Accounts are closed! Why? Because YOU DEPEND ON A CENTRAL SERVER. And you don't OWN the server! Don't depend on adversary weapons! Claim your digital weapons in the info-war >> https://t.co/TBTjRB93pO - FULL THREAD 🔻🔻

I have been a Substack and Patreon user for a few years now. And though more than one social media giant has, in recent months, expressed the desire to help writers and journalists monetise their audience, there are very good reasons to take these SOPs with a pinch of salt.

Because the reason Patreon and Substack came into existence was not the need for a new business model. It was as a cure for the old business model - an algorithm-driven ad revenue system that powered the attention economy. The attention economy turned audiences into scrollers...

...who were in it for the next viral hit. Quality of information suffered, the nature of discourse suffered, and as a result, democracy itself suffered. Much of this was enabled by the social media giants who are trying to copy the Substack and Patreon model right now in an...

...attempt to "put creators first". But what we must not lose sight of is that the Substack / Patreon model only emerged as a result of the bad practices the social media giants enabled. The algorithm made a toxic internet possible and they were what hit back. Today, multiple...

...podcasting tools video streaming services have donation buttons built in. But it was not always so. I applaud all attempts that anyone makes to help independent media not have to rely on ad money, but I am not going to ever be able to see Facebook's newsletter tool as a...

~8yrs ago (Dec’12) I got a job @Google. Those were still early days of cloud. I joined GCP @<150M ARR & left @~4B (excld GSuite). Learned from some of the smartest ppl in tech. But we also got a LOT wrong that took yrs to fix. Much of it now public, but here’s my ring-side view👇

By 2008, Google had everything going for it w.r.t. Cloud and we should’ve been the market leaders, but we were either too early to market or too late. What did we do wrong? (1) bad timing (2) worse productization & (3) worst GTM.

We were 1st to “containers” (lxc) & container management (Borg) - since '03/04. But Docker took LXC, added cluster management, & launched 1st. Mesosphere launched DCOS. A lot of chairs were thrown around re: google losing this early battle, though K8 won the war, eventually 👏

We were 1st to “serverless” (AppEngine). GAE was our beachhead -- it was the biggest revenue source early on but the world wasn’t ready for serverless primitives. We also didn’t build auxiliary products fast enough. Clients that outgrew GAE wanted “building block” IaaS offerings.

1st to hadoop (map-reduce ‘04) but our hosted Hadoop launched in ‘15. AWS EMR was ~200M ARR by then. 1st to cloud storage (GFS ’03), but didn’t offer a filestore till ‘18! Customers were asking for it since 2014. Didn’t launch archival storage or direct interconnect till v. late.

#Whatsapp Privacy & Term of Service Thread:

I am sharing screenshots of their ToSs, please have a look.

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time to get back to "repairing" old computers

The funny thing about making the 8-bit-guy into a meme about "repairing" computers with powertools is that the obvious heightening joke would, like, the "8 rounds guy", who fixes computers with firearms

but that would also be him, given that he's also a big gun enthusiast.

so it's inherently hard to satirize the repairing-computers-with-dremels guy, since they're also the guns-guy.

you'd have to go up to like a mythbusters level of overkill.

"this hard drive from 1986 won't spin up. We tried freezing it, tapping it with a rubber hammer, and opening the case to lower the friction... there's only one option left: GET OUT THE C4 EXPLOSIVES!"