Ben Werdmuller

1. Don't lie to your customers.

2. Don't lie to your team.

3. Spinning is lying.

4. Intentional omissions are lying.

5. If you find that you must lie or spin to sell your product, go back and build a product that actually matches your talk.

6. If you lie, people will find out.

7. All business is relationship-based.

8. Trust is core to every relationship.

9. Lies are kryptonite to trust.

10. Don't lie to your customers.

11. Don't lie to your team.

#work

A few weeks ago, I went to the doctor with an ear infection. It turns out it was probably to do with my AirPods Pro, which fit just a little bit too snugly into my ear canal. (After some Googling, I've learned that this is actually a surprisingly common reaction. Boo, hiss.) I've been banned from wearing earbuds for the foreseeable future. I loved the simplicity of my AirPods, but I've had to figure something else out.

My first thought was to look at AirPods Max, because apparently I'm a sucker for Apple to the point where even causing a biological risk to my hearing isn't that big a deal. But they take over six weeks to deliver. I also spend, on average, four to five hours in video calls every single day (yes, it's everything you think it is, and as productive as you worry it isn't). So I needed to find something fast.

I settled on the Bose NC 700 HPs. They're noise-canceling (check), wireless (check), have a microphone (check), and work pretty well within the Apple ecosystem (check). The price tag is a little bit on the eye-watering side, but given how much use I would get out of them, I figured it would be worth it.

So far: audio quality is beautiful. I want to fall asleep listening to music on them. Noise canceling works really well. But the bluetooth connectivity and the microphone both need a bunch of work. I'm constantly having to re-pair with my devices (I have a work laptop, a home laptop, a phone and a tablet) and people are continually telling me that the microphone is too quiet. So the bottom line is, for my use case, that it needs work. I can use the built-in system microphone, but for an audio device that comes in at just under $400, I really shouldn't have to. I've also had feedback that the ear cushions wear out really fast. I haven't noticed that yet, but I've only had them for a few weeks.

I'd love feedback and advice. What do you use? Do you have anything you really love? Does what I'm looking for even exist? Or am I doomed to follow Apple everywhere? Let me know.

#work #tech

I'm starting to see a bunch of startups that offer to speed you up by completing your work using GPT-3. It's a hell of a promise: start writing something and the robot will finish it off for you. All you've got to do is sand off the edges.

Imagine if the majority of content was made like this. You set a few key words and the topic, and then a machine learning algorithm finishes off the work, based on what it's learned from the corpus of data underpinning its decisions, which happens to be the sum total of output on the web. When most content is actually made by machine learning, the robot is learning from other robots; rinse and repeat until, statistically speaking, almost all content derives from robot output, a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of human thought and emotion.

Would it be gibberish? I'd like to think so. I'd like to assume that it would lose all sense of meaning and the original topics would fade out, as photocopies of photocopies do as the series goes on. But what if it's not? What if, as the human fades out, the content makes more sense, and new, more logical structures emerge from the biological static? Would we stop creating? Would we destroy the robots? Or would we see these things as separate and different, almost as if software had a culture of its own?

What if a robot learned how to be a human based on data gathered on the behavior of every connected human in the world? That data exists; it's just not centralized yet. What if, then, we started to build artificial humans whose behaviors were based on that machine learning corpus? Eventually, when the artificial humans vastly outnumber natural humans, and new artificial humans are learning to be human from older artificial humans, what behaviors would emerge? How would they change across the generations? Would they devolve into gibberish, or turn into something new?

What if we were all cyborgs, a combination of robot and human? Imagine if we had access to the sum total of all human knowledge virtually any time we wanted, and access to the form of that data changed the way we behaved. And then new humans would learn to be human from the cyborgs, and become cyborgs themselves, using hardware and software designed by other cyborgs, which in turn would change their behavior even more. What does that look like after generations? Does it devolve into gibberish? Or does it turn into something completely new?

#ai #tech

This is my monthly roundup of the tech and media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for January, 2021: a month that included an armed coup attempt, my 42nd birthday, and the start of a new Presidency.

Books

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, by Eric Hoffer. Fascinating, searing and insightful, but also set in its ways. It was originally published in 1951, and some of Hoffer’s perspective has not stood the test of time; however, the parallels he draws about mass movements around the world absolutely do, and I found it hard not to think about the current rise of Trumpian nationalism as he laid out his argument.

The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu. Spectacular science fiction ideas drawn from real imagination, woven into a nonsensical story with wooden, unbelievable characters that often stray into sexist tropes. It turns out I care about the latter more.

The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage (Book of Dust, Volume 1), by Philip Pullman. It’s absolutely magical to read a fantasy universe set in an alternate version of my hometown. I felt a waterfall of emotions, from homesickness to wonder. I’ve never read His Dark Materials, to my shame, and this has me very much wanting to go and read that trilogy before I continue with this one. But the last third is much weaker, and contains a narrative choice I won’t spoil but really didn’t need to be there. Not a perfect book, then, but for the first two thirds, it was moving in that direction.

Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America, by Laila Lalami . This series of dynamic first-person perspectives on the conditions of citizenship placed on the majority of people in this country who don’t happen to be white, male, or straight should be required reading for every American. It culminates in a manifesto of sorts that paints a picture of the sort of country we should be building. The only point of departure I have with the author is her apparent belief that faith makes a person more ethical; I simply don’t believe this to be the case. Nonetheless, this is her truth, and it’s related in a direct, dynamic way that adds a great deal to the discourse of what it means to be an American.

