Open source can have a dark side too, as when malware source code leaks in this story about The Hunt for the Financial Industry’s Most-Wanted Hacker.
Category Archives: Asides
In light of the Pope’s encyclical last week and the US election season ramping up, there has been some great writing on the environment lately. Check these three articles out.
Slate memorializes the passing of jazz great Ornette Coleman with a review of his recent album Sound Grammar, covering what they call the key to understanding the legend’s “harmolodic” music. Also check out some jazz quotes from Coleman.
Writing for the New Yorker (!) Om Malik compares and contrasts Apple and Google.
The Internet has removed scarcity, meaning business models based on controlling distribution are no longer viable. Instead, the key to success is controlling access to the best customers — and that means being the best.
Read all of Ben Thompson’s Funnel Framework.
Funding Trends
I really enjoyed this presentation from Andreessen Horowitz on how funding has evolved, and the current tech situation vis a vis the bubble around the turn of the millennium. It’s a pretty strong case for there not being a bubble right now. Go full-screen to be able to read it well.
And remember the $5 billion website, 5 billion we spent on a website, and to this day it doesn’t work. A $5 billion dollar website.I have so many websites. I have them all over the place. I hire people, they do a website. It costs me $3.
We were just talking about government websites! The transcript of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential announcement is one of the more interesting things I’ve read in a while. “And I promise I will never be in a bicycle race. That I can tell you.” In the spirit of alway saying something positive, I do agree that La Guardia airport is a hot mess.
How Facebook is eating the $140 billion hardware market — I’ve always said that open source eventually dominates every market it enters, and with enterprise hardware it’s in the very, very early stages but this article is chock-full of examples of the economies of scale when companies start collaborating on shared problems. The problem is one company’s inefficiency and wasted cost is another company’s revenue. Cool to look at in the context of yesterday’s post on government.
Fast Company has a great and in-depth look at the United States Digital Service (and similar programs across the government) that is really interesting. They have a number of people involved that I really respect, and I can’t wait to see the results of it not just in the remainder of Obama’s term, but the coming decade. It’s shocking how much is spent on IT at not just the federal level, but the waste at the state and municipal level is even more shocking in many ways because there is so much duplication across the country (and the world). I’ll be blogging more about this theme this week.
“It’s easy to be very busy but not get anything done that you’ll look back a year from now and say was worthwhile.”
“You’ll get a lot of contradictory advice, and often neither side is wrong.”
Entrepreneur.com collected a few quotes from me and blogged some context for each.
How Tesla Will Change The World from the great Wait But Why.
Shervin has an amazing write-up on how Munchery is literally eating the world, and Sherpa’s continuing investment there. If you haven’t tried Munchery yet they’re now in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York.
We are here because the editor of this magazine asked me, “Can you tell me what code is?”
Paul Ford’s amazing What is Code? for Bloomberg. I only spotted one mistake, of course from the Taupe Blazer guy: you’re never at the limits of WordPress.
I think one challenge a lot of the business schools have is they end up attracting students who are very extroverted and have very low conviction, and they put them in this hot house environment for a few years — at the end of which, a large number of people go into whatever was the last trendy thing to do. They’ve done studies at Harvard Business School where they’ve found that the largest cohort always went into the wrong field. So in 1989, they all went to work for Michael Milken, a year or two before he went to jail. They were never interested in Silicon Valley except for 1999, 2000. The last decade their interest was housing and private equity.
This entire interview with Peter Thiel is pretty interesting.
If you’re following along with the customizer and menu work for the next version of WordPress, check out Trust, Live Preview, and Menus in the Customizer.
Techcrunch has a really great essay by Natasha Lomas that I think got missed, The Online Privacy Lie Is Unraveling.
Americans believe it is futile to manage what companies can learn about them. Our study reveals that more than half do not want to lose control over their information but also believe this loss of control has already happened.
From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.
This story of Adrian Chen in Russian definitely turns weird at the end.
Pitch Perfect and its sequel, which I saw a few weekends ago, are the best geeky kind of fun (though I thought there were some jokes that fell flat in the latest). Longreads has an interview with Kay Cannon, the Pitch Perfect screenwriter, How to Be Aca-Awesome and the changing definition of cool.
Someone asked me the other day who my favorite rappers were, here they are in no particular order:
Pre-2000: Big Pun, Jay Z, Nas, Ludacris, Method Man.
Post-2000: Kendrick Lamar, Kanye, Childish Gambino, J Cole, Drake.
We’re trying something new this year: instead of WordCamp San Francisco being the main WordCamp event of the year doing a WordCamp US in a rotating city. I’ve heard some great in-person pitches for places like Phoenix already. Do you think your city would be the coolest place in the 50 states for the first ever WordCamp US? Submit your city in this new survey. It’s open until the end of the month.