{ "posts": [ { "created": "Sun, 29 Mar 2020 06:47:16 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 1806, "id": 1, "modified": null, "post": "
On [[1769:2020-03-21]], I had a call with [[615:Sahar Massachi]] and [[1728:Sarah Winsberg]] on [[2:Facebook]] and we talked about my [[118:Personal Website]]. Everyone is trying to stay safe because of [[1729:COVID-19]]

", "slug": "sahar-and-sarah-covid19", "title": "[[1728:Sarah Winsberg]] and [[615:Sahar Massachi]] and [[1729:COVID-19]]" }, { "created": "Sun, 29 Mar 2020 06:49:39 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 1807, "id": 2, "modified": null, "post": "\n\n\n\n2020-03-28 Journal\nI just wrote my first official [[1731:Post]] using [[16:World Wide Graph (w2g)]] -- [[1806:Sarah Winsberg and Sahar Massachi and COVID-19]]!

Fun with the [[1481:Wayback Machine]]:
[[1745:Today]] I had [[1771:fun]] re-discovering my old [[1773:embarrassing]] [[118:Personal Website]]s via the [[1481:wayback machine]]:
* http://web.archive.org/web/20080801040013/http://www.uvm.edu:80/~mkarpele/brian
* http://web.archive.org/web/20041112220558/http://www.angelfire.com/fl5/mekreations
* http://web.archive.org/web/20090521103550/http://www.uvm.edu:80/~mkarpele/tutorials/prolog_recursion.html

[[474:Graph.global]]:
I also [[986:Worked on]] [[16:World Wide Graph (w2g)]] and added a ton of new features, like the ability to write [[1757:posts]]. I now essentially have a [[2:Facebook]] clone and my own personal [[1485:knowledge graph]] which I can [[331:Tag]].

[[1774:Thanks]] to [[982:Taylor Rogalski]] for giving me [[1050:feedback]] on my early [[1775:prototype]] of this [[1746:feature]]. A [[1731:Post]] is an [[1754:entity]], just like anything in [[474:graph.global]]. However, there's a separate [[1760:database table]] where (ostensibly) additional content may be stored and associated with an [[1754:entity]]. So a [[1731:Post]] may be thought of as an alternative [[1761:representation]] (or an augmentation) of an [[1754:entity]]. The actual way it works is an [[1754:entity]] is created first, and then the [[1731:Post]] is created after -- the entity.id is passed as a foreign key to the post (so they remain linked and back-linkable).

The new [[101:w2g]] [[1731:Post]] system introduces a [[1751:Related Posts]] [[1746:feature]] such that any new published [[1731:Post]] automatically [[1776:enumerate]]s and lists the [[1755:reference]]d [[1752:tags]], but the [[1731:Post]] will also show all [[1753:references]] to other [[1751:Related Posts]] which [[763:mention]] the same [[1754:entity]] [[1752:tags]]. I arbitrarily chose pink as the [[1731:Post]] color, similar to [[1386:green text]]. The feature also show other [[1751:Related Posts]] which mention this [[1731:Post]] by its [[1754:entity]] [[1765:identifier]], i.e. [[1756:back-references]].

I was excited to [[503:Demo]] this feature to [[1335:Ariel Liu]] and [[1749:Bobi Rakova]] yesterday and today at [[1317:Serapeum]].

[[1777:Suprises]] by [[8:Jessy Exum]]:
Last night [[8:Jessy Exum]] randomly met [[944:Robert M Ochshorn]] ([[949:rmo]]) who was strolling around the [[1742:dogpatch]] casually looking for [[1744:apartments]], possibly to [[1743:rent]]. [[1778:Small world]]!

[[1732:Iris Xu]]'s Digital [[1733:Birthday]]:
Yesterday was [[1732:Iris Xu]]'s [[1733:birthday]]! [[1335:Ariel Liu]] threw a [[1734:zoom]] call and [[1732:Iris Xu]] + [[1735:Alex Huras]] and also [[1736:Daisy Chu]] joined. We [[1738:sang]] [[1737:Happy Birthday (song)]] and then [[1732:Iris Xu]] blew out the [[1740:make-believe]] [[1739:candles]] which [[1335:Ariel Liu]] digitally drew on a beautifully drawn digital [[1741:velvet cake]][1]. Here's a [[1747:video]] of [[1335:Ariel Liu]]'s [[1741:velvet cake]] [[1748:drawing]] for [[1732:Iris Xu]]'s [[1733:birthday]][2]!

[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/B-Q7F_qjywx
[2] https://www.facebook.com/hello.ariel/videos/10163520542460650", "slug": "2020-03-28-journal", "title": "2020-03-28 Journal" }, { "created": "Sun, 29 Mar 2020 19:00:38 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 1840, "id": 5, "modified": null, "post": "
This is a [[689:Response Essay]] to [[512:Naomi Theora Most]]'s https://www.facebook.com/nthmost/posts/10158449484348395.

The notion of \"[[1832:king]]\" or \"[[1833:queen]]\" is not something one necessarily has the power to [[1834:vote]] to disband. It's very nature is such that the role is the emergent property of someone wanting power and having the means or capability to achieve it.

Folks can collectively act for some period to work against such a role, but eventually inequitable distribution of resources will enable the cycle to renew.

And this is complicated by the reality that many people similarly fear the flaws of ineffectual decision making by way of [[1835:collective action]].

(a) there are a lot of people out there who don't care and or don't have informed opinions

(b) the people who do care are usually disproportionately leveraged, one way or another, to act (in a way which is very difficult -- e.g. last mile, incentive misalignment -- to challenge)

(c) [[1836:decentralized decision making]] is difficult, especially for a society which barely has the bandwidth to elect competent representatives. #[[1837:decentralization]]

The problems go on. Ideologically, systems with democratic [[1838:checks and balances]] are great. Until the fact that they are slow becomes a disadvantage and fast-moving, highly leveraged organizations start iterating on advancements faster than governing bodies can understand or regulate and pressuring the system through lobbying.

What projects often get is design by [[1841:consensus]] and a million other flavors which sound good to to revolutionary types (and may have powerful concepts we may benefit from) but rarely results in lasting [[1839:equitable change ]] that isn't gamed.
", "slug": "on-kings", "title": "On Kings" }, { "created": "Mon, 30 Mar 2020 00:08:16 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 1844, "id": 6, "modified": null, "post": "Today I was on a call with [[1842:Gary Johnson]], [[9:Drew Winget]], [[876:Galen Mancino]] and others. We discussed [[1843:language learning]]. This is a nice break what I was doing earlier in the week which included writing about [[1805:The Uncertain Future of American Libraries]] and [[1782:OverDrive]]", "slug": "monthly-catchups-with-friends", "title": "Monthly Catchups with Friends" }, { "created": "Thu, 02 Apr 2020 03:07:16 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 1849, "id": 7, "modified": null, "post": "Tonight I watched a [[1846:Laid Back Lectures]] with [[1647:Arya Sabeti]] and [[1335:Ariel Liu]] and [[1252:Benjamin Reinhardt]] and [[1847:Bernice Yu]] and it was great. I wanted to write up a [[1848:review]] on [[2:Facebook]] but I got tired. Instead we talked a bit about [[94:fromscrat.ch]].", "slug": "lbl-2020-04-1", "title": "[[1846:Laid Back Lectures]] about [[1845:Semiconductors]]" }, { "created": "Sat, 25 Apr 2020 23:02:36 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 1888, "id": 19, "modified": null, "post": "
A private message on Reddit:
> Lol you are a cheating leech piece of shit who has never created a piece of art in your life. All you can do is be a leech and suck the creativity from others. I hope you die. All you shits would never steal from a multinational like Google but you love to do it to authors who are struggling to survive. Luckily copyright will be strengthened in the coming years and untalented leeches like you who add no value to the world can die off :)

Disclaimer: A few spelling corrections, minor insertions, and markup was added to the following response. This response reflects my own opinion, not that of my employers (past or present).

Hi <redacted>,

I'd appreciate the chance to get to know you better. What type of creations resonate with you? Are you a writer? A musician, film-maker, and/or visual artist?

My name's [[7:Michael E. Karpeles (Mek)]]. I enjoy playing music ([[1868:guitar]], [[1869:clarinet]], [[425:Jazz Piano]], [[1870:ukulele]]), [[1871:creative writing]], [[1748:drawing]] (I'm not great), and [[1872:writing software]].

For the past 10 years or so, I've authored software which I release free of charge and open source to the public: [[1873:http://github.com/mekarpeles]]
\u2022 In my free time, I sometimes write creative stories (which, you're right, may suck). These are also openly available to the public: https://github.com/mekarpeles/quintet/blob/master/quintet.org
\u2022 I've written and recorded covers of handfuls of songs (I'm a [[1874:Simon and Garfunkel]] fan), none of which I charge for: https://mek.fyi/music
\u2022 I've written hundreds of essays, which I make freely available to the public at https://mek.fyi/essay
\u2022 I am not the greatest artist, but I enjoy drawing. Here's a version of [[1875:Edgar Degas]]' \"Absinthe\" I drew: https://tinyurl.com/degas-absinthe

Importantly, I don't have any such expectation that authors, artists, musicians, or other creatives should have to give away their work for free. [[1876:Open access]] is a model which resonates with me (as a personal decision), in part because I don't rely on publishing creative content to make a living. And I appreciate and am sympathetic to the hardships that many creatives are facing right now. I listen and work directly with members of the community -- both indie bookstores and authors -- to learn how I may lend support. At the Internet Archive, where I work, ever since the [[1729:COVID-19]] emergency, we've hired a different musician or artist to perform before each all-hands meeting.

Do I believe in the importance of [[1877:libraries]] (serving the disenfranchised & promoting [[1878:public good]])? I do.

I also believe that [[1879:authors]] and creatives should be compensated for their works.

I think it's worth discussing there are several ways for authors to achieve compensation. Some are harder/easier to pursue than others: One way is to negotiate with [[1795:Amazon]] (but Amazon has lots of lawyers and leverage through their distribution channel). Another way is for authors to push back against publishers for better rates (this does happen, though I don't blame authors for worrying about the real risks of being dropped by a [[851:publisher]]). A third way is to charge libraries more, for instance, ([[1880:carrot and stick]]) offering to lease books instead of selling them, in exchange for helping libraries reach audiences digitally. One of the reasons some publishers get away with this is, the majority of libraries don't have software engineering teams to maintain online lending infrastructure, and so one way of looking at the arrangement is they're giving up their right to own the book in exchange for access to a 3rd party's lending platform. Some libraries (that do have engineering teams and lending infrastructure) continue buying physical books (as they've done for a hundred years) and lend them through [[1796:Controlled Digital Lending]] https://controlleddigitallending.org.

Out of these possible options authors have, my personal belief is that non-profit libraries (funded by the public) are the easy targets. And the well protected, well-funded for-profit publishers and distributors ([[1881:Elsevier]], amazon) are being let off the hook.

For example, the for-profit publishing company [[1881:Elsevier]] generates around $4B in revenue a year. They produce good content. I'm not the hugest fan of how they do it. Authors are required to pay $150 - $6000 [[1882:Article Publishing Charge (APC)]] to Elsevier to be included in the journal. The author generally gives up their [[1883:copyright]] to Elsevier in the process. Worse, this research is often times funded by public tax dollars. I'm upset about this. I feel it exploits the American people funding our academic process. And in my eyes it doesn't fairly reward authors.

As a former PhD candidate (the \"[[1884:publish or perish]]\" model is a big reason I left), I was personally offended that my research would only be available to those who could afford it. Having been in a situation where I was a researcher living on a ~$20k a year stipend, I am sensitive to the argument that many researchers do not feel the system is equitable to them.

Now, Elsevier and the academic publishing world are not alone. I'm not a world expert on traditional publishing (I did help run engineering for one; [[1885:Hyperink.com]]); several websites report that traditional publisher pays authors ~$1.25 per sale for $20 books (i.e. ~6%) https://authoritypublishing.com/book-publishing/12-reasons-why-self-publishing-kicks-butt-over-traditional-publishing. Again, when I see these splits, I find myself wishing it felt like authors were being compensated more equitably by publishers.

My stance is: 
\u2022 I am for authors and creatives making a living and supporting their work.
\u2022 Without compromising the mission of libraries.

I believe that accredited Libraries (like the [[313:Internet Archive]], which buys its books or receives donations like any library) play an important role in ensuring our public has resources to learn from and to be creative with. Why especially now?

