Jack and I prove that humans are not web scale
(Vicki’s Note: I’m going to do one more post after this one for 2019 ( fingers crossed), and then Normcore is on vacation for the rest of the year. I’ll be...
Venture capital will now ruin coffee
Most mornings, fresh after a night of waking up anywhere between three and five million times to feed and change the baby, and then getting the preschooler...
Weird Government Twitter versus Zuck
(Vicki’s note: I had so much fun writing the Elon Musk post and we’ve had so many Serious Normcore posts lately, that I made an executive decision that it’s...
Sidewalks for the internet
Since having a second kid, my husband and I realized that we are rapidly out-kippling our ability to stay in our current house, and we’ve been on the hunt...
Open thread: Keybase's next steps
About a day after I published the post on Keybase and their inaction against spammers on their platform, Keybase put out this blog post, “Dealing with Spam...
Keybase and the chaos of crypto
Today, it’s nearly impossible to have a truly private conversation online. Someone is always listening: either the company providing the chat service, or...
Reading Zuck's emails
I wrote a couple weeks ago that if your company gets sued, your email becomes collateral, The key issue at hand here is a legal term known as “discovery.”...
We're still in the steam-powered days of machine learning
The reveal of the ridiculous Cybertruck design last week made me curious about the history of cars. If you look at pictures of cars from the early days (as...
Tablets at the table
A recent trend I’ve seen at restaurants over the last five years or so is kids glued to screens sitting next to family members who are talking to each other...
What's up with Russia's internet
There are several ways the internet as we know it today could end.It could end with an established capitalist panopticon that monitors what we’re doing and...
The price of good journalism
Earlier this week, American journalists put together and circulated a spreadsheet of media salaries in Google Sheets. This kind of thing is becoming a lot...
Open thread: Is whistleblowing ever ok?
Yesterday’s post about Snowden seemed be controversial (although I didn’t intend for it to be.) So now I’m curious: if you take him as a personality out of...
Edward Snowden and our great cross-hatch
A couple of housekeeping items before today’s post: Thank you to Ben for this beautiful logo! Do you like it? I really do. I think it embodies the spirit of...
The highest-interest bank account
When the Iron Curtain came down on the Soviet Union after World War II and all capitalist influences were kicked out, it was a travesty for the population....
Die Gedanken sind frei
In the late 1700s, a student folk song floating around in Germany was finally written down and put to music. It was called “Die Gedanken sind frei,”...
Eric Schmidt and the great revolving door
Last year, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, gave an interview to Tyler Cowen, who runs the long-standing contrarian economics blog Marginal...
I spent $1 billion and all I got was a Rubik's cube
Art: David HinnebuschLast week, I saw this tweet come across my timeline: OpenAI @OpenAIWe've trained an AI system to solve the Rubik's Cube with a human-...
Imgur is bad now
Every night in the seven minutes between when I go to sleep and the baby wakes up for the first time, I scroll through the Imgur app to wind down. Silly...
Open thread: Using Big Tech tools
Howdy everyone! It’s been a while since I did one of these. The last one about good recommenders ended up being a great discussion, so please chime in. I got...