Rob Shearer

You can argue the distinctions don’t matter, but it seems relevant that Larry Page was an actually-smart grad student who turned real research into a trillion-dollar company, while Musk was a middling student who couldn’t cut grad school and made a career of stealing credit from actual researchers.

The “writing is overrated” argument has always struck me as exactly as well-informed as modern homesteading. I get the appeal of the utopian fantasy you’re selling. It is completely out of touch with not just the lives people actually live, but with the lives they *want* to live.

It’s notable that WNBA finals games (so far) have gotten roughly the same ratings (1-2 million viewers) as marquee regular-season games. It really seems like the WNBA has a lot of the same dynamics as minor-league baseball: a fun environment full of attendees not terribly invested in who wins.

I like this framing, because it also captures the “let’s punish Dems who aren’t sufficiently Left” dynamic. Folks you’re the fucking problem not just until the election, not just until a 2028 trifecta, but until after SCOTUS reform and DC/PR statehood and and and. That sucks, but it’s where we are.

Dave Karpf and I tend to do a lot of the same hate-reads, but I’ve got to say I see no appeal at all to *this* kind of book: second-hand sanewashing by a a non-journalist whose entire career is shameless hyping of society-destroying scams.

I think my distaste is colored by just how much overlap I have with Roose. I admire the cleverness of blockchain and remain obsessed with the question of whether there are any useful applications. (So far: no.) Similarly, what modern AI is good for is the defining question of the century…

The 538-ing of election coverage gets a lot of shit, but the pre-538 vibes coverage was worse and the post-538 markets-based coverage is *much* worse. It turns out that if you want to know who will win an election, the mature discipline devoted to that is the best option.

Nobody’s more demeaning to Trump voters than Republicans. “I bet when you think ‘fancy restaurant’ you think of the Cheesecake Factory!” is a dis. It is *fine* for TCF, or TGI Friday’s, or Olive Garden to be your go-to “let’s celebrate” place. Nobody thinks they are the candlelit French place on TV.

Maple syrup is bad for you and (good) sugar-substitute alternatives taste just as good. Fight me.

I was, and remain, 100% on the side of Google and Apple deferring to the GNIS database for US users. My one caveat is the moral hazard: if Trump takes this as permission to blatantly and pervasively vandalize that database, you have to give up on it.

My pitch if I were “tech advisor” to any Dem Congress-critter: create Congressionally-controlled mirrors of all the federal databases, starting with GNIS, so that Apple and Google can simply flip over to them if Trump does any more vandalism. Very cheap and easy to do…but you’ve got to be ready.

I was, and remain, 100% on the side of Google and Apple deferring to the GNIS database for US users. My one caveat is the moral hazard: if Trump takes this as permission to blatantly and pervasively vandalize that database, you have to give up on it.

You Can See Everything is a terrific film about lying and artifice, but I’d be lying if I didn’t confess that my single biggest visceral reaction was not to the main themes, but to something that has always pissed me off about Theranos…and SV “innovation” in general…

This is the idea that makes Theranos a “platform” instead of just a bit of lab equipment. It is, however: 1) A dumb architecture. You can store a library of 100 test protocols locally. 2) Utterly trivial. *Way* below the “nonobvious” threshold that’s supposed to be applied to patents.

You Can See Everything is a terrific film about lying and artifice, but I’d be lying if I didn’t confess that my single biggest visceral reaction was not to the main themes, but to something that has always pissed me off about Theranos…and SV “innovation” in general…

A decades-long trend has been acknowledging that feelings (and “trauma” and “mental health”) are real, and I’m really hoping the pendulum is swinging back from the absurd excesses of “my fears matter more than your reality”. Which very much includes the “wars” against Christmas/men/merit.

A minor but telling interaction I had after the “Ukraine blew up a data center hosting all the Russian bots” story: Him: I’m seeing way fewer bots. Me: Here are three actual monitoring companies saying no difference. Him: One of those stories admits it’s hard to measure, so I stand by my claim.