Justin Singer @justin-singer - Tumblr Blog

2,000 made shots / 80% accuracy / 6 hours of utterly robotic, completely uninterrupted, machine-gun shooting / 60 minutes in an hour = 7 shots per minute, or one shot every 8.5 seconds. For 6 hours. I call bullshit.

Also, higher quantity leads to higher quality most often in simple, closed systems with fast, consistent feedback loops. Like basketball and other games. Life and business are different animals entirely.

A Century of Progress in the United States (1900)

If a man wanted a pair of shoes a hundred years ago, he had his shoemaker to make them, and he had to wait for them until they were finished. The pay of this shoemaker was 73 1/3 cents a day. If he wanted a house, the carpenter with broad-ax laboriously hewed the lumber, and with hammer, saw and hand· plane slowly dressed and put together what is now known as the mill-work, for which he received wages at the rate of something over 70 cents a day. The printer was the skilled mechanic, and at $1 a day he set the type, and worked off on a creaky hand-press the limited edition, whose crude sheets now form valued curios. To-day the shoemaker on the McKay machine makes many hundred pairs of shoes a day, the laborious work of the carpenter is performed almost entirely by the planing, sawing, boring, mortising ann turning machines of the great woodworking mills, while the printer, with wages more than trebled and hours of labor reduced, has been elevated to the dignity of an expert manipulator of the linotype machine, performing the work of four or five compositors, or has become the operator of the octuple press, printing papers by steam at the rate of 1,600 a minute, ready pasted, folded and counted for distribution.

A Century of Progress in the United States (1900)

In no period of human endeavor has the work of man been so built into tangible and enduring things of a useful quality as in the century just about to pass into history.

A Century of Progress in the United States (1900)

The interviews were held in a jungle clearing atop a mountain at an undisclosed location in Mexico. Surrounded by more than 100 cartel troops, and wearing a silk shirt and pressed black jeans, Mr. Guzmán sat down to dinner with Mr. Penn and Kate del Castillo, a Mexican actress who once played a drug kingpin in the soap opera “La Reina del Sur,” according to Rolling Stone.

Sean Penn Sat for Secret Interview With ‘El Chapo,’ Mexican Drug Lord - The New York Times

In October, Brian Bogosian, a former Good C.E.O. and a significant shareholder, along with two institutions that own common shares, said the board was not looking after the interests of common stockholders and sued in Delaware Chancery Court. They are seeking unspecified damages and fees. Randall J. Baron, the lawyer representing Mr. Bogosian and the institutions, said that “managers and controlling shareholders may not put their interests ahead of the minority owners of the company.”

When a Unicorn Start-Up Stumbles, Its Employees Get Hurt - The New York Times

The more optimistic/greedy/desperate a board member gets, the finer the line becomes between voting to “go for it” and a breaching one’s fiduciary duty to common shareholders.

John Roberts Delivers Finishing Blow To Stephen Breyer To Defend Title Of Chief Justice

Applying the hacker metaphor to the brain, though, is wildly premature, since we have a pretty good idea of how computers work, since we built them, but we have very little idea about how the brain does what it does at all.

Andreessen Horowitz’s First Move in Biopharma | In the Pipeline

Companies are shunning fundamentals — fundamentals critical for long-term viability — in order to juice short-term growth and capitalize on the frothy private funding market. And in the race to capture funding and subsequent headlines, these companies are burning the trust and respect of restaurants and consumers — two essential ingredients in ensuring long-term sustainability.

Not All that Glitters is Gold — Medium

It’s deeply ironic that venture capital -- ostensibly a tool of the free market -- exists today mostly as a means for removing market strictures from the chosen. An asset class created to overcome the barrier of high fixed costs has morphed into a means to overcome the barrier of negative unit economics, and we’re all the near-term richer/medium-term poorer for it.

After hopping into another Uber car, Mr. Altman opened his laptop to record his impressions of the meeting. Since 2009, a password-protected site has been used to collect notes from every meeting a YC partner has held with portfolio companies.

Tech Incubator Y Combinator Takes New Tack With Venture Capital Fund - WSJ

Somewhere, a misguided hacktavist is cracking his knuckles.

Some things we’ve learned over the past 30 years–that novelty is more important than quality; that if you’re not disrupting yourself someone else will disrupt you; that entering new markets is more important than expanding existing markets; that technology has to be evangelized, not asked for by your customers–may no longer be true. Almost every company will continue to be managed as if these things were true, probably right up until they manage themselves out of business. There’s an old saying that generals are always fighting the last war, it’s not just generals, it’s everyone’s natural inclination.

The Deployment Age | Reaction Wheel

Connecting a thermostat to the Internet wirelessly is awesome, but calling it an Internet-enabled thermostat will start to be like calling a vacuum cleaner an electricity-enabled broom. And if your thermostat does not connect to the Internet, it will be bought only by retro-chic hipsters.

The Deployment Age | Reaction Wheel

In 1953 the establishment believed that what was good for GM was good for America; it’s not a stretch to say that over the next 20 years the establishment will begin to believe, and act, like what’s good for Google, Facebook, and Apple is good for America.

The Deployment Age | Reaction Wheel

Already happened.

(via Bear feeding - YouTube)

At best, having the the top tiers of our industry include figures who believe in fairy tales is a distraction. At worst, it promotes a kind of messianic thinking and apocalyptic Utopianism that can make people do dangerous things with all their money.

Web Design - The First 100 Years

Technological Utopianism has been tried before and led to some pretty bad results. There's no excuse for not studying the history of positivism, scientific Marxism and other attempts to rationalize the world, before making similar promises about what you will do with software.

Web Design - The First 100 Years

Fixing the world with software is like giving yourself a haircut with a lawn mower. It works in theory, but there's no room for error in the implementation.

Web Design - The First 100 Years

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Justin Singer