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...
Our bosses live in our phones
For a couple years now, I’ve been trying to figure out who owns my phone. Not physically. I know for sure that I overpaid Apple for the privilege of...
The beautiful grind
I’m coming up on being halfway done with my second maternity leave (😩), and since I spend all day on maternity leave, I also spend a lot of time thinking...
Neural nets are just people all the way down
When I was in seventh grade, we had to take a class called home ec. Everyone brushed it off as a super easy class. “All you have to do is cook and sew,”...
The curse of being Big on the Internet
I first came across Siraj Raval around 2016, when a data scientist friend sent me his video. “This is ridiculous,” he said, and I had to agree that it was....
Backing up our lives on Dropbox
Vicki B🎃ykis @vboykis"Dropbox brings your files together, in one central place. They’re easy to find and safely synced across all your devices." Natalia...
How much I make running a paid newsletter
Social media platforms are becoming bigger than ever (Facebook claims 2.4 billion monthly active users),but it’s harder to find any real people on there....
How do you like THAT, Elon Musk?
(Vicki’s note: 👋 Hello new followers who came from the Stack Overflow Newsletter and Elezea! I’m a data scientist in Philadelphia and this newsletter is...
The death of the last comment section on the internet
Vicki’s note: This is a post by request from Rian, who runs the Elezea newsletter, which you should definitely check out. As always, please send me requests...
Greta on mute
Like a lot of people, I’ve been following Greta Thunberg over the past couple of months. As the press hype around her has grown to a fervor pitch, I’ve been...
Logs were our lifeblood. Now they're our liability.
In the beginning, writes Jay Kreps, co-founder of Confluent and co-creator of Kafka, there was the log. which WeWork, now imploding, still does not needA log...
Sorry, I won't hire you
I saw this Twitter thread a couple days ago (thanks, Stas!), and I’ve been thinking about it ever since: Toxic @toxicIf I see palantir on a resume, I trash...
Silicon Valley runs on Saudi
Vicki’s Note: I actually wrote this before I even went on maternity leave and originally had this scheduled to go out on Tuesday, but due to recent events in...