Ian Vanagas

The “____” is the rallying cry. This is the part that makes people aspire to join the movement when the economy is still nascent.

It is as if there existed, for what seems like millennia, tracing back to the very origins of mathematics and of other arts and sciences, a sort of “conspiracy of silence” surrounding [the] “unspeakable labors” which precede the birth of each new idea, both big and small[.]

When things go wrong in your company, nobody cares. The press doesn’t care, your investors don’t care, your board doesn’t care, your employees don’t care, even your mama doesn’t care. Nobody cares.

ML models are formed from combining biases and data. Sometimes the biases are strong, other times they are weak. To make a model generalize better, you need to add more biases or add more unbiased data. There is no free lunch.

In any civilization, an age can be measured by whether or not the best and brightest are applying their talent and wealth to make that civilization work better, to inculcate patriotism, to build and improve institutions, and improve the lives of their fellow citizens.

Given these realities, I find the furthest extreme of the free and open source philosophy not only unethical in its own right in that it incentivizes wide-scale consumption over production and thus impoverishes the software world, but divorced from reality in that it misunderstands the economic forces responsible for the production of software (and... See more

Communities should think hard about their onboarding process for new and returning users. They should understand what information is shared and needed to engage with the community, and what path those users are going on. They should think about how to summarize context to be more consumable for both new and returning users.

Group chats where people spend time with their friends online, and so this is where the experiences should happen. Playing a game, watching a trailer, or reading an article with friends should be as easy as sending a message to them. Experiences should build on the group chat, not move away from it.