The internet can be a confirmation bias machine. If one wants to find evidence that Wegmans is amazing, they will find it. If one wants to find evidence that Wegmans is terrible, they will find it. For that reason, I don't think anyone should celebrate when they find others online who agree with them. It feels like validation, but I believe it's meaningless.

Consensus is different. If almost all people who are knowledgeable about a certain subject agree on some fact, despite their different upbringings, cultures, and worldviews, then it probably is true. Can one find people online who believe that pandas speak Latin? Probably. The internet is a big place. Can one find broad consensus that pandas speak Latin? Absolutely not. That's one way of knowing it's probably bullshit.

Is broad consensus everything? No, but it's a strong indicator of truth. Add it to your truth detection scorecard. Have it replace “my tribe agrees with me.”

#Life #SocialMedia #Tech

I recently discovered a trick which one can use to save money while shopping online. If a store offers a lower price for a product when “autoship” is enabled, purchase the item with autoship, then cancel autoship after the item arrives. I don't know of any store that charges any kind of penalty at that point. Of course, one needs to actually cancel autoship when the item arrives; forgetfulness can be costly.

Is it dishonest? Yes, it is. But the dark patterns that motivate people to choose autoship (for example, making autoship the default) are even more slimy, especially when one considers how many customers these platforms have. I've known people who have enabled autoship accidentally, and I'm sure many, many others do. I consider this trick a reasonable way of fighting back.

#Tech #TechTips

Incentives rule the world.

#Life #Maxims #SocialMedia #SoftwareDevelopment #Tech

I just heard about Tin Can. What a great idea! It's a physical phone for kids that can connect with other Tin Cans for free. For a monthly fee, it can even connect with other phone numbers. Only approved contacts are supported, and best of all, there are no apps! It's an old concept, of course, but something about it seems so exciting, novel, and fun. Imagine kids spending less time on screens and more time actually talking to their friends, building real communication skills. This is what the world needs.

#Life #SocialMedia #Tech

I hate to criticize an organization as wonderful as Mozilla, but I must say, Proton is the company I wish Mozilla had become. We need an alternative to Google, a suite of competing web applications that put users first and protect privacy. Proton is accomplishing exactly that.

#SoftwareDevelopment #Tech

You get what you measure.

If cost is fixed and you measure speed, you'll get speed, but not quality. If cost is fixed and you measure quality, you'll get quality, but not speed. If you measure page views or ad impressions, your company may become a clickbait factory. If you measure messages sent within your app, your app might begin boosting outrageous content that makes people argue all the time. (Yes, I'm talking about social media.) If you're a bank and you measure account openings, your employees just might commit fraud to “get those numbers up.”

Incentives rule the world. If you decide to incentivize something by making a measurement a goal, be sure you understand the unintended consequences. Better yet, don't make a measurement a goal at all. As they say, “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, when a metric becomes a goal, people will inevitably game the system, and you might be surprised by what they do to “win.”

#Favorites #Life #Quotes #SocialMedia #SoftwareDevelopment #Tech

[The] social internet is, I would argue, not a net positive for humanity, even if it has greatly benefited some of us who use it a lot.

—John Green in Am I Cigarettes?

#SocialMedia #Tech

“Why are there different programing languages?”

An acquaintance once asked me this shortly after taking an online programming course. I said something about how any given language can be better or worse at solving a particular problem. French is great for poetry, and Haskell is great at representing algorithms and mathematical functions.

Nonsense!

Well, no, not completely. It's true. It's just not the whole story. Consider Python and Ruby. Why do we need both? Yes, yes, sure, there are important differences, but in the grand scheme of things, are they really that different? Hardly. They're both dynamic scripting languages which work well for web development. We could save a lot of time and energy by deprecating one and only using the other.

For that matter, why do we need Billy Joel and Elton John? They're not that different. They both play piano, they both write pop songs, and they both tour internationally. Talk about a waste of recourses! We could really save a lot of time and effort by having them join forces.

Does anyone think that would work? Of course not. Elton John doesn't want to sing “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” and Billy Joel doesn't want to sing “Tiny Dancer.” Billy Joel doesn't care about fashion and Elton John doesn't care about Long Island. They don't want to work together!

In the same way, Guido van Rossum thought it would be fun to create Python, and Yukihiro Matsumoto thought it would be fun to create Ruby. Millions of programmers like using blocks and millions of others love **kwargs. Who are we to disagree with them? Do we really think they would be equally productive doing something they don't enjoy?

Music is not a utilitarian matter, and neither is computer programming. Software development is an art as much as it is a science. When we forget that, we miss some of our most important opportunities.

A bottle of red, a bottle of white It all depends on your appetite

#SoftwareDevelopment #Tech

The newly-published video Impossible Challenges (Google Veo 3 ) by demonflyingfox is both an amazing showcase of Google's new Veo 3 AI (to be fair, I'm sure there was post-production) and hilarious commentary on the kind of algorithmic bullshit YouTube is constantly manipulating creators into publishing.

edit (2025-12-30): Although I was sure there had to be post-production when I published this, I'm no longer sure. If there was, there wasn't necessarily much. Sora 2 shows that this technology really is that amazing.

#SocialMedia #Tech

I just read John Gruber's blog post recommending Kagi as a replacement for Google Search when it occurred to me, for the hundredth time in the last year… what the hell happened to anti-spam efforts at Google Search?

I met Matt Cutts once in 2011. He was very kind, and he explained to me that he worked to combat search engine spam at Google. At the time, I didn't really understand what he was talking about, but boy do I understand now. Perhaps that's the best compliment I could give him; few notice anti-spam efforts when things are going well.

Matt Cutts has since left Google, and now, I get lots of results which provide very little value. What a shame. Apparently, Google needed him more than he needed Google.

#SoftwareDevelopment #Tech