Right now:
\u2022 Tens of millions of books (which tax payers have rightfully purchased from authors & publishers) are currently unavailable to these funders.
\u2022 Millions of students are stuck at home, out of school, and many parents who otherwise rely on their libraries are left without access to the right resources.
\u2022 Many Libraries (which already had large waitlists for their online books) have temporarily shut down and are completely overwhelmed with waitlists, leaving students, parents, educators, and researchers without fundamental learning material.

P.S. Interesting that you brought up [[5:Google]] as an example: Google (a for-profit) digitized ~15 million books and put previews online, was sued (+ an appeal) by the [[1886:Authors Guild]], and my understanding (I am not a lawyer) is the courts ruled in Google's favor that their use as \"[[1887:fair use]]\" (here's a summary): https://www.eff.org/cases/authors-guild-v-google-part-ii-fair-use-proceedings

Thanks for your comments. I understand and appreciate this is a personal hot topic and also appreciate that peoples' jobs are on the line. I hope you're staying healthy, safe, and in good spirits during this really difficult time.

best,
- [[7:Michael E. Karpeles (Mek)]]
", "slug": "responding-to-critique-being-pro-authors-and-libraries", "title": "Responding to Critique: Being Pro-Authors & Libraries" }, { "created": "Sat, 09 May 2020 22:35:39 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 1899, "id": 20, "modified": null, "post": "Today I had a [[539:conversation]] with [[1647:Arya Sabeti]] about [[16:World Wide Graph (w2g)]]. We were talking about [[963:Conor White-Sullivan]] and [[1675:Roam Research]] and also [[1894:Tiago Forte]]. One topic which came up is [[1895:Progressive Summarization]]. 

We talked about [[1:Wikidata]] and [[1896:freebase]]. We talked about the [[1897:OG]]s of the space, like [[341:Vannevar Bush]] and [[432:Paul Otlet]] and [[1898:Danny Hillis]]. And I recommended, of course, one of my favorite books ([[958:book recommendations]]) called [[301:Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages]].

", "slug": "conversation-between-arya-and-mek", "title": "[[539:conversation]] between [[1647:Arya Sabeti]] and [[7:Michael E. Karpeles (Mek)]]" }, { "created": "Mon, 25 May 2020 19:30:35 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 1904, "id": 21, "modified": null, "post": "what is this?", "slug": "?", "title": "Huh?" }, { "created": "Sun, 29 Mar 2020 18:32:56 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 1831, "id": 4, "modified": null, "post": "

Originally published on March 22, 2017

[[1817:Indirection]] and [[1818:abstraction]] are the tools which blur [[1819:corporate accountability]] and provide corporations and its workers with the [[1820:plausible deniability]] required to equivocate and violate [[1822:social contract]] and [[1821:ethical contract]].

Code (i.e. abstracting and codifying a process, whether codified as software or hardware) is one such form of indirection, as noted by [[1815:Lawrence Lessig]] in the claim, \"[[1816:code is law]]\". By this it is perhaps meant to suggest, automation takes a responsibility (e.g. advertising) traditionally conducted by a person (about which present day law predominantly considers and governs) and indirectly shifts responsibility (and as a corollary blame) away from the programmer to an unthinking counterpart which just does what it's \"told\". In this way, [[1823:corporations]] can freely optimize processes beyond the limitations of human bandwidth to achieve greater scalability characteristics (e.g. reach a greater volume of people, conduct business faster). An important [[1824:trade-off]] (read: [[1825:liability]]) of shifting responsibility from people to technology is, if an unplanned for edge case arises, the automated program must be responsible for making a potentially difficult decision (in a way which may not be informed by [[1822:social contract]]) or, alternatively, malfunctioning. In either case, this indirection affords latitude to the programmer, who can't reasonable be held responsible for the outcome -- they may have behaved entirely differently if they had directly intervened. Within these decisions lay the \"law\" of which [[1815:Lawrence Lessig]] speaks. If a self-driving car must crash and hit either a granny or a toddler, which should it choose?

This scenario raises another interesting question, which is spurred by the reality that the legislative concerns of our government (with its checks and balances) almost necessarily lags behind that of fast-moving corporations and their incentives. As a result, there is often misalignment in the focus of government legislation and the multitude of needs and necessarily exception handling brought on by the rise of technology. If the [[646:United States of America]] had to wait for the government to answer the question posed above about self driving cars, and all the multitude of questions like it which emerge alongside automation, it would be at the expense of our competitive advantage. And so, to a great extent, technologists and their managers (being in the fastest driver's seat) enact policy every day, unchecked, often without sufficient process of [[1826:due diligence]] or accountability to protect the peoples' interests.

The challenge is complicated further by the notion that technological methods are advancing faster than our (anyone's) ability to [[1827:legislate]]. [[168:Deep Learning]] can evolve solutions to problems whose structure lacks transparency, making it hard (sometimes unprovable) to know how technology will act when a certain edge case emerges. This is a problem I view as more imminent and likely than a \"[[1828:Singularity]]\" (i.e. [[1829:artificial intelligence surpassing our cognitive intelligence and imprisoning us]]), potentially leading to chaotic economic fluctuation and distribution of wealth.

The solution to these challenges is left as an exercise to the reader. I starts with spending time to think about and acknowledge the problem, that corporations and their hierarchies and practices are becoming increasingly separated from the problems they are solving, by way of indirection and abstraction. The challenge is difficult to generalize across industries and there is no [[1814:Hippocratic oath]] for programmer and manager.

Related:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL21399542M/Moral_mazes
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL6037025W/Code

These opinions shaped by the books:
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL21399542M/Moral_mazes [[1217:Moral Mazes]]
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL3947191M/Understanding_power [[1830:Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky]]
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16801714W/Who_Owns_the_Future [[97:Who Owns the Future?]] by [[636:Jaron Lanier]]
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL6037025W/Code by [[1815:Lawrence Lessig]]

", "slug": "on-indirection-and-the-implications-of-moral-profiteering", "title": "On Indirection & the Implications of Moral Profiteering" }, { "created": "Thu, 04 Jun 2020 02:03:01 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 1913, "id": 23, "modified": null, "post": "
Originally published on July 29, 2018

An article by the American Conservative argues, \"War Doesn't Make Sense Anymore\" in the 21st century.

I reject this notion on the basis: War absolutely still makes sense, warfare is just fought very differently today than 50 years ago. The basis of this argument spawns from, among other things, the sentiments that: \"Law can't keep up with new tech.\"[1]

This essay provides (probably unpopular) hypotheses on:
(a) Why So Many Terrorists are Men & Technologists[2]
(b) Why Men Predominate Tech[3]
(c) Why Technology is the Stage of Modern-Day Warfare

I want to begin with a disclaimer: I think women are every bit as capable as men. The intent of this essay is not to compare the abilities of women, men, and or those identifying as other. My objective is to establish that there are reasons for the number of men v. women in tech that are not entirely explained by e.g. discrimination. Social re-enforcement is no doubt a large culprit. Society hasn't normalized an image of women, for instance, as military figures. However, I think there's something more systemic, rooted in our biology. I ask you to question with me, why 88% of [[1914:homicides]] in the [[1791:United States]] between 2003 and 2012 were committed by males?[4]

My hypothesis for (a, b) is that men are, by mean, more intrinsically egotistical and violent than women are. i.e. Put simply, more men want to dominate the world than women.

This claim is important because my hypothesis for (a, c) is that technology is not just a career / profession -- it is a way of scaling one's impact to reach millions of people and impose changes on their life. And, apologies if I am projecting, but both data and anecdotes lead me to believe this image appeals more, on average, to males and their testosterone-leaning hormones.

I'd like to pivot beyond this aside and address the core of my claim, that technology is (and will play an increasingly important role as) the essence of modern-day warfare. And that we're already in the thick of it: With the [[1911:stock market]], [[1206:Cryptocurrency]], artificial intelligence, and our fundamental [[1912:digital rights]].

Essay:

Many people see programming or engineering or \"Technology\" (writ large) as a profession or career track one enters in order to get a job. Once upon a time, people would have similarly referred to those [[1915:privileged]] enough to read or write as \"scribes\". In fact, before \"computers\" were machines we programmed, they were a (women-dominated) profession. Eventually these things became ubiquitous. Those who entered these disciplines early on found themselves with the rare opportunity to move (increasingly) faster than policy/law and to determine the rules of the new world they were creating.

Plain and simple, technology is the creation, mastery, or advancement of tools to solve problems. Assuming we're able to avoid existential or global catastrophic circumstances (e.g. nuclear or guerrilla warfare, unstoppable AI) risks, it's reasonable to assume technology will continue to improve over time, and that it confers to its wielders a strict competitive advantage.

From this perspective, the reason to become proficient with technology is not just to get a job. It's the same reason one might reserve their right to own a gun and becoming a marksperson. It's because one's freedom of speech -- one's ability to speak code and manifest action -- is becoming farther reaching than firing a shot.

Today, over half of the world has and relies on [[1916:Internet Access]][5]. A well placed strategic offensive could leave millions of people without access to critical communication channels. Tens of thousands of engineers throughout silicon valley and the rest of the world find themselves in positions capable of instantly installing / deploying changes carrying the potential to impacts the lives of millions of people, without firing a shot.

Revolution used to be a monumental problem of collective action. Getting people to uproot a political party often meant putting their lives on the line. Organizing strategy, distributing supplies, coordinating movement and communication all required massive efforts. During the US civil war, 620k of the 31M population died (2%) died fighting slavery. The battle took four years.

Today, revolution can be coordinated and catalyzed in a viral episode of 24 hours. The \"[[1206:Cryptocurrency]] / [[1837:decentralization]] / [[1917:blockchain]] revolution\". The \"artificial intelligence revolution\". In ostensibly one night, [[855:Protocol Labs]] can ICO (international coin offering) [[1918:FileCoin]] and raise $250M. This number pales in comparison to the amount generated between December and January 2017 through bitcoin and ethereum.

And \"technical entrepreneurs\" (those well versed in both the technical how-to and the strategic why-to create a new technology) understand this dynamic well. As programming continues to establish itself as our next evolution of basic literacy, opportunists come out of the woodwork to capitalize; to catalyze and to take part in a revolution. Some come selling shovels. Some jump on board the Oregon trail for their chance to usher in a new age / paradigm of technology and be at the forefront of policy and decision making which emerges with it.

Many of the \"revolutionist\" engineers (and their sometimes cult-like followers) believe they can advance and popularize their technology faster than those with greed or competing visions can understand the landscape, and thus win the race. In one line, they are banking that: \"Law can't keep up with tech\". That they have more sophistication to upgrade society to a new system and then install their rules on top of it than others have to prevent it. And (probably, naively) to deprecate out existing system into obsolescence*. I claim capitalism is rather effective at collective action, intrinsically well funded and incentivized to undermine such efforts, and thus should be subject to some basic controls and rules to prevent unfair play.

* Many sufficiently strategic/cunning Machiavellian technical entrepreneurs probably[6] aren't thinking this way. They are either selling the shovels, waiting for the right time to collude and bet against these technologies, vulture-ing and trying to raise as much money in the \"now\" while these technologies have hype around them, and/or are more interested in ensuring a revolution comes about which lets them retain control (by any means) so they can then install their laws on the new firmware (rather than caring specifically which technology actually wins). You wouldn't know it by listening to them. And it might be the case that you *couldn't* tell by listening to them, because these pressures are driven by VCs or other nameless forces which utilize indirection[7] to achieve these ends which most benefit their shareholders.

To date, bitcoin came closer than most shifts to seeing something which resembles an escape velocity. What happened -- instead of a new class of millionaires emerging and a revolutionary radical shift of power and wealth occurring -- was that billions of dollars of changed hands back to the wealthy as established players applied pressure and colluded to bet against (in a self-fulfilling prophecy) bitcoin's success. This is a prime example of the critical importance of collective action. But there are hundreds of other efforts gaining momentum, all looking to spark the winning revolution which lets them implant the world they envision.

Which of these digital-wars are being fought today? What protects us?

In part, regulations are supposed to protect us. Regulations are pretty much the government's only real purpose[8] -- to do things like guarantee our freedom of speech and e.g. declare things like internet access to be important enough to be considered a public utility, like water. Regulations tend to *admit* policy can't keep up and so they put protections in place to protect the People so they don't get completely screwed until we figure out what works and what doesn't.

But if the People aren't getting screwed, corporations claim they're getting screwed. Corporations would be just find competing each other away to oblivion until there's just a single monopoly serving everyone. And so capitalists often [conveniently, intentionally] misinterpret regulations as \"slowing down\" progress / free markets whereas what they're [the regulations] really doing is preventing exploitation by doing things like forcing internet service providers to provide a minimum quality of service to the People.

