Maciej Cegłowski, founder of Pinboard, publishes talks and essays on technology, startups, and AI, plus the Pinboard database schema.
HN calls his AI talk one of the funniest takes on the subject and links his XOXO talk as an example of a successful one-person business.
Obligatory link to Maciej Cegłowski's The Website Obesity Crisis[0]
> These Apple sites exemplify what I call Chickenshit Minimalism. It's the prevailing design aesthetic of today's web. I wrote an essay about this on Medium[1]. Since this is a fifty minute talk, please indulge me while I read it to you in its entirety:
> "Chickenshit Minimalism: the illusion of simplicity backed by megabytes of cruft."
I just opened up that one-sentence, image-free blog-post, with uBlock, uMatrix disabled. Without cache it pulled in 790 KiB - with cache it's still 108 KiB.
And it used to be worse:
> I already talked about how bloated Medium articles are. That one-sentence essay is easily over a megabyte. It's not just because of (pointless) javascript. There's also this big image in the page footer[2]. Because my article is so short, it's literally impossible to scroll down to see it, but with developer tools I can kind of make out what it is: some sort of spacesuit people with tablets and mobile phones.
> It's 900 kilobytes in size.
I hate Medium and their ilk with a passion.
[0] https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
[1] https://medium.com/@mceglowski/chickenshit-minimalism-846fc1412524
[2] https://static.pinboard.in/ob/ob.082.jpg (Cegłowski's archived copy of that once-mandatory 900 KiB footer)
This festive map shows seismic hazard in Northern California, where pretty much all the large Internet companies are based, along with a zillion startups. The ones that aren't here have their headquarters in an even deadlier zone up in Cascadia. (...)
So even if you don't agree with my politics, maybe you'll agree with my geology. Let's not build a vast, distributed global network only to put everything in one place!
That slide[1] hits close to home. I'm painfully aware of how hard (and almost pointless/powerless) it is to reason about long-term geological risks, esp compared to less catastrophic and more (short-term) predictable hazards like hurricanes, tornadoes or blizzards; but from time to time I idly question the wisdom, from a civilizational point of view, of having so many concentrated, incredibly talented people living directly atop one of the most dangerous fault regions on earth[2].
But again, it's pointless to think about it as an individual, so better get back to work and keep living day by day, I guess. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann...
[1] https://static.pinboard.in/bt14/bt14.069.jpg
[2] http://peer.berkeley.edu/pdf/Senate_testimonial-8-07.pdf
At first, I found the direct comparison of Google with the Nazi ideology as happened in the picture (https://static.pinboard.in/ancient/thumbs/law.034.thumb.jpg) and the text
> You don't get a clear warning that you're working on something that's bad for the world. They put you to work designing a machine that answers to "OK Google", not "OK Goebbels".
not justified, as Google is a very different organization and has different values and motives. But then I understood the comparison as a mean of drastically warning about what unforeseen consequences lie in these data collections, derived models, undemocratically and centrally controlled systems, proprietary systems, and the induced shift of powers in our society. That change can be devastating for society. As a society, we need constantly be on watch over what these systems and do who controls them. Closed and proprietary systems manufacturers and developers have an immense political influence on our society. Do we agree with their statement? Can we even afford that as a society?
The OP is one of the funniest takes on the subject I've ever read -- funny because a lot of it rings true. Perhaps the funniest part is the section that compares true believers in the AI singularity to a cult, headlined by this photo of three prominent believers, which always makes me laugh out loud: https://static.pinboard.in/si/si.050.jpg . The linked PBF cartoons are pretty funny too, given the context: http://pbfcomics.com/115/ , http://pbfcomics.com/154/ .
Whether you agree or not with the OP's views, I highly recommend you read the whole thing and click on all the links!
>> I wouldn't call these people success stories.
https://static.pinboard.in/xoxo_talk_thoreau.htm
> Thoreau said about his two years at Walden:
> I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours
> Thoreau wrote this never having tasted any of traditional forms of success. He was thinking of a different, more fundamental kind of success, one that I wish for myself, and earnestly wish for all of you.
You're welcome to my DB schema. https://static.pinboard.in/schema.htm
There seem to be a gazillion open source bookmarking projects out there. It's hard to go wrong if you're the only user and willing to host it for yourself.