The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig. A lovely feel-good read. I occasionally felt like the author was over-stressing obvious conclusions, but that’s because the premise of depression leading to constant agonizing over past regrets is pretty much where I live. It left me, like its protagonist, eager to go out and live. Sure, you could unkindly describe it as Quantum Leap for people with depression. But honestly? Even that synopsis sounds great to me.

Streaming

Revolution of the Daleks. After the year we had, I really needed a solid Doctor Who special. And this was it: from great character development to a “fuck the police” subtext, this is the subversive show I love. I’m looking forward to more later this year, as soon as they finish filming during the pandemic (apparently they don’t quite know when that will be yet).

Locked Down. It was critically panned, and the subject matter is the definition of “too soon”, but I enjoyed this weird little movie. It’s neither a romantic comedy nor a heist movie, but it rhymes with both. It reminded me of a quirky novel.

chez baldwin. A Spotify playlist based on records found in James Baldwin’s home in France. Sublime.

Notable Articles

Business

How Google workers secretly built a union. I’m deeply pro-union, and excited to see more unionization in tech.

Vons, Pavilions to Fire “Essential Workers,” Replace Drivers with Independent Contractors. This is what we get for passing Proposition 22.

Imagine a Hiring Process Without Resumes. “Open hiring shifts resources to invest in workers, rather than finding ways to exclude them. Most important, this approach allows companies to build more resilient businesses and address one of today’s greatest social challenges: providing economic opportunities for people often viewed as unemployable.”

World's richest person Elon Musk to dedicate wealth to Mars colony. “And lest you think a trip to Mars is too pricey for most people, Musk has said he intends for there to be "loans available for those who don't have money," and jobs on the Red Planet for colonists to pay off their debts. Some critics say Musk's plans resemble an interplanetary form of indentured servitude.” You don’t say.

Seed Investments in Insurrection. “Some investors who rewrite the history of innovation. They forget that taxpayers funded the creation of the internet and contributed to pharmaceutical discoveries. They call for the end of regulations except for the ones that incentivize them to invest through tax benefits regular people don’t get. They want the government off their backs except when it comes to making sure no one builds affordable housing down the street from them.”

Culture is the Behavior You Reward and Punish. “People stop taking values seriously when the public rewards (and consequences) don’t match up. We can say that our culture requires treating each other with respect, but all too often, the openly rude high performer is privately disciplined, but keeps getting more and better projects. It doesn’t matter if you docked his bonus or yelled at him in private. When your team sees unkind people get ahead, they understand that the real culture is not one of kindness.”

Expensify CEO David Barrett: ‘Most CEOs are not bad people, they're just cowards’. “My opinion is a little bit different. I think this idea of "Oh, we're apolitical," I think that's kind of bullshit. I think there's no such thing in a democracy as being apolitical. Every action you take is your position. I think that a large number of these tech companies, by saying, "Oh, we're apolitical," that's a very convenient way of saying, "No, I'm voting for the status quo. I support the current administration, and I'm not going to take actions to do anything about it because it's actually good for business." I think it's actually pretty cynical.”

Why You Should Practice Failure. “We learn from our mistakes. When we screw up and fail, we learn how not to handle things. We learn what not to do.” All opportunities for growth.

Why I wouldn’t invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one. “The question then is: Is open-source a better business strategy than a more conventional, proprietary tech model? And the answer - at least to me - is a resounding "No". The ratio of failed OS businesses to successful ones is worse than in prop-tech; revenue kicks in much later, business model pivots are hampered by community resistance, and licensing issues leave OS businesses vulnerable throughout their lifetime. Instead, why not do what traditional businesses are doing, sell a product, and simply charge for the value it provides?” AKA “the exact same mistake I made twice.”

Making Twitter a better home for writers. It's super-interesting to see Twitter enter the paid newsletter space. Lots of interesting places to go with this.

Speaker Rider for Meaningfully Inclusive Events. Let's please all start using this.

Tractors won't be fully autonomous anytime soon — but not because they can't be. It’s interesting to think about the long term effects of autonomous farming. I don’t believe we can switch to this without much stronger social safety nets in place. I can also see a world where low-wage workers end up working behind computers, policing the decisions made by machine learning systems.

Culture

How about finding new books by mapping who thanks who. I love this idea. I wonder if a company other than Amazon or Google could pull it off?

A full accounting of the one hundred and fifty tales that make up the entirety of the thousand and one tales. This is a lovely writing project. It makes me want to do something similar - you know, with all my copious free time.

Three Things Cameron Couldn't Tell You, by Michael Haynes. I loved this short story.

Media

The mafia turns social media influencer to reinforce its brand. “Southern Italy’s mob bosses embrace digital platforms as a way to spread their message.” I’m excited to see the TikTok dances.

A sneak peak at power mapping, 2073’s top innovation. “What if every piece of journalism helped the public understand whether old or new power dynamics and values were at play?”

The Day Without News. If only.

Using printed QR codes for links in books. I love these examples, and the idea. URLs on the printed page have always sucked. Including QR codes inline can be beautiful, and simultaneously less obtrusive.

