anildash

5 ms·

1.
by anildash 13d ago
If you’re arguing he and I are the same thing, though he’s a VC and spends his time being a podcaster who advocates for the venture industry, and I’m someone who is talking about how power actually works in society, I proposed an easy test
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by anildash 13d ago
Was truly the mask-off moment.
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by anildash 13d ago
Yeah, I did barely cover the shift in dynamics around IPOs. I originally had a lot more on that, but cut a lot out. I think what you point out is absolutely a huge factor.
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by anildash 14d ago
You should ask Chamath how he feels about empowering workers through unions.
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by anildash 14d ago
I think “regular” VCs are one of the cohorts of people I feel worst for! I have a lot of friends who got into the business wanting to help entrepreneurs, and now they’re stuck on a cap table with folks who they’d never want to do business w
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by anildash 17d ago
Since then, he also called for a pogrom against Romani people, in language that explicitly mirrored that which the Nazis used when calling for ethnic cleansing against the same group of people.
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by anildash 17d ago
It's vice-signaling. They want to make sure that the industry knows that calling for a pogrom against the Romani people is the kind of malevolence that will be rewarded.
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by anildash 3mo ago
He was a genuinely good person, and a genuinely honest voice, in an industry that had very few back when he was one of its pioneers, and has far, far fewer of those things today. A lot of people will write nice words about Om, and he deserv
9.
by anildash 5mo ago
Shameless plug (as a board member): If you are interested in the book that this is from, a great way to pick it up is on the EFF website, where your purchase helps EFF keep up the fight for privacy. https://www.eff.org/Priva
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by anildash 5mo ago
It's technically legal to take photos of people through their windows, but we don't worry about anybody but big tech creeps actually doing it on a regular basis.
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by anildash 5mo ago
It's good to care about these choices. There are also lots of ethical reasons to leave GitHub, and this makes it easier for people to choose to leave on those grounds, too. Every time people talk about their decisions and normalize any
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by anildash 5mo ago
That’s literally what the phrase means. Can’t help if people don’t know what words mean. It was phrased fine, it wasn’t _read_ well.
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by anildash 5mo ago
Addressing the usual few complaints folks always bring up: * This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't any resource contention happening there * Thunderbird is revenue positive, a
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by anildash 6mo ago
Adobe doesn't provide tools explicitly designed to enable the creation of child pornography — in fact their tools try to prevent its creation — and they don't profit from the sale of it. But, of course, Musk fanboys can be reliabl
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by anildash 8mo ago
Hanging your jersey from the rafters in the Plain Text Arena. A bullpen of weary cubicle-dwellers salutes you!
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by anildash 8mo ago
I _don't_ think it was just ego. I think it was a smart strategy because formal standardization tends to bring in complexity, and just letting folks go off on their own and document their own usage (or "flavors") ends up bein
17.
by anildash 8mo ago
I was texting with John the other night while working on this piece, and reminiscing about my initial quibbles about the format, and I think I had been frustrated by just about everything on your list. I just need you to travel back in time
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by anildash 8mo ago
I actually _did_ want the underscores, but enough people thought it wasn't intentional that I just gave up and changed it to italics. lol?
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by anildash 8mo ago
It took me a long time to see the variations as a plus and not a minus; as a veteran of the RSS-vs-Atom wars, I was long an advocate of Technical Correctness(tm) like any good coder. But the years since then have made me a lot more amenab
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by anildash 8mo ago
This is a good call. I know it's been suggested multiple times over the years; I wonder what the rationale was for rejecting the format, or at least having the option to render a file when it's loaded. (Maybe a "display as HT
21.
by anildash 8mo ago
I know it seems quite absurd! I actually just added in to this piece a photo I took of the CNN screen that (I believe) was the first mention of the word "blog" that they ever put on-screen; it also has a mention of Hart's cam
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by anildash 8mo ago
I actually had a digression into "worse is better", but the piece was already pushing 5,000 words, so I figured I probably was better of leaving out such a big topic. But you're right that's a larger trend that mattered.
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by anildash 8mo ago
I liked Textile a lot better initially, and it came out first. And interestingly, both launched at the same time on the platform (Movable Type) where Markdown debuted. So it really was sort of a clean A-B test about which one users chose. T
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by anildash 9mo ago
Prince changed his name because a corporation had refused to give him control over the work he created, and wouldn't let him release work under the name that he was born with. (Sort of the template for "Taylor's Version"
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by anildash 9mo ago
People love to smugly suggest this useless advice like there aren’t literal public services from governments around the world that are being tied to these platforms, let alone the many private companies which gate access to their goods and
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by anildash 10mo ago
I actually don't think this is true. I think a lot of folks who are (understandably) angry at the Big AI companies want people not to want AI in Firefox. Which is a slightly different problem. https://www.anildash.com&#x2F
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by anildash 11mo ago
There's more than enough critical mass on other platforms that there's no excuse for them to still be on X, and it's a shame they stay there. Journalists would go to (for example) Bluesky if it were the only place they could
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by anildash 11mo ago
Also, to be clear, I’m mostly goofing about it CLIs, and — as I mentioned in the piece — I use one every day. But yes, there are four or five billion internet users who don’t and never will. And CLIs are a poor user interface for 99+% of th
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by anildash 11mo ago
Yeah, I think there are profound security issues, but I think many folks dug into the prompt injection nightmare scenarios with the first round of “AI browsers”, so I didn’t belabor that here; I wanted to focus on what I felt was less cover
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by anildash 1y ago
We wrote it in the blood from one of Peter Thiel's blood bag boys.

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