“For one experiment in the study, Wilcox and Stephen asked 84 study participants to either browse Facebook or read CNN.com for five minutes. […] The Facebook group was much more likely to go for the cookie, while the CNN group picked the granola bar.” — Does Facebook Praise Kill Self-Control?.
Category Archives: Quote
“And now there’s a Rolls Royce. I would believe literally anything you told me was about to happen right now.” This Verge post on Qualcomm’s insane CES 2013 keynote is the funniest thing I’ve read or seen all year.
[…] the nostalgia cycles have become so short that we even try to inject the present moment with sentimentality, for example, by using certain digital filters to “pre-wash” photos with an aura of historicity. Nostalgia needs time. One cannot accelerate meaningful remembrance.
From Christy Wampole’s How to Live Without Irony.
America’s Cup in San Francisco
Got to watch the start of the America’s Cup race in San Francisco from a boat, sometimes very up close to the action.
Lukasz Lindell writesHow we screwed (almost) the whole Apple community. “We wanted to test this, how easy is it to spread disinformation?” Fascinating story.
Mike Hendrickson, Roger Magoulas, and Tim O’Reilly have a new report on the Economic Impact of Open Source Software, which included one of their findings that “WordPress is a far more important open source product than most people give it credit for. In the SMB hosting market, it is as widely used as MySQL and PHP, far ahead of Joomla and Drupal, the other leading content management systems.”
I thought I could skip this one, but have been getting lots of ribbing on the NY Times Bachelorville article that was in their style section yesterday. To answer the FAQs: 1. My eyes are not always red. 2. Dvorak really is a thing. 3. I, too, had to look up what they meant by “unreconstructed.”
The Breadpig guys fundraised a billboard to go up in Lamar Smith’s district in Texas saying “Don’t Mess With the Internet.” I’m a Texan and I approve this message.
The landlord at 87 Third Avenue included a lease clause requiring that MakerBot comply with science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov’s “three laws of robotics,” which require that robots follow orders, not injure humans, and protect their own existence.
Makerbot has a fun article in the WSJ today about moving office space. (Makerbot is an Audrey company.)
I used to use three 27″ monitors vertically, then switched to two 30″ Dells, nowadays I’m on a 13″ Air screen most of the time, and occasionally plug into a Thunderbolt Display. Here’s a cool article on how to increase productivity per square inch of your screen by Peter Legierski.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” –- Zen Master Shunryo Suzuki. Read more about Beginner’s Mind on zenhabits.
Gamification
I like neologisms. We need new words because we have new ideas, and ideas are the only things that break the law of the conservation of energy. Where once there was nothing there now is something, and the history of the neologism is a history of those moments of pure creation. ‘Gamification’, that said, can go take a long walk off a short pier.
Can’t play, won’t play by Margaret Robertson. Hat tip: Paul Kim.
Zuckerberg on Social
One thing that I think is really important — that I think is context for this, is that I generally think that most other companies now are undervaluing how important social integration is. So even the companies that are starting to come around to thinking, ‘oh maybe we should do some social stuff’, I still think a lot of them are only thinking about it on a surface layer, where it’s like “OK, I have my product, maybe I’ll add two or three social features and we’ll check that box”. That’s not what social is.
Social – you have to design it in from the ground up. These experiences, like what Zynga is doing or what a company like Quora is doing, I think that they have just a really good social integration. They’ve designed their whole product around the idea that your friends will be here with you. Everyone has a real identity for themselves. And those are fundamental building blocks.
From TechCrunch’s Interview With Mark Zuckerberg On The “Facebook Phone”.
Sync Privacy
Sync took a different tack, and started off with “what if we didn’t want the data? What if even having that data was a failure state?” That led us to cryptography. Sync uses strong crypto to encode your data before it is uploaded. The secret phrase is the key to this encryption, and we never send that anywhere to keep your data secure. This really means that Mozilla can’t see your data, giving you full control. (Which is great, because we really don’t want it!)
Acceleration of Addictiveness
People commonly use the word “procrastination” to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what’s happening as merely not-doing-work. We don’t call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working.
Paul Graham’s The Acceleration of Addictiveness.
Why Intelligent People Fail
1. Lack of motivation. A talent is irrelevant if a person is not motivated to use it. Motivation may be external (for example, social approval) or internal (satisfaction from a job well-done, for instance). External sources tend to be transient, while internal sources tend to produce more consistent performance.
Read Why Intelligent People Fail from Michael Anissimov for the other 19. Hat tip: Paul Kim.
Grand Unified Theory
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
A quote from Thomas Jefferson in an oldie but a goodie essay, especially relevant given all the talk about GPL-based business models the past few days: The Grand Unified Theory On The Economics Of Free by Mike Masnick. (Before anyone says it: the GPL doesn’t say you have to give away anything for no-cost. However as a businessman myself, I think it’s an excellent approach sometimes regardless of license.)
Web Designer Magazine Interview
Q. If you had a crystal ball would you have given more thought to the commercial aspects that WordPress has to offer?
A few months ago I did an interview with Web Designer magazine they just published on the web asThe Wizard of WordPress, An interview with Matt Mullenweg. It includes the answer to the above question. They published it with a funky Warhol-esque cover, but I can’t find an image of that online. (Issue 167 isn’t listed on their site.)
Facts Backfire
“In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information.”
— Joe Keohane in How facts backfire. Hat tip: Ramit Sethi’s psychology bookmarks.