Open letter from Laura Poitras. “On Monday, November 30, 2020, I was fired from First Look Media, an organization I co-founded. My termination came two months after I spoke to the press about The Intercept’s failure to protect whistleblower Reality Winner and the cover-up and lack of accountability that followed, and after years of raising concerns internally about patterns of discrimination and retaliation.”

Apple is reportedly considering a podcast subscription service. Okay, but I want them to be compatible with my podcast player, and not have to use Apple's.

The Impact of COVID-19 on Journalism in Emerging Economies and the Global South. "Taking a deep dive into the critical challenges faced by the profession, the report examines issues including the pandemic’s impact on the personal safety and welfare of journalists, the structure of newsrooms and disruption to business models, the proliferation of fake news, and surging threats to media freedom. The study also identifies best practice and innovative approaches that have been developed as a response to the challenges of COVID-19."

Misinformation went down after Twitter banned Trump. By 73%. So there’s that.

Is there room for small, niche streaming services?. Take the quiz: how many streaming services are real and how many are fake? I got 6 out of 13 right.

Politics

The NDAA bans anonymous shell companies. The NDAA, which passed after this post was written, “includes a measure known as the Corporate Transparency Act, which undercuts shell companies and money laundering in America. The act requires the owners of any company that is not otherwise overseen by the federal government (by filing taxes, for example, or through close regulation) to file a report that identifies each person associated with the company who either owns 25% or more of it or exercises substantial control over it. That report, including name, birthdate, address, and an identifying number, goes to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). The measure also increases penalties for money laundering and streamlines cooperation between banks and foreign law enforcement authorities.”

Trump pressures Georgia's Raffensperger to overturn his defeat in extraordinary call. Just astonishing.

Same Elections, Different Americas. “Donald Trump will likely get away with massive election fraud. Crystal Mason got five years for one vote.”

I’m in a roomful of people 'panicked that I might inadvertently give away their location'. A remarkable account of the Capitol insurrection. I was surprised at how emotional my reaction to reading this was - there were tears. We came so close to something much worse.

What it was like for a reporter to be evacuated from the U.S. Capitol. “Back in the Capitol, police began a room-by-room search to find senators, staff and reporters who had been left behind. One senior GOP aide, who has an office not far from the Senate floor, said he took a steel rod and barricaded his door when the pro-Trump mob approached. For what seemed like 20 minutes, he said, rioters banged on his door, trying to break in.”

The other reason Facebook silenced Trump? Republicans just lost their power. "It has not escaped my attention that the day social media companies decided there actually IS more they could do to police Trump's destructive behavior was the same day they learned Democrats would chair all the congressional committees that oversee them."

Madness on Capitol Hill. ““This is not America,” a woman said to a small group, her voice shaking. She was crying, hysterical. “They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.””

Who decides when there are helicopters? Experts weigh in on National Guard monitoring protests. “It sets an incredibly troubling precedent when we think about what it might mean if any time there’s a protest you might have military surveillance helicopters there.”

First Amendment and free spech: When it applies and when it doesn't. “Let's look at some common First Amendment arguments, illuminated and debunked by constitutional experts.”

Lisa Montgomery becomes first woman to be executed by federal government since 1953. Stomach-turning. The death penalty is the opposite of justice. It’s just cold-blooded murder, committed by the state in our names.

Alt-Right Groups and Personalities Involved In Last Week’s Capitol Riot Received Over $500K In Bitcoin From French Donor One Month Prior. This is a remarkable story in every possible way.

Secret Service paid $3,000 a month for a bathroom near Jared and Ivanka’s D.C. home. One of 2021’s gifts is not having to care about these awful people anywhere near as much.

Self-styled militia members planned Capitol storming in advance of Jan. 6. “In charging papers, the FBI said that during the Capitol riot, Caldwell received Facebook messages from unspecified senders updating him of the location of lawmakers. When he posted a one-word message, “Inside,” he received exhortations and directions describing tunnels, doors and hallways, the FBI said. Some messages, according to the FBI, included, “Tom all legislators are down in the Tunnels 3floors down,” and “Go through back house chamber doors facing N left down hallway down steps.” Another message read: “All members are in the tunnels under capital seal them in. Turn on gas,” the FBI added.” Holy crap.

Biden’s climate plan emphasizes environmental justice. You know, I’d like to take a minute and appreciate how nice it is to read a headline about something that someone did in government and think, “that’s great”. It’s been quite a while.

Science

How researchers are making do in the time of Covid. “To gauge how researchers in different fields are managing, Knowable Magazine spoke with an array of scientists and technical staff—among them a specialist keeping alive genetically important strains of fruit flies, the maintenance chief of an astronomical observatory working to keep telescopes safe and on standby during the lockdown, and a pediatrician struggling to manage clinical trials for a rare genetic disease.”

Society

Working From Bed Is Actually Great. “Those with chronic illness or disabilities say that they hope that, much as the way the pandemic has made companies more open to remote work, the stigma around working from bed will also be broken.”

What If You Could Do It All Over?. “Most of us aren’t haunted so acutely by the people we might have been. But, perhaps for a morning or a month, our lives can still thrum with the knowledge that it could have been otherwise.” This is a sickness that I know very, very well. A really interesting exploration.

Meet the gun-toting ‘Tenacious Unicorns’ in rural Colorado (Queers, alpacas and guns). “How a transgender-owned alpaca ranch in Colorado foretells the future of the rural queer West.” I love this so much.

