Category: Links

O’Leary:

Over the course of my career, I have shrugged off things that horrify me now. I learned to push through the routine humiliation. As an ambitious woman, I often ran an internal calculation about how much “trouble” I was willing to make. Should I fight about the story I want to do or the unwelcome remark about my legs? Time and time again, I went with the former. If I hadn’t, I don’t know if I would have been as successful. I’m not ashamed about wanting a career, but I can’t look back at some of my actions without wincing.

I never waste my time with non-Matthew Panzarino reviews of iPhones. He did yet another fantastic review.

Fantastic analysis of Apple’s strategy about their iPhone X review units.

Ryan Holiday:

Skilled copywriting and marketing was covering up an undeniable fact: There was basically nothing there.

I made a quip this morning on Micro.blog about doing reviews of how good a job people do at writing a review. The above is what I mean. Quite often you read a fantastically well written review, which doesn’t actually tell you anything.

While not particularly graceful in how I wrote it, this tells you something. Yet I’m not perfect as I wonder if my review of the Filson Briefcase has anything there.

Jannis Hermanns:

The iPad Pro with Apple’s Smart Keyboard in conjunction with a server running ZSH, tmux and neovim makes a fantastic portable development machine that leaves very little to wish for.

Another option if Rucking isn’t your thing.

Nick Bilton:

It’s worth recalling, of course, that it wasn’t the makers of Tylenol who put cyanide in the pills that killed seven innocent people; nevertheless, the company felt a responsibility to come up with a solution to the problem. While Facebook’s engineers may not be posting fake news, the dirt is still on their hands. “The damage done to organizations in crises isn’t the crisis itself— it’s how you handle the crisis,” Scott Galloway, author of the new book The Four: The Hidden D.N.A. of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, told me this week on the latest episode of the Inside the Hive podcast. “There’s only one thing you have to remember: you have to overcorrect. You have to clear every shelf of all Tylenol nationwide. You can’t say this is an isolated incident and it won’t happen again,.”

The problem with Facebook is that it fundamentally believes that it is above the law — above the normal rules of business. That because it is different than what has come before, what has come before does not apply. That’s dangerous thinking.

Sarah Buhr:

So why the apparent confusion in the industry over what, exactly, constitutes sexual harassment? Emerson has a theory or three. “I think often people who defend harassing behavior do so because they have engaged in such behavior themselves. Or they defend individuals accused of this behavior because they believe them to be generally ‘good people.’ Or, as a rule, they just don’t believe women.”

Justin Blanton:

I guess the connection I’m trying to make here is that both evolution and AI seem to converge on the notion of competence without comprehension.

Fantastic explanation of how we build something that we can’t even fathom how to build.

Cyrus Farivar:

However, law experts that Ars contacted largely say that Scoble is mistaken.

Common sense also largely says that Scoble is a moron and wrong.

Fantastic interview and insight into Outlier.

Kevin Collier:

Twitter took 11 months to close a Russian troll account that claimed to speak for the Tennessee Republican Party even after that state’s real GOP notified the social media company that the account was a fake.

I mean, what the fuck?

Sam Schube on Outlier:

It’s probably wondering the same thing as you: Does the world need a better white T-shirt? Or an equally good white T-shirt that is simply more white? But these questions are irrelevant to Clemens and Burmeister. “The compromise part of the market is very well serviced,” Burmeister says. “So we go for the uncompromised.”

Fantastic read about what Outlier clothing is really all about.

I’ve been lucky enough to test out all these features in betas, and damn is it nice. What’s great is that it feels fresh, while at the same time feeling familiar and subtle. Ulysses remains the best writing app, not because of it’s features, but because the app goes out of its way to get out of your way.

God I love this app.

We want to start three more camps by 2020. Three new camps means we’ll be able to bring camps to an additional 60 kids per year nationwide! 

I’m shocked this isn’t overfunded at this point. Get on it. Throw money at them.

Jason Kottke:

In five years, Casper will probably have dozens of retail stores and 10 different kinds of mattress at different price points — they already have more than a dozen stores and 3 models ranging from $600 to $1850 — just like the companies they are trying to replace. Their origin story won’t matter…VC-fueled marketing will paper over all of that and, tada, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Unrelated, I have a Tuft & Needle mattress and love it. It may not sponsor every podcast, but it also doesn’t sponsor every podcast. And that’s not an affiliate link, it’s just a link to a fantastic mattress.

Mike Monteiro:

Twitter would have you believe that it’s a beacon of free speech. Biz Stone would have you believe that inaction is principle. I would ask you to consider the voices that have been silenced. The voices that have disappeared from Twitter because of the hatred and the abuse. Those voices aren’t free. Those voices have been caged. Twitter has become an engine for further marginalizing the marginalized. A pretty hate machine.

Note also:

Actor Rose McGowan, one of the accusers of disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein, has had her Twitter activity suspended. McGowan had earlier tweeted “fuck off” to actor Ben Affleck and accused him of lying about his knowledge of Weinstein’s history of sexual misconduct.

For me there’s a key line from Monteiro which tells you all you need to know about many things in life:

But I’ll tell you this: a lot of those people have tried, honestly tried to deal with the abuse on the platform. But when leadership doesn’t want something fixed it’s close to impossible to fix it. And when leadership doesn’t see something as a problem, it’s not getting fixed at all.

Speaking of security, it looks like WPA2 WiFi security is totally fucked. This will likely need patches on your OS and routers. What a fucking mess.

This is a fascinating read and shows the true dangers of networks like Facebook, and Twitter as well. What’s most interesting, and most dangerous is that these networks themselves don’t know how they impact the world until well after the fact.