Google makes billions of dollars in revenue each fiscal quarter. That money comes about by the same process that all companies use: They sell a product to their customers. Their customers pay money for that product.

Who’s Google’s customer? You? Really? When’s the last time you paid Google for anything?

Advertisers are Google’s customer. What do they sell to advertisers? They sell you. Or, at least, they rent you out, or provide access to you.Mike Elgan

Assuming I'm going to see ads on the internet anyway, my total experience is improved the more relevant and helpful they are in connecting me to what I'm looking for. To the extent that my information helps Google improve my experience on the web, they're welcome to it.

Would I rather no ads at all? Yes. Realistically speaking that is not going to happen.

In the physical world the race to the bottom is won by mass manufacturers in third world countries paying their workers 2¢ an hour. That's bad. And in the race for lowest per-unit cost, low-quality products get shipped.

In the software world there are no significant manufacturing costs, so commoditization doesn't rely on reducing per-unit product cost and actually results in higher product quality. This is achieved when someone builds and releases a functioning¹ Thing for free with the source code available, and other people take interest and offer to help. Game over, this thing is free and getting attention and if it doesn't exactly fit your needs, you can adapt it at a lower cost than writing another Thing from scratch. The result is always better than something you built yourself. This allows you to concentrate on the truly new and unexplored work behind the great products of today. The flywheel of software development gets a little bit faster.²

Open source is not the Only Way. People are entitled to be rewarded for coming up with new and interesting things that other people want. Successful free software tends to be commoditized software—stuff that other people have written many times before. These projects benefit most from the "collective bargaining" development style of open source, with the mistakes of all those previous implementations in mind and addressed in a package that anyone can use.

OpenSSL is a great example of this. Encryption software is terrifically hard to write, and everyone should be using it. Any bug could mean that someone owns your sensitive data, and even if it runs correctly, you're probably vulnerable to side channel attacks that monitor timing, power usage, sound, or math faults. Everyone who writes their own security routines falls for this stuff, including the open source libraries.

The best part about commoditization in software: you're better off using OpenSSL instead of DIYSSL because they've already run into these problems. Early versions had security vulnerabilities, but those have been fixed and the library is under constant analysis and attack by others and you benefit from it directly just by consuming it³. You stand on the shoulders of giants.

It's not just security either. Want high performance code? Someone probably wrote a free library that does what you want. And someone else came along later and improved it. This iteration is what makes open source software such a powerful force.

Open source software has a place in the world, and everyone in the ecosystem relies on it. As the industry matures, it becomes impossible to build a compelling new product without it⁴.

In any publicly-accessible forum, spam and trolling are a huge issue, consuming most administrator-hours and requiring a larger staff than would otherwise be required to run a large site. In comparison, sites that charge for admission, and sites that cannot be joined without an invitation have close to no administration overhead beyond maintaining the code, servers, and resetting forgotten passwords.

Some public sites (Stack Overflow, Slashdot, and Reddit come immediately to mind) have implemented a form of reputation. This allows other users to know at-a-glance if the person they're dealing with is stupid, full of shit, or fuckin' nuts. The goal is usually to keep track of troublemakers, but this system can also be used to find the best users on your site. These are people who probably want to help you, given the opportunity.

Here's an idea: pair the "report" function of a site with another reputation, one that is a ratio of number of posts this user has reported to how many of them were valid¹. For users that frequently spot problems with a high level of accuracy, it's safe to take action when a few of these high-reputation users flag the same issue independently instead of making the issue wait in a queue until a moderator can get around to it.

This sort of merit-based promotion of volunteer moderators could be automated and invisible to non-administrators, the high-reputation users not knowing their own augmented abilities, just that the site is a better place for their effort.

My point being, I’m saying God doesn’t exist. I’m not saying faith doesn’t exist. I know faith exists. I see it all the time. But believing in something doesn’t make it true. Hoping that something is true doesn’t make it true. The existence of God is not subjective. He either exists or he doesn’t. It’s not a matter of opinion. You can have your own opinions. But you can’t have your own facts.Ricky Gervais via h3h

some rich people have been talking smack about privacy lately, and it's nothing new.

but it's got me thinking, how can we care so much about privacy when the best defenses we have for it are "we need privacy… because we do!" or "if we don't have privacy our world will eventually reflect Nineteen Eighty-Four!" these defenses are all unsatisfying to a thinking person.

I think I've come up with something better…

paying someone minimum wage is equivalent to telling them "if I could pay you any less, I would."

It's fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode… Your nascent developer community needs to have something runnable and testable to play with.

When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise. Your program doesn't have to work particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do is convince potential co-developers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the forseeable future.Eric S. Raymond¹

there are a lot of projects that miss this critical point. it's disappointing when you find a promising-sounding project on the web and its latest release turns out to not even compile let alone run. being a good open source denizen, you look through the source with hopes of contributing a fix but there are problems at the most basic levels—this program doesn't need a patch, it needs a rewrite. you've just wasted the last hour.

this is damaging to open source. outside of a few well-populated categories, a person is more likely to find a broken or half-finished mess of code than even a half-useful library. it would be better to not waste their time and let them write their own solution that they can release once it fulfills their needs.

after finishing Ghost in the Shell S.A.C. from start to finish for the first time, and with the memory of Cowboy Bebop and Firefly¹ in mind, I realized why I intensely dislike shows like Battlestar Galactica and The Office.

the characters in shows I enjoy are excellent people in exceptional situations. they do not suffer from stupid miscommunications, traffic jams, or mismanagement. they can think at least as fast as you, so you don't find yourself shouting "HE'S THE MURDERER DON'T TRUST HIM!" at your television. I don't enjoy these uncomfortable feelings—embarrassment on behalf of a fictional character isn't entertainment. I leave the room when these shows are on; I can not stand them.

if I wanted to watch characters with normal personalities in normal situations ruining unsuspecting people's lives with their incompetence, I'd sit in on a seven hour catered meeting populated by nodding suits and led by incomprehensible charts and spreadsheets².

this bullshit happens often enough in real life that I don't want it as entertainment. it's depressing and obnoxious, not entertaining.

from The New York Times, a neat infographic:

note how the number of edges emanating from a company is an indicator of its health¹. Kodak has been dying since the commoditization of the digital camera. Nokia started to crumble when the iPhone went global. conversely, HTC is doin' all right—they even split last year.

filing lawsuits is an indicator that you've lost your innovative edge. losing the lead, you're exploiting what's left out of your inventions and legacy until you've finally converted all your integrity into bankruptcy. the news will enjoy adding their spin as well, further complicating things.
whether founded or not, these impressions taint your reputation. they damage your business.

Can you name a company you admire that spends its time enforcing patents, instead of innovating? Remember the pirate flag you flew over Apple's headquarters when you were building the Mac? Is Apple part of the Navy now?Wil Shipley

who cares if someone took your ideas to build a competing product? that's how the market works. build the better product—it can't be hard if all your competition can only manage plagiarism.

I hope this passes soon so we can get back to creating the future.

as part of my quest to maximise my life's SNR, I've been thinking about email. I don't think any other form of textual communication has so much verbiage.

let's start with an example of a great email:

Subject: Re: Avia Wildflower Triathlons News
From: Joe
To: Keith
Cc: Ken, Cindy, Scott

Oh, don't worry about the beer - that was more an offhand remark than
anything else. If y'all weren't planning to bring any, don't bring one
just on my account.

clean, simple, concise. what's missing? the signature.