When lobbyists from internet service providers push politicians within the FCC to remove safe-guards and regulations put in place to protect Americans against censorship, this is a wage of war.

And this is exactly what has happened over the past year when the US Federal Communications Commission passed docket 17-108 to roll back the 2015 Open Internet Order which classified internet service providers as a public utility. The removal of such protections leaves us with gaping openings which leaves us vulnerable to corporate interests advancing their technologies in way to which we are indefensible and which conspires to undermine the continuance of our freedom of speech.

We're in a very unique and sensitive time where one way to battle back is by redesigning the world wide web (our fundamental medium of communication and connectedness) in such a way that internet service providers cannot control our internet behavior, censor us, isolate and cut us off, decide with whom we can connect, or throttle us. In response, many technologies are rising to the occasion to fight back. But what's to say our new overlords need be any better than the old? And once we give them the key to the city, whose to guarantee they can be stopped?

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/law-too-slow-for-new-tech-how-keep-up/
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html
[3] http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/06/programmers-gender.html
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_crime
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage
[6] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL21399542M/Moral_mazes
[7] https://www.facebook.com/michael.karpeles/posts/10102911316939380 -- indirection
[8] [[97:Who Owns the Future?]]: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16801714W/Who_Owns_the_Future

Book recommendations:
- [[637:\"Who Owns the Future?\" by Jaron Lanier]]: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16801714W/Who_Owns_the_Future
- Cornered: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15483476W/Cornered
- [[1217:Moral Mazes]]: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL21399542M/Moral_mazes
", "slug": "Engineers-and-Terrorism-On-Modern-Digital-Warfare", "title": "Engineers & [[1910:Terrorism]]: On Modern [[1909:Digital-Warfare]]" }, { "created": "Sun, 07 Jun 2020 01:44:33 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 1921, "id": 24, "modified": null, "post": "Today I had a [[539:conversation]] with [[1170:Bryan Newbold]] about [[15:Mathematics]]. We talked about [[1919:Mathematica]]. We talked about [[1148:Scheme (programming language)]] and [[1920:intermediary representations]]. Of course [[402:Bret Victor]] came up. And now I am giving a demo of [[16:World Wide Graph (w2g)]].", "slug": "conversation-with-bryan-newbold", "title": "Catching up with [[1170:Bryan Newbold]]" }, { "created": "Sun, 29 Mar 2020 16:19:05 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 1813, "id": 3, "modified": null, "post": "

Brick and mortar libraries provide a lot of value beyond serving as a home for books. They host programs, enable internet access, and connect patrons with an array of essential services. But I want to talk about books for a moment, because the future of this fundamental service is at risk.

There are some things worth knowing about libraries:

1. ~[[1785:1793]], the American public lending library concept was innovated by [[273:Benjamin Franklin]] in 1973 via the Library Company of Philadelphia.

2. Libraries work because of this [[1788:policy 17 U.S.C. \u00a7 109(a)]] called the \"[[1787:First Sale Doctrine]]\" (right of first sale) which, \"gives the owners of copyrighted works the rights to sell, lend, or share their copies without having to obtain permission or pay fees\". Libraries buy books or receive donations and then lend these books to patrons. https://libguides.ala.org/copyright/firstsale.

3. ~1900 [[1789:Andrew Carnegie]] helped fund 2,500 libraries according to brilliant \"[[1790:Carnegie formula]]\" which (as prerequisite funding) required the local government to commit to drawing public funding + paying staff for maintenance, operating as non-profit, and providing the building site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library

4. Today there are > 115,000 libraries in the [[1791:United States]]. Many libraries have limited, premier floor space where patrons can check out books, and out of circulation \"stacks\" where less used material may be moved \"out of circulation\".

5. Most American public libraries have limited funds and opportunities for increasing their funds (beyond receiving funding via taxes), and have access to very few engineering resources.

6. Since ~2000, libraries have faced increasing pressure to offer their books online to remain relevant within the digital age. Except, due to point [5], most libraries have no engineering staff. They have neither the leverage nor the resources to create and manage an online lending system. And they are terrified about the idea of doing getting sued, because that means they lose their jobs and their ability to serve the public. This makes Libraries helpless and vulnerable.

7. [[1782:OverDrive]] (& [[1783:Libby]]) -- run by the [[1808:Japanese]] for-profit, [[1784:Rakuten]] -- exploits this vulnerability and fills this digital divide for libraries by negotiating ebook access through publishers. Titles are made digitally available to libraries at a significant markup (e.g. ~5x). If this weren't bad enough for libraries, [[1782:OverDrive]] pushes libraries in the direction of forgoing their first sale doctrine (the thing which allows them to buy and lend out their own books)[2] and instead offers a watered down lease model where the library has to pay over and over again to lease and lend books. So the libraries (which we fund as tax payers) spend 5x the [[1795:Amazon]] cost of a book, and we only get a ~2 year lease before we have to renew our purchase. What is the alternative for libraries? Not having the digital books patrons want?

8. In [[1811:2007]] the [[313:Internet Archive]] received official [[1809:Special Library]] (Rush Brandis, [[1793:California State Library]]) accreditation by the State of [[1794:California]]. In [[1810:2011]], being one of the few non-profit archives and libraries with an engineering staff, the [[313:Internet Archive]] piloted its own online [[1796:Controlled Digital Lending]] (https://controlleddigitallending.org) program on OpenLibrary.org, backed by its physical book collections.

9. As of 2013, 90% of America Libraries rely on [[1782:OverDrive]] to provide a digital offering.

10. The year is 2020. Fast forward 15 years. What happens in 2035 when US libraries which have been spending tax payer money on leasing, no longer own the books they purchase? And what happens if one of these ebook providers stops doing business or increases their rates?
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3k3wkk/microsoft-ebooks-will-stop-working-because-its-shutting-down-a-drm-server

11. Over the past 10 years, a handful of pro-library movers and shakers (like [[1798:Hadrien Gardeur]] & [[1797:Leonard Richardson]]) have pioneered open standards (e.g. [[1799:OPDS]], [[1800:Readium]]) to enable libraries and other members of the non-profit and for-profit book ecosystem, to streamline the process of syndicating, distributing, and accessing book (and related) content. [[1786:Raj Kumar]], [[428:Brenton Cheng]] and also [[423:Richard Caceres]], [[1180:Charles Horn]], and I have been hard at working within the [[313:Internet Archive]] integrating and maintaining implementations of these standards. On top of these foundations, confederations have emerged to share resources to create projects like [[1802:Library Simplified]] (https://librarysimplified.org ~2015) and [[1801:FOLIO]] to enable libraries to retake control by running their own online catalog and lending infrastructure.

12. If US libraries are to survive, it will take more than librarians. It will take we the people stepping up to bring our skills to non-profits. It will take organizers helping facilitate new types of collaboration between librarians and mission-aligned non-profits. It will require respectful and responsible \"unionizing\" of libraries at the library level.

At the [[313:Internet Archive]], [[1803:Chris Freeland]] runs the [[1804:Open Libraries]] Partners initiative (http://openlibraries.online) which brainstorms how libraries can share data, resources, and work together to build a system that works better for everyone.

Want to learn more? What to help support the [[1812:American Library System]] and see how you can help?

Contact me and:

* We can include you in one of Chris's upcoming webinars.

* We have a slack channel with scores of open-source contributors of all sorts of backgrounds (library science, marketing, design, engineering, research) and we'd love to talk about your ideas.
All thoughts are my own.

", "slug": "the-uncertain-future-of-american-libraries", "title": "The Uncertain Future of American Libraries" }, { "created": "Thu, 11 Jun 2020 22:38:25 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 1926, "id": 25, "modified": null, "post": "Today, I did a [[503:Demo]] video of [[16:World Wide Graph (w2g)]]. We talked about [[1923:Notion]] by [[1924:Ivan Zhao]] et al and we talked about [[1675:Roam Research]] by [[963:Conor White-Sullivan]] et al.

We discussed [[1:Wikidata]] and [[1896:freebase]] and their history. 

We talked about one of my favorite [[281:Essays]] by [[341:Vannevar Bush]] called [[520:As We May Think]] which inspired [[502:Douglas Engelbart]], [[402:Bret Victor]], [[1683:Alan Kay]], [[863:Ted Nelson]] and many other visionaries.

We talked about [[5:Google]]'s [[1485:knowledge graph]] and described how we may create our own open source, potentially decentralized public [[1485:knowledge graph]] which the public can use to create rich notetaking applications and [[1042:Tools For Thought]]. 

The [[1925:source code]] for [[474:graph.global]] can be found here: https://github.com/w2g/w2g", "slug": "demo-video-of-graph-global", "title": "First [[503:Demo]] of [[16:World Wide Graph (w2g)]]\u00a0" }, { "created": "Thu, 02 Apr 2020 05:17:23 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 1863, "id": 18, "modified": null, "post": "Today I am showing a [[503:Demo]] of the [[16:World Wide Graph (w2g)]]. My name is [[7:Michael E. Karpeles (Mek)]]. This is a replacement for [[2:Facebook]] that you can use to create blog posts which have rich snippets of [[1386:green text]]. It is inspired by the work of [[283:Mark Carranza]] and [[968:Kevin Kwok]] and [[402:Bret Victor]] and [[963:Conor White-Sullivan]]. [[1352:Jerry Michalski]] also has a wonderful demo on [[1850:thebrain.com]]", "slug": "demo-of-world-wide-graph-w2g", "title": "Second [[503:Demo]] of [[16:World Wide Graph (w2g)]]" }, { "created": "Mon, 29 Jun 2020 07:12:20 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 1972, "id": 26, "modified": null, "post": "This is a page of things that make me happy.

The concept is inspired by [[1978:Derek Sivers]] [[1979:Now page]] (https://nownownow.com/about)

[[1980:2020-06-29]]

\u2022 I posted about [[1956:Mek's Happy Page]] on [[727:Twitter]] and it felt good.

[[1965:2020-06-28]]

\u2022 [[1975:Mckay Wrigley]] mentioned the [[275:book]] [[1977:Founders at Work]] on [[727:Twitter]] and we had it on [[481:openlibrary.org]] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24962027M/Founders_at_work

\u2022 [[1252:Benjamin Reinhardt]] topped [[1946:Hacker News]] with his [[281:Essay]] [[1948:Why Does DARPA Work?]] https://benjaminreinhardt.com/wddw

\u2022 [[1170:Bryan Newbold]] showed me his [[503:Demo]] of [[1970:ModelThing]] http://modelthing.org

", "slug": "happy", "title": "Happy" }, { "created": "Sat, 11 Jul 2020 20:16:12 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 2095, "id": 28, "modified": null, "post": "\"No


* Knowledge Graph https://github.com/w2g/w2g



1. PROBLEM: I have too many browser tabs open! Let's apply 5 Why's
https://www.facebook.com/michael.karpeles/posts/10102203163145260



On [[2094:2020-07-10]] [[2090:Beaker Browser]] announced a [[2093:tiling window manager]] on twitter:
https://twitter.com/BeakerBrowser/status/1281631200889774085 -- https://youtu.be/AhVRQvFwetw?t=14.

Sources:
[1] [[2090:Beaker Browser]] and the [[2093:tiling window manager]]
https://youtu.be/AhVRQvFwetw?t=14

Essays:
[[2090:Beaker Browser]] [[2091:Firefox]] [[2092:Mozilla]]


https://www.facebook.com/michael.karpeles/posts/10102203163145260


", "slug": "browsers-of-the-future", "title": "Browsers of the Future (Draft)" }, { "created": "Thu, 24 Sep 2020 01:11:57 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 2155, "id": 32, "modified": null, "post": "Today I talked to [[2154:Matthew Hoffman]] about [[341:Vannevar Bush]]'s [[338:Memex]] he has an [[281:Essay]] called [[520:As We May Think]]", "slug": "matthew", "title": "Talking about the [[338:Memex]]" }, { "created": "Mon, 10 Aug 2020 07:24:31 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 2126, "id": 30, "modified": null, "post": "The primary reason I compose [[164:Music]] is because it enables me to fully express myself, in a way which is true to myself, empowering, [[2124:cathartic]], and shielded from true understanding and thus judgement and ridicule.

Music is important to me as a means of encoding or [[2125:encrypting]] my raw feelings and achieving cathartic release. It affords me an important layer of [[1818:abstraction]] and plausible deniability (read: protection). And because of the harmony of these two features, I am able to safely share a version of my most intimate or controversial thoughts in a way which may offer an allusory, provocative, or emotional experience for others who may find themselves resonated in unanticipatable ways.

