Tony La Russa is a member of the MLB Hall of Fame as a manager. The man helped introduce video study and analytics to the game of baseball when he was manager of the great Oakland A’s teams in the late 1980s and 1990s. He understands the value of data, but he also gets that data only gets you so far before humans have to adjust to the situation in front of them. Read More
Category: Opinion
AMP for email is a terrible idea
Google just announced a plan to “modernize” email, allowing “engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences.” Does that sound like a terrible idea to anyone else? It sure sounds like a terrible idea to me, and not only that, but an idea borne out of competitive pressure and existing leverage rather than user needs. Not good, Google. Send to trash. Read More
The Falcon Heavy backlash and the public trust
I watched the Falcon Heavy launch this week. Not as an accredited journalist, from an observation tower, but as one of the masses on Alan Shepard Beach twelve miles south. Watched it arc across the sky; watched the two boosters return safely to t…
View More The Falcon Heavy backlash and the public trustHere comes the sun
Let’s talk about the side effects of the creeping apotheosis of solar power. I mean, don’t get me wrong, we’re a ways away yet — but we’re definitely heading in that direction. “Renewables are about to become our cheapest form of energy,” Wired UK observes. “We expect $7.4 trillion to be invested in new renewable energy plants by 2040 – 72%… Read More
The insight-industrial complex
I don’t like tech conferences. I mean, of course I don’t, they’re not meant for people like me. I’m an introvert, so I find them exhausting, and am (presumably) less likely than an extrovert to meet interesting or contributory people. I read much faster than people talk, so they’re not a good way for me to learn things. But there’s more to my dislike than… Read More
Sex, the final frontier: Cindy Gallop raises $2M from mysterious investor for social sex tech
“Everything’s a battle,” Cindy Gallop sighs, although ti’s clear she relishes those battles. What she means is that the entire Internet has long been divided into two separate, walled fiefdoms: one labelled “pornography,” the other marked with those three dread words “no adult content.” The territory between those two worlds, which she is trying… Read More
Everyone hates us, and it’s not because of our sex parties
It was, briefly, the zeitgeist’s perfect Silicon Valley story: a sex-and-drugs party hosted hosted by since-ousted top-tier VC Steve Jurvetson, at an official Draper Fisher Jurvetson event,attended by multiple billionaires including Elon Musk. So said Paul Biggar, founder of CircleCI, in a widely read Medium post, expanding on Vanity Fair’s excerpt of Emily Chang’s new book.… Read More
The secret to avoiding CES cynicism is never really going
I’ve been going to CES for almost ten years now, and it amazes me that really, nothing has changed. The same people are saying the same things on the same stages, selling the same people the same junk with… well, slightly different numbers attached. But this year I had a great time and found some amazing companies — because I avoided at all costs actually stepping foot on… Read More
The cryptocurrency bubble is strangling innovation
Sure, fine, maybe it’s a bubble. OK it’s definitely a bubble, but that’s a good thing, a bubble brings attention and investment in infrastructure, which breeds real innovation. Right? Look at the dot-com boom. A lot of people lost a whole lot of paper money, but it brought us a cheap worldwide fiber backbone and companies like Amazon and Google. Today’s crypto bubble… Read More
The cryptocurrency bubble is strangling innovation
Sure, fine, maybe it’s a bubble. OK it’s definitely a bubble, but that’s a good thing, a bubble brings attention and investment in infrastructure, which breeds real innovation. Right? Look at the dot-com boom. A lot of people lost a whole lot of paper money, but it brought us a cheap worldwide fiber backbone and companies like Amazon and Google. Today’s crypto bubble… Read More
It’s the Jons 2017!
Happy New Year! It’s been a transformational year in tech. The golden era of startups ended. Sorry about that. The tech industry finally rolled over a big rock it had ignored and/or leaned on for years, and exposed the squirming morass of sexual harassment beneath. We witnessed major AI breakthroughs, a cryptocurrency megaboom, really truly self-driving cars, and 18 SpaceX launches. But… Read More
Facebook’s “comment a memory” meme should replace “HBD!”
I find it truly sad the way Facebook has led us to reduce wishing friends a happy birthday to a meaningless, generic chore. It’s not Facebook’s fault. It gives us an open-ended comment box. But our laziness and sense of social obligation unfurl as a pile of “Happy Birthday!” or even “HBD!” wall posts.
I’ve been bashing this emergent behavior since 2011. Read More