The imminent possibility of UFOs. The truth is out there.

The Retirement Crisis for Women of Color. "In fact, women of color are more likely to fall into poverty in retirement because they are less likely than white women to have retirement plans available through their employer, says Geoffrey Sanzenbacher, an associate professor at Boston College and research fellow at the Center for Retirement Research. It’s rare for workers to be able to save substantial amounts of money for retirement outside of those plans, creating inequality in who can save for the future."

The Ways We're Suppressed. "The cruelty of American Society isn’t simply in its unfairness, but in the fact that your fellow people actively support and canvas for said unfairness. They want to keep it the same way because it’s a way of justifying their own privilege - many people can’t face the fact that they got lucky two, or three, or a hundred times over, because luck suggests that their hard work wasn’t part of it. They’re people who are babies - so fragile on the inside that they can’t see that, yes, they worked hard and got stuff, but there were advantages along the way, and that acknowledging said advantages doesn’t discount the work they did."

Recompose, the first human-composting funeral home in the U.S., is now open for business. I’m fully 100% in.

Technology

Regulation is coming in 2021. Here’s how Big Tech is preparing for it. “The open internet. Section 230. China. Internet access. 5G. Antitrust. When we asked the policy shops at some of the biggest and most powerful tech companies to identify their 2021 policy priorities, these were the words they had in common.”

Downloading meditation apps and rethinking meetings: How tech leaders changed in 2020. “We asked a number of leaders across the tech world to reflect a bit on a crazy year, and to tell us a few things they've learned, what's changed, and how they're bringing the new normal into 2021. Here's what they told us.”

Feature Prioritizing: Ways To Reduce Subjectivity And Bias. Some good ideas to improve design sessions and avoid structural biases. I’m looking forward to putting them into practice.

Tech legislation to watch in 2021. Useful round-up of legislation on the cards for the coming year. I’m particularly hopeful for a nationwide privacy law.

On Online. “At first, the internet was where I found other people like me, people I hadn’t yet found in real life. They were on Diaryland and LiveJournal, being honest about what was going on in their lives and tooling around with HTML and CSS. Usually we liked the same music. We exchanged images of different artists, when images were hard to find. It was a place of solace. Now I can’t tweet a damn thing without someone I don’t know, who doesn’t know me, saying something in reply that mocks me, insults me, suggests total lack of awareness of the circumstances of my life, etc., etc. It’s not the place it once was, where we were vulnerable, honest, and seeking connection. Now, it feels like we are only seeking righteousness and/or a perfect aesthetic. It’s boring. I’m not the first to point this out.”

DALL·E: Creating Images from Text. Legitimately one of the most amazing technology demos I’ve ever seen. Click into the examples and see what I mean.

The continuing rise of private virtual neighbourhoods. “Perhaps what we’re seeing is the disentangling of social media back into social and media: newsletters and podcasts are best understood as being part of the media spectrum, even if many of them are smaller and have community spaces attached. And Discord space, Slack spaces, etc, these virtual neighbourhoods are pure social.”

A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?. “In 1995, a WIRED cofounder challenged a Luddite-loving doomsayer to a prescient wager on tech and civilization’s fate. Now their judge weighs in.” Frankly, neither man comes off very well.

Archivists Are Mining Parler Metadata to Pinpoint Crimes at the Capitol. “Using a massive 56.7-terabyte archive of the far-right social media site Parler that was captured on Sunday, open-source analysts, hobby archivists, and computer scientists are working together to catalog videos and photos that were taken at the attack on the U.S. Capitol last Wednesday.”

Federal Front Door. “Recent research has made clear what many folks have personally experienced: The federal government needs to improve how it interacts with the public. Enter the Federal Front Door, an initiative to improve public-government interactions across the board.”

Everything Old is New Part 2: Why Online Anonymity Matters. A really useful list of resources about why anonymity matters online, and why using real names is not the solution to online abuse.

Facing Forward. A really lovely reminder of another era of creativity in software design.

Turning off your camera in video calls could cut carbon emissions by 96%. “A new study from Purdue University in the US estimates that an hour of videoconferencing or streaming emits between 150 and 1000 grams of carbon dioxide. It also uses up to 12 litres of water and an area of land around the size of an iPad mini.” It’s rare to see the environmental impact of the internet industry discussed, but it’s important.

China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub. "With GitHub in the crosshairs of Chinese censors, Beijing is backing Gitee as its official hub, an open-source institution tailored for a closed internet." Fascinating, not least because Gitee really just looks like a GitHub clone.

New WhiteHouse.gov. Hooray for a bilingual White House homepage again - and on WordPress!

‘The Big Shift’: Internal Facebook Memo Tells Employees to Do Better on Privacy. "Facebook VP Andrew Bosworth tells colleagues that privacy matters more than the product experience." If they can reform the company around privacy and the human rights of their users, I might even re-join. Color me skeptical, though.

‘For Some Reason I’m Covered in Blood’: GPT-3 Contains Disturbing Bias Against Muslims. Yet again, algorithms carry the bias of their sources.

Make Boring Plans. "Since we often end up in the land of novel technology, we owe it to ourselves and our customers to be boring in other ways. And the most important way that a Platform team can be boring is by writing boring plans." This is fantastic.

Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech. "Moving to a world where protocols and not proprietary platforms dominate would solve many issues currently facing the internet today. Rather than relying on a few giant platforms to police speech online, there could be widespread competition, in which anyone could design their own interfaces, filters, and additional services, allowing whichever ones work best to succeed, without having to resort to outright censorship for certain voices. It would allow end users to determine their own tolerances for different types of speech but make it much easier for most people to avoid the most problematic speech, without silencing anyone entirely or having the platforms themselves make the decisions about who is allowed to speak."

Facebook and Apple Are Beefing Over the Future of the Internet. "On Thursday morning, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave a speech explaining his company’s upcoming privacy changes, which will ban apps from sharing iPhone user behavior with third parties unless users give explicit consent. And he made plain that these new policies were designed at least in part with Facebook in mind." Let's be clear: rightly so.

#notablelinks

I learned my uncle, my father's older brother, died the other day: my cousin reached out to me and asked if I'd heard the news. I hadn't. He'd passed away on my birthday, and I had no idea.

A fair amount has been written about the grief of being a third culture kid (TCK). You grow up in a country you're not from, and that your parents are not from. For me, that meant growing up in the UK (which I am not a citizen of) to a Swiss-Dutch-Indonesian father and a Ukrainian-American mother. We traveled around a fair amount - a year in Vienna here, a year in Durham, NC there - but it was nothing like the experiences of army brats, who grow up uprooting their lives every couple of years. I was lucky to have a consistent set of friends throughout my childhood, even if sometimes I wrote to them over long distances.

TCKs often form attachments to people over places, which is certainly true for me. Adult TCKs rarely repatriate successfully, and while we feel like we can relate to many different kinds of people, few people relate to our experiences. As much as people might want me to assimilate, I never will, even if I wanted to (which, admittedly, I don't). The same goes for our blood: although my nuclear family is arguably closer for having had to be each other's allies in a series of strange cultures, my extended family doesn't always feel as close.

I grew up thousands of miles from my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. We saw each other every couple of years, and we have a lot of love for each other, but I always felt a weird sort of distance, too. It's hard to have the same depth of relationship as cousins who live in the same country and see each other many times a year when you come from what might as well be another planet, and see each other every few years at best.

I've been in California for a decade, and while I want to be closer, I don't know how to be. Like any relationship, I need to put in the work and reach out - we can all text - but patterns were set in motion decades ago.

I am resolving to try and do better, but it's impossible to patch over every gap. My uncle lived in Zurich. No matter where I am, I'll have family who is in some other universe, who I'd love to be closer to. I have family I dearly love who live in Melbourne, Australia, where I've never been. We're all aliens to each other. Aliens who love each other, but aliens nonetheless.

So, there's where the grief comes from. Connectedness is important to all people. But when your network of loved ones is spread out across countries, cultures, and universes of understanding, you can never connect enough, and you'll always wish you had more.

The truth is, I didn't really know him. Not well. But I wish I had.

Here are the final two pieces I published on Medium this month:

8 simple ways to get the most out of today. A guide to living well in the pandemic. (Hint: I don't take self-help pieces seriously.)

Your 401(k) hates you. The way we all save for retirement in America needs serious reform - for our own benefit, for the planet, and for a more equitable society.

So what's the outcome?

I'm predisposed to like Medium. I worked there in 2016, I know the team well, and I know they're doing everything for the right reasons. I also deeply respect Ev. But I pre-date its current Partner Program strategy. I've written pieces about the startup ecosystem that have made me hundreds of dollars each on its network, but that was several years ago, and I wasn't sure what its current dynamics were.

Each piece on Medium received roughly the same viewers that I would get on my blog. There was a small Medium network boost, but it generally accounted for 10-20% of readers, and I didn't notice a meaningful follower increase over time (which would, if I kept it up, snowball my readership). I made about $10 from partner program revenue.

It's a really beautiful interface to write in (and always has been), which is both a help and a hindrance: it discourages bloggy content, and encourages longer-form pieces, which are more time consuming to produce. I suspect if I lowered the volume and went for a handful of higher-quality pieces a month, I would do better on the network. That stands to reason: I've always thought of Medium as a magazine that anyone can contribute to, which is a concept that lends itself to a certain kind of content.

My plan, then, is this. I'm returning to posting in this space. If I write something long-form that I'd like to be compensated for, which I plan to do a few times a month, I reserve the right to post it on Medium (although I may also experiment with other platforms and my own experiments, as well as returning to the Unlock decentralized paywall).

I've added an anonymous feedback form to my website, which will stay online. You can always leave me feedback and let me know what you're interested in. You can also always just email me. I'd love this to be more of a conversation. I'm also thinking about how to build community into the site itself (and, spoiler alert, any site itself) - stay tuned.

To everyone who shared feedback over the last few weeks, including the folks who complained about not being able to get through the Medium paywall, thank you. And thank you, as always, for reading. It means a lot.

As I mentioned, I've been experimenting with writing on Medium instead of my personal space for the second half of January. Here are some pieces you might have missed:

Where I want to work: what are the characteristics of a healthy workplace? Which values matter?

Do no harm: what does it mean to work with the goal of not making the world worse? Is it enough to simply say that you want to do no harm?

How to startup like a bro: "Get a Patagonia vest and make sure you’ve got a couple of pairs of AirPods. When one pair runs out of battery, mid-conversation maybe, just swap them out with the next one. It pays to be prepared." Satire's a dead horse, but I'm flogging it anyway.

