I’ve been fascinated by conspiracy theories, true and false, and over the years I’ve read quite a number of them. Unfortunately, in these strange times, many people have spent far too much of their time “going down rabbit holes” and sharing unreliable information.
There’s a great French word for the collection of Internet sites that spread this sort of misinformation: la complosphère, which I’ve translated as the Conspirosphere.
The Conspirosphere is the collection of Internet sites which copy lurid allegations that are unverified and mostly false. Truly “fake news”.
Sadly, some people believe that when something is “in print”, such as written in a salacious self-published memoir of a woman who claims to have been forced into sex slavery by nefarious forces in the US government, no less, that it must have really happened. One woman making such claims is Cathy O’Brien, and another wrote under the pen name Brice Taylor. Both of their names are listed in the oval at the right side of the giant “Q Web” which I’ve copied into this story for reference (designed by Dylan Louis Monroe). …
I didn’t quit Twitter. In fact, I’ve been more active there than anywhere else. I’m going to write more about my hobbyist Android and NetBSD/vax projects here soon. Stay tuned!
I finally figured out the exact qualities that I dislike about Twitter, and I want to describe how the decision to make my collection of 351,000 tweets private, uninstall the mobile app, and stop using the service on a daily basis, felt so worthwhile and consequential after I did.
I felt like my daily Twitter usage had become a bad habit that was slowly killing me, similar to an addiction to cigarettes or alcohol, except that unlike those drugs, the damage to my physical health was limited to a relative lack of physical exercise, while the real damage was caused to my mental and emotional well-being, my attention span, my outlook on the future, and my use of time. …
This is the first of two essays exploring the reasons why I fell into a deep depression while living and working in Silicon Valley. The Bay Area distills some of the worst excesses of American capitalism. This essay focuses on the deep sadness and loneliness that built up inside me over the years. The second essay will focus on the negative effects of greed and arrogance.
I moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 2005, thanks to a friend and former coworker who had some extra money and wanted to build a Web app that he envisioned as a combination of a social bookmarking service, like Delicious, and a geographic review site, like Yelp. He didn’t have money to pay me a salary, but he put me up in a succession of cheap SF hotels, and paid for my food while we worked on it. After a few weeks, I made contact with a former coworker from an internship at Be Inc., …
My Résumé
Here’s a link to my current résumé. I’m requesting to be a verified user on Twitter so I’m confirming my biographical info.
Here are some topics I plan to write about. My most recent Medium post was kind of a bummer and I want to write about some serious topics not related to the tech industry necessarily.
I don’t want to write too much on each topic initially, but try to sketch out my views briefly for each, based on Twitter discussions/debates/rants and other ideas that I’ve had.
- Violence/War/Terrorism/Nuclear War
- Climate Change & Environmental Policy
- Economics & Fiscal Policy (US Edition)
- Consumerism as Hypnosis or Zombieism
- Republicans: Tea Party / Trump Wings
- Republicans: Nixon / FOX News Wings
- Professional Software Engineering
- History of Mobile Devices & Apps
- Alternative Medicine and anti-Science
Feel free to vote for any of the above topics, or add your own suggestions in comments below.
In May 1991, Time magazine published a game-changing cover story, “Scientology: The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power.” The famously litigious Church of Scientology responded with ad campaigns and a libel lawsuit, which they lost (Wikipedia).
The title of this essay reflects some unpleasant similarities I’ve discovered between the corporate culture of Scientology and that of many tech companies, including my former employers Google (now Alphabet, Inc.) and Microsoft (under former CEO Steve Ballmer). …
Ever since I switched from Android to iOS last December, I’ve been thinking about some of the ways that Apple did things differently from Google over the past few years. Apple is constantly criticized for not using “open” standards, but those decisions often end up making more sense over time. Case in point: Apple’s much-maligned Lightning connector.
What’s wrong with the Lightning connector? The primary complaint is that Apple locked down the standard by requiring an authentication chip in the cable, to discourage cheap cables that didn’t meet their standards. …
I realized about a year ago that today’s smartphones are nearly feature complete, as far as what we’ve asked of them at the platform level. I want to mention a few areas for improvement.
I’m old enough to remember when the first audio CDs were introduced in the 1980s and how much cleaner they sounded, and easier they were to use, than vinyl records or cassettes.
What’s embarrassing is that, 35 years after Philips and Sony defined the original CD-DA format, we’re still using the same old 16-bit, 44.1 kHz sampling rate for digital audio. We should really be using 24-bit, 48 kHz audio, at minimum (ideally, 32-bit floating-point samples). …
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger may have been directly responsible for more unnecessary death and destruction during their time in power than any other humans of the 20th century except for Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and possibly Mao Zedong.
Unlike the others, Kissinger is still alive (at 92) and has somehow managed to retain both his reputation and mystique as a gifted statesman and trusted diplomat with politicians, the mainstream media, and the American public, despite the massive amount of evidence to the contrary that has accumulated in the decades since Nixon’s resignation in 1974 (Kissinger remained Secretary of State in the Ford administration, leaving office in 1977 with Ford). …
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