July 18, 2020 ā¢ #
On private emotions being thrown into the public sphere:
People escape the Dunbar world for obvious reasons: life there appears prosaic and uninspiring. They find a digital interface and, like Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, enter a new realm that glitters with infinite possibilities. Suddenly, you can flicker like a spark between the digital and the real. The exhilarating sensation is that you have been taken to a high place and shown all the kingdoms of the world: āThese can be yours, if. . . .ā If your video goes viral. If you gain millions of followers. If you compose that devastating tweet that will drive Donald Trump from the White House. There is, however, an entrance fee. Personal identity must be discarded.
Deirdre McCloskey on the boom of progress over the past 200 years:
The Great Enrichment came from human ingenuity emancipated. Ordinary people, emboldened by liberalism, ventured on extraordinary projectsāthe marine chronometer, the selective breeding of cotton seed, the band saw, a new chemistryāor merely ventured boldly to a new job, the New World, or going west, young man. And, crucially, the bold adventurers, in parallel with liberations in science, music, and geographical exploration, came to be tolerated and even commended by the rest of society, first in Holland in the 17th century and then in Britain in the 18th.
A partnership between Esri, Facebook, and the OpenStreetMap community to polish up and release datasets readily compatible with OSM (tagging and licensing).
June 20, 2020 ā¢ #
Martin Gurri is one of the best minds we have for the current moment. Make sure to subscribe to his essays on the Mercatus Centerās āThe Bridge.ā
The American people appear to be caught in the grip of a psychotic episode. Most of us are still sheltering in place, obsessed with the risk of viral infection, primly waiting for someone to give us permission to shake hands with our friends again. Meanwhile, online and on television, we watch, as in a dream, crowds of our fellow citizens thronging into the streets of our cities, raging at the police and the established order generally, with some engaged in arson, looting, and violence.
On one side, a reflexive obedience to authority. On the other, a near-absolute repudiation of the rules of the systemāfor some, of any restraint whatever. The future will be determined by the uncertain relationship between these two extremes.
My friend and former colleague Kevin Stofan wrote the launch post for DataRobotās latest product additions for spatial AI. Pretty amazing additions to their platform.
Good to see the Mapillary team add their computer vision tech and work with OpenStreetMap to Facebook. Big congrats to the team!
March 14, 2020 ā¢ #
A technical piece describing the goals for Facebookās rewrite of the Messenger app. Interesting to see them avoiding their own React Native for this, and doing things in native iOS/Android.
A humorous post, but has a point. Thereās pressure to add new tools that donāt do much but add moving parts and complexity. Thereās nothing wrong with Kubernetes, but thereās a place for it (and your small team probably doesnāt need it).
The more you buy in to Kubernetes, the harder it is to do normal development: you need all the different concepts (Pod, Deployment, Service, etc.) to run your code. So you need to spin up a complete K8s system just to test anything, via a VM or nested Docker containers.
And since your application is much harder to run locally, development is harder, leading to a variety of solutions, from staging environments, to proxying a local process into the cluster (I wrote a tool for this a few years ago), to proxying a remote process onto your local machineā¦
Mapbox digs into the impacts of San Franciscoās Market Street going pedestrians and bikes only.
November 2, 2019 ā¢ #
Strasburg tipping his pitches almost ended the Natsā run:
He remembered the game Strasburg pitched in Arizona on August 3. The Diamondbacks pounded Strasburg for nine runs in less than five innings. The D-Backs knew what was coming. The Nationals broke down the tape and discovered Strasburg was tipping his pitches by the way he reached into his glove to grip the baseball near his waist, just before he raised his hands to the set position.
An annotated version of Mike Migurskiās workshop on RapiD and Disaster Maps from the NetHope Summit. Facebookās work on this stuff looks primed to change the way everyone is doing OpenStreetMap contribution.
Iāve never used TikTok, but itās been a fascination tech story to follow its insane growth over the last 8-12 months. With the current geopolitical climate and the fact that itās owned by Chinese owner ByteDance, it seemed like this CFIUS investigation was inevitable.
June 29, 2019 ā¢ #
Fantastic visualizations from the WSJ team. Shows the history of satellite expansion divided by country, year, and orbits, both LEO and geosynchronous. A great use of maps for storytelling.
This is a concept pulled from Talebās The Black Swan, which I recently enjoyed. As he notes, the antilibrary can function as a reminder of how much there is to know, and (as is a main point of The Black Swan, we tend to underestimate the value of what we donāt know).
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with āWow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have. How many of these books have you read?ā and the othersāa very small minorityāwho get the point is that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendages but a research tool. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means ā¦ allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
Definitely rings familiar, for me, as someone with a large collection of books Iām anxious to read, but may never get to.
The Facebook-designed and sponsored Libra is a more interesting idea than the much-discussed āFacebookCoinā entrance into cryptocurrency thatās been rumored. The gist is that itās somewhere between an open blockchain and a closed system, with a consortium of funders in place to share control and add stability in the currency. Iām interested to see where this goes given Facebookās massive reach to expose it to regular people. See also Ben Thompsonās sharp analysis of Libra from earlier this week.