When you choose whom to follow on Twitter, you’re choosing what types of mindsets and aesthetics to expose yourself to on a regular basis. You’re choosing what types of conversations to have. You’re choosing to be reminded regularly of certain things, and not of others. This is a kind of Programmable attention.

So it’s useful to ask what absolute power would reveal about Israel and Hamas. In other words, what would each side do if it had nukes and its enemies didn’t? Based on Hamas’s history, and its charter, which calls for the total obliteration of Israel, we can be confident they’d nuke Tel Aviv. And yet, if Israel had nukes, they wouldn’t nuke Palesti... See more

Unlike with South African apartheid, Israel gives its Arab citizens all the rights available to its Jews, and it even has Arabs sitting in the Knesset. Further, Israel allows Palestinians into Israel to work, though, since millions of Arabs want to see Israel obliterated, Israel must carefully vet those it welcomes. And given the flow of weapons in... See more

A PM I once worked with was struggling to persuade somebody of something. I told him to ask them the question, “What data would I have to show you to get you to change your mind?” If they didn’t have a clear answer, then he would know this was an idea they held on faith, a bit like a religious belief. No amount of data can sway a person from their ... See more

Looking at the landscape of open source software today, I note two things. First, successful open source platforms tend to be partnered with caretaker organizations. Wikipedia has the Wikimedia Foundation, Linux has the constellation of organizations around the Linux Foundation, and Kubernetes has the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Second, open... See more

On life:“All right, what are the things that are most important in  life?” They’re health, loving family and friends, and something you’re excited about. What did you do to help someone  today? We basically go through each of these things, and it’s like, all right, so health. What did you do to like, make  yourself stronger, more fit... See more

“Resentment is like taking poison and hoping that someone else will die.”

It’s the height of madness to worry about being despised by the despicable.

The very smartphone or laptop you may be using to read this is the result of thousands of minds, all thinking together about what it takes to extract raw materials from the Earth, assemble everything into the singular shape you see now, imbue it with the properties of computational power, and cleverly market the resulting device so your hard-earned... See more