Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

how many ppl is "medium-sized" approximately?

i don't know how accurately it depicts the silicon valley culture and don't really care too much, but the writing was excellent.

i joined at just below 200, people had been saying IPO next year for a year or two at that stage. still no IPO but they're at about 500 employees i think

that sounds reasonable, I wasn't sure where the line merged into large

anything more than like... 50 - 100 people, maybe, seems like a medium-sized company? I'm sure there's a gartner study that tells me exactly where the quadrants are

Under Dunbar's number, small company. Over Dunbar's number, medium company. Over 10x Dunbar's number, large company.

https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/files/Size_Standards_Table.pdf

Information businesses generally are categorized as "large" at >~$30M or >1000 employees apparently.

hmm, tricky one. I think my employer fits under a couple different categories

just making it towards the end of caek's article, which I v much enjoyed (with all the usual tinges of bitterness)

I tell her that the first woman engineer is also the only engineer without SSH access to the servers

sad lol of recognition, from across the world and considerably further down the glamour (and pay) scale

lmao yeah i listened to a lot of industrial music as a teen too

https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/735135973323898880

He didn't quite say that - he said anti-colonialism had been disastrous for the Indian economy for decades. It was in the context of the country rejecting Facebook's 'free basics' model.

― On a Raqqa tip (ShariVari), Sunday, May 15, 2016 10:49 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he donated tonnes of money to mitt and supports his politics so this makes sense

this is excellent https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valley/

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Monday, May 23, 2016 10:22 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

great read thanks

goole wtf is that

http://gizmodo.com/how-san-francisco-plans-to-use-self-driving-cars-to-fix-1778306148

Done right, self-driving cars can also alleviate the city’s affordable housing crisis. “It’s a space issue,” said Tim Papandreou, chief innovation officer for San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), who recently spearheaded the city’s big proposal. “We have the data to prove we won’t need the space on the streets anymore. But if we do both shared and electric automated vehicles, we’re not just freeing up space in the street, we’re freeing up space in the lots.”

San Francisco’s vision is one of the seven finalists for the Smart City Challenge, the US Department of Transportation-sponsored contest to turn one American city into a transportation utopia. As one of the finalists, San Francisco received $100,000 to refine its proposal, and could get up to $50 million more for implementation when the winning Smart City is announced this summer.

SMDH WTF $50M bonfire waiting to happen.

You know what could alleviate your housing crisis is density and fixing the fucking transit systems you've already got
but no - robot cars will save us all! do they work? no! but free money for local companies that are already made of money and are basically all tax cheats! yes!

otfm

Done right, self-driving cars can also alleviate the city’s affordable housing crisis

love when you can check out after the first sentence

http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site568/2016/0517/20160517_071827_google-stuckped-0518.jpg

This diagram from a patent granted May 17 to Google shows how a pedestrian hit by a self-driving car would remain stuck to the front of the vehicle with glue, theoretically to prevent further injuries from being carried along and then thrown. (U.S. Patent Office)

lol what the hell

tombot otm

what could possibly go wrong w pedestrians glued to the front of cars

well if they're glued to a self-driving car that never needs parking then they aren't part of the housing problem anymore

just make the self-driving cars out of homeless people and skip the glue

Crumple zones!

The Collateral remake will be spectacular

You're also going to have to glue the first pedestrian that gets hit so that the next one doesn't get thrown.

Peter Bromberg
Energetic, Positive, Confident, Assertive Motivator-Visionary Influencer-Driver personality.

I am a former Microsoft C# .NET MVP (Most Valuable Professional) for 10 years , author, and UnEducator based in the Orlando Florida area. I write mostly about .NET, formerly for eggheadcafe and currently at my programming blog at peterbromberg.net. I'm an ex-jazz musician and stockbroker who dreams of being a philanthropist and paying less in taxes. I believe in the US Constitution and free-market "Austrian" economic theories. I'm also a "climate realist" and believe in good science, which is never "settled".

As a computer programmer with over 25 years of hands-on experience in designing and developing large-scale enterprise applications, I am an expert at solving business problems.

I'm on Google+ because I enjoy engaging with others. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, the G+ ecosystem makes this much easier.

I'm a long time Mensa member, but I do not believe that possessing a high IQ makes you smart. My favorite quotation is: "Wrong is Right" -- Thelonius Monk.