In this respect, I reject the need for music or any creative forms to be limited to a specific genre or lens of intention, and invite that music be protected as a way to safely explore alternate perspectives without fear, pressure, or corruption.

For me, music is a way to express deep sadness and discontent with myself and with the world -- and for the intensity of these feelings to be seen in a way which is safe for myself and others; that we may together suspend disbelief or preconceived knowledge and revel both simultaneously in uncharted territory and common ground, in a state of feeling and reflection where there needn't be right or wrong answers.
", "slug": "on-music", "title": "On Music" }, { "created": "Tue, 11 Aug 2020 09:53:43 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 2135, "id": 31, "modified": null, "post": "
This essay is a response to [[2127:Hugo Amsellem]] [[2128:@HugoAmsellem]]:
https://twitter.com/HugoAmsellem/status/1293074499550707712 &
https://twitter.com/HugoAmsellem/status/1293108009095303169

The theses of [[564:Paul Graham]]'s [[281:essay]] `inequality` http://paulgraham.com/inequality.html are:
(a) don't hate startups: police corruption,
(b) take from rich, &
(c) increase productivity of the poor. It aims to absolve + glorify startups as a (!= only) high risk vehicle which accomplishes this.

Favoring those most able to absorb risk.

A meaningful way of enabling equal footing and greater inclusive opportunity for startups is by increasing the floor for everyone and funding sustainable non-profit services which serve everyone & help the poor disproportionately: e.g. [[1790:Carnegie formula]] Libraries.

Which wealth is being created matters. An open/unregulated market w/ millions of hustling founders may yield [[2132:opiods]], sugar, pornography, and [[2130:externalities]] such as global warming (while very well elevating themselves).

[[2131:Regulation]] is important, though as noted can hurt startups.

* The challenge for non-profits is survival: sustainable funding and favorable policy
* The challenge for startups is the high-risk barrier to entry (product market fit) and inequitable access
* The problem with startups is they need to be checked for corruption once successful

We have an opportunity, as a society, to drive talent to [[2133:NGOs]]/non-profits, and establish public funding mechanisms to ensure both [[2134:startups]] & public-good establishments flourish.

Of the two: because startups incentivize themselves, I think we need to be driving more talented people to NGOs.
", "slug": "ngos-and-inequality", "title": "[[2133:NGOs]] and Inequality" }, { "created": "Sun, 27 Sep 2020 21:51:51 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 2162, "id": 33, "modified": null, "post": "
by [[7:Michael E. Karpeles (Mek)]], [[2161:2020-09-27]]

Today, a colleague asked me this challenging question about my experiences tracking my life in a public Quantified Self spreadsheet:

> I saw that you maintain a public spreadsheet about activities in your life. I was simply wondering doesn't maintaining that sort of a list sort of confine your further actions? I mean as humans we do things that even though they might be repetitive give us a sense of freedom you know, because we might be ignorant about those things - but listing those things down - wouldn't that be limiting for our future actions?

This struck me as a great opportunity to share some of my aggregate experiences, learnings, and history around my Quantified Self experiment

First, for the uninitiated, I should share some background.

2000 Days of Quantified Self
5 years (2,080 days) ago on January 23, 2015, I started tracking & quantifying various aspects of my entire life in a public, Quantified-Self Spreadsheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1k-zl-Ya4OAU7Lp8DsPGy7mSJVCeXSPqK673Wiq8ndt8/edit#gid=656185669

\"image\"

I track everything from exercise to learning, hours of sleep, minutes spent helping others (philanthropy), working, or reading, whether I organized my daily agenda, and beyond.

How it works
Each column has its own distinct descriptor, weight, and formula describing, relatively, how important a quality is to my daily schedule and what objective target score I might be able to repeatedly tune my sights on. 

https://www.facebook.com/michael.karpeles/posts/10102117504156560

Goal
The idea began an experiment inspired by [[274:The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin]]. Franklin would maintain a journal with a table of 13 virtues which he aspired to exhibit daily. Things like moderation and temperance. I mused, in the golden age of technology, how might [[273:Benjamin Franklin]]'s table be made more useful?

> What if [I] represented every day [of my life] as a linear combination of weighted hourly participation in different activities and tried to achieve an average target score?
https://www.facebook.com/michael.karpeles/posts/10102117504156560

The hypothesis was: computers are better than we are at remembering information. They can keep track of and compute complex equations and relationships better and can assist us by presenting these datum in novel ways which would otherwise be challenging for us to conceptualize. Having a history of these numbers can help [us] revise [our] strategies over time and improve. [There's also value in having] this data from a provenance point of view.

My initial theory of change began as: The more data and structure I have, the more I may understand, tune, and hit more ambitious goals.

Reality
In reality, the usefulness of the quantified self practice as a low-friction tool for accountability and bootstrapping habits has far exceeded the value I've realized from data mining or insights. It's nice and motivating to see results or to challenge myself with gamification (e.g. one of the first rows of my spreadsheet calculates how I'd perform if I was having a \"superhero\" day, and it can be fun to reach \"super-mek status\"). But really, the value has been finding a way to systematically use a technological framework to turn myself into my own life coach. To cement one meta-habit which helps me bootstrap the rest. 

My revised [[2163:theory of change]] is: Keeping up habits is really hard. At best, I have enough attention span to keep up a small handful of habits. An alarm helps me wake up at a specific time. Showering, brushing my teeth, and getting dressed are all activities with strong social and physiological incentives and feedback loops (avoiding offending others and medical consequences). Designing my life so I bike to work, listening to an ebook as I bike, and strategically ensuring the gym is literally on my path home have all been major optimizations. But cementing more habits is a monumentally difficult task. Unless there's a way to have a single, easy habit (let's call it an accountability check-in) which may bootstrap or remind oneself about every other inspirational habit. This is my theory of change. Investing 2 minutes a day to fill in my Quantified Self spreadsheet gives me public pressure, accountability, and increases my opportunity at remembering to participate in activities. The practice takes advantage of spatial and temporal locality -- two of the same principles computer programs and architectures use to compute efficiently.

In a nutshell, if you want to learn guitar, don't keep it in its case. Keep it somewhere easy to access. Make it as easy as possible to access and do everything in your power (motivation, discipline) to play it, even for only 5 minutes. In the spirit of spaced repetition, the more you do it early on, the more the practice will become cemented. 

But is it all red roses and green pastures?
In my opinion, life is a balance of many perspectives and trade-offs.
e.g. explore v. exploit
\u2022 How much do we research before we start doing?
\u2022 How much do we have fun v. work?
\u2022 Do we cook or order from a restaurant?
\u2022 If we go to a restaurant, should we choose one we know is good, or try a new one?
On one hand, trying new things (within itself) has experiential value. We learn more about the landscape of possibilities.
On the other hand, (as is often the case for financial investors) there is value in knowing what one's financial \"return\" is going to be. And there's tremendous value in predictability, certainty, and compounding interest.

Point 1: Personalization. I choose this strategy for myself. An important note about my [[676:Quantified Self Spreadsheet]] is, I (made the decision and) broadly identified classes of things I find valuable. If I follow this path, I have a general idea of where I'll end up. The act of checking a spreadsheet once a day is a powerful reminder of the activities I value (activities which I've found will more likely to be replaced by procrastination than any other high-leverage opportunity, in the absence of structure). People should choose (or not choose) whatever strategy feels most comfortable to them, in the same way someone may choose a School, a Religion, a Friend, or a Political Candidate. We make such choices every day

Point 2: Mutability. The spreadsheet can change at any time. Simply put, as soon as the spreadsheet ceases to be useful, I can change it. The spreadsheet isn't static: I change it over time to reflect my updated values.

Point 3: Free-will. The spreadsheet is a recommendation, not a prescription. I'm in control. People often suffer from the \"consistency principle\" fallacy -- i.e. once we as people decide something, that we're somehow bound to it. But ultimately, we get to decide how religiously or rigorously we are going to follow our own rules. I often deviate from my spreadsheet

Point 4: Positive re-enforcement + compound Interest, visualized. Another benefit of a spreadsheet is the inspiration / positive re-enforcement which comes by seeing progress over time. I've done 45,000 pushups. And 10,000 pull-ups. Wow!Counterpoint: Is it true that strictly following a template or algorithm (even if that algorithm is \"try as many new things as possible) may reduce one's ability to experience a diverse set of perspectives? Certainly. Committing to any strategy may have such consequences. See: [[2166:Goodhart's law]]: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. By choosing any lens (even by choosing not to use a lens), we are by definition making a decision to constrain / limit / focus ourselves in a specific way.The question boils down to a personal decision: do we believe outcomes will be better (our happiness, wealth, friendships) by avoiding structure + planning ([[2167:laissez faire]]) and instead playing life by ear vs. being intentional and applying methods, strategies, goals, approaches, and having theories of change.Careful: The trap is that life is not \"all or nothing\". laissez faire v. intention is often a false dichotomy. One applies different strategies at different times in their life on different aspects of their life. Someone may wish to be structured about their job. Or about their education (e.g. learning a new language may benefit significantly from an organizational plan). Someone may decide that, e.g. for their love / dating life, that a more natural approach is better than trying to optimize a formula.The beauty is, you get to decided and move the slider bars. The beast is, we're always making a decision, even by electing not to do a strategy.

FAQs

\u2022 Doesn't this take a lot of time?
It sometimes takes 5 minutes a day. That's a good thing. It's 5 minutes I want to be spend reminding myself about the activities I care about and how I'm going to achieve them. Over the course of 2,000 days, this equates to around 10k minutes which is around 15, ten hour days. There are 60 months in 5 years. This ultimately means essentially means I am investing 1 work day every four months. Most people (including myself) likely waste more than this amount of time watching movies and procrastinating.

\u2022 What kind of analysis have you done?
I occasionally sanity check or tune my weights and columns to accurately reflect my evolving goals, but I don't do a whole lot of data mining. Sometimes (e.g. if I notice myself being sad), I'll check to see whether I am experiencing any cycles (e.g. do I tend to get sad during similar months?). As noted above, the process has been more instrumental in providing motivation, accountability, and memory than it has been at a tool for mining insight. With enough data and improvements in frameworks for doing data mining, I might fight this path pays dividends. But at the end of the day, for now I'm a human meat sack and I'm at peace with the reality that there's only so much I can or should optimize in order to be healthy and happy. And I already feel pretty good about how hard and smart I work (even if I know how it could be done better, at the risk of diminishing returns).

\u2022 How rigorous is the spreadsheet?
Not very. On several occasions, I've had extraordinarily bad months. I've gotten sick, been traveling, felt unmotivated and altogether dropped the ball. Often times when this happens, I practice forgiveness. I mark myself as \"0\" on my spreadsheet to back-fill these botched days and then leave a google Note on the spreadsheet cell to indicate my failure. And then I move on.
", "slug": "in-defense-of-quantified-self", "title": "In Defense of Quantified Self" }, { "created": "Thu, 06 Aug 2020 23:29:53 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 2115, "id": 29, "modified": null, "post": "[[1399:Andy Matuschak]] has a wonderful [[281:Essay]], [[2121:\"Why Books Don't Work\"]], which may be read at https://andymatuschak.org/books (CC BY-NC 3.0).

The headline alone is enough to stir debate even before the essay is opened, though I implore against falling into this trap. The title offers either an opportunity to miss the point and forgo valuable learning, or to those willing to suspend disbelief, a chance to receive wisdom about how books are limited in their ability to facilitate learning. I find the latter interpretation to be more fruitful, and I think the one deserved by Andy, whom I will endorse without hesitation (conceding his own track record speaks be more loudly), who has substantial expertise and informed opinions not limited to the topics of education, meta-learning & epistemology, experience design, and research methodology. You can learn more at http://andymatuschak.org. And on this topic of books and in his essay, I've found Andy's perspective to be informed, insightful, and worth reading (multiple times).

It's good enough that I feel it deserves response, critique, and perhaps additional chapters of complimentary perspectives.

Disclaimer

The subtle \"disagreements\" I choose to highlight within my response to his essay do not necessarily constitute disagreements with Andy. Based on previous conversations with him and re-reads of his essay, I'm convinced I agree on the majority of the points he presents. More likely is the reality that a five-page essay is unlikely to effectively reflect all perspectives on the topic and attempting to cover every alternative is more likely to dilute his main message than to elucidate.

In contrast, being a lengthy and bad writer myself with less sensitivity to discretion, I have yet to internalize this lesson and will so venture to continue until exhaustion. Needless to say, I hope my approach, instead of being perceived as disagreement, presents itself as an offer of alternative lens. That we may take books for granted, perhaps too there may be perspectives which seem obvious to Andy and perhaps worthy of omission but (I at least I feel) may be useful or appreciated by others whose learning goals/values, styles, or preferences may differ. The spirit of my disclaimer comes from https://twitter.com/mekarpeles/status/1291512991100203008. In summary, Andy is great -- Thanks Andy for writing this essay.  

