smurda

good feedback. updated.

Or the early days of video uploads, YouTube's most watched videos were "pirated" clips from popular shows (e.g. SpongeBob, The Daily Show) and part of the reason I went to YouTube instead of other video hosting sites (e.g. DailyMotion).

Viacom sued YouTube, while CBS and Universal ended up licensing their content.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/03/viacom-v-google-invest...

I love last.fm but never understood the URL structure naming convention. Why use a "+" instead of a "-" for every band page (e.g. https://www.last.fm/music/The+Beatles).

I thought Kebab-case is usually the norm, and I don't think I've seen the "+" in any other URL paths that aren't query strings. Any ideas why they formatted it like this?

The "Don't be evil" Google feels long gone

How much time is required to spend with someone to become friends with them?

If you assume 20 hours, that's 5-10 hangout sessions with someone. During a working life, that might take over a year. University life offers large windows of disposable time to forge those friendships. In work life, we don't have as much disposable time to spend building friendships.

Blackboard, the Canvas predecessor, was so unstable that we called it BlackOutBoard

This is actually super useful! I find much more useful current and tactical information at BSides than I do at RSA/BlackHat.

In “Why We Sleep” by Harvard sleep researcher Matthew Walker, he says that during REM sleep your brain revisits emotional experiences but in a chemically safe environment. Stress-related chemicals like noradrenaline are greatly reduced so you can replay difficult or painful memories but without the full emotional intensity you felt at the time. The brain can process and “defuse” those emotions.

TLDR, sleeping on it works.

"SpaceX, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon Web Services and Reflection". I've never heard of one of these. Looks like Reflection started in 2024.

Things really are moving fast. To win a government contract within two years of founding wouldn't have happened 10 years ago. In the previous generation of startups just getting FedRAMP didn't happen until a few years after founding.

I'm not sure I believe these results. As the study notes: "We need a reliable way to tell AI-generated and AI-assisted text apart from human-written text. AI-generated text detection is itself an open problem..."

There is definitely AI-generated text that's easy to sniff out. Then there's a huge grey area that is misleading - like if you use an em dash. Or write concisely.

What specifically is cumbersome and annoying? It's not the ideal query language for every frontend app, but it's useful for solving a couple of problems that large organizations at scale have like over-fetching and a single network call rather than multiple REST calls.

Bots have always been a problem on these platforms, but it has taken the deluge of AI generated accounts to force platforms to truly wrestle with the problem.

The upside is hopefully there are fewer bots on these platforms, which has many positive second-order effects. The downside is the method of human verification as ID cards will lead to more identity theft, fake IDs, and a new set of problems.

This is one of my favorite movies, yet it won 0 Oscars (nominated for 7) and was a box office flop (cost $25M to make and box office proceeds were $28M). It only gained popularity after the theatres from the VHS rental market.

I firmly believe part of the initial commercial failure was because of the title. With something more descriptive like, "Escape from Shawshank" or just "Prison Break" people would have been more interested to see it.

Tom Kelley and David Kelley, founders of Stanford's Design School and IDEO (the industrial design firm that made things like Apple's first mouse and the standup toothpaste tube) have a great book, Creative Confidence.

Here's their website for the book, along with some tools and useful instructional videos https://www.creativeconfidence.com/tools/

$100 on sushi and I’m still hungry. $10 on a burrito and I’m full for 24 hours

Start selling in the US early. To be the global leader, and not just the regional leader, sell across global markets early to establish the position of best product globally.

“They do not reliably capture what a user was shown or told.”

This adds to the case for middleware providers like Vapi, LiveKit, and Layercode. If you’re building a voice AI application using one of these SST -> LLM -> TTS providers there will be definitive logs to capture what a user was told.

Would you say MCP is a protocol (or standard) similar to how REST is a protocol in that they both define how two parties communicate with each other? Or, in other words, REST is a protocol for web APIs and MCP is a protocol for AI capabilities?

