TFW a team you founded announces something big and new and the announcement comes from someone you've never heard of. 🤔👏

The hacker attitude is often approximately this: “Open up your life to the ’net, all you ordinary people. The world is about to become transparent and that transparency will be the beginning of a golden age. Sharing is good. However, encrypt your life like crazy. Use VPN, etc. Only the smartest people can make no sound in the digital forest.”

- Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

Judging the campaign tactics this election season is hard. There are so many fun ones to choose from!

In the twentieth century, the golden age of public relations, publicity, meaning the attention of the press, came to be something that many private citizens sought out and even paid for. This has led, in our own time, to the paradox of an American culture obsessed, at once, with being seen and with being hidden, a world in which the only thing more cherished than privacy is publicity. In this world, we chronicle our lives on Facebook while demanding the latest and best form of privacy protection—ciphers of numbers and letters—so that no one can violate the selves we have so entirely contrived to expose.

  – Jill Lepore

The Beginner’s Guide is one of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in a long time. Carve out an hour and play it. You'll be a better person for it.

+Adrian Hon's History of the Future in 100 Objects, one of my favorite books in recent memory, is now free! Totally worth reading. Congrats Adrian!

I wonder why the FBI isn’t suing Google for a backdoor in Android yet.

(Some speculation: brute forcing is prevented in software as opposed to Apple’s Security Enclave, device encryption is less common and only recently on by default, device manufacturers could add backdoors individually, etc.)

"Facebook is becoming more like an electric utility every day.
If Facebook starts to fail commercially, suddenly people over the world would be at risk of losing old friends and family ties, or perhaps critical medical histories.
Facebook is only one example of many recent highly successful network players that have made themselves essential in advance of making themselves sustainable."

- Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, emphasis mine

All code is liability. -+Peter Norvig​

Which one are you?

1. Never-better. We’ve never had it so good.
2. Better-never. If only all this progress had never happened!
3. Ever-waser. All of this is as it ever was.

Great categorization of views by Adam Gopnik.

Back from Iceland. Pictures are up!

It constantly amazes me how many bugs a baby can find in major consumer apps by just banging on the keyboard.