Checking for Understanding

I think before offering my perspectives, it's a respectful, responsible, and moreover useful exercise to demonstrate some level of understanding of the original work (i.e. to present one's understanding and assumptions openly so there is shared context and grant others the opportunity to challenge and discuss on common ground / equal footing). I will attempt to do so here and will happily update this section as I inevitably learn where and how my assumptions are wrong.

Below I list some takeaway assumptions and cite sections (hopefully faithfully presented) which led me to these conclusions:

1. The [static] form of a book is easy to take for granted (both for its good and its limitations)
>  Books are easy to take for granted. Not any specific book, I mean: the form of a book.
> which is a shame because, as we\u2019ll see, it\u2019s quite mistaken.

2. That perhaps a primary value of a reading a books is to load one's memory and repeatably augment one's understanding:
> Have you ever had a book like this\u2014one you\u2019d read\u2014come up in conversation, only to discover that you\u2019d absorbed what amounts to a few sentences?

3. That many people are embarrassed by forgetting things they've read
> The situation only feels embarrassing because it\u2019s hard to see how common it is.

4. That books perhaps are meant to be read fully, beginning-to-end
>  Each takes around 6\u20139 hours to read

5. That reading takes a long time 
> Each takes around 6\u20139 hours to read. Adult American college graduates read 24 minutes a day on average, so a typical reader might spend much of a month with one of these books

6. That [3, 5] may imply that books (or how we read them, and this is part of the point) are not effective at [2]
> books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don\u2019t realize it.

7. The scope of Andy's essay is ~limited to non-fiction / textbooks / research, etc.
> This essay is [...] about explanatory non-fiction like the books [...] which aim to convey detailed knowledge.

8. That books contain useful knowledge
> books are shockingly powerful knowledge-carrying artifacts 
> some readers really do absorb deep knowledge from books, at least some of the time.

9. That books & lectures don't have an explicit teaching strategy
> Books don\u2019t work for the same reason that lectures don\u2019t work: neither medium has any explicit theory of how people actually learn things

Which is perhaps good given people learn differently; every book or lecture is organized by a person which is using their own techniques to give direction and convey knowledge.  

10. That lectures, and perhaps books, lack reliability in \"teaching\" where successful teaching results in [2] of [7]. 
> you probably don\u2019t believe that lectures are a reliable way to convey knowledge.

11. Many students and lecturers (and readers and writers) are unaware of (or misjudge) the limitations of their mediums.
> If pressed, many lecturers would offer a more plausible cognitive model: understanding actually comes after the lecture, when attendees solve problem sets, write essays, etc. The lecture provides the raw information for those later activities.
(which I strongly agree).

12. Acquired knowledge is actualized by successfully applying it
> to understand something, [one] must actively engage [... in] activities like interactive discussions and projects;
(agree, in books, this can mean examples, dialogues between other authors, citations, etc)

13. lectures lack a functioning cognitive model.
> lectures don\u2019t work because the medium lacks a functioning cognitive model
Disagree. Many lectures leverage cause/effect, demonstration, and other powerful mechanisms (e.g. Professor Walter Lewin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaALPa7Dwdw). Sometimes the point of a lecture is to give 1 data point where there was previously 0. And these inaugural data points can be incredibly influential, informative, and transformative. I don't see why a lecture as a mediums needs to lack a functioning cognitive model while I can agree many (MIT lecturers scratching at a chalkboard) do. 

14. Books & Lectures work by transmitting packaged content for consideration
> [...] that model is transmissionism

15. Books and lectures transmit but don't ensure thought and consideration.
> [those who think about what they\u2019re reading] do absorb knowledge from books. [...] they\u2019re summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing [which are] learn[ed] specific reflective strategies [i.e. metacognition].

Knit-Picks

I think [9] lectures are a reliable way, and [6] books are effective mediums for encoding and conveying knowledge. I don't think they're sufficient (in a single linear pass) to enable memorization or understanding. And books are seldom \"context free\", i.e. sufficient absent of processes for using books.

> Where is the book in all this? If we believe that successful reading requires engaging in all this complex metacognition, how is that reflected in the medium? What\u2019s it doing to help?

It's in a different book:
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20654304W/How_to_Read_a_Book?edition=howtoreadbook0000unse

* Much application occurs on people's own time and not in real time. Whether someone can recall a memorized fact is not always a critical as one's ability to recall an important detail as it becomes relevant. Many cases for memorization have been partially deprecated into obsolescence (e.g. memorizing statistical tables, manual calculations v. programming, calculus chain rules). They're still conceptually very useful to know of, to intuitively and contextually understand, and to be able to apply. But that doesn't necessarily mean one must be practiced in such things.


In Defense of Books

Here are a few ways books (or the circumstances which create them) may actually be getting worse over time, not given full credit, or where we may be misattributing blame (when really it's the author, reader, or society's fault).

1. Signal-to-noise: The barrier to entry has been lessened for who can write a book. This has both positive and negative effects. On one hand, more great works exist. On the other, the noise ratio is exacerbated.

2. Lack of collaboration: Very few books are written by many authors and many competing books are written on the same topic. 

3. Misaligned incentives: there are monetary incentives to compete rather than collaborate

4. Bad Teachers: People who know things are not necessarily the best teachers or writers. e.g. the story of Charles Hutton's, \"Theory of the Earth\" described on page 94 of Bill Bryson's, \"A Short History of Nearly Everything\":

https://archive.org/details/shorthistoryofne0000brys_u9b9/page/94/mode/2up

Coincidentally, I had forgotten the name Hutton, however I was able to recall the relevant material through the associative trail of, \"least read important book\".

5. Good teachers: Euclids Elements
(https://openlibrary.org/books/OL6196489M/The_thirteen_books_of_Euclid's_Elements) survived as a definitive textbook on mathematics and geometry for 2,000 years, specifically because *how* it was written (axiomatically as a collection of compounding proofs) and because Euclid was an exemplary teacher. He was so sought after that he was employed to teach King Ptolemy
(https://archive.org/stream/theusesandtriump00johnuoft?ref=ol&access=1#page/5/mode/1up/search/ptolemy).

During one such lesson with Ptolemy, when asked for a shorter way to learn Geometry than studying, Euclid famously answered, \"There is no royal road to Geometry.

The idea of propositions as proofs was itself very new [a,b] and that Euclid had the intuition and genius to formalize the unite and findings of scores of Geometers of the time by incrementally composing all of geometry from a set of simple axioms is a testament to the power latent in a good book. The right book matters as much as the reader.

a. http://www.msme.us/2013-2-3.pdf
b. https://www.math.tamu.edu/~don.allen/history/thales2/thales2.html#:~:text=Thales%20is%20believed

Of the books of this era which survive today, it's no surprise that many were written by great teachers. For instance, Rhetoric, Physics, Nicomachean Ethics, Metaphysics, Logic (Organon), and treatises on optics, animals, and the soul, among other things, were all revolutionized by Aristotle, who also happened to be the tutor of a young Alexander the Great. It's similarly no surprised that many of Aristotle's works have survived, filled with examples and explanations.

6. Book Tech Evolves: I feel we may be unfairly discounting how much technological advancement occurs within books. Test questions, annotations and citations, conversations, syntopticons, tables of contents, problem-sets, worked examples, illustrations...

Quintus Valerius Soranus (d. 82 B.C.) as the first author to provide a table of contents to help readers navigate a lengthy work. Leveraged by Pliny the Elder in Historia naturalis.



", "slug": "why-books-work-and-could-work-better", "title": "Why [[2114:Books]] Work And Could Work Better" }, { "created": "Sun, 04 Oct 2020 20:18:26 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 2173, "id": 34, "modified": null, "post": "I can count on my fingers the number of people I've met who faithfully live by [[273:Benjamin Franklin]]'s principle: \"[[2173:A place for everything and everything in its place]]\".

It's amazing how important predictability and organization are to various success metrics. [[2179:Context switching]] is already incredible expensive and [[2180:cache misses]] are very disruptive.

When I'm in a [[2181:flow state]] and I surpass my expected allotted time for a lookup -- e.g. where is my can opener -- my [[2182:Jenga]] tower of focus topples. Same is true for conversations and code. Losing a good train of thought or scrambling because a code definition changed.

Tooling can help augment the problem. Especially for digital material, evergreen [[2175:bidirectional links]] (which don't go stale), [[2176:labels]], sym(bolic)-links, and [[2177:search]]/[[2178:filters]] can bridge the divide -- letting us be as messy as we need to be while minimizing the consequences.

In people's day-to-day physical lives, some privileged and conscientious people hire secretaries/executive assistants, cleaners, and the like to put things in their place because they recognize the value.

In people's day-to-day physical lives, some privileged and conscientious people hire secretaries/[[2185:executive assistants]], cleaners, and the like to put things in their place because they recognize the value.

There's a tough trade-off between getting things done (near-term optimization) and long-term prosperity & survivability. Shareholders and markets seems to prioritize the former. Many smart orgs (like [[2174:Walmart]] & [[1795:Amazon]]) structure their models around the latter.

And I think in the world of this latter, there's tremendous value in the mantra: \"A place for everything and everything in its place\" Especially when \"winning\" means managing inventory (digital or otherwise). Food for raw thought.

Counterpoint: There's also the famous quip by [[2183:Albert Einstein]], \u201c[[2184:If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?]]\" I wouldn't suggest structure at expense of progress. Only perhaps we underestimate the value of organization as bedrock of enabling creativity.", "slug": "a-place-for-everything", "title": "A Place for Everything" }, { "created": "Mon, 22 Mar 2021 01:37:16 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 2601, "id": 35, "modified": null, "post": "Hi", "slug": "bjr", "title": "Brian James RubintonBrian James Rubinton" }, { "created": "Fri, 20 Aug 2021 17:55:33 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 2803, "id": 36, "modified": null, "post": "Slug ", "slug": "Slug", "title": "SAmos\u00a0SAmos\u00a0" }, { "created": "Wed, 31 Jan 2024 16:09:39 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 3096, "id": 40, "modified": null, "post": "This essay is meant to be philosophical and reflective.

This week, two separate people suggested I might want to, \"love myself\" more. I spent time reflecting upon why this sentiment feels strange to me. Intuitively, I understand and agree that showing oneself care, kindness, and compassion is useful. We should strive to become people we respect and value. Simultaneously, the same statement can be used as an insult: this person really loves themself; [[3099:narcissism]], presumably to the detriment or expense of caring for others. So it feels to be the case that either love is a spectrum and there's such a thing as too much, or that there are different ways to love oneself and thus the phrase may benefit from refinement and clarification. A part of me genuinely wonders whether we should be aspiring to love ourselves. I experience it in much the same way I experience the world \"selfishness\" -- a quality that seems necessary to exist at a sensitive balance. I wonder if there is a (or what may be the) relationship between love and selfishness.

Needless to say, I brought up my frustration about the accuracy of this phrase and [[3095:Anvita Pandit]] replied that these people were probably right in their review, so I am inspired to treat the claim seriously and also invest time into arriving at an understanding what it may mean for one to productively love oneself.

In what case might we tell someone they need to be more selfish? The simplified answer is often that someone is consistently making decisions that result in them giving more than they can take: importantly, to their own detriment. There are plenty of people who can give more than they take, and have an excess to give. The case where one may be told to be more selfish is when our friends realize that we're giving more than we're sustainably able to give and this poses a threat to either the comfort of the person's friends or the person.

This is an interesting lens to view love. Maybe it suggests that when one says, \"love yourself more\", perhaps they do so because it's their experience that they love who you are more than they feel you are loving yourself. If this is others' experience with the phrase as well, this is very kind and the thought fills me with warmth. Receiving validation from people we care about that we are worthy of more love than we are showing ourselves is a powerful sentiment and -- itself -- is an important showing of care for and validation of who we are.

I'm just not convinced that this discrepancy is a bad thing that needs remedy. I think it's important for one to show oneself love: to defend one's values, to lookout for one's health, well-being and happiness, to practice self care and understand one's needs, and to not put oneself down or diminish one's own self worth. But I'm not so sure that one should feel obligated to love themselves more than they do, or as much as others might love us. One doesn't have to love ice cream, even if others do. But maybe one shouldn't throw out ice cream just because they don't like it -- someone else might enjoy it! And that someone may have things to offer that make us feel loved, whole, and appreciated in ways that we may not be able to achieve in the same way ourselves.

