So long, and thanks for all the fish. I really mean it.
PRs for Governance
They’re Made Out of Sand
[…] It still amazes me, from the scientific point of view, that we turned sand into thinking machines. Pretty incredible. […]
On Failure
“It’s so freeing and beautiful in a way, to have a great failure. There’s nowhere to go but up.”
On Mastery
Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status.
Derek Siver, as seen on Farnam Street.
The Implicit Bias of my Tribe
Sturgeon’s Law
Ninety percent of everything is crud.
Theodore Sturgeon, Venture Science Fiction Magazine, March 1958
Because I am free to be whatever I want
And that is everything that matters today, or not, or Whatever:
What defines a platform
Today, I read a great definition of what creates a platform delivered by, no other than, the “great” BillG (emphasis all mine):
Neither of [Facebook platform and connect] are platforms. They’re both kind of like these comical endeavors that do you as an Nth priority. I was in charge of Facebook platform. We trumpeted it out like it was some hot shit big deal. And I remember when we raised money from Bill Gates, 3 or 4 months after… Like our funding history was $5M, $83 M, $500M, and then $15B. When that 15B happened around literally a few months after Facebook platform and Gates said something along the lines of, “That’s a crock of shit. This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.”
Via the very controversial Chamath Palihapitiya at StrictlyVC’s Insider Series.
The Best Definition of Bitcoin
Today, I listed what is, for me, the best explanation of what Bitcoin is in terms of a financial instrument. This is Robert Armstrong for FT News Briefing:
[…] let’s think of it as a call option on an equity that owns a technology that we are not sure if it’s gonna be magic or not but it just might be. And what that technology promises to do at some point down the road is to become, in a way, more like the Dollar or the Euro. We just don’t know it it’s there or not. […]
He also shows in his article for the Financial Times today that there is more than an apparent correlation between the Rolling 1m Average Daily Single Tech Stock Call Volumes:
And bitcoin:
I guess I just had an epiphany today…