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Saved by @SteveeRogerr

[BIG THREAD] MeWe, the “anti-Facebook” social media platform, is overflowing with anti-vaccine content. What’s worse, administration are distinctly aware of this, but choose to do nothing. The philosophy behind MeWe’s creation is resulting in deadly misinformation.

 Meet MeWe founder and CEO, Mark Weinstein. He created the platform in direct response to Facebook’s notorious exploitation of user data. He also wanted to have a space without what he calls censorship. In doing so, he opened the door to a plethora of junk science.
Defending it in a NY Post op-ed, Weinstein says, “Censorship is often counter­productive. Banning content proves to the conspiracy-minded that it must be valuable because the authorities don’t want them to see it.” To him, removing dangerous misinfo worsens the problem. Link ↓
https://t.co/i1uNcvz9Kh
Weinstein recently posted a statement on the site saying that it isn’t the job of a social media company to regulate its content beyond illegal activity. He indicated that views on health and medicine were not to be moderated, acknowledging the sizable anti-vax community.
With this all in mind, here are the consequences of Weinstein’s philosophy. Bear in mind each post taken seriously can endanger yourself and those around you.
Tries to legitimize anti-vax conspiracy through an invitation of an anti-vax doctor to Senate hearing about covid treatments. Said doctor belongs to an association that view vaccine mandates as “a violation of human rights”. Link ↓
https://t.co/Nz4pwELoUh
Attempts to use slowed covid vaccine rollout as evidence of ineffectiveness and to label the determined science behind it baseless.
Claims that covid vaccines can result in HIV.
Uses out of context article to prove testing for covid is unnecessary. This was published in August 2020. At the time, most medical experts were directly contradicting the CDC’s position.
Uses out of context article to say vaccine is unsafe because doctors are refusing it. When read, it clearly states most doctors’ reasoning is because of mistrust in government and pharmaceutical industry. They are not decrying the science itself. Link ↓
https://t.co/EVkqUq8s5C
@mewe you are endangering lives in the face of a pandemic that has killed over 400,000 Americans. In one interview, Mark Weinstein said he was calling Facebook on its BS. Well, now I’m calling you on yours. #Covid_19

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Jason Kint
Jason Kint
@jason_kint
I could create an entire twitter feed of things Facebook has tried to cover up since 2015. Where do you want to start, Mark and Sheryl? https://t.co/1trgupQEH9


Ok, here. Just one of the 236 mentions of Facebook in the under read but incredibly important interim report from Parliament. ht @CommonsCMS https://t.co/gfhHCrOLeU


Let’s do another, this one to Senate Intel. Question: “Were you or CEO Mark Zuckerberg aware of the hiring of Joseph Chancellor?"
Answer "Facebook has over 30,000 employees. Senior management does not participate in day-today hiring decisions."


Or to @CommonsCMS: Question: "When did Mark Zuckerberg know about Cambridge Analytica?"
Answer: "He did not become aware of allegations CA may not have deleted data about FB users obtained through Dr. Kogan's app until March of 2018, when
these issues were raised in the media."


If you prefer visuals, watch this short clip after @IanCLucas rightly expresses concern about a Facebook exec failing to disclose info.
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Most software founders, particularly in B2B, need to get radically better at sales. @Steli , who is the best person for explaining the scrappy stages in the beginning and then building out a team with scripts and processes, wrote a guide to:

For technical founders it is irrationally, obscenely hard to reverse years of programming (ba dum bum) that sales is a value-destroying activity. Sales is CLEARLY a value-creating activity, contingent on you have a value-creating product.

The world will not drop what they are doing to adopt your work. This is particularly true in B2B, where simply building a better mousetrap won't overcome the activation energy required to get people with additional non-mice problems to prioritize changing mousetraps today.

This is very non-obvious for founders because founders are not often people who *want* to be sold to. We often come from a background where trying out tools is a bit of a fun hobby. We like looking at all the options, making charts, and ripping out partially complete tests.