My gut tells me that people may experience life differently, experience happiness as a result of different events. Some people see happiness as surfing all day, some people search for moral imperatives, some people relish in community. These interests are not mutually exclusive (see: https://mek.fyi/essays/politics/kicking-the-bucket) and instead exist as a gradient; a complicated linear combination. But the point, which I presently believe is material, is that the combination matters. We're all different and our views of happiness don't necessary all come (in the same dose) from how we see ourselves as a person. There are plenty of people who believe in [[3098:anatt\u0101]], the tenant of [[3097:Buddhism]] that there is no self. For those who embrace this perspective, it seems valid to me that one may not feel strongly about the requirement of loving oneself, in particular.

I think it's alright to not love things about ourselves, even when others like them. It's one of the things that might drive one to grow. Yesterday a friend and I were talking about \"fun facts\" about ourselves. I was able to come up with a long list of things that I think society may find interesting about me. Has done handstand clap pushups, climbed v11, started some company. I don't know that I feel pride for these things. This is one of the contexts in which the friend told me I may wish to love myself more. I'm not sure I want to take more pride in these things. What I do value is spending time with people. I value staying healthy and not feeling overwhelmed. This results in me going to the climbing gym obsessively and becoming someone who society sees as a good climber; it's just not the outcome I take most pride in or necessarily want to take more pride in.

I think one thing I may struggle with is that the world around me has specific expectations that I don't necessarily share. What is beauty, what is intelligence, what is love, what is happiness, what is morality/ethics/fairness/equitability. I think one can be someone who shows themselves self-care, likes aspects of who they are, and doesn't necessarily feel any special love the type of person other people seem as. If someone thinks I'm a great musician and I don't feel I'm a great musician, I may feel happy to be seen by a friend as a musician, but I don't know that I want to change how I feel about myself: I want to feel at peace with my standards for myself and have a healthy relationship with music, and also not delude myself into believing or feeling something that doesn't feel authentic. 

I look into the mirror and I see someone who I respect, someone who I know is trying really hard, who is trying to have principles and values and lives them. I see someone who cares about others and makes an effort to be kind. Someone who questions convention, shares liberally with others, advocates for those who weren't born into fortune. These are the qualities I respect in others, and they are values I love in myself. I am someone who loves deeply, and feels very loved by my friends. I just don't feel a need to love everything about myself. The love one might show themself is fundamentally different than the love and care we might receive from others. Yes, it's important to take care of and look out for ourselves, show ourselves compassion and forgiveness, and validate our self-worth. But I think it's okay that we annoy ourselves or disappoint ourselves, just as someone else might annoy or disappoint us. I feel good about being me, I feel energized by showing up and being valued by those around me, and I'm grateful to all of you for the love I feel that keeps me going. I just can't imagine a happy life where the only live I experience is from myself, whereas I relish in the idea of life with loving friends and peace with the fact that others may love me more than I might love myself.

For anyone who has suggested I can do more to love myself, I feel genuinely warmed by your care, happy to have had this chance to reflect, and excited to hear your thoughts and refine my own.
", "slug": "on-loving-oneself", "title": "On Loving Oneself" }, { "created": "Fri, 24 Sep 2021 20:17:45 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 2864, "id": 37, "modified": null, "post": "

Sometime in April, 2013 I registered the domain [[2859:thebestbookon.com]] with the singular mission of harnessing human collective action to determine the best nonfiction textbooks on different academic topics. I was also hoping the community would also help shape how such a useful subjective objective may be evolved.


The idea was motivated by a variety of sources:

  1. First and foremost, [[2863:lukeprog]]'s 2011 paper \"The Best Textbooks on Every Subject\": https://lesswrong.com/lw/3gu/the_best_textbooks_on_every_subject

  2. [[2861:Luis von Ahn]]'s lab & [[2862:GWAP]] ([[2860:games with a purpose]])

  3. [[469:Santiago Ortiz]]'s Ross Learning Spiral https://spiral.ross.org/spiral

  4. [[341:Vannevar Bush]]'s [[520:As We May Think]]

  5. [[414:Metacademy]]'s graph-based Knowledge Package Manager: https://metacademy.org

  6. All of the names like [[1399:Andy Matuschak]], [[402:Bret Victor]], [[1683:Alan Kay]], [[1898:Danny Hillis]] et al in this tweet: https://twitter.com/mekarpeles/status/1277362858263588864


The mission of collaborating to discovering and improve the world's best resources is near and dear to my heart and something I've spent some time thinking about: https://mek.fyi/mission


The Idea

As stated in https://archive.org/embed/openlibrary-tour-2020/Open+Library+Community+Celebration+2020.mp4?start=1865 and https://blog.openlibrary.org/2021/08/24/the-open-book-genome-project, book reviews can be pretty messy, off topic (such as a review reflecting amazon shipping instead of the book content), difficult to normalize and compare, can cater to trendy books, and may be gamed by publishers/readers.


> We\u2019ve all heard the advice, don\u2019t judge a book by its cover. But then how should we go about identifying books which are good for us?


Within [1] [[2863:lukeprog]]'s essay, \"The Best Textbooks on Every Subject\", they propose an interesting idea that high quality book recommendations may be possible by requiring a reader to recommend a book in comparison to at least one other book. This ensures, from a mathematical analogy, that we're talking about two points (a line and the derivative between them) rather than a single uncontextualized point in space.


The second insight was that this process could be formalized as a sports / competition bracket which anyone in the community could participate in. In this way, hopefully results would become more relevant and accurate over time. This mechanism doesn't prevent gaming, but for that and other implementation details, we look towards [[2861:Luis von Ahn]]'s [[2860:games with a purpose]]. Of course, this project still has unsolved / unaddressed elements.


Ultimately, the goal is to build a graph database where each record is a user contributed vote that, on a given subject, one non-fiction book is better than another.


We hope to extend this idea so that readers can not only battle books, but can also start to surface which books may depend on other books.


Implementation

Book `battles` (i.e. a submission from a reader that one book is better than another for a given subject) and `dependencies` (e.g. one book is a prerequisite for or dependent on another book) are both `types` of graph relationships .


This is an old but novel semantic graph idea we're adapting to improve the usefulness of books. If TheBestBookOn.com is a big graph database, then `battles` and `dependencies` may be thought of as `typed` edges (which may be arbitrarily extended to other \"types\" of relationships in the future).


The database schema essentially looks like:

| user_id | subject_id | edge_type | book1 | book2 | notes | 


It's a lot like [[522:Aaron Swartz]]'s [[2867:infogami]] system called [[2868:infobase]] which is an RDF-type db used under the hood for [[3:OpenLibrary]].

  

How it Works

From an experience perspective, when a patron navigates to https://TheBestBookOn.com, they will see a list of top level academic subjects (like maths, biology, physics, chemistry). The patron can select one of these subjects or use search.


When a subject is selected, the system looks in the database for all books related to this subject. It does counting to see how often the different books mentioned in the database win their book battles, and a ranked list of books is presented to the reader. These scores are calculated on the fly or cached.


For each book in the ranked list, you can also see a breakdown of how this book performed in battles against other books in the list. For instance, the book in 1st place may show that it actually lost 10% of the time to the 2nd book in the list.


A reader can challenge or contest the best book results for a subject by clicking a \"contest\" or \"challenge\" button. By contesting the list, the reader is essentially saying they've read the best book on this subject as well as another book that they believe is superior to it. If the reader really wishes, they can choose which of the books in the are being compared, such that someone could challenge the 2nd place book, not just the 1st place book (but we assume, even though this is cool, this likely won't be the most frequent case).


A patron may also add a new subject into the system by creating a \"contest\" between two books they've read on that subject.


Our hope is that over time, the subjects (labels) will also turn into a dependency graph which has some knowledge of the conceptual/topical difficulty of the subject matter. For instance, Biology may be a more general book than Cell Biology, and thus the Biology subject tag would have a directed edge to Cellular Biology and a searcher will be able to adjust the granularity or specificity of their search results as one might expect with e.g. a slide bar. 


History & Timeline

In 2015, the first thing I put on \"paper\" was a search box with the example, \"Learning Chinese\"

http://web.archive.org/web/20141218070739/http://thebestbookon.com/


The next version in 2016 had sparse notes about how one would evaluate the best non-fiction book on a subject. 

http://web.archive.org/web/20160207120610/https://thebestbookon.com


On [[2866:2016-10-29]] I authored an essay called, \"On Books\" about the promising future of books as native first-class citizens of the web:

https://mek.fyi/essays/universal-knowledge/on-books


In 2018 my community house hosted a symposium dinner called, \"Overwhelmed Readers Anonymous\" (https://www.facebook.com/michael.karpeles/posts/10103494731027870) where we brainstormed how people could work together to save people time on the process and the outcome of surfacing great books on every topic. 


The premise was:

> We can only read so many books in our lifetime. There are way too many books to choose from. It's difficult to find trustworthy, high quality book recommendations. How do you make sure you pick the right ones? What strategies do you choose? Who do you listen to? How can we help each other? Do you have a favorite (meta) book or essay on how to read or what books to choose?


Since 2020, we've been hosting weekly Friday community calls to slowly develop the idea of TheBestBookOn.com: https://github.com/Open-Book-Genome-Project/TheBestBookOn.com/commits/master?after=9c73e90e095a09604230c628917bff10f1ec4dba+174&branch=master


In 2020, a core group of volunteers formed a working group to develop a MVP.

https://archive.org/embed/openlibrary-tour-2020/Open+Library+Community+Celebration+2020.mp4?start=1865


In August 2020, I spoke at [[725:Joe Edelman]]'s [[2865:Social Design Club]] https://witter.com/edelwax/status/1293308089974824966 and got feedback on some of the things we were doing on TheBestBookOn.com. We also brainstormed about a similar idea: creating a curriculum graph of book dependencies. I registered the domain https://booktrails.us for experimentation on this topic.


In August 2021, we launched a slew of updates around the [[1162:Book Genome Project]] and the Community Reviews feature, both which are complementary infrastructure to TheBestBookOn.com. You can read the blog post here:   

https://blog.openlibrary.org/2021/08/24/the-open-book-genome-project/


", "slug": "the-best-book-on", "title": "The Best Book On" }, { "created": "Sun, 29 Jan 2023 16:19:56 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 3055, "id": 39, "modified": null, "post": "", "slug": "yandex-leak", "title": "Yandex leakYandex leak" }, { "created": "Thu, 04 Sep 2025 15:12:18 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 3154, "id": 41, "modified": null, "post": "

\"Image\"

Renting (e.g. a movie) can be a useful option to increase access and lower upfront costs.

However, it's problematic when a product or service is offered exclusively as a lease, such that it exploits customers or strips them of rights essential to intended use, preservation, or civic value.

Leasing should not be used as a tool to capture markets and evade legal protections or societal responsibilities.

Here are 3 examples.

Example 1: First Sale Rights

The right of First Sale (i.e. the [[1787:First Sale Doctrine]] 17 U.S.C. \u00a7 109) is what gives Americans the right to buy a book, lend it to a friend, and sell it after they're done.

Publishers bypass this by only offering ebook leases that you license \"perpetually\" and don't own (your Amazon ebooks included).

Example 2: Evasion of the [[3156:Public Domain]].

17 U.S.C. \u00a7 302\u2013305 sets a limit on copyright. But there is no requirement for publishers to release DRM-free version of lease-only material in a way that can enter the public domain. And breaking [[3155:DRM]] is illegal via 17 U.S.C. \u00a7 1201.

Example 3: The end of [[3157:preservation]]

[[3158:17 U.S.C. \u00a7 108]] gives libraries the right to make archival versions to preserve the media they own. If a library or archive can't own the material, they can't preserve it or enable access to those with disabilities.

In conclusion, leasing can expand access, but it should never be the only option.

For copyright law to function as intended, there must also be a path to true ownership \u2014 even if time-limited \u2014 that restores the public\u2019s ability to exercise rights like First Sale and preserve works under \u00a7108.

I'm not a lawyer, I am speaking for myself, etc, etc.

", "slug": "the-lease-trap", "title": "The Lease Trap" }, { "created": "Wed, 12 Nov 2025 15:23:23 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 3164, "id": 42, "modified": null, "post": "
1. CONVERSATIONAL SEARCH ENGINES: In middle school into high school, I started developing a \"conversational search engine\" called [[2980:GNUAsk]]. I applied both to undergrad and grad school with the idea of prototyping a conversational search engine. I knew neural nets would play a role, I didn't know exactly how. I was using hidden markov models to unreliably generate natural language, translating natural language queries into a set of machine queries, collecting gigabytes of natural language with bots via chat room logs ( [[2970:AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)]], [[2978:IRC]], etc), and tuning bots to attempt to answer questions in these chats with varied levels of success.

