The personal website of Alex Weber
Mostly links from around the web, presented with quotes and commentary. Sometimes I write long-form pieces too.
There are a lot of funnily-named startups here… Having a comedic actor guess what they are = lulz. Here’s my favorite:
WhalePath
T.J.’s guess: “That’s a site that tells you the general migration patterns of whales. And it’s not a very funny site. It’s incredibly informative. It’s for the maritime man in all of us.”
Actually: A crowdsourced business growth site
Source: TJ Miller of HBOs Silicon Valley Tries to Guess What 10 Actual Startups Do
Is it OK to notice a problem and do something small to make it better, or is it better to do nothing at all?
If you implicitly believe in the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics, then to confront the scope of suffering in the world is to make it your fault, and then if you don’t throw everything you have at the problem you’re as “bad” as PETA or Mr. Thornley or Uber or BBH Labs.
But what if – what if noticing a problem didn’t make it any worse? What if we could act on a problem and not feel horrible for making it just a little better, even if it was an action that benefited ourselves as well? What if we said that in these instances, these groups weren’t evil – it’s okay to notice a problem and only make it a little bit better.
Source: The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics | Almost No One is Evil. Almost Everything is Broken.
Don’t click through to this gallery because if you do you might end up living IN A VAN, DOWN BY THE RIVER!
A photographer spent two months with people who live off the grid but still log in every once in a while.
A delightful, whimsical journey of “The Little Printf” as he meets developers and explores their worlds with curiosity…
In the end though, it is only when you solve problems with a human face that you can feel truly right; What is essential is invisible to the computer.
It is the time you have spent on your system that makes it so important”, the man added, “and when you lost sight of why it made sense to spend time on it, when it became a game of pride, it caused more grief than relief.
Source: ferd.ca -> The Little Printf
“It’s not just a lawsuit,” says Trauss. “It’s a political exercise. Most people would be very uncomfortable tearing down 315 houses. But they don’t have a similar objection to never building them in the first place, even though I feel they’re morally equivalent. Those people show up anyway. They get born anyway. They get a job in the area anyway. What do they do? They live in an overcrowded situation, they pay too much rent, they have a commute that’s too long. Or maybe they outbid someone else, and someone else is displaced.”
“It’s easy to see the problem when you’re tearing down someone’s home. But when you’re not building, it’s hard to see whose home it is.”
Source: Urban activists set out to sue San Francisco’s suburbs | Grist
I never knew the backstory of this man—Peter Norman—until now… very interesting! TL;DR: he consciously chose to stand with these men, and was ostracized from the Australian Olympic community as a result.
The two Americans had asked Norman if he believed in human rights. Norman said he did. They asked him if he believed in God, and he, who had been in the Salvation Army, said he believed strongly in God. “We knew that what we were going to do was far greater than any athletic feat, and he said “I’ll stand with you” – remembers John Carlos – “I expected to see fear in Norman’s eyes, but instead we saw love.”
A fascinating and fortunate longitudinal study is able to draw conclusions from these families receiving what amounts to basic income. TL;DR: Everyone benefitted.
There’s also the question of stress, which the extra money helps relieve—even if only a little. While the added income wasn’t enough to allow parents to quit their jobs, it’s a base level that helped with rent and food and other basic expenses. That, Akee said, is powerful enough itself.
“We know that the thing poor couples fight about the most is money,” he said. “Off the bat, this means a more harmonious family environment.”
I wandered up a couple of flights of stairs, through Moynihan Station’s cavernous halls, and sat down with Nadella to ask him what he’d meant by his remark. “The lesson we have learned is that there’s going to be more personal computing in our lives,” he replied. Forms will change, functions will change, devices will change, he explained, and so, “You can’t fall in love with this one thing becoming the hub for all things and for all time to come.”
That philosophy is, in many ways, the opposite of the old Microsoft. The company under Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer was a hyper-competitive, cutthroat organization focussed on getting as many people as possible to run Microsoft software on personal computers. The company was so in love with P.C.s (the hub for all things and for all time to come) that it came late to the Internet and much, much too late to mobile phones. Windows used to run on ninety per cent of computing devices; now, with the rise of Android and Apple phones, it runs on eleven per cent.
Nadella, who took over as C.E.O. in February of 2014, is changing the company both strategically and by personal example.
Source: Satya Nadella and Microsoft’s Very Good Day – The New Yorker
Props to DuckDuckGo for Doing It Right!
“DuckDuckGo is actually profitable. It is a myth you need to track people to make money in web search,” Weinberg said during the AMA session. “Most of the money is still made without tracking people by showing you ads based on your keyword, i.e. type in ‘car’ and get a car ad.”These ads are lucrative because people have buying intent. All that tracking is for the rest of the internet without this search intent, and that’s why you’re tracked across the internet with these same ads.”
Source: DuckDuckGo CEO: ‘It’s a myth you need to track people to make money in web search’