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December 16 - December 26, 2017
An empty pageant; a stage play; flocks of sheep, herds of cattle; a bone flung among a pack of dogs; a crumb tossed into a pond of fish; ants, loaded and laboring; mice, scared and scampering; puppets, jerking on their strings; that is life. In the midst of it all you must take your stand, good-temperedly and without disdain, yet always aware that a man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions. —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
A “pivot” is supposed to recall a ballerina’s demi détourné, a delicate change of course as graceful as it (hopefully) seems intentional. In reality, a startup’s pivot is a panicked sprint comparable to that of a Titanic passenger who’s spotted the last open life raft.
The Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, a dictionary of the Dutch language and the largest monolingual dictionary in the world, runs to 50,000 pages and 431,000 entries.
As Geoff Ralston, a YC partner, told us: people don’t really change, they just become better actors.
In the future, we wouldn’t all be famous for fifteen minutes; we’d be famous 24/7 to fifteen people.
Following the online documentation, I successfully set up a dev server, the machine on which I’d develop code, kind of like a personal sandbox. I then pulled an entire version of Facebook’s code from the main repository, browsing all of it via an editor. So this is what all the fuss was about, huh? For giggles, I changed the text of the Like button to an obscenity, saved the code, hit Reload in my browser,
Aotearoa is the original Maori word for New Zealand, which roughly translated means “Facebook test set.” Thus does that verdant island nation, graced with stunning fjords and clear alpine lakes, sample whatever random product twiddle a twenty-three-year-old Facebook engineer in Menlo Park dreams up. Of course, in the ads world, matters
Like me, PMMess would lose herself in bouts of louche, ethanolic self-destruction that typically ended in some disinhibited act of carnality. A couple of times already, such behavior had involved me, though only at a relatively PG-rated level of barside making out. It was time to close the deal. Friday afternoons at
#metoo
Mostly, though, it was due to my getting chewed up and spit out by the Facebook machine within two years, while the boys gamboled in the bucolic hipster pastures of Twitter for four years and counting—the very pastures I struggled and plotted mightily to avoid, and which I traded for the horror show that would thanklessly reject me despite the moneymaker I built them. Who says karma doesn’t exist?
A9 is a numeronym, a common trope in Valley naming aesthetics. It stood for “Algorithms” (The letter “A” plus nine other letters),
