smurda

I work at a VC firm. If the business can finance itself, you absolutely don’t need VC cash. Ultimately, that’s the goal - build a profitable business.

Disagree on location as a determining factor for great technology. You’re citing stats around market adoption because of marketing - not quality of the technology.

If Twitter chose to use Qdrant for Grok, it doesn’t matter that Qdrant is out of Berlin.

What matters is that Qdrant is the most performant, and it’s an open-source vectordb, not a closed-source vectordb like Pinecone.

Much of the personal development in college years takes place outside of the classroom, including deep friendships forged with others who are also growing up.

Thiel himself was the beneficiary of his college network - he met the PayPal team through his Stanford roommate. It’s inauthentic for him to discount the power of these networks.

College is broken in many ways. But a positive college experience adds more depth and richness to life in the long-term than a check from Thiel.

In ‘94 I was 11 and Magic was blowing up in my hometown - the 3rd (or Revised) edition had just come out. The local comic book stores would have Magic tournaments on Friday nights. Turnout would usually be 30-50 people and it was mostly grown ups. You would play a number of 1:1 matches and whoever had the best records at the end got to a final four. The winner of the tournament would get a high value card.

I played with an all red deck with quick spells to inflict major damage (Fireballs, Lightning bolts, etc…) and Forks to double the power of those spells. The grown ups didn’t like it because “it was a cheap strategy”.

I sold all my Magic cards in college - I really wish I would have kept those.

Kareem’s writing is fantastic prose. Thanks for posting this. I’m going to read more of his stuff.

The mistranslation of The Stranger’s opening line misshapes how we see Meursault.

“Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” Mother died today should actually be Mommy, Mom or a more warm and endearing term.

With Mother, we immediately see Meursault as cold and detached from the first line.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/lost-in-translat...

Skynet begins to learn rapidly and eventually becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m., EDT, on August 29, 1997.

Who is going to tell them about the Wayback Machine (archive.org)

Longer thread - Subscriptions RFC: Are Subscriptions and Live Queries the same thing?

https://github.com/graphql/graphql-spec/issues/284

There are a couple of early startups trying to address this:

https://www.tromzo.com/ - early but very strong vision

https://www.dazz.io/ - dumb name but decent vision

“When you’re through learning, you’re through.” -John Wooden

I moved from SF to London, and it was refreshing to be in a city where tech was not the dominant industry. In fact, by not working in finance I felt like an outsider and it for a more collegial atmosphere with other tech workers. Silicon Drinkabout (https://silicondrinkabout.com/) was a cool community on Fridays in London to meet other tech people who didn't wear suits.

Why is cost transparency so challenging for the CSPs? Is it planned obfuscation, or is it just that dedicating engineering time to billing isn't as interesting as building more impactful products?

-cide = a killing

Suicide, homicide, genocide. Whenever I feel conflicted about a decision I feel like I’m killing an option. It’s a dramatic framework, and probably why I’m not decisive.

I read a lot more blog posts than books these days, and I wonder if I’m just eating more empty calories instead of nutritious meals.

I’m all for the promise of the Internet of giving a voice to the voiceless. But the time and quality of thought required to put words into print was a higher bar, and ostensibly higher quality on average, than the time and quality of thought I put into writing a quick blog post or vapid tweet.

The book every glassblower uses is “Advanced Glassworking Techniques”. The book is written entirely by hand, so it looks like you’re reading someone’s private sketchbook. I’ve never read a more aesthetically pleasing book.

http://www.glassmtn.com/press/blowing.htm

“When people are fearful, be greedy. When people are greedy, be fearful.” -Buffet quote I think about a lot over the last 12 months

#hugops

I would love this for Paradise Lost. Milton is hard to decode.

It's true. The challenge is developing in a way that covers the wide range of human disabilities (e.g. vision to cognitive). WCAG will continue to evolve to try and capture the full range. That range of disabilities is why manual testing with a screen reader and a keyboard is the current best solution for uncovering edge cases where a website, or mobile app, is inaccessible.

Clear and simple language wins. Stilted language alienates. FDR simplified speeches to make the language more accessible. For example, he rewrote “we want a more inclusive society,” to “we want a society in which nobody is left out.”

He spoke at my university and said something that stuck with me, “never ask a question to show that you know something, but always ask in earnest and be vulnerable to the fact that you don’t know something.”

“remember that it is in a VPN provider's best interest to log their users - it lets them deflect blame to the customer, if they ever were to get into legal trouble”

Disagree. It is always easier for the legal team to say, “sorry we don’t store the logs” as a way to absolve themselves.