Werd I/O

Wowzers. It’s going to be hard for other accelerators to compete with this. (Matter invested one tenth of this amount.)

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“A National Labor Relations Board ruling sheds light on a highly secret anti-union campaign at Google, that a top executive explicitly described as an initiative to “convince [employees] that unions suck.”” Gross.

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“More than 1,700 people who served in the U.S. Congress in the 18th, 19th and even 20th centuries owned human beings at some point in their lives, according to a Washington Post investigation of censuses and other historical records.” Amazing work; a vital database. An important and troubling part of America’s history. Slavery is core to what it is.

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SF author Charlie Stross’s stock take of where we are this year. Come for the cogent commentary on covid - stay for the link to the absolutely batshit community about quantum Bible changes. Insightful as always.

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“At the end of each year, I asked the elders if they were glad to have lived it. Did the year have value to them? Always the answer was the same, even from those, including Ruth, who had said during the year that they were ready to go, that they wished for an end sooner rather than later. Yes, they said, yes, it was worth living.”

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“This was surprising to me. So much work, energy, and time has gone into creating a trustless distributed consensus mechanism, but virtually all clients that wish to access it do so by simply trusting the outputs from these two companies without any further verification.” Moxie Marlinspike, creator of Signal, dives into web3.

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“The 19th spoke with a wide range of experts about what older people and family caregivers should know about the risk omicron poses to seniors, as well as best practices to keep loved ones safe.”

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“The page functions as a hub of London’s best local eateries and their delicious dishes, celebrating these spots in all their day-to-day glory. Many of them have distinct shopfronts, too, which 30-year-old Rangaswami never fails to point out, often via poetic captions about the history of hot dogs, old school cash registers or musings over what a chip shop might say if it could talk.” Quite lovely.

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This, unfortunately, all sounds familiar to me.

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“The goal of this post is to summarise some patterns and anti-patterns, so that in the future you or I can leave our roles in the most professional and positive way possible. The content is applicable to people in a wide range of companies, at different levels of seniority, but is probably most directed at mid-career types.”

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“Facebook, Twitter and other tech companies took an unprecedented step last year when they banned a sitting U.S. president from their platforms in the wake of the attack on the Capitol. Since that day, Republican legislators in more than half the country have introduced their own unprecedented wave of bills that aim to prevent tech platforms from taking that very kind of action.”

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“While GitHub quickly took down the app, following massive social media backlash, this is the second time in seven months that the platform has been used to target Muslim women in India. In mid-2021, a similar web application called “Sulli Deals” was hosted on Github to trade Muslim women without their consent. The app was online for weeks before it was taken down.”

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“While initially this seemed like the best way for teams to stay connected, we’ve since realized that these non-stop video calls, emails, and chats have turned into digital overload, and we see the well-being impacts in our Microsoft employee surveys. Between April and November 2020, employees’ satisfaction with work-life balance dropped by 13 percentage points.”

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“Instead of the classic red wax featured in the dairy version, the mini vegan cheese wheels are wrapped in peelable green wax. The cheese snack is made from a blend of coconut oil and starch and contains calcium as well as vegan-friendly vitamin B12.” Honestly, this seems kind of great?

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“The founder and chair of Entrata, a Silcon Slopes tech firm, sent an email to a number of tech CEOs and Utah business and political leaders, claiming the COVID-19 vaccine is part of a plot by "the Jews" to exterminate people.” I wonder how many other people quietly hold similar views?

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A lot of my work style is indirectly inspired by the Stanford “Touchy Feely” class - it was what led to a lot of Matter’s culture, which I’ve found enormously helpful. This might sound like ridiculous stuff on the face of it, but it really works, and it’s a way to get to a kinder business culture.

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“Even today, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in India are dominated by dominant castes. In fact, I quit Instagram last year because I could not relate to the elite, high-resolution world of the dominant castes. Given the lack of diverse voices, caste slurs are rampant on social media in India. Many caste names are casually used as curse words.”

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“But since Wordle was built originally for just Mr. Wardle and Ms. Shah, the initial design ignored a lot of the growth-hacking features that are virtually expected of games in the current era. While other games send notifications to your phone hoping you’ll come back throughout the day, Wordle doesn’t want an intense relationship.” Just really lovely.

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“The last time ships got stuck in the Suez Canal, they were there for eight years. From 1967 to 1975, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, 14 ships were stranded in the Great Bitter Lake, a salt lake connected to the canal. Unable to leave, the crews, dubbed the "Yellow Fleet" because of the desert sand that eventually covered them, developed their own society at sea. This society developed its own postal service and stamps, and held a version of the Olympics in 1968.”

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“2021 was another big year for tech workers organizing for a greater say at their workplaces. This year, more workers took action to build lasting, enforceable structures to protect their rights. Across multiple industries, it was a record year for unionizing, and tech was no exception.”

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“What does the current popularity of comic book superheroes, in culture, do?
It reinforces the idea of a hierarchy of human, with the ubermensch as its apex. The superhero makes things alright without being asked. It looks after us, it protects, it cleans up the streets. It’s a parental role. [...] It says that the superhero is someone other – it ain’t us. And that’s a good thing, it says.”

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“Much of this work has been impressive. And yet, something crucial is missing. For the most part, news organizations are not making democracy-under-siege a central focus of the work they present to the public.”

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No founder or investor should work with anyone like this. But please note: he’s not just a VC, he’s the founder of Palantir. Which assumptions do Palantir’s products and services - famously sold to law enforcement and more - have baked into them?

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