I am Elon Musk, CEO/CTO of a rocket company, AMA!. This guy continues to amaze.
Category Archives: Asides
Hey guys! I found a good comment on Youtube. Documenting here for posterity, from vTxTobi:
Top 5 rappers:
1. Kendrick Lamar
2. K.dot
3. Guy in second verse of Control
4. Short dude in TDE
5. The good kid in a mad city
(I added the links.) The joke is all of those refer to Kendrick Lamar, so was laugh-out-loud funny. It was on Kendrick’s powerful and controversial new Blacker the Berry track. So congrats to vTxTobi for writing the only decent comment I’ve read on Youtube in years. 
There’s been some interesting threads going around on Jetpack and the future of WordPress, here’s Chris Lema’s take: Is the Future Success of WordPress tied to Jetpack?.
I enjoyed this Ars Technica look at USB 3.1 and Type-C, which is probably the cable/connection change people will notice the most over the next few years. (As I look with despair on my dozens of USB devices and cables.) I also dug their retrospective, A brief history of USB, what it replaced, and what has failed to replace it. Remember serial ports?
Automattician Guillermo Rauch writes on the 7 Principles of Rich Web Applications.
One theory I have is that there’s some secret “developer full-time employment act” that means these programmers have to do something even if it’s just replicating work that’s already been done. Kind of like New Jersey where every gas station is full serve (that had to be some full employment gambit back in the day).
Sounds like something that could be written today about Vox, Buzzfeed, Gawker, or any of the quixotic CMS projects at Washington Post, NY Times, Conde Nast, et al, but it was actually written in 2007.
Jobs’s taste for merciless criticism was notorious; Ive recalled that, years ago, after seeing colleagues crushed, he protested. Jobs replied, “Why would you be vague?,” arguing that ambiguity was a form of selfishness: “You don’t care about how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like you.” Ive was furious, but came to agree. “It’s really demeaning to think that, in this deep desire to be liked, you’ve compromised giving clear, unambiguous feedback,” he said. He lamented that there were “so many anecdotes” about Jobs’s acerbity: “His intention, and motivation, wasn’t to be hurtful.”
Your one #longread today should be the New Yorker’s profile of Jonathan Ive by Ian Parker. This anecdote resonated with me from the time I (poorly) did design for a living, and how much patience and stoicism are part of the job when working with a deciding stakeholder, often known as a client:
Bob Mansfield, a former senior hardware engineer at Apple, who is now semi-retired, recently described the pique that some colleagues felt about Ive’s privileged access. As he put it, “There’s always going to be someone vying for Dad’s attention.” But Mansfield was grateful for Ive’s cool handling of a C.E.O. who was “not the easiest guy to please.” Mansfield’s view was “Jony puts up with a lot, and, as a result of him doing it, people like me don’t have to.”
This also made me giggle.
Brunner is proud of the Beats brand, but it took him time to adjust to a design rhythm set as if for a sneaker company: “Originally, I hated it—‘Let’s do a version in the L.A. Lakers’ colors!’ ” He laughed. “ ‘Great. Purple and yellow. Fantastic.’ ”
To make it a full New Yorker weekend, here’s a longread from Michael Pollan, best known for his book Omnivore’s Dilemma, on the reopened research on the potential therapeutic uses of psychedelics. While we’re on Pollan it’s worth repeating his advice from Food Rules, “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”
Since it’s Valentine’s day, here’s a little humor from the New Yorker’s Hallie Cantor: What I Imagine My Boyfriend’s Ex-Girlfriends Are Doing Right Now. (That the character is named Matt is completely coincidental.)
Shocked and dismayed this morning on the news that David Carr passed last night after collapsing in the New York Times newsroom, where he was working into the evening. If you’re not familiar with his work or legacy, these links on Mediagazer are a good start.
Amazing Dance
https://vimeo.com/118946875
Incredible music (“Take Me To Church” by Hozier), incredible artist (the dancer, Sergei Polunin), and incredible photographer / director (David LaChapelle).
I had the great fun the other week of hanging with Tim Ferriss on his podcast, an episode he titled Matt Mullenweg on Polyphasic Sleep, Tequila, and Building Billion-Dollar Companies. His previous guest was Arnold Schwarzenegger (!) and if you dig into the podcast archives there are some really amazing episodes, I’m working my way through them now.
There’s a relatively new site called Fusion.net that is definitely worth checking out, it’s already full of great articles and they’re starting to climb up the Techmeme Leaderboard. They run on WordPress.com VIP.
Steven Levy asks What is a Hacker? and gets some great answers back.
FiveThirtyEight says People Working From Home In A Snowstorm May Be Producing More Than You Are, on the productivity of working from home.
Seattle’s decision to throw the ball at the goal line with 20 seconds to go in last night’s Super Bowl was a costly one. But in the long run, it won’t be nearly as costly to the rest of the United States as the National Football League (NFL) itself.
Every year, the NFL rakes in around $9.5 billion in revenue. Its commissioner, Roger Goodell, meanwhile, has an annual salary of $44 million. And while those numbers might make sense for any big business, the NFL isn’t a business – not technically, at least.
According to the Public Law 89-800, it’s a 501(c)6 tax-exempt nonprofit. That’s right, a nonprofit. In other words, the NFL, one of the most lucrative organizations in all of sports, is subsidized by you and me the taxpayers.
From The Real NFL Scandal. If you’re curious, here’s a list of other notable 501(c)(6) organizations.
Cory Doctorow on How Laws Restricting Tech Actually Expose Us to Greater Harm.
The Pun-Off, held annually since 1978, matches the peculiar energy of a place where the unofficial slogan is “Keep Austin Weird.” This is the city, after all, that organizes Eeyore’s Birthday Party, an outdoor costume party honoring the depressed donkey from Winnie-the-Pooh. […]
It’s a reunion of legends past. Steve Brooks, a country singer with a mop of gray hair, is the only other person besides Ziek to have won both Punslingers and Punniest of Show in the same year. Retired from competition, he now serves as a judge and emcee.
Everything about this article about the World Pun Championships in Austin is amazing, I want to quote the entire thing.
Yo’s Law: “in the 21st century tech industry, satire and reality are not merely indistinguishable but actually interchangeable.”
From Jon Evans’ This Industry Is Still Completely Ridiculous, a hilarious article with a conclusion (the ridiculous stuff is worth it) I agree with.
A federated Wikipedia by Jon Udell talks about the ossification happening in the Wikipedia community, caused in part by its attachment to rules that were created with the best of intentions. All open source communities, including WordPress, have to be vigilant against this. Sometimes we have to throw out what worked before to create what will work tomorrow.