Will Slack

maybe there's still some good left in this world after all

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

I think we're going to have to figure out that LLMs are pattern-regurgitators vs being actual intelligences - mimicking a type of responder. Figuring that out allowed me to use them more effectively.

So they can be good at many of the rote parts of dev, imo.

“It was a very healthy reciprocal acceptance of suffering,” he said. “Which does not mean being defeated by suffering. Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness.” He smiled in anticipation of the callback: “ ‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that's why. Maybe, I don't know. That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.” I love the thing that I most wish had not happened. I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien's mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”

when i think of Colbert, i think of an interview he gave to GQ when he first took over The Late Show, and had this to say about losing his father and brothers in a plane crash. www.gq.com/story/stephe...

Actual news alerts sent this a.m.:

Financial Times: “US inflation rose MORE THAN EXPECTED to 2.7% in June"

WSJ: “Inflation picked up AS EXPECTED, with consumer prices rising 2.7% in June from a year earlier"

Bloomberg: “Underlying US inflation rose in June by LESS THAN EXPECTED for a fifth month"

Good day as any to delete Facebook, Instagram, and/or Threads if you have not already

The fact that Meta will not rule out using private photos on your camera roll to train AI is abominable, full stop

futurism.com/meta-sketchy...

The only useful tech I've seen in education is tablets for teachers to quickly write equations/circle passages/etc by hand to be projected instead of writing on the board, but we didn't have those. Instead we had useless "ActivBoards" because they won a grant or something.

Boring works.

Worth a watch:

Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

If your law is good when there are good people in office, but dangerous when there are bad people in office, your law is bad.

Arizona Woman Pleads Guilty in Fraud Scheme That Illegally Generated $17 Million in Revenue for North Korea Christina Marie Chapman, 48, of Litchfield Park, Arizona, pleaded guilty today in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. in connection with a scheme that assisted overseas IT workers—posing as U.S. ci...

this is a very real thing these days. www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/a...

SME-QA pilot edthat specific tool for a CX posting. The SMEs really, really liked it because they could review the videos one after the other much more efficiently and could focus on evaluation vs asking the next question. The candidates did not like it a bit. Not sure if we should try again ever.

Ah kk. I have never been good at catching the jokes on/off social media. We don't really know yet how to send a lot of people to space in anything besides small capsules.

??? SpaceX is the sole commercial supplier for the US to get to the ISS - it has a fantastic position thanks to the Falcon 9 and Starlink. They've also spent much, much less on developing this next ship than Nasa did with the Saturn 5, because they are willing to test things that will break.

I wrote a thing about what automating the bureaucracy *actually* looks like. If you’re into administrative law and algorithm design, this is for you.

For everyone else, I’m sorry.

chrisgiven.com/2025/06/sitt...

Would very much not be up for this. NASA set up the commercial crew program because it was better for commercial firms to handle certain forms of space work, and that vision panned out. It's not SpaceX's fault that the other competitors were weaker; they haven't acted in a monopolizing way IMO.

Post to the subreddit r/AskHistorians: What was navigation like for vehicle drivers in the United States before the internet and GPS? Before GPS devices and smartphones/cellular internet networks were a thing (Garmin company was founded 1989), millions of Americans were already getting around driving without the use of those inventions. How did they navigate? Did everyone need stacks of maps? Were drivers frequently lost? Did everyone have to understand the interstate system and use intuition to guide them? How burdensome was driving before GPS? Did drivers pay people to calculate an optimal route for them?

I am officially one of The Ancients, Keeper of Knowledge of the Before Time

Not actually true: bsky.app/profile/wald...

The freedom to adjust plans sounds basic but others don't have it, and I'm grateful to those who signed up to fight for it at the cost of their lives. I hope y'all had a good Memorial Day.

I didn't realize that SQL and "sequel" were the same thing for a long, long, time. Just a vague confusion about this technology people kept talking about that wasn't written about anywhere.

I LOVE the books and would suggest the first for sure. The show doesn't (at least so far) really capture their magic. I'm not a fan of the changes - the books work bc you're with Murderbot as it learns about the folks who brought it along; the show is more 3rd person omniscient.

I'm so sorry Waldo!

could this be the result of some PR firm placing that and sourcing the quote?

Earlier this semester, an NYU professor told me how he had Al-proofed his assignments, only to have the students complain that the work was too hard. When he told them those were standard assignments, just worded so current Al would fail to answer them, they said he was interfering with their "learning styles." A student asked for an extension, on the grounds that ChatGPT was down the day the assignment was due. Another said, about work on a problem set, "You're asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn't I use a car to get there?" And another, when asked about their largely Al-written work, replied, "Everyone is doing it." Those are stories from a 15-minute conversation with a single professor.

Absolutely cooked.

One of the greatest tech tragedies of our time is the way we’ve let the phone and post office degrade into a basket of scams, exposing millions of people to risk on a daily basis.

In ATL they do that for the whole airport to avoid confusion because people would think that Delta was at Terminal D.

Wow. Just was seconds away from being phished.

SCAM WARNING
🧵

-Got a call from an area code where Paypal has corporate headquarters
-Recorded voice says that it's Paypal fraud protection and that they were getting a request to change my number on the account and to press 1 if it wasn't me

1/

the number of times i was told i did not really want a simple chronological feed

Text on men feeling isolated and the dismissal of their concerns.

Andrew Chen, co-founder of one of my favorite denim brands, 3sixteen, breaks down how the tariffs affect his company

IG 3sixteen