"This week I unsuccessfully trialed four software options for automating that thing that has been killing us. Our actual production process remains the same as last week. Don't worry; this was a great use of time." is not a thing you want to write in a progress report to manager.
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
A thread on HN about bad code in legacy projects both makes me think how little we've learned as a discipline over the years and, honestly, how little credit we give ourselves for some pretty major

Fun going down this list and thinking: "Hmm, plausible at a well-run modern software shop", "Hmm, possible, but requires implausible tradeoffs", "Literally disallowed by languages", and "If you were to attempt doing that our test suite wouldn't let you merge."

I think we as an industry celebrate (not quite the right word) failure too much and don't celebrate success nearly enough. There is no DailyWTF for competent execution, word of which generally stays pretty local to the source while incompetence passes into legend.

Alrighty let me try to thread the needle on being the change I want to see in the world while not giving away anything that will get me in trouble:

Ruby has wonderful developer ergonomics. Typed languages are easier for machines to guarantee the correctness of. We built a type checker for Ruby (and I believe it is slated for OSS release sometime).

c.f.
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sumitgarg.eth
sumitgarg.eth
@sumitupgarg
I read two-and-a-half decades worth of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon shareholder letters.

It’s like a mini MBA.

Here I’ve pulled out a free guide for startups, investing, marketing, and “web3”🧵

(It’s a thread, not an ebook)


First, why the focus on web3?

It’s the mid 90’s. A 30-year-old Jeff Bezos is trying to raise money for Amazon. And investors are wondering,

“What’s this internet thing?”

Fast forward, the year is 2022, and folks today are wondering,

“What’s web3?”

Now, a little background…

In 1994, Bezos quit a well paying job to start Amazon.

It wasn’t an easy decision. But Bezos used his famous “regret minimization framework.”

In other words, he didn’t want to be 80 and regret not doing what he really wanted to do.

But what did he want?

Bezos didn’t set out to disrupt retail from the outset.

He simply wanted to come up with a business idea based on the internet and then let the internet grow around it while he kept working on it.

Today, that idea is worth $1.7 trillion and counting.

Moving on to the lessons…

Each year since 1997, Bezos has written an annual letter to Amazon shareholders.

These letters reveal a great deal of lessons and secrets behind his massive success.

So what are they?
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Austin Energy
Austin Energy
@austinenergy
LIVE: ❄️ City of Austin leadership including @AustinEnergyGM will address the unprecedented severe weather.
💻 Due to tech limitations, it will only be available via Facebook Live here: https://t.co/PchiwUgP0M
We will be live-tweeting in this thread.

Mayor Steve Adler: This will require us all to come together and help one another.
City Manager Spencer Cronk: As a City, we are doing our best to help those in need.

Cronk: Stay off the roads and conserve energy. Every little bit helps.

COA Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management Director Juan Ortiz: Currently we have a warming center at the Palmer Events Center. You can show up at any time. As of this morning, cold weather shelters remain active. 282 were sheltered overnight.

Ortiz: Urge residents to conserve much power as possible to help with the emergency issues. We are working with critical facilities to ensure that access to those facilities remain open, so ambulances can get in.
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Jaya_Upadhyaya
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SRI MOOKAMBIKA DEVI, KOLLUR (KAR)

There was an Asura, Kaumasura, who was doing penance to please Shiva and get a boon. To prevent him from asking for a boon, Devi Saraswati made him dumb (hence called Mookasur)
Later, Adi Parashakti slayed him and came to be called Mookambika.


It is said that Adi Shankaracharya had a vision in which Devi agreed to follow him provided he did not look back. He kept walking and was assured of her presence due to the sound of anklets. When he reached here in Kollur, he turned back as the sound of anklets had stopped.


So Devi stayed here and merged with the lingam. The place came to be called Mookambika Kshetram.
The linga has integrated on it’s left side MahaKali, Maha Lakshmi and Maha Saraswathi and on the right side- Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.


A swarna rekha (gold line) divides this linga into left and right portion. Adi Shakthi in this Udhbhavlinga form appears only here.
Devi sits in padmasana and has 4 hands.
Adi Shankaracharya installed the Sri Chakra in front of Devi and also composed the Soundarya Lahiri here.
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James Felton
James Felton
@JimMFelton
Butt plugs were originally sold as a miracle cure for headaches, acne, and insanity

Thread, article here and h/t: @qikipedia :
https://t.co/Ts84xnmWKJ


For a long time, medicine was pre-occupied with the question "can this be solved by putting something in the butt?"