2. SEARCH EVERYWHERE: I thought [[3165:conversational search engine should be integrated (as a background secretary) into the fabric of our Operating Systems]] (e.g. in the terminal, in our chats). This wasn't a big leap -- [[1683:Alan Kay]] and [[2608:Smalltalk]] showed us what an operating system ([[3166:Plan9]]) could be when every program could talk to each other. I was taught an interesting take in undergrad that [[3167:\"AI is Search\"]] -- i.e. AI is solving search problems -- and this stuck with me.
3. THE UNIVERSAL MESSENGER: I hoped (against what seemed like inevitable market-cornerning) that communication applications would converge on standards or interoperable APIs that would allow their participants to funnel every correspondence into a single system. I thought the solution may be primarily \"multi-auth\" (kind of like Mint.com) but I think the more important advancement is [[3168:LLM]]s being able to bundle and triage messages, summarize, cut through the noise.
https://mek.fyi/.../universal-messaging-protocol-for-all
4. THE INTERNET, A SEMANTIC GRAPH: I believed we'd move in the direction of graph-based note-taking with (bidirectional) back-links (and prototyped [[474:graph.global]] ~2016, a precursor to [[1675:Roam Research]]). I think [[1:Wikidata]] has helped a lot, but I think LLMs have shown that \"figuring it out on the fly\" is perhaps more tractable as an approach to keep up with the world (and saving tags / associations along the way as a bi-product) than tagging everything.
https://mek.fyi/essays/universal-knowledge/www2
5. Similar to point [4], I thought that we'd have much better universal learning systems, which -- instead of being domain specific -- are sensitive to what each individual knows. I figured this wasn't much different than the targeted advertising that is already done to/on/for us. [[1898:Danny Hillis]], in a previous life, had many talks on Personalized Learning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz7wN904rvs -- we have [[3169:MOOC]]s and LLMs are very useful as tutors, however the world seems to be headed in a direction of increased digital artificial scarcity in many ways (including library ownership).\n\n\"May
", "slug": "20-year-reflections", "title": "5 significant areas where I've been wrong + right in the past 20 years" }, { "created": "Fri, 23 Dec 2022 21:47:40 GMT", "edit_history": null, "entity_id": 2965, "id": 38, "modified": null, "post": "Early Years
I became interested in [[2969:natural language processing]] (without really knowing what the field entailed) in elementary school when I tried out [[2970:AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)]], shortly after it was released circa [[2675:1997]].

I was quite introverted and asocial growing up (ok, this is an understatement) and the idea of being able to cherry-pick friends based on the types of conversations I liked to have and being able to leave a conversation at any time (and for this to be commonplace and socially acceptable) were attractive to me.

But what I really loved was the idea of chat rooms. Watching how people interacted, what conversations worked, which caused people to get upset, which caused people to laugh.

For any who remember how AIM's early chat feature worked, you clicked a button to start a chat, it pre-populated a unique room ID, and you had the option either to rename the room, or enter the chat. I remember thinking this was odd and vividly remember one (entire) day making it a priority to type in all the common room names I could think of to see what happened. One of the first I tried was \"friends\". Low and behold, I was in a room with a handful of people who were very confused as to why I had just intruded on their private chat. But amazingly, it seemed almost okay. Some thought it was weird and bailed. But many others were intrigued to meet a digital pen-pal. It's almost as if we were occupying public domain together. After a great conversation, I had suggested we keep the chat open and check back every few days.

or months, I more or less lived in that \"friends\" chat room and started inviting what few other friends I had to it. I looked for other ephemeral rooms on AIM and invited the people I found to join the \"friends\" room as well. We quickly hit a limit of ~32 people. When one room filled, a few of us would create another one: There was \"hi\", \"hello\", \"hey\", \"chat\", \"chat2\"... and so on. Over the few years, the use of these unofficial AIM chat rooms really took off, many with themes and unique micro-cultures. It was like a mini-revolution; gosh it was exciting.

Middle School

But nothing as exciting as when I saw the first \u201cscrambler bot\u201d -- an AIM account controlled by a robot -- which initiated a game of word unscramble in the \"friends\" chat room. I had been learning [[2972:qbasic]], html, and introductory [[2973:java]] at the time and I immediately asked the chat how the thing was working and who programmed it.

The whole scene exploded into a massive game of augmentation and creativity. People who write bots to flood chat rooms and take them over so people couldn't organize with their friends. People who write tools to ban users. Instead of video games, it was its own version of war games. I remember being especially inspired by a friend \"Mike311211\" (a [[2971:Disturbed (band)]] fan) who created his own complete instant message client called Disturbed AIM.

Around middle school, it became instantly obvious to me that there was an unparalleled opportunity to bend and augment the very fabric of the medium through which communication was occurring. There was a \"magic\" middleware in between me and them and an opportunity to optimize the very idea of communication, to enhance it.

Up to this point, programming had mostly been a curiosity to me, but this got me serious about programming. I wanted the ability to protect the chat rooms I was in. To enhance them with features. To fundamentally push communication to the limit and redefine the paradigm beyond chat messages. AIM, Google, and then Wikipedia quickly became my favorite tools on the web and I started learning how to write bots to combine them using the TOC/2 protocol, which I learned from others in AIM chat rooms. I started writing a bot (much like the ones on IRC) to automatically save logs of various chat rooms so I could read them later. There was an \"ego\" log which listened to all the chats for when my name or screen name was mentioned. The bot responded to simple queries, like, \"when was I last mentioned\". It was like social network notifications before such a feature was mainstream. Of course the bot allowed me to evaluate simple math expressions and programs by forwarding them to Java.

Every summer for years, I would spend weeks at a time at Fairfield University for National Computer Camp to learn how to use new programming languages. I met all sorts of interesting and smart people like Katherine McCusker, this awesome dude named Tal (someone should help me re-discover) who had a shaved head but for an epic front-facing rat tail. I spent my next five or so summers this way, learning [[2975:c++]], [[2292:Unix]], [[2974:A+ certification]] type hardware stuff.

I quickly became infatuated with the ideas of chat systems, search engines, [[2976:human-computer interfaces]], computer-assisted experiences (e.g. [[2977:artificial intelligence]]), [[2369:free software]] & hacker culture, and platforms for mass-collaboration. Around this time I learned of [[2978:IRC]] and was becoming aware of what others were programming bots to do in more sophisticated settings and what was possible. What I wanted was a bot which could enable advanced search. The ability to research collaboratively with friends and to integrate chat with search. To create something like [[2979:IBMs Watson]].

By freshman year of high school, I was convinced I wanted to try two things: to do graduate research at a university and to try starting a company.

[[2980:GNUAsk]]

I began turning my chat bot scripts into a conversational search engine called GNUAsk. GNUAsk was intended to be a free, open & privacy-centric, experimental/alternative search engine (like Duck Duck Go). One could GNUAsk questions like, \u201cWhen did Michael Jackson die?\u201d and then (kind of like clippy) GNUAsk would provide answers but also ask/predict clarifying questions based on how similar conversations had proceeded, like: \u201cI think you mean Michael Jackson the singer, who died on June 25, 2009. Did you mean Michael Jackson the actor?\u201d. It excelled at helping one refine the accuracy of one\u2019s current search (during a time when people had to be \u201cgood at Googling\u201d) and even guide one deeper in new unexpected directions. The path of your conversation would then help strengthen the path, experience, and recommendations of other researchers. In its simplest form, GNUAsk was a question answer system like [[2996:Quora]].


To set the stage, at the time [[5:Google]] search didn\u2019t have zero-click Now cards powered by its Knowledge Graph or contextual hysteresis (i.e. you had to be good at searching because Google couldn\u2019t yet predict your intent from previous queries). That is to say, Google search didn't have hysteresis/context-sensitivity, so one had to tune searches dozens of times in order to get a right answer. Also, searching only seemed to happen on a single website. I believed web searching should happen anywhere \u2013 within a microsoft document, in a chat with a friend, even in a text file or the command line. I believed that everyone\u2019s search history should be able to be anonymously combined to help carve paths through the information landscape like a stream corrodes paths through bedrock. I also believed that searching shouldn\u2019t be a discrete 1-off event, but a process, a trail, or a conversation that builds understanding over time. And that everyone\u2019s conversations or paths through knowledge should work together to help beat trails and navigate problems as we think together. I didn\u2019t want someone to share a website or a google search term which dumps me into a sprawling list of unvetted websites, I wanted someone to share a journey with me (which I called a [[2986:GNUrl]]) which showed which directed route they took, which questions they asked, which landmarks/pages they stopped at, which were most useful, and what conclusions they reached. That is to say, I found (and still find) dozens of aspects inadequate about Google\u2019s search experience. 

 

How did it work? GNUAsk (the aspirational, mostly unreleased search engine UI) relied on hundreds of bots, running as daemons, and listening in on conversations within AOL AIM, [[2978:IRC]], [[2984:Skype]], and [[2985:Yahoo]] public chat rooms and recording all the textual conversations. The bots listened for questions, tried to provide answers when asked, and even inferred answers from other participants in the chat room. It relied heavily on dozens of APIs or scraping web pages like Answers.com, Wikipedia, (eventually [[2983:Duck Duck Go]]).


I started to write primitive algorithms to determine which sentences typed by users were questions and, much trickier, if users were writing answers in the chat room. The approach that seemed most reasonable to me was prompting chat room users with additional validation questions like, \"did what user X say answer your question Y, Z?\". Of course this was abused and error prone.


By the time I went to college, I had gigabytes worth of associated textual questions and answers, a good number of which were flagged as \u201cverified\u201d based on feedback from people in chats. By now, [[382:Wikipedia]] had become a thriving and invaluable resource and I was starting to learn about [[2982:markov chains]] and methods for generating text based on corpra. The pieces of GNUAsk would become the focus of my graduate school application. It would be another five years before I\u2019d learn of [[341:Vannevar Bush]]\u2019s landmark [[1179:1945]] [[2981:Atlantic]] essay, \u201cAs We May Think\u201d.

College

I loved my college experience. Because I spent so much of my high school learning independently and avoiding the people in my school, my grades were quite average. I went to the University of Vermont (UVM), a lower-stress school which I didn\u2019t find super demanding. This was perfect for me because I learned when I feel free, I love rising to the occasion and feeling like a big fish in a smaller pond, gobbling up unconventional ways of learning. I helped Peter Hurd write a Lego Mindstorm Robot called BRIAN (Basic Reconnaissance Independent Accurate Navigator) which uses genetic algorithms to find and pick-up trash. I took a special topics class with Jeanne Douglas where I saw this tech talk by Luis Von Ahn (co-creator of recaptcha) and learned about the idea of harnessing human computation, which completely changed how I thought about computer science. I participated in a team which helped build a UVMonopoly game. I did independent basic neural net research with one of my favorite researchers, [[2995:Dr. Josh Bongard]]. I learned a lot in classes, and learned even more outside of classes from world class graduate students like my mentor Dr. Gary Johnson and professors who I\u2019d spend time with during office hours. I even helped create this incredibly embarrassing UVM hacker spoof of Lord of the Rings.


I spent the vast majority of my time helping build a hackerspace with [[3019:Robin Wilke]], [[3022:Jonathan Godbout]], Dillan, [[3021:Chris Tucci]], [[3020:Andrew Guertin]], [[1842:Gary Johnson]] (who has been a life long mentor of mine, and one of the most brilliant people I know), [[10:Stephen Balaban]], [[3013:Alex Munkelwitz]], [[3014:Abe Barth-Werb]], [[3015:Jacob Beauregard]], [[3016:Evan Yandell]], [[3006:Zack Ney]], [[3007:Evan Flynn]], Tenzin, [[3017:Phelan Vendeville]], [[3009:Ethan Eldridge]], [[3012:Mike Torchio]], [[3024:Leif K-Brooks]], and a handful of other amazing personalities. Our student-run [[2993:hackerspace]], the [[2992:CSSA (Computer Science Student Association)]], became so popular (~10% of the department) that students began skipping classes to hear grad students talk or to work on independent projects in our lab (building beowulf clusters, debugging x11 intel graphics chip problems, linux from scratch). The department ended up letting me and [[2994:Dr. Gary Johnson]] co-teach a class for 3 semesters (we donated our proceeds to buy pizza for every class and it was insanely popular) and we arranged guest speakers from industry, had professors and grad students talk about their research, arranged hands-on projects, and taught less covered material, like version control, [[2991:tail call optimization]], and [[2990:recursive trampolining]] in [[2989:clojure]]. During my summers I worked for a small wireless sensor company called [[2987:Microstrain]], building configuration web dashboards using [[522:Aaron Swartz]]\u2019s [[2988:web.py]] and helping design secure initialization/pairing handshake sequences between devices. I met quite a few local people from the industry. Throughout my four years at UVM I learned a lot, felt like we were helping the community, and got positive feedback from professors (I received the department ACM faculty award some 3 times and was asked to be part of a committee which helps inform the university\u2019s curriculum).


