Folks have been waiting for this for a while, and it's great news for one of the most important new technologies in recent times. 

In Born Red, a profile of Chinese Leader Xi Jinping (New Yorker) —

Shortly after taking over, Xi asked, “Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse?” and declared, “It’s a profound lesson for us.” Chinese scholars had studied that puzzle from dozens of angles, but Xi wanted more. “In 2009, he commissioned a long study of the Soviet Union from somebody who works in the policy-research office,” the diplomat in Beijing told me. “It concluded that the rot started under Brezhnev. In the paper, the guy cited a joke: Brezhnev brings his mother to Moscow. He proudly shows her the state apartments at the Kremlin, his Zil limousine, and the life of luxury he now lives. ‘Well, what do you think, Mama,’ says Brezhnev. ‘You’ll never have to worry about a thing, ever again.’ ‘I’m so proud of you, Leonid Ilyich,’ says Mama, ‘but what happens if the Communists find out?’ Xi loved the story.” Xi reserved special scorn for Gorbachev, for failing to defend the Party against its opponents, and told his colleagues, “Nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.”

I just became a new father and a friend of mine recommended I read the book "Brain Rules for Baby" by developmental molecular biologist John Medina. Parenting tips I expected. Underlying psychological phenomenon that is the basis of universal human conflict? Not so much. Medina writes:

People view their own behaviors as originating from situations beyond their control, but they view other people's behaviors as originating from inherent personality traits. Say a guy arrives late for a date. He is likely to ascribe his tardiness to external factors (being caught in traffic). She is likely to ascribe his tardiness to being a careless person (not taking traffic into account). One invokes a situational constraint to explain being late. The other invokes an insult. 

...

Alone in our skulls, we have privileged access... providing detailed knowledge of our psychological interiors, motivations, and intentions. Formally called introspection, we know what we intend to mean or to communicate on a minute-to-minute basis. The problem is, nobody else does. Other people can't read our minds. The only information others have about our interior states and our motives is what our words say and how our faces and bodies appear. This is formally called extrospection.

We are amazingly blind to the limits of extrospective information. We know when our actions fail to match our inner thoughts and feelings, but we often forget that this knowledge is not available to others. This disparity can leave us bewildered or surprised at how we come across to other people. As poet Robert Burns wrote, "Oh that God the gift would give us / to see ourselves as others see us."

Which reminds me of David Foster Wallace's "This is Water" graduation speech (PDF here) where he says:

Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do — except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

I quoted this on my personal homepage in 1999 —

'Current economics is merely refining the obsolete. Economic theory is still based on the scarcity axiom, which doesn't apply to information. When I sell you a phone, I no longer have it. When I sell information to you, I have more information by the very fact that you have it and I know you have it. That's not even true of money.' 

—Peter Drucker, Wired 6.03 March 1998

Like a lot of people our generation, I grew up listening to Nirvana. In Utero was on repeat on my Walkman, and I still can lip sync the words whenever I hear it. But the rock star and the man were different things, and tonight's HBO premiere of the Cobain documentary "Montage of Heck" made the man that much more real. 

Instead than rockumentary or myth-making, most of the film is Kurt Cobain's own journal writing, art, and of course music, both released and unreleased. The home videos are the most compelling — a true window to his life. You do feel like you're spying on private moments, Kurt growing up, and his life with Courtney Love and their daughter Frances Bean. 

Any Nirvana fan would love this documentary. It's not easy to watch, but important if you, like me, felt like you were given a voice by the music. Thanks Kurdt. 

Here's an excerpt of what Ross Ulbricht wrote years ago about starting Silk Road from Ars Technica:

I was calling it Underground Brokers, but eventually settled on Silk Road. The idea was to create a website where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them. I had been studying the technology for a while, but needed a business model and strategy. I finally decided that I would produce mushrooms so that I could list them on the site for cheap to get people interested. I worked my ass off setting up a lab in a cabin out near Bastrop off the grid. In hindsight, this was a terrible idea and I would never repeat it, but I did it and produced several kilos of high quality shrooms. On the website side, I was struggling to figure out on my own how to set it up. Driving out to Bastrop, working on Good Wagon, and trying to keep up my relationship with Julia was taking all of my time. By the end of the year, I still didn’t have a site up, let alone a server.

I went through a lot over the year in my personal relationships as well. I had mostly shut myself off from people because I felt ashamed of where my life was. I had left my promising career as a scientist to be an investment adviser and entrepreneur and came up empty handed. More and more my emotions and thoughts were ruling my life and my word was losing power. At some point I finally broke down and realized my love for people again, and started reaching out. Throughout the year I slowly re-cultivated my relationship with my word and started honoring it again.

My relationship with Julia was pretty rocky throughout the year. We even broke up for about a month and half toward the end. I couldn’t even tell you now why it was a struggle, or why we broke up. On my side, I wasn’t communicating well at all. I would let little things build up until I got mad. We eventually got back together and even moved in together, and it has been amazingly good since.