Take, for example, tobacco smoke enemas, in which 18th Century physicians saw drowning victims and attempted to de-deadify them by blowing tobacco smoke up their rectums with a pipe.


Despite having no medical benefit whatsoever, the practice was popular, and enema kits lined the Thames like lifebelts, ready to be used as one final humiliation for somebody who was crap at swimming.

This practice ended sometime after 1800 when it became apparent that it didn't really work, given how the anus famously isn't really connected to the lungs, but doctors weren't quite finished with having a poke around in the old anus to see what happens just yet.
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EverythingOppresses
EverythingOppresses
@SoOppressed
The first area to focus on is diversity. This has become a dogma in the tech world, and despite the fact that tech is one of the most meritocratic industries in the world, there are constant efforts to promote diversity at the expense of fairness, merit and competency. Examples:

USC's Interactive Media & Games Division cancels all-star panel that included top-tier game developers who were invited to share their experiences with students. Why? Because there were no women on the

ElectronConf is a conf which chooses presenters based on blind auditions; the identity, gender, and race of the speaker is not known to the selection team. The results of that merit-based approach was an all-male panel. So they cancelled the conference.

Apple's head of diversity (a black woman) got in trouble for promoting a vision of diversity that is at odds with contemporary progressive dogma. (She left the company shortly after this

Also in the name of diversity, there is unabashed discrimination against men (especially white men) in tech, in both hiring policies and in other arenas. One such example is this, a developer workshop that specifically excluded men: https://t.co/N0SkH4hR35
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Marc K\xf6hlbrugge
Marc Köhlbrugge
@marckohlbrugge
💬 I often get Q’s like these:

How did you get your first customers for WIP? How did you grow BetaList’s traffic? Etc.

Makers are looking to reverse-engineer success. I see it everywhere.

I don’t think it works that way and the answers to those questions are mostly useless. 💥

I have built dozens of different products over the last couple of years. The vast majority failed. 😭

Surely if I know the answers to these questions, but still fail over and over again, these answers aren’t that useful. 🤷‍♀️

So what’s a better question to ask? 🤔

99.9% of the questions I receive are about the products that did well. In a way that makes sense, because we quickly forget about those that didn’t succeed.

🧠 This is known as survivorship bias.

Focusing on what survived, while ignoring what made it survive in the first place.

The real question, what you really want to know, is this:

What makes @WIP, @BetaList, and to some extent @AllStartupJobs succeed where my countless other attempts failed?

What separates a failed product 👎 from a successful product 👍?

Honestly, I don’t know. I wish I did.

It’s like Steve Jobs said “I’ll know it when I see it.” 👀

Same is true when we make products. We don’t know upfront what will work. But once we see an inkling of a product that does have potential, it’s not that hard to spot.
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Brittany Packnett
Brittany Packnett
@MsPackyetti
We should stop confusing what someone was doing when we became aware of them with all they are capable of, interested in, or ever hope to be

Let folks have their many talents, interests and gifts. Life is far more fun with variety, loves.

A lot of folks have come to know me as an activist & I’m grateful that folks care to know me at all.

But I wasn’t born in 2014. I was a whole teacher, executive, policy person, speaker, arts and culture lover, reader, writer, woman of faith, fashion and more before 4 yrs ago 🤷🏾‍♀️

We rightfully complain that marginalized people are not allowed to be fully human.

But we internalize and transfer our oppression daily. It’s a smog. We all breathe it in & act it out.

And then tell WoC “girl ain’t you supposed to be a _______? Why you doing ____?”

Can I live?

And don’t go reading anything personal into this-this isn’t about me necessarily and it’s no subtweet (I try hard not to do that.)

I’ve just been observing that behavior more and more lately. Especially when it comes to marginalized folks.

Evolution should be our aspiration.

“Can’t knock the hustle” should be our anthem.

As long as someone isn’t bringing active and continual harm, why can’t they explore their many sides?
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