kotfu.net

LLM deflation

2026-02-01T01:42:00+00:00

About a year ago, Andreessen Horowitz (the largest venture capital firm in the world), published a blog post showing that the cost of LLM inference is dropping 10x per year.

Andrej Karpathy, a member of the founding team at OpenAI and subsequently Tesla’s Sr. Director of AI, says that in 2019 it cost $43k to train GPT-2. Today he can train a model that performs similarly for $73. That’s 600x cheaper in 7 years. Not the same metric, but maybe more important.

Orion 1.0

2025-12-01T01:42:00+00:00

In the last few months, a bunch of new AI browsers have launched, including Comet, Atlas, and Dia. I have no interest in these applications, they seem like a privacy nightmare, and I’m perfectly happy to use Claude and ChatGPT in a browser tab or in their native Mac apps.

Six years ago, the team at Kagi decided to build a new browser called Orion using the WebKit engine that powers Safari. They just released Orion 1.0 for Mac. It’s already available for iOS and iPadOS.

I’ve been an occasional Orion user for several years. It’s faster than Safari every time I measure it. Orion loads and runs Safari, Chrome, and Firefox extensions, including must haves like uBlock Origin and 1Password. Unlike Chrome, Kagi offers full support for extensions using both manifest v2 and v3. Orion has a robust AppleScript dictionary, and the user interface is excellent. You can tell a lot about how much a Mac dev team cares about their app by looking at the settings. Orion’s settings page is beautiful. This is a Mac-assed Mac app.

Orion has no telemetry and no AI built in, and that receives top marks from me. It’s not open source, but the development is done in the open with an active user community. Kagi is working to bring Orion to both Linux and Windows.

I’m going to give Orion a try as my daily driver, and I hope you do too.

Laptop Edit and Arrow Keys

2025-09-01T17:10:00+00:00

Keyboard Layouts and Sizes
Image From Keychron

In the olden days, every computer keyboard had all the alphanumeric keys, a row of function keys, an inverted T arrangement of arrow keys, edit keys (page up, home, end, etc), and a number pad. Today there are many different keyboard sizes, with various combinations of all of these types of keys. Keyboard nerds know what a 60% keyboard is. The rest of us call it a laptop keyboard. I use the editing keys a lot when typing at my desk with a full size keyboard, and I really miss them when using my laptop. Inspired by Brett Terpstra’s Home Row Arrow Cluster, I decided to see if I could figure out a solution.

I use a Macbook Air, so my approach is only useful for Mac users. Like Brett, I decided to use Karabiner-Elements, an outstanding low-level keyboard customizer. In Brett’s implementation, you hold down the ; with your pinky, and then use I J K L for the arrow keys.

That feels uncomfortable to me, and I wanted to be able to use P and ; for Page Up and Page Down. I wanted something where I could enter an edit key mode, then have the keys work as arrows and edit keys, then leave the mode and they go back to normal. Kind of like how the Num Lock key works. I can’t use Num Lock, because Apple laptops and keyboards don’t have it. In it’s place is the Clear key, which nobody uses because nobody knows what it does.

While experimenting with several keystroke options I discovered I was already using them for something else. Funny how your fingers know to type a thing, but your brain can’t remember all the things you know how to type. I finally settled on using ⌃+Delete to activate and de-activate edit mode.

Once in edit mode, I had to decide which keys to use for arrow keys and edit keys. I also experimented with this a lot. On my full size keyboard, I move my right hand over to use the arrow keys, so I wanted to use keys on the right hand side of the keyboard. I use my left hand for the modifier keys, so when I want to select backwards by word I use my left hand to press and hold ⌥+⇧ and then use my right hand to repeatedly press Left Arrow. I want to be able to do a similar thing on my laptop.

I ended up with the following keys:

Key	Function
`I`	`Up Arrow`
`J`	`Left Arrow`
`K`	`Down Arrow`
`L`	`Right Arrow`
`U`	`Home`
`O`	`End`
`N`	`Delete`
`Y`	`Page Up`
`H`	`Page Down`

I configured I J K L for the arrow keys, in a similar configuration to the gaming W A S D but on the right hand. Because I exclusively used Unix and Linux before ever using Windows or MacOS, I have Home and End move to the beginning and end of a line. U and O are logically positioned for those actions. I originally had H for Delete, but changed it to N so I can have Y and N for Page Up and Page Down.

To implement this in Karabiner, you need to create a new complex rule, and paste in this JSON:

{
    "description": "Control-Delete toggles 60% edit mode (I/J/K/L → ↑/←/↓/→, U/O → Home/End, N → Delete, Y/H → PageUp/PageDown)",
    "manipulators": [
        {
            "conditions": [
                {
                    "name": "sixty_edit_mode",
                    "type": "variable_if",
                    "value": 0
                }
            ],
            "from": {
                "key_code": "delete_or_backspace",
                "modifiers": { "mandatory": ["control"] }
            },
            "to": [
                {
                    "set_variable": {
                        "name": "sixty_edit_mode",
                        "value": 1
                    }
                }
            ],
            "type": "basic"
        },
        {
            "conditions": [
                {
                    "name": "sixty_edit_mode",
                    "type": "variable_if",
                    "value": 1
                }
            ],
            "from": {
                "key_code": "delete_or_backspace",
                "modifiers": { "mandatory": ["control"] }
            },
            "to": [
                {
                    "set_variable": {
                        "name": "sixty_edit_mode",
                        "value": 0
                    }
                }
            ],
            "type": "basic"
        },
        {
            "conditions": [
                {
                    "name": "sixty_edit_mode",
                    "type": "variable_if",
                    "value": 1
                }
            ],
            "from": {
                "key_code": "i",
                "modifiers": { "optional": ["any"] }
            },
            "to": [{ "key_code": "up_arrow" }],
            "type": "basic"
        },
        {
            "conditions": [
                {
                    "name": "sixty_edit_mode",
                    "type": "variable_if",
                    "value": 1
                }
            ],
            "from": {
                "key_code": "k",
                "modifiers": { "optional": ["any"] }
            },
            "to": [{ "key_code": "down_arrow" }],
            "type": "basic"
        },
        {
            "conditions": [
                {
                    "name": "sixty_edit_mode",
                    "type": "variable_if",
                    "value": 1
                }
            ],
            "from": {
                "key_code": "j",
                "modifiers": { "optional": ["any"] }
            },
            "to": [{ "key_code": "left_arrow" }],
            "type": "basic"
        },
        {
            "conditions": [
                {
                    "name": "sixty_edit_mode",
                    "type": "variable_if",
                    "value": 1
                }
            ],
            "from": {
                "key_code": "l",
                "modifiers": { "optional": ["any"] }
            },
            "to": [{ "key_code": "right_arrow" }],
            "type": "basic"
        },
        {
            "conditions": [
                {
                    "name": "sixty_edit_mode",
                    "type": "variable_if",
                    "value": 1
                }
            ],
            "from": {
                "key_code": "u",
                "modifiers": { "optional": ["any"] }
            },
            "to": [