In 2011, I am creating a year of prosperity and power beyond what I have ever experienced before. Silk Road is going to become a phenomenon and at least one person will tell me about it, unknowing that I was its creator. 

There's three types of SEO. White Hat is playing within Google's rules. Black Hat is playing outside of them (think comment bots that drop links). Grey Hat is the space inbetween. "The Gawker" strategy lies somewhere between White Hat and Grey Hat.

The linkbuilding strategy called "the Gawker," is where you hire someone known for choosing unpopular positions and trolling/being unable to take criticism. That person creates a shitstorm by saying something incredibly stupid and stubbornly sticking to it. This prompts everyone to talk about how irrational they are and generates a lot of controversy. You get a lot of links to your site during the controversy. Later, you fire this person to save face.

One of the biggest rules of posting anything on the tubes is "Don't be wrong on the Internet" because everyone HAS to correct you, this strategy relies on using that that rule to your advantage. Post something absurdly dumb in a random reddit comment page, and a dozen people will feel the need to correct you, and all you are is an anonymous person on the internet. When a media entity - especially a generally respected one - posts something absurd, other media entities feel the obligation to correct them. Since their readers are probably unaware of the other media entity's wrong-headed entry, the other media company links to it. As mentioned earlier, a link from a domain that has lots of links is worth many, many times more than a link from a less endowed website.

Been impressed by the state of gadget tech today. Four drool-worthy things so far. 

1) Mercedes Benz F 015 self-driving car

2) Gogoro scooter — Designed by Horace Luke, who also designed most of the HTC phones in the past decade previously. 

3) Yves Behar's gorgeous curved HDTV

4) Samsung T1 portable SSD that holds 1 terabyte in the palm of your hand

Elon Musk on knowledge and learning via Reddit AMA: 

I think most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying.

One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.

Pacific Standard magazine penned a long form piece on the success of better policing against gangs in Los Angeles. Cops started using statistics (CompStat), community policing, bans on congregating in public (no street slinging) and federal RICO statutes to take down entire neighborhood gangs, while gentrification changed the demographics of the neighborhoods. 

But others are speculating it is the end of the use of leaded gas in automobiles that directly caused a plunge in crime:

It might also be culture and the Internet. A redditor writes:

Gangs are cultural social groups. They thrive on regional and ethnic pockets of culture. All culture has become globalized and somewhat diffused. Especially "urban" culture. Regional urban culture in America used to be really clearly pronounced from state to state. For example, young people in poor neighborhoods in Compton didn't dress like kids in Miami hoods. Rappers in NY didn't sound like rappers in the Bay Area. Nowadays the internet has connected the world, and so young people are no longer isolated into regional cultures. Poor kids in California wear the same fashions as kids in Kansas city now. The new generation of rappers are almost impossible to identify by state or region. A$AP Rocky and Tyler the Creator and Drake have no regional style whatsoever, because they grew up with no regional cultural limitations. They are global.

This is a big part of what's happened to gangs, IMO. The youth have no more regional pockets of culture for gangs to live and breath.

Hat tip HN

There's this tiny game studio that released a very playable point-and-click adventure game, and I played through it just now. Put simply, the game is HBO's The Wire in old school PC adventure game format. It's about than an hour of story and action but a very enjoyable one with real suspense. They've stripped down the mechanics of a typical point-and-click to just that which will progress the plot, which makes the whole mechanism quite streamlined and cuts back on the hunt-and-click aspect of these games. They've managed to really generate palpable tension in this storyline. You're never sure if your character will make it through, and your actions feel like they have weight. 

The game was created by a small team in Finland, and it looks like they were recently greenlit on Steam. They've released episode 1 of 5, and as a fan of these kinds of games I do hope this studio keeps going and brings the whole series to fruition. This thing is compelling, so if you've got a PC, check it out on Steam. 

I love seeing people create something new, and this is one game that deserves to have a bigger audience.

Cars, unending tract homes, and cul-de-sacs are all ways of the past that are fading out. People want to live in more urban centers with rich public transit options, like the above futuristic vision of Urban Alloy Towers in would-be Queens, NY. 

The Atlantic Monthly expanded on this recently in The Cheapest Generation:

Smartphones compete against cars for young people’s big-ticket dollars, since the cost of a good phone and data plan can exceed $1,000 a year. But they also provide some of the same psychic benefits—opening new vistas and carrying us far from the physical space in which we reside. “You no longer need to feel connected to your friends with a car when you have this technology that’s so ubiquitous, it transcends time and space,” Connelly said.

In other words, mobile technology has empowered more than just car-sharing. It has empowered friendships that can be maintained from a distance. The upshot could be a continuing shift from automobiles to mobile technology, and a big reduction in spending.

...

The old cul-de-sacs of Revolutionary Road and Desperate Housewives have fallen out of favor with Generation Y. Rising instead are both city centers and what some developers call “urban light”—denser suburbs that revolve around a walkable town center. “People are very eager to create a life that blends the best features of the American suburb—schools still being the primary, although not the only, draw—and urbanity,” says Adam Ducker, a managing director at the real-estate consultancy RCLCO.