I did almost get expelled on five separate occasions, by accidentally kicking [[2997:Xindong Wu]] the head of the CS department off his static IP (what are the chances), accidentally taking down uvm.edu\u2019s edora web server by using a grad student\u2019s directory permissibly set to 777, getting caught up in another [[2992:CSSA (Computer Science Student Association)]] member\u2019s rainbow table experiment (he was taking Ling\u2019s security class with me) which discovered a network on campus was truncating [[3000:DES]] CBC passwords to 8-characters, noticing that local make alt-installs were allowing students to bypass many of the university\u2019s security policies, and helping reverse engineering the business school\u2019s [[2999:Trans-Lux stock ticker]] to print, \u201cZombie alert in effect\u201d. In each of these cases I worked incredibly hard with an abundance of good will to remedy the situations, detail vulnerabilities, propose solutions, and offer apologies. Thank you for these learning experiences and letting me graduate.


From Research to Entrepreneurship

I applied and got in to UDel and Cornell with an application essay about my search engine. In 2010 I started a PhD program at the [[3023:University of Delaware]] hoping to continue working on my search engine. I love learning, researching, and teaching, so in some ways grad school was a dream. But my experience ended up being a slog for two reasons, one circumstantial and the other fundamental to the industry. Circumstantially, one of the reasons I chose UDel over Cornell is I found a semantic web professor who seemed excited to help me continue my high school research. But when I joined the program, I learned the professor had decided to go on prolonged sabbatical, leaving me without an advisor to sponsor my work. So instead, I took an offer to help the Software Verification Lab, which had a great advisory team but was a complete departure from my passions of AI/NLP. The second problem though was fundamental: for me, research requires a certain type of patience for theory \u2013 an indefinite gritting of one\u2019s teeth and biding of one's time, bound by the open-ended processes of discovery and not market need.


With markets, one may collect more data, talk to patrons, refine a toolkit of tactics, grow a distribution channel, and pivot in any number of directions and magnitudes until there\u2019s a fit. In research, one has no guarantee of achieving a positive result. And if one does, one may discover an amazing, true, positive result and still not usefully manifest the concepts until someone discovers the right application and takes the idea to market. My ideal research lab experience would have been one like [[3001:Louis Von Ahn]]\u2019s ([[792:recaptcha]], ESP, [[3002:duolingo]]) which develops at the intersection of theory and application and becomes stronger over time (e.g. grows distribution channels), even when one experiment flops.


Aside from the circumstantial subject matter and the indeterminism, there was also a matter of the process and inequity. As a researcher, I was typically working by myself, in a sterile cubicle, working on fairly demanding math and software architectures, with no carrot at the end of the stick: researchers often receive hardly more than a stipend as compensation, researchers are typically pressured to hand over copyright of their papers to prominent (exploitative) research journals, and (because the lab cared more about the means than the ends, the implications of the research were unclear to me and so) I personally was given few reasons (other than presumed intrinsic drive) to care if my solutions worked. I care more for collaboration and seeing solutions help people in practice than I do the glory of solving an obscure problem. So after months of my dear undergrad friend [[10:Stephen Balaban]] encouraging me to join him on an entrepreneurial journey, I put my PhD research on hold to explore entrepreneurship, to grow as a software engineer, and to gain experience managing projects.


What was wrong with research?


On Being a Co-founder

The opportunities in entrepreneurship seemed so much more real. There were customers, competitors, venture capitalists, the media, lawyers, prospective talent, and potential business partners all playing different roles and offering their own perspectives on the same game. Research remains an important part of this process, but a much smaller piece of a larger stakeholder pie. Experiencing this zoom-out was refreshing.


The company that Stephen and I worked on in 2011 solved a real problem which Gumroad (our main competitor), Shopify, and others now predominate today. Leading up to 2010, selling digital merchandise online (e.g. self publishing, art, music, courses \u2013 today may include [[3003:NFTs]]) was non-trivial for the layman. One needed to know how to build a website, which means one needed a domain and hosting. One likely needed a way to securely store and fulfill the digital products, a shopping cart for managing the customer experience, and payment integration. And then of course, there were affiliate systems, newsletters, and other aspects which were integral to distribution and sales. This likely meant one was dealing with paypal/stripe, clickbank, ejunkie, godaddy, linode, and wordpress. Because the process was so technical and involved, it was only accessible to people who both had digital products and the technical know-how to string these technologies together into an online storefront. In our case, that was Stephen.


Something that was great about this business is (a) Stephen already had self publications he was selling elsewhere online and (b) others like him who already had existing products and storefronts were willing to try something new if it meant more sales. So we spent about six months building the basics of a marketplace which would allow any customer to manage their own storefront, complete with a shopping cart, checkout & fulfillment process, and affiliate system. Then we started finding existing sellers with followers who wanted to dominate this new marketplace. We made it turn-key \u2013 as easy as dropping a file onto your browser \u2013 to create a new store.


Technically, the platform was good and solved a real problem. Our experience and service design were not great, especially compared to Gumroad which launched the same day as us. Looking back, it\u2019s obvious we should have kept it simple and developed features in response to problems as they arose (which is how we knew to focus on payment integration). We probably could have gotten away with not having shopping carts (or bags, as we called them) at first, too. [[3004:Gumroad]] was smart because they focused on a much easier vision, making the storefront possible and then letting store owners self-promote. We on the other hand had committed to a marketplace rather than recognizing sellers intrinsically had incentive to promote their content; they just needed the technology.


During this time, Stephen and I built technology, spoke with and onboarded content creators, drafted terms of service, spoke to lawyers, incorporated our business, handled our accounting, presented at events, pitched incubators and [[3005:VCs]], and tried to recruit others at hackathons to help us build. Hindsight is 20-20; we may have benefited from more design input, keeping things simpler and building only what was needed very well, more time speaking to sellers, more focus on specific domains, and likely being more flexible to secure early opportunities that came along. I\u2019d describe our project management style as, \u201cflying by the seat of our pants\u201d. We built what we knew we had to build and then built the things we thought would have impact, before trying to test our hypotheses and seeing how good our core technology was at solving sellers' pain points. By working six days a week or more, fourteen hours a day, teaming up on skype video calls and pair programming using gnu screen and [[1714:tmux]] (and then eventually living together), we got an incredible amount done. We both seemed to have a shared sense of what needed to be done and how, we had so many different hats to wear and responsibilities to cover, and we were so in-sync, that we rarely had anything like a roadmap meeting for tech or features.


On Being Engineer #1

About six months in, we got rejected by [[3025:YCombinator]], got provisionally accepted into [[3026:Angelpad]] and received interest from WIN (both which ended up not panning out), and then got a chance to meet with [[564:Paul Graham]]. PG suggested we talk to [[1885:Hyperink.com]], a Winter YC 2011 high-tech publishing company that had a track record for producing great content and a need for scaling their process with technology. A few months later, Hyperink acquired our company and I went on to build out Hyperink\u2019s online platform, hyperink.com, based on my previous learnings. Several things were good about working for Hyperink. [[3027:Kevin Gao]] was good at making deals happen, coming up with vision, and including me and Stephen in planning and advisory meetings. I had a lot more time to focus on product and learned from Matt Lee about how to engage with designers. I continued to work way too hard (especially given the incentives) and ended up getting really sick on several occasions. But I also gained experience proposing and conceptualizing features, growing an engineering team, and making decisions with people who had spent more time in industry. Soon Hyperink was up and running, with simple and beautiful designs by Holger and others, and before I knew it we were generating ~$1M a year in revenue. We had a \u201ccha-ching\u201d bell that rang every time a sale was made and we eventually had to turn it off because it was happening too frequently. I learned the importance of targeting content whales as partners (who already have strong distribution channels), the critical importance of appearing organized and on the same team during advisory meetings, how to organize a recruiting pipeline and interview, how important division of labor is (being able to rely on others who are very good at their parts of the puzzle), and what\u2019s possible with the extra bandwidth of not having to do everything alone.


At the same time, experience is what you get when you don\u2019t get what you want and I got a taste of being both a founder and a founding-first engineer with little compensation to show for incredibly hard work.


3 More Years in Early Stage

As Hyperink struggled to raise a Series-A which the founders felt okay with, I was looking for an opportunity to join an early stage company at the next phase of its journey, to see what it was like to grow a team from ten to fifty. I spent a short stint as the VPE and then, shortly after when the just-hired CTO left, as the interim CTO (which may tell you something) at Ark.com which I\u2019ve decided to skip from the story. Needless to say, both from my experience at Ark & Hyperink, I noticed a trend towards online-first work and remote teams. We had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars both on remote engineers and content creators, editors, and designers. So in 2013 I started a second company, Hackerlist. If Amazon\u2019s Web Services was a dashboard for spinning up compute resources on demand, the Hackerlist network (and its platform Upscale) was a way of spinning up elastic teams of expert AI researchers and software engineers. We were about five years and a pandemic too early, but still in the first six months of operation me and my co-founder Andrew Valish had pulled in a quarter of a million dollars in revenue, with almost a million dollars worth of job postings in the marketplace.


Lots of things went right. Lots of things went wrong. We went through many, many iterations of products. The products were too futuristic and not focused enough. We prototyped at least 5 different experiences which could have been completely different companies and even tried to connect some of these prototypes rather than just choosing one. We also underestimated how long it takes to vet talent, how important sales is to a business like ours (we hired our sales lead way too late), and by far most importantly, neither Andrew nor I were in love with the idea. We just knew it was the future. Each month I would review our finances, amortize our victories, and we had legitimate 30%+ month over month growth. We were finding amazing clients, including a handful of YC companies, and we were earning enough money to grow our team to six people. Because we were bootstrapping and looked like a consultancy, VCs seemed to want us to stay that way and didn\u2019t want to fund us to build the forward-looking developer experiences that github and upwork are starting to provide today. When we finally got funding offers, I think Andrew had hit his limit and our bank account was close to the wire because we had been re-investing our revenue paying our teammates and building the product alongside coordinating (and even participating in) contracts. The platform is still (maybe even especially) a good idea today, but it was early at the time, should have been more focused, and needed to be funded as a venture backed effort rather than on the back of a consultancy.


One of the problems with startups is they move so quickly and, early on, are so dependent on either a source of revenue or funding, that it\u2019s incredibly hard (and actually even more important) to build a (focused) roadmap. Experience really makes a difference once you\u2019re in the racecar and start seeing problems fly at you. Having seen the obstacles before shock you into knowing when you\u2019re losing focus, when you may need to pivot, when danger is coming, or how to handle a difficult situation. Having a good roadmap may give you a chance to premeditate, stay focused, and avoid some of these risks, but eventually (if what you\u2019re doing is working) the car will begin to move so fast that you\u2019ll need some type of intuition or experience (or be surrounded by people who can contribute these things) in order to stay on the track. Otherwise, you\u2019ll spend as much time trying not to burn through money, addressing customer complaints, and dealing with retention than growing a culture and building a product that people love.


During this period, my personal hero Aaron Swartz had paced away. And I was forced to reflect on the fact that someone who stood for my values was no longer around, and paradoxically, no one seemed to be filling his place. And I had just spent several years working on yet another startup that didn\u2019t align with my passions, in the pursuit of gaining experience and confidence that I was capable. I spent most of 2015 reading, writing, and working on side projects to figure out how I could reconnect with my values, fill the gap in my heart, and do something I felt mattered. This included fostering a community called Archive Labs to help increase communication among open source folks & volunteering at the Internet Archive on Aaron\u2019s Open Library.


What\u2019s wrong with entrepreneurship?

  • The customers (or profits) are always right

  • Winner takes all

  • Sociopaths win

  • Fundraising pitches

  • Exploits customers and staff rather than researchers

  • Does what\u2019s possible, not necessarily what\u2019s right

  • Produces externalities, reaps commons


What are the alternatives? Galen Mancino recommended Reinventing Organizations (2014 edition) | Open Library.


Nonprofits & Growing Pains

This brings us to 2015 where I'll continue my story when I have time. For the impatient, one may read my notes here.


", "slug": "autobiography", "title": "[[2966:Autobiography]]: As Problems Arise" } ] }