Werd I/O

I was asked if I’m planning to monetize ShareOpenly.

Short answer: I have no plans to do so. This is a personal project.

If it’s wildly successful and the infrastructure costs skyrocket, I may look for donations or sponsorship of some kind in order to cover those costs. I’m not looking for it to be profitable or for it to be my job.

It’s intentionally very very lightweight, so I don’t expect that to happen for a long time to come.

Here’s what I would say to Russell T Davies if I could:

One of my very first television memories is sitting watching Peter Davison’s Doctor (and reruns of Tom Baker’s) on a tiny 12” TV set, my face probably too close to the screen. My imagination ran wild. There was a large horse chestnut tree set in the playground of my primary school, and it became the console of my own time machine: first by myself, as a lonely, weird little kid, and then more as other children decided to see what on earth I was doing.

When Sylvester McCoy’s era rolled around, we would fold out the sofabed every Wednesday after Wogan and watch the next installment. I remember being particularly drawn in by the continuing story around Ace, the hints about something bigger in the Doctor’s past, and his plans for her.

When it was canceled, I devoured the New Adventures books, starting with the Timewyrm and Cat’s Cradle series.

And then, in 2005, when it all started up again, I would gather up the episodes and watch them over Christmas with my mother, once again. When she became terminally ill and I moved to be closer to her, we watched them all together in real time. We loved the reboot, the reinvigorated ethos and the joy of it, and the continuation of stories that had been in progress since before I was born.

Russell: it wasn’t just a TV show that you resurrected. (Although it was that, too, of course, and a really good one.) It was those times sitting together, the shared family space, the love and togetherness and fun of it all.

She would have loved the bi-generation and Ncuti Gatwa’s sparkling take on the character. She would have been excited for this new season as much as I am.

I can’t wait to watch. I’m excited for all these new stories, new ideas, new provocations. I won’t be alone. Through all those adventures in time and space, I’ll have a companion with me, invisibly sitting close, the sofa bed unfolded, laughing and hiding behind the cushions alongside me.

Thank you for this. Thank you for all of it.

Mark Nottingham highlighted this alarming quote by CEO Alex Karp from the latest Palantir earnings call:

I think the central risk to Palantir and America and the world is a regressive way of thinking that is corrupting and corroding our institutions that calls itself progressive, but actually -- and is called woke, but is actually a form of a thin pagan religion.

That is a real danger to our society. And it is a real danger to Palantir if we allow -- if we don't discuss these things. The reason we have by far the best product offering in the world is because we have by far the best alignment around how to build software, what it means to build software, full alignment with our customers, a view that some -- the Western way of living is superior and, therefore, it should be supported by the best products.

[…]We believe we are fighting for a stronger, better, less discriminatory, wealthier, more open, and better society by providing the friends of the West, U.S. industry, U.S. government, our allies, with by far superior products.

I find this so alarming. I’m so opposed to this way of thinking that I don’t exactly know where to start. “Woke is paganism” smacks of a deeply regressive way of thinking; not least because “paganism” is bad smacks of a very narrow way of thinking where some religions are better than others. I hate it on every level — and that’s before we get to the US-centric nationalism.

Palantir, of course, is the company whose products and services routinely power systemic human rights abuses. So perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. But it’s still very striking to see these kinds of words expressed during an earnings call.

Update: I wrote a longer post that explains this argument less flippantly and in more detail.

This post is anecdotal and should not be considered to be investment advice.

A company I used to be associated with sent out an email yesterday that essentially explained that the effective share price was lower than some people had bought options at, and that preferred shares were now common stock. I’m not mad about it: in fact, I think the restructuring was a good thing, and the cap table is now optimized for employees of the current phase of the company, which is how it should be. (The company, which will remain nameless, used to be troubled but is now doing really well under a new CEO. I like both the old and new CEOs very much, and there seems to be alignment between them on what needs to happen, which helps.)

I did not exercise my options at that company, so I have lost exactly nothing. In fact, I’ve never exercised options at any company I’ve been a part of.

This is maybe a bit of a self-own: that implies I’ve never been a part of a company that I felt strongly enough about that I wanted to own part of it. That’s actually not true. I own a significant chunk of Latakoo, the company that powers video delivery for news networks around the world — but I bought those shares as a direct investment at a low price while I was a very early employee, rather than as options. I also own shares in a few other companies that I’ve either advised or been a part of. (I’m also always interested in advisory roles in other companies in exchange for equity.)

But in general, for regular employees, I think options are rarely worth it. They typically require an up-front investment that many employees simply can’t make, so it’s a bit of a fake benefit to begin with, and their future value is little more certain than a lottery ticket. It’s a nice sign for founders when you can buy in, but those employees tend to be already-wealthy. Unless you’re very early at a company, the options are very cheap, and the prospects look amazing, I think it’s usually better investment to optimize for cashflow and save a portion of your money in traditional funds. Perhaps that’s a boring idea, but there it is. The promise of getting rich quick through options is what every get rich quick scheme is: too good to be true. Take the salary and bank it.