The potential benefits of alcohol are hard to decipher because of the population data:

“A lot of people who don’t currently drink are people who used to drink heavily, or who have health problems that led them to quit...” said Keith Humphreys, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the Esther Ting Memorial Professor. “That skews the data, making moderate drinkers look healthier by comparison.”

https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/08/moderate-alcohol-c...

Interesting paper. You might get more adoption if you remove the religious premise as the concepts can stand alone without theological underpinnings.

I'm not sure I agree with the transition to full automation, but Piketty's premise that returns on assets will outperform returns on labor is still at the root of growing income inequality.

If you have a bankroll, investments will yield higher returns than returns on labor (just working your butt off). Without wealth shocks or redistribution the income inequality gap will continue to widen.

When the CCPA launched in 2018 companies had to comply when a consumer requested a Data Subject Access Request (DSAR). Because the consumer had to request a DSAR not all companies felt this compliance pain acutely (e.g. it was mostly big companies with A LOT of users that got more DSARs, so they adopted workflows and tools to alleviate the pain).

The Delete Act has more teeth. Independent compliance audits begin in 2028 with penalties of $200 per day for failing to register or for each consumer deletion request that is not honored. GDPR spurred organizations to compliance, partly because of the steep penalty (up to €20 million or 4% of revenue, whichever is higher), maybe The Delete Act (and its much smaller penalty) will also spark organizations to comply.

Marissa Mayer on why Google chose sans-serif fonts for search results:

When I had to make a decision about should the Google results pages be serif or sans-serif, I didn't have enough users to do the split A/B testing and mathematically figure that out, so I ended up reading a lot of research and ultimately finding out that serif fonts are more readable, and sans-serif fonts are more legible.

The serifs create a horizontal rule that guides the eye, so serif fonts are much better when you’re reading long pieces of text. Sans-serif fonts are more legible which means that... when the serifs are removed your eye can spot read a character much better and much more quickly, and as a result it is much better for spot reading. In an activity like search it turns out you want to facilitate spot reading to a much greater degree than reading long prose.

Here's the 2006 talk: https://stvp.stanford.edu/podcasts/nine-lessons-learned-abou...

On the East Coast there are more cities with dense populations, so public transit can be effective and car ownership rates are lower.

In the West, many cities are urban sprawls that built out instead of up, so public transit is less effective and car ownership rates are higher.

I wish LA or Phoenix or Vegas was dense living where public transit could be effective, but since they’re urban sprawls and public transit isn’t aa effective as a densely populated city, most people own cars to get around.

In 2024, 78% of Alphabet’s revenue came from ads (72% in Q3 2025).

Ads subsidize experimentation of loss-generating moonshots until they mature into good businesses, or die.

Wow. Huge congrats! This is a real business that is profitable.

Our industry focuses so much on venture-backed startups (many of which are unprofitable) that would lose sight of one important goal when starting a business - be profitable!

https://web.archive.org/web/20251220223226/https://www.teleg...

"We cannot allow Europe's biggest export to be regulation," is the phrase I think of after reading this article. I am hopeful that Europe will continue to cultivate an environment full of talent and capital that can produce formidable alternatives to the hyperscalers.

But, today, as the article notes, "European alternatives do exist...Yet for many organizations, distinguishing real alternatives from false promises has become increasingly difficult."

One theoretical use case is “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” (HNDL) attacks, or “Store Now, Decrypt Later” (SNDL). If an oppressive regime saves encrypted messages now, they can decrypt later when QCs can break RSA and ECC.

It's a good reason to implement post-quantum cryptography.

Wasn't sure if you meant crypto (btc) or cryptography :)

Many cities have mixed-income housing strategies to create a social and economic mix, including London where council housing is peppered in throughout the boroughs.

"Building more densely in the right places will not just enable the delivery of more homes, but will also improve access to jobs and services, while helping to fund desperately needed social and physical infrastructure. It will help people to be active and healthy, by locating more housing within walking and cycling distance of local amenities and public transport access, and by reducing reliance on car ownership. Furthermore, it will help to foster socially and economically mixed neighbourhoods, which are a key part of maintaining London’s vibrancy and economic success."

-London Housing Strategy https://www.housinglin.org.uk/_assets/Resources/Housing/Othe...