I tend to be skeptical of everything, and believe that is a healthy way to approach ideas.

Some subjects that I am interested in are: Art, Jazz, Classical, Photography, Politics, Science, Erotica, Psychology,Economics. One of my hobbies is creating digital photocollage with my original photographs and Autodesk Maya software.

Most all of my posts are public, and I only have two circles: Close Friends (I get notifications) and Friends (Everybody else). You graduate to "Close Friends" when you engage with me and I see that we have some things in common. I am very accessible, but get to know me first by interacting with me before you send me a Hangout request.

NOTE: I occasionally make controversial posts or comments in order to stir debate. This rubs some people the wrong way. That's too bad. My comments are my own, and do not represent in any way those of any employer or client, past or present. I encourage civil debate, whether you agree with me or not, but if you engage in ad-hominem personal insults on one of my posts you are gonna get blocked in a New York second.

Excerpts provided by me are pursuant to the Fair Use Doctrine for educational and discussion purposes per Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, Copyright Law.

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

these self-aggrandizing tech libertarian bio blurbs are irresistible to me

amazing

I tend to be skeptical of everything

Energetic, Positive, Confident, Assertive Motivator-Visionary Influencer-Driver personality.

http://i.imgur.com/P8wV1vq.png

so happy I am never in a role that requires me to write a bio

brb adapting that guy's bio to be my okcupid profile

feel like it's probably reasonably simple to write a bio that doesn't present yourself as an enormous pulsating tool

that thinks it rules from the centre of the ultraworld?

, Erotica,

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/how-mark-zuckerberg-led-facebooks-war-to-crush-google-plus

wait they actually thought Google now was a huge looming threat? lol

How about Facebook’s first version of Search, available in English only, mostly useful for checking out your friends’ single female friends, and since discontinued?

rip Facebook search I miss u

good piece

on reading old issues of Wired from the 90s

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/on-reading-issues-of-wired-from-1993-to-1995

I don't get why they killed facebook search, it wasn't some life-changing product, it just made their search engine marginally more useful

Maybe I don't remember what that was, because it seems to me like they have a search function that works ok and certainly better than the one they originally had.

i want someone to write about the change in Facebook Event visibility

at some point you could see any (public) Event anyone you were friends with was invited to. and then it switched to only events that you were personally invited to. and now i think they charge the promoter for greater visibility. i was helping run a venue space last year and now it's super fucked, you can't even invite members of a group you manage but only your personal friends. so only personal friends of promoters get explicitly invited

anyways it used to be great cause you could easily find out about stuff going on that you werent necessarily directly plugged into. and i swear to god this change had discernible effects in montreal music + party scene (and i assume elsewhere)

Huh, I can see 'Events Popular in your Network' and 'Related to your Events History' AND 'Popular Events Nearby' on the web and I occasionally get a notification "Friends of yours are going to an event nearby", which seems a Zuckertastic double-edged sword.

lol every time I get that notification I'm like "Holy shit, there is actually an event in Forest Hills?" And then I realize it just means "New York City." But it fools me every time.

i've got "friends are going to an event nearby" when it's on in brighton. or yeah, just "hey your friend also lives in london". events has been fucked for a long time for various reasons, i can't even keep track of them all since it's been so annoying for so long in so many different ways.

yeah you can see some stuff but i know for a fact they're withholding 90% of it from you

they killed fb search because it gave an instant view to all the data you have "visible" to the public/friends/friends-of-friends

it's one thing to not mind if a random friend-of-friend knows where you work, but when some creep (*cough*) can think "hmm this girl named Sarah said she works at that local giant place" and you search "women named Sarah who work at giant place and live in this city" and she pops up it's fuckin' weird

Or, say, "women between ages of 18 and 35 with no relationship status or single relationship status who live in.." and get every person who has their gender, age, and vague location set to public

that makes sense. it would work fine if everyone had sensible privacy settings, but fb has reason to push people away from sensible privacy settings.

obviously that shit is way useful for serving targeted ads, but randos or even advertisers shouldn't get more than "12 users matched your criteria"

I'd argue their privacy settings aren't that bad as long as there's not a way to troll that shit! Even if I were to program something, I wouldn't get a list of all ppl in my area given broad criteria because that's not public

public to find manually versus public to broadly search are two pretty diff things

Miss that search.