I'm a software engineer with a knack for entrepreneurship, privacy, and freedom of information.
I sometimes have this conversation with friends - what gives us hope for the future of the world. As Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson puts it, this is just a way for people to seek hope. Here are some headlines just from the last 2 days : Seattle continues to break heat records, hits 108 degrees British Columbia sees 195% increase in sudden deaths during Canada heatwave Five Asian countries account for…
Modern web is a mess. That’s why I think I loved the idea behind 1MB Club , and the offshoots 512KB Club and 250kb Club . They are lists of websites where the pages are under 1MB, 512KB, and 256kb respectively. Taking inspiration from them, I am launching The NoJS Club . As the name suggests, it’s a showcase of the Javascript-less web. While we can debate the merits of Javascript endlessly,…
Historic: AP-US-APNewsAlert Nov 07, 2020 11:26AM (GMT 16:26) — 10 words WASHINGTON (AP) — Joe Biden elected president of the United States. Joe Biden / Kamala Harris won with more popular votes than Obama ever did, and is ahead with a larger margin than in 2016. What’s depressing is that 8 million more people chose to vote for Trump - a bankrupt fascist responsible for 237,000+ deaths - now than…
Facebook (like every other platforms) touts its content moderation and content removal numbers really well. Here’s just a sample from the last few months: September 13, 2020: Facebook says it will remove false claims about who started wildfires in Oregon August 19, 2020: Facebook Removes 790 QAnon Groups to Fight Conspiracy Theory August 11, 2020: Facebook says it has taken down 7 million posts…
Within privacy circles, Glenn Greenwald’s 2014 TED talk titled “Why privacy matters” is considered required reading. One quote jumps out to nearly everyone ― including the live audience ― has to do with how Greenwald responds to people who don’t worry about privacy because they have nothing to hide. I always say the same thing to them. I get out a pen, I write down my email address. I say, “Here’s…
Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker : But the rationalists, despite their fixation with cognitive bias, read into the contingencies a darkly meaningful pattern. Alexander, whose role has been to help explain Silicon Valley to itself, was taken up as a mascot and a martyr in a struggle against the Times, which, in the tweets of Srinivasan, Graham, and others, was enlisted as a proxy for all of the…
A few weeks ago, I decided that my tweets will be ephemeral. Unless they are tagged with “#DNT”, my tweets will auto-delete after 3 days 1 . After being on Twitter for over a decade, and taking a months-long hiatus from using the platform recently, it was not a very hard decision. I primarily use Twitter to share opinions around current events. Twitter, like other social media platforms,…
I’ve been thinking about what it means to own something. The definition that resonated the most with me is this 1 : You own what you can pass down It used to be common decades ago for people to pass down their property including media (vinyl records, disks, cassettes). You paid for hard assets that you owned. Objectively, it’s easier to hold on to, and pass down, digital assets - you just have to…
Last week, I decided to cancel my Amazon Prime account. Over time, I have come to realize that I don’t really need things in two days or fewer. I either need something right now - in which case I’ll run to the store - or soon - in which case I’ll shop around for a quality product. I did not feel like I should contribute to Bezos getting any richer 1 . Amazon evades avoids taxes , mistreats its…
I recently joined a Mastodon server years after ditching Facebook (and Instagram) and dramatically scaling back my Twitter use (if there’s interest, I can write about why I quit most social media). Mastodon is a breath of fresh air. It’s decentralized and you can run your own instance - meaning you own your data - and “federate” with other instances. The best way I can describe Mastodon…