And why buy a car and have it sit for 23 hours a day when you can get a car via Zipcar or Uber on demand via smartphone? 

This makes me hopeful for the future of cities as the younger generations surge into voters and key positions of power in government. 

The entire idea of stock video footage is just really bizarre if you spend a little bit of time to think about it. Which is what makes making an entire music video out of stock footage pretty awesome.

It was 1925, and the car was destroying America's youth. "The general effect of the automobile," wrote Princeton University Dean Howard McClenahan, "was to make the present generation look lightly at the moral code, and to decrease the value of the home." With a car, the youngsters could drive anywhere on Sunday. McClenahan didn't think they'd drive to church. And if they didn't, he argued, they'd become devilish and depraved.

This did not come to pass. Nor did phonographs create a "marked deterioration in American music," as composer John Philip Sousa feared in 1906. Nor did the telephone "break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends," as the Knights of Columbus warned in 1926. Nor did writing--a growing activity in the ancient world--"create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories," as Plato himself hypothesized. Some 2,400 years later, the Atlantic floated the same thesis about search engines. Its headline: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Proclamations like these should remind us that every technological revolution will spawn naysayers, who for the most part should be ignored.

Ever wonder about the meaning of being? Or if time truly is a flat circle? Now there's finally an explanation using video game tropes. Thank you Internet!

Some of my favorite screenshots:

Okay, I’m just gonna use that same old brush, its working so well. Gonna tap that corner into a little bit of yellow ochre. Just tap the corner, I want very little paint.

What am I painting? Fuck you, that’s what I’m painting. You know why, mister? You drive to the store to get your paint supplies in a Hyundai, I drive an $80,000 BMW. That’s what I’m painting.

...

Read the whole hilarious thing at McSweeney's

From GQ's recent cover story on Louis CK:

These situations where I can't make a choice because I'm too busy trying to envision the perfect one—that false perfectionism traps you in this painful ambivalence: If I do this, then that other thing I could have done becomes attractive. But if I go and choose the other one, the same thing happens again. It's part of our consumer culture. People do this trying to get a DVD player or a service provider, but it also bleeds into big decisions. So my rule is that if you have someone or something that gets 70 percent approval, you just do it. 'Cause here's what happens. The fact that other options go away immediately brings your choice to 80. Because the pain of deciding is over.

"And," he continues, "when you get to 80 percent, you work. You apply your knowledge, and that gets you to 85 percent! And the thing itself, especially if it's a human being, will always reveal itself—100 percent of the time!—to be more than you thought. And that will get you to 90 percent. After that, you're stuck at 90, but who the fuck do you think you are, a god? You got to 90 percent? It's incredible!

Take your butter and put it on a toothpick tripod. Pop it in the microwave and stop it right as the butter starts to slide down. Voila, turn refrigerator-cold butter into perfectly spreadable butter with no mess or melt. 

I wish there were simple tricks like this to solve all of life's problems. 

via The Spalenka Letters (hat tip Lifehacker)

In Slate, The Untold Story of Larry Page's Incredible Comeback (Hat Tip Jeff Lonsdale):

"Page recognized that Google’s search-advertising business, with its insane profit margins and sustained growth, was exactly the kind of cash-generating machine that his hero, Nikola Tesla, would have used to fund his wildest dreams."

Israeli electric car startup Better Place ate through $900M in funding and died. In his coverage, Max Chafkin writes this gem:

Entrepreneurs are frequently told not to drink their own Kool-Aid--which is to say, to remember that the stories they tell about how their products will save humanity are just that.

Privately, they are cautioned to focus on the small things; to make more money than they lose; to cut costs when needed; and, when necessary, to pivot to a more promising business. The caution seems especially important in a culture that increasingly celebrates startups, threatening to confuse their mythmaking with reality. 

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

It's always great when a big company innovates, but just like a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, a little innovation can be that way for creating a million paper cuts of user pain. 

Here's one paper cut by American Express's ReceiptMatch service, that can take posts by email. But unfortunately, when its servers are down (and they are down often), the service just starts instantly rejecting email.

This simply isn't the kind of thing a normal software engineer would do. Emails queue by default, actually — and receipts are rarely so mission critical that I need 200 millisecond response times on my receipt emails. So just leave the email in the queue and process it when you can. 

A rare case of addition by subtraction — it's actually more work to send a rejection email than it is to let it sit in an email queue. That's the easiest thing in the world to do, and infinitely better than what they do now. 

"The problem with human progress is that it tends to go too fast—that is, too fast for the great majority of comfortable and incurious men."

One of my favorite infographics ever made:

View Full Size

via NASA and National Geographic

Love this footage of beta board rider Alec Foster on his freshly made final Boosted Board going 20mph around South Park:

Boosted Boards Blog

"This vehicle can guarantee it will get you from point A to B ... most of the time."

via adweek.com