A small web development thing I’d missed until yesterday:

When you want a link to open a page in a new tab, you’ve long been able to add the attribute target="_blank" to the tag. The problem was, that actually gave the opened pages rights to their referrer: it opened a security hole that could potentially have leaked user information or opened the door to phishing.

In response to that, the received wisdom was to also add rel="noopener" to the tag — or, more commonly, rel="noopener noreferrer", which strips referrer information from analytics. (Please don’t do this second part. For all kinds of reasons, it’s useful for a publisher to see who’s sending them traffic.) I’ve been adding noopener for years.

It turns out that browsers have been automatically setting this for links where target="_blank" since 2021: for three full years (and, actually, longer for Safari and Firefox). So there’s no need to add it anymore. There’s no harm in setting it, but there’s also no need.

#TIL

ProPublica, the newsroom I work for as Senior Director of Technology, won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service journalism for its work on Supreme Court justices’ beneficial relationships with billionaire donors. You’ve probably heard something about Clarence Thomas’s corruption in particular; that story was broken by us.

ProPublica was also a joint Pulitzer Prize finalist for its work with the Texas Tribune and Frontline on the Uvalde school shooting.

Of course, I’m not a journalist and can’t claim credit for this work. But I feel very privileged to support these journalists and to help publish work that has had (and will continue to have in the future) a real impact on our democracy.

There’s a lot that happens during my day to day work that I can’t talk about at all, but it runs the gamut from supporting software development on our web platform and infrastructure, through helping journalists make good use of secure tools like Signal, to securely dealing with sensitive data drops from sources.

It’s very different work from startups or building open source social networking platforms — but it’s rewarding and meaningful. I’m honored to get to do it, and to know the journalists who are on the ground really doing this reporting.

Now, back to work. Look at what’s going on in the world; where we are as a nation. There’s a lot to do.

By far the coolest thing about blogging is the replies. I’ve had a bunch of responses to my latest iteration of the baby stack across various platforms: universally other dads, none of which I’ve met before, who are looking for recommendations. I think that’s really neat.

Some interesting questions I’ve received include:

• How tall am I? (I’m 6’4”.) It’s really hard to find a stroller that isn’t too short. (I found that the Uppababy Cruz V2 does work for me if I extend the pushbar all the way. The Joolz Aer is shorter but I care less because we use it so sporadically.)
• Why I didn’t I include a baby carrier? (We don’t use them anymore, and I’ve never found one that worked for me. I’d love to have a baby backpack for him, and I’m kind of on the lookout for one.)

This has been true whenever I’ve posted about anything that is more substantial than an opinion: lots of community discussion, feedback, questions, and ideas. It’s the best thing about blogging, and about the web.

The biggest thing to be concerned about in all these student protests is not the students, but the severity and strength with which the police are entering the fray. A police officer fired a gun on the Columbia campus. Tear gas is being used on multiple campuses. In multiple cases (including Indiana and UVA), universities have pre-empted the fact that these protests were legal and within the rules by changing the rules in response to the protests in order to render them illegal without notice.

The outrage over protests is a useful way for the news cycle to evolve, in a way, because the story has become about the protests about the killing rather than the killing itself. But while this outrage has been playing out, the death toll in Gaza has risen to 34,500 people and Netanyahu has threatened to invade Rafah whether there’s a deal or not. It’s a bloody, horrific situation for ordinary people in Gaza — who have been in wretched conditions at the hands of political machinations for generations now — to be in. The outlook doesn’t look good for them.

It seems logical that Americans would be upset that their money is being used to fund this killing, and to fund the annexation of Gaza. None of this is about support for Hamas; it’s about support for the human beings and respect for the sanctity of human life.

There are small numbers of instigators at the fringes, as there are at every protest. There are right-wing counter-protesters, as there are for every progressive protest movement. But this looks like an anti-war moment to me: one that values peace, dignity, and human life. While there’s certainly a huge amount of diplomatic complexity behind the underlying situation, the military activity in Gaza recently is less complicated. There’s no umm-ing and ahh-ing needed with respect to the idea that the mass slaughter of human beings is wrong. It just is. I support the protesters whole-heartedly.

I’ve been pretty sick for over a week now. Daycare is a Petri dish of germs and viruses, but most have them have passed me by; this one, in contrast, hit me like a ton of bricks. I’ve been the sickest I’ve felt in years: a really unpleasantly deep congestion in my lungs combined with a lightheaded wooziness that comes and goes through the day.

So, for the moment, I’m pretty quiet here. I’ll be back to it soon.