Here's what I earned from my tech career: a history of what I've earned from my career in technology.

The whole-employee professional development plan: I open sourced the professional development plan I use with my team. Here's a guide to using it.

And more personally:

Ma: how working remotely in the pandemic allowed me to care for my mother.

Pulmonary fibrosis and me: the story of how I learned I probably wasn't terminally ill.

If you're saving for retirement in the United States - or you want to be - I'd love about 30 seconds of your time.

Here's a very short survey form. Heads up that it does ask for your contact details - but if you're squeamish about that, feel free to write 'n/a' or 'anonymous@company.com' for those details. It's the data that really matters.

Thank you!

I'm not quite an indieweb zealot - you can find me on Twitter and other social networks over the web - but I've been writing on my own site since 1998 (albeit not one consistent, continuous site - I change it up every decade or so), and it's become a core part of who I am, how I think, and how I represent myself online.

You might have noticed - email subscribers certainly did - that I've turned up the volume on my posting this year. So far in January, that's meant a post a day in my personal space. The feedback has generally been good, but a few email subscribers did complain. I totally get it. Nobody wants their inboxes to clog up; the calculus might be different if this was a business newsletter with actionable insights, but that's not what this is. More than anything, I'm hoping to spark a conversation with my posts.

There are a few things I'm thinking about doing. The first is dropping the frequency of the emails, and thinking about them as more of a digest. You'd get one on Thursday, and one on Sunday (or something like that). Obviously, RSS / h-feed / JSON-feed subscribers (hi!) would still receive posts in real time. Maybe there would also be an email list for people who did want to receive posts as I wrote them.

The second thing I'm thinking about doing is taking this posting frequency and putting it on Medium for the rest of the month, with a regular summary post over here. This is a controversial thing for someone who's so deep into indieweb and the open web to suggest, but there are a few reasons for trying this. Mostly I want to see how the experience compares. I worked at Medium in 2016, and posted fairly regularly there during that time and while I was at Matter Ventures, but the platform has evolved significantly since then.

So that's what I'm going to do to start. For the remainder of January, I'll be posting on Medium daily, with summary listings posted here semi-regularly. Then I'll return here in February and let you know what I discovered.

You can follow me on Medium over here.

One of my favorite pieces of software is Apple photo search. If you've got an iPhone, try it: great searches to try are "animal selfie", "bird", "ice cream", or "cake".

What's particularly amazing about these searches is that the machine learning is performed on-device. In fact, Apple provides developer tools for on-device machine learning in any app across its platforms. There's no cloud processing and the privacy issues related to that. The power to identify which photos are a selfie with your cat lies in the palm of your hand.

Not everyone can afford a top-end iPhone, but these represent the leading edge of the technology; in the near future, every phone will be able to perform rapid machine learning tasks.

Another thing my phone does is connect to 5G networks. 5G has a theoretical maximum bandwidth speed of 10gbps, which is faster than the kind of home cable internet you might get from a company like Comcast. In practice, the networks don't quite work that way, but we can expect them to improve over time. 5G networks will allow us to have incredibly fast internet virtually anywhere.

Again: not every phone supports 5G. But every phone will. (And, inevitably, 6G is around the corner.)

Finally, my phone has roughly the same amount of storage as my computer, and every bit as fast. Not everyone has 256GB of storage on their phone - but, once again, everyone will.

On the internet, we mostly deal with clients and servers. The services we use are powered by data centers so vast that they sometimes have their own power stations. Technology startup founders have to consider the cost of virtualized infrastructure as a key part of their plans: how many servers will they need, what kinds of databases, and so on.

Meanwhile, the client side is fairly thin. We provide small web interfaces and APIs that connect from our server infrastructure to our devices, as if our devices are weak and not to be trusted.

The result is a privacy nightmare: all our data is stored in the same few places, and we usually just have to trust that nobody will peek. (It's fair to assume that somebody is peeking.) It also represents a single point of failure: if just one Amazon datacenter in Virginia encounters a problem, it can seem like half the internet has gone down. Finally, the capabilities of a service are limited by the throughput of low-powered virtualized servers.

But the world has changed. We're addicted to these tiny devices that happen to have huge amounts of storage, sophisticated processors, and incredibly fast, always-on connectivity. I think it's only a matter of time before someone - potentially Apple, potentially someone exponentially smaller than Apple - uses this to create an entirely new kind of peer to peer application infrastructure.

If I'm in the next room to you and I send you a Facebook message, the data finds its way to Facebook's datacenter and back to you. It's an incredibly wasteful process. What if the message just went straight to you over peer to peer wifi (or whatever connection method was most convenient)? And what if there was a developer kit that made it easy for any engineer to really easily build an application over this opportunistic infrastructure without worrying about the details?

Lately I've been obsessed with this idea. The capabilities of our technology have radically changed, but our business models and architectural paradigms haven't caught up. There's an exciting opportunity here - not just to be disruptive, but to create a more private, more immediate, and more dynamically functional internet.

I'm nearing the end of my first week on the Whole30 diet. I'm still not what sure I think about it: which foods are allowed and which aren't feels a bit arbitrary, and the very fact that the diet has a logo and a trademark is off-putting. On the other hand, maybe it's my imagination, but I feel a lot better. I'm certainly eating a great deal more vegetables.

I've also been better about doing exercise before work so far this year. Usually that's involved running, but I've been doing some weight training, as well as long, brisk walks and push-ups every day. The result is that I'm more alert during the day, and feel free to relax and read / write during the evening. (Whole30's ban on alcohol helps here, too. I had fallen into a pattern of drinking a glass of wine or two most evenings in 2020.)

I suffer from anxiety, bouts of depression, and historically really low self-esteem. At my lowest, I made a plan - never followed - to end my life. Shallow self-confidence has sometimes led me to bad places and poor choices. It's frequently led me to sleepless nights and their subsequent, zombie-like days. I've spent much of my life feeling like I must be physically abhorrent; like there's something horribly wrong with me that nobody wanted to tell me about. As a kid, I was over six feet tall when I was thirteen, and I didn't so much as date until I was twenty-one. Those feelings of inferiority have never really left me.

By rights, the pandemic should have made me feel worse. We were all locked inside; I spent a great deal more time caring for my terminally ill mother as she precipitously declined. The goals I had for my life were out of reach. It should have been a miserable time.

And it was, in lots of ways, but it also gave me something important. I could be in my own space, rather than commuting to work. I was not expected to show up in a certain way. All the worries I used to have about the impression I was casting in the real world - worries that I resented having terribly - evaporated. Instead, I could just be me.

I gave myself permission to write more than blog posts. On a whim, I entered a flash fiction competition, and placed first in the initial round. I enrolled in workshops and courses and continued to practice. Today, I have a regular practice of writing every day.

I ran more than I'd run in my entire life leading up to that point combined: at least two 5Ks a week, which for many people isn't all that much, but for me was an enormous step up. Towards the end of the year, I had some conversations about stressful things that had been building up as reservoirs of bad feeling that were threatening to spill over.

Somewhere in all of this, my self-esteem crept up, and my anxiety started to diminish. I felt less awful about my body and found that the stressful conversations went well. The darkness is not necessarily gone for good; anyone who suffers from depression knows that the cloud can re-emerge at any time. I also don't think it's just because I started to do exercise and did some writing; I think those things were reflections of something else.

Self-respect is something that requires practice and investment, and somewhere during last year, I made the decision to spend the time. It wasn't esteem, as such, at least at first, but I decided that I was worth spending time on. Writing and exercise weren't things that would make other people like me. They were just for me. And a switch flipped, without me realizing it, that allowed me to know that was okay.

In a lot of ways, I feel like a different person going into 2021. I'm full of gratitude, and excited for the future. We're still in an awful, deadly pandemic; I still have the trauma of watching my mother deal with her illness. But in lots of ways, I can meet those challenges with more energy.

There are ups and downs. I had a blip before Christmas where I still felt incredibly low. But generally speaking, every day is a small progression in the right direction. Things are looking up.

It's really easy to assume that the world around us is fixed and absolute. The way we do things is the way things are done. The internet works the way it does. The market is the market. People behave how people behave.

One of my superpowers has traditionally been that I'm an outsider: I'm an off-kilter third culture kid who doesn't really fit into anyone's community, which means I see everything from a slightly different angle. Often that's allowed me to see absurdities that other people can't see, and ask questions that other people might not have asked. Sometimes, they're painfully naive. But naivety and optimism can lead to interesting new places.

Lately I've had a few conversations that have made me realize that my perspective has settled in a bit more than I'm comfortable with; I feel like my horizons have closed in a little bit. It's been a sobering realization. Narrower horizons lead to safer, more timid decisions; a small island mentality where a smaller set of possible changes are considered and new ideas are more likely to be met with a pessimistic "that'll never work". It's a toxic way to think that creeps up on you.

It's not enough to invent new things for our current context - there's a lot to be gained from reconsidering that context entirely. Why are things the way they are? Do they have to be? What would be better?

Chris Messina's website subtitle used to be "All of this can be made better. Are you ready? Begin." I've thought about that phrase a lot over the years. It's an inspiring mission statement and a great way to think. It also requires that you feel some ownership or ability - permission - to change the way things work.

People come to this in different ways. I think it helps to have seen broader change manifested, but it's not a prerequisite. It certainly helps to have been in an environment filled with broader, change-oriented thinking. If you live in a world of conservative stagnation, you're much more likely to feel the same way. But, of course, plenty of people from those sorts of environments emerge to change the world.

And it turns out that people lose it in different ways, too. I'm grateful for conversations with smart people who challenged my thinking and encouraged me to take a step back.

For me, right now, this is wrapped up in the fabric of what I do. Why do we have to use the software and protocol models we've used for decades? What does it look like to think beyond APIs and browsers, clients and servers? What if, knowing what we know today, something radically different could be better? Do we need to depend on vast datacenters owned by megacorporations, or can we do away with them altogether?

It's worth asking the questions: how could you broaden your thinking? What in your life do you consider to be immovable that might not be? What does thinking bigger and putting everything on the table look like for you?

I have a longstanding bet that we're moving to an ambient computing world: one where the computer is all around us, interacting with us in whatever way is convenient to us at the time. Smart speakers, high-spec smartphones, natural language intelligent assistants, augmented reality glasses, wearables with haptic feedback, and interactive screens aren't individual technologies in themselves, but all part of a contiguous ambient cloud with your digital identity at the center. In this vision of the future, whoever controls the ecosystem controls the next phase of computing. Ideally, it's an open system with no clear owner, but that won't happen by itself.

A lot of the reports coming out of (virtual) CES this year involve augmented reality of one kind or another. Lots of different companies have new models of AR glasses, which are becoming a little bit more like something you'd actually want to put on your face with each passing year; Sony also has a pretty cool sounding (but ruinously expensive) spatial display that looks like examining a 3D object through a window.

Throughout all this, Apple is pretty quiet. Even though Siri is objectively the worst digital assistant, it was early to the market, and signaled an intention to pursue a vision for ambient computing that has since been followed up with the Apple Watch, AirPods, and HomePods. It has filed patents for AR glasses. And I have a strong suspicion - with no inside knowledge whatsoever - that it's planning on doing something interesting around audio. Podcasts are cool, but evolving what podcasts can be in an ambient computing world is cooler. Whereas most companies are concentrating on iterating the technology, companies like Apple rightly think about the human experience of using it, and elegantly figuring out its place at the intersection of tech and culture. It won't be the first company to come out with a technology, but it may be the first to make it feel human.

If this is the way the world is going - and remember, it's only a bet - it has enormous implications for other kinds of applications. We're still largely wedded to a monitor-keyboard paradigm that was invented long before the moon landing; most of your favorite apps and services amount to sitting in front of a rectangular display and lightly interacting with it somehow. An ambient paradigm demands that we pay close attention to calm tech principles so that we are not cognitively overloaded, jibing with our perception of reality rather than stealing our engagement completely. The main job of the internet is to connect people; what does that look like in an ambient environment? What does it mean for work? For fintech? For learning? And given that all we have is our perception of reality, who do we trust with augmenting it?

Anyway, Norm Glasses will make everyone look like the main character in a John Hughes movie, and I'm kind of here for it.

I'm hiring for two roles. I'm looking for product leaders with hands-on mission-driven startup experience, and for back-end engineers who have both written in Ruby on Rails and scripted headless browsers in a production environment as part of their work. In both cases, I'm looking for people who have experience in these roles in other startups.

Here's how I think about hiring: more than anything else, I'm building a community of people who are pulling together for a common cause. Each new person should add a new perspective and set of skills, and also be ready to productively evolve the culture of the community itself. That means intentionally hiring people with diverse backgrounds who embody our core values.

Some values - like being empathetic and collaborative, or being great at both written and verbal communication - are absolute requirements. Because I'm building a community, I need people who get on well with others, who share my desire for inclusivity, and can work in a group. A high EQ is an enormous asset for an engineer. Other values may evolve over time, as people propose new ideas that change the way we all work - perhaps based on processes they've seen working well at places they've worked in the past. Anyone who joins the community should have the ownership to improve it.

ForUsAll is changing the way people save for retirement. We have radically ambitious goals for 2021, centered around helping people find financial stability in ways that are still very new. I'll write about them when we're ready, but for now, the key is to find people who are motivated by a strong social mission and by creating something new, and who enjoy the fast-changing nature of startups. I believe in healthy work-life integration, treating people with kindness, and a human-centered, empathetic approach - all while we're building cool stuff with energy and creativity.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, and you're located in the US, reach out. I'd love to chat with you.

The power of free and open source software comes down to how it is shared. Users can pick up and modify the source code, usually at no cost, as long as they adhere to the terms of its licenses, which range from permissive (do what you like) to more restrictive (if you make modifications, you've got to distribute them under the same license). The popularity of the model has led to a transformation in the way software is built; it's not an exaggeration to say that the current tech industry couldn't exist without it. Collaborative software drives the industry.

(If you're not familiar with the concept or its nuances, I wrote a history and guide to the underlying ideas, including how it relates to projects like Linux, a few years ago, which might help.)

In my work, I've generally veered towards permissive licenses. Elgg, my first open source project, was originally released under the GPL, and then subsequently dual-released under the more permissive MIT license. Known and its plugins were released under the Apache license. While GPL is a little more restrictive, both the MIT and Apache licenses say little more than, "this software is provided as-is".

If I was to start another open source project, I'd take a different approach and use a very restrictive license. For example, the Affero GNU Public License requires that you make the source code to any modifications available even if they're just running on a server (i.e., even if you're not distributing the modified code in any other way). This means that if someone starts a web service with the code as a starting point, they must make the source code of that service available under the AGPL.

Then I'd dual-license it. If you want to use the software for free, that's great: you've just got to make sure that if you're using it to build a web service, the source code of your web service must be available for free, too. On the other hand, if you want to restrict access to your web service's source code because it forms the basis of a commercial venture, then you need to pay me for the commercial license. Everybody wins: free and open source communities can operate without commercial considerations, while I see an upside if my open source work is used in a commercial venture. The commercial license could include provisions to allow non-profits and educational institutions to use the software for free or at a low cost; the point is, it would be at my discretion.

I love free software. The utopian vision of the movement is truly empowering, and has empowered communities that would not ordinarily be able to tailor their own software platforms. But allowing commercial entities to take advantage of people who provide their work for the love of it as a bug. There's no reason in the world that a VC-funded business with millions of dollars under its belt should avoid paying people its company value integrally depends on. It's taken me a long time to come around to the idea, but restrictive licenses like the AGPL align everyone in the ecosystem and allow individual developers and well-funded startups alike to thrive.

More than that, it's a model that allows me to think I might, one day, dive head-first into free software at least one more time.