Commentary on links that caught my attention around the web.
Technology
[Lucas da Costa at Briefer] "Some people call our strategy "open-core" and that's technically right. Still, I'd rather say that we have two pieces of software: one that is open-source and another that is not. I think that's more honest because
Business
[Hunter Walk] "I asked some investor friends to share, as the title suggests, one thing they wished people better understood about venture capital. There were no ground rules other than to specify that ‘people’ could be founders, politicians, LPs, etc and that it would be default attributed but anonymous
Technology
[iA] "In a text editor, chapters are files. Organizing your files is work, but in a large text body it’s essential work. Your book or thesis will grow from it and get stronger as you clarify the structure. With iA Writer 7.2, structuring large writing projects has
Media
[Elahe Izadi at The Washington Post] I adore The 19th. It's making big moves, and that's good news for everyone. "What [Emily] Ramshaw and fellow co-founder Amanda Zamora started in January 2020 — a newsroom with just one reporter and no website — has grown into a
Startups
[Paul Graham] "In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the
Fediverse
[Ghost] "It's a simple thing, but it's kind of a big deal. With this milestone, Ghost is for the first time exceeding the functionality of a basic RSS reader. This is 2-way interaction. You publish, and your readers can respond." This is a big
Notable links
[Matt Webb] "The EU may (or may not) be making technology policy missteps, but they are gently and patiently promoting a certain way of life which feels globally very, very special, and fundamentally counter to the hypercapitalism found elsewhere." I love Europe, and this is a large part
AI
[Robin Rendle] Robin Rendle on Sarah Jeong's article about the implications of the Pixel 9's magic photo editor in The Verge: "But this stuff right here—adding things that never happened to a picture—that’s immoral because confusion and deception is the point of
Notable links
[Brett Wilkins at Common Dreams] "After years of working with Iraqis whose relatives were killed by U.S. Marines in the 2005 Haditha massacre, American journalists finally obtained and released photos showing the grisly aftermath of the bloody rampage—whose perpetrators never spent a day behind bars." These
Technology
[Nolen Royalty] "On June 26th 2024, I launched a website called One Million Checkboxes (OMCB). It had one million global checkboxes on it - checking (or unchecking) a box changed it for everyone on the site, instantly." This story gets deeper from here: how he found a community
Notable links
[Aaron Ross Powell] ""First, there’s what I’ve referred to in the past as the “Quillette Effect.” Because we believe our own ideas are correct (or else we wouldn’t believe them), we tend to think that people who share our ideas are correct, as well."
Labor
[Emily Peck at Axios] "70% of Americans said they approved of unions, per Gallup's most recent poll, conducted in August." This represents a giant change in American society: labor unions haven't been this popular since 1967. But at the same time, union membership is