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CartyBoston

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My Time at MIT 1 year ago

I did not go to MIT but spent my entire career in Boston startups and tech. It is impossible to overstate how influential CSAIL was (and is?) in addition to it sounding here like a wonderful place.

Twitter sucks because it's commercial. Threads sucks because it's commercial. Bluesky will suck because it's commercial.

If only there was a pattern we could detect.

Learn about the Fediverse (not just "Mastodon"), it's the only solution worthy of you.

This piece teaches me almost nothing about Vadim but shows me a ton about the environment he worked in. Someone built that culture, who are they? Why did they do it? Was Vadim complicit? Why did he feel so little control?

Hustle culture is not challenging, it does not help anyone grow, it simply exploits people. It's common, banal stuff.

The spacecraft has an ad prominently displayed on itself, it's depressing.

We will never reproduce the experience of 10 year old me watching the moon landing with my dad. It's all just egos and entertainment now.

In the startup world and in much of the tech corporate world in practice predictability is valued above all else. It's because investors, perhaps reasonably, value and therefore demand predictions.

But as we know that is fundamentally difficult. So many tech orgs make up a "hero-hustle" culture to compensate. "We're top 10% and we work all the time, this is the best we can do!"

Strong leadership is strong leadership, building the right product development culture is really hard.

CDC 6600 2 years ago

The first two machines I touched were a CDC 6400 and DEC 20 at Lehigh University in the 70s.

Both - while built by large teams - "felt" like they were designed by a single person, complete consistency across hw, OS, tools, and apps (programs). It's so foreign from the experience we have now it's difficult for me to describe.

"platform with fewer features" does not sound right, fediverse microblogging apps (there are many of them) are implemented on the rich W3C ActivityPub standard. It's not a platform, it's a huge and vibrant distributed ecosystem.

Twitter is (just) a very popular, proprietary microblogging platform.

[dead] 4 years ago

I do it elsewhere, was just hoping one of you might read the article.

Silicon Values 4 years ago

I agree with your assessment as of today, we can accomplish some amazing things by electing different leaders over time though. I read this as a call to activism.