Month: October 2014

Open Source jerks

a sad state of affairs, but for many areas, open source is dead both because it is technically obsolete, but also because it is full of jerks who drive off the productive members. this was true for an open source project i worked on in 2002 and it is still true today:

The author found that the project he was involved in, PostNuke, had many demanding consumers, and few producers. The consumers felt entitled to the fruits of the producers’ labor without contributing themselves, and were very vocal about their wishes.

Privacy vs. User Experience

Apple is going to realize very soon that it has made a grave mistake by positioning itself as a bastion of privacy against Google, the evil invader of everyone’s secrets. The truth is that collecting information about people allows you to make significantly better products, and the more information you collect, the better products you can build. Apple can barely sync iMessage across devices because it uses an encryption system that prevents it from being able to read the actual messages.

The female warlord

Commander Pigeon is a collector of lost and exiled men. The quietest soldier once belonged to the Taliban. He had been captured by local police, escaped, and having heard about Commander Pigeon, walked km to reach her home. He fell to his knees and begged for protection. She made him swear loyalty. I asked how she knew he wouldn’t rebel. “I’m watching him closely. I’m converting Taliban to normal people.”

Rejection of progress

I keep seeing and hearing cynics sigh about how far we have “fallen.” The disease is rampant, on both right and left: “Isn’t it a shame that our wisdom has not kept pace with technology?” This nonsense is spouted amid the greatest transformation of diversity, inclusion, acceptance, re-evaluation and tolerance in the history of our species! At no other time were so many hoary/awful assumptions – about race-gender and so on – pilloried by light and scrutiny! And if that is not ADVANCEMENT of our souls, I do not know what would be.

Sub 2h marathon

The road is so flat and straight, you can see them coming from 1km away. 6 runners flow in arrowhead formation around the Canadian city of Saskatoon. The early November air is still and dry, the sky overcast, and the temperature hovers a bit above freezing, just as predicted. All in their early 20s, they’ve been training together for this moment for years; only in the last month did their coach select which 3 will go for the record. The remaining 3 form the front of the arrowhead, blocking the wind and enduring the mental effort of controlling the pace. Should one of them cross the finish line in 2 hours—or faster—all 6 will share equally in the $50M jackpot promised by the heirs to the Hoka One One fortune. The pot of money is up for grabs, for any runner, anywhere in the world. The chase is on. So, will they make it? And what year is this? We’ve cut the distance to the sub-2 marathon in half since 1998, but it will get progressively harder to trim the remaining seconds. Still, the physiologists tell us that it’s not impossible, meaning it is possible. I’m saying the year is…2075—and they make it.

The 2h barrier fell in October 2019, though as always there’s drama.

Tirole wins Nobel

since tirole is a successor to coase in some sense, here’s one of my favorite papers, by Yochai Benkler on how open source could help revolutionize the nature of production:

we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode “commons-based peer-production,” to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets

the paper has remained under-appreciated since it came out in 2002, and deserves to be more widely known.

4th estate doesn’t exist

My friend Ed Lyons is taking investigative reporting into his own hands because media can’t be trusted to not screw up their 4th estate duties that they always trumpet when questioned about their value to society:

When the government said everything was fine, it was easier to believe them than ask questions. Coverage was scattershot, especially at the Globe where there were more than 20 stories about the Connector failure, and several reporters doing them. The stories shifted from health policy reporters to general interest reporters, and there didn’t seem to be a coherent, continuous narrative about what was happening. The press didn’t seem to understand the consequences of the state not being able to process website applications.