This time he covered a lot more ground and was willing to talk about the mundane details of presidential existence. “You have to exercise,” he said, for instance. “Or at some point you’ll just break down.” You also need to remove from your life the… Continue reading →
One archetype that hits me very forcefully, as it does many people, is that when I’m wandering around the Himalayas, for example, most of the people that I see are Westerners from Germany, California, or the Netherlands, who are wearing sandals, Indian smocks, and are… Continue reading →
Andreessen: Airbnb makes its money in real estate. But everything inside of how Airbnb runs has much more in common with Facebook or Google or Microsoft or Oracle than with any real estate company. What makes Airbnb function is its software engine, which matches customers… Continue reading →
Chiefly, though, I make sure I don’t rely on other people to find stuff for me to read. I mean, I do, of course; everything I’ve described so far is powered by other people. But I feel strongly about also hunting for material on my… Continue reading →
AMA with Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy. What an epic comment thread.
I sometimes run a very old version of The Sims to optimize living conditions for two people with busy lives who want to achieve maximum happiness and self actualization. I run simulations of floor-plans and then try to find places that are similar to those… Continue reading →
The Local-Global Flip, Or, “The Lanier Effect”. Absolutely fascinating interview. Two technologies on the cusp of going mainstream: self-driving cars and (dis)assembling robots. Also, technological efficiencies tend to have a positive benefit to the already wealthy (you save more money) but a negative benefit to the already middle-class or poor (you don’t have any money to begin with). What do we do when machines can do it better?
Q&A: CMN’s Rusty Lewis and Jon Beck about new advertising options for College Publisher. CMN’s new managed WordPress offering is required to use their advertising software, ultimately meaning they still take a cut of the overall revenue.
Q&A: Rusty Lewis on CMN’s new business model. It just hit me: College Publisher inadvertently made it cost-effective to hire a developer and host it yourself. Student publications who don’t, and instead pay $2K/year for a terrible CMS while also donating their advertising revenue to CMN, aren’t long for this world. I can’t believe College Publisher would stick this to 80% of their clients.
Ev Williams: The Challenges of a Web of Infinite Info. According a co-founder of Twitter, “what’s ‘dead’ is the original model of the web, which was completely distributed and decentralized.” Instead, large corporations will own huge tracts of land of which netizens sharecrop small plots. The corporation will control how the community operates and how individuals form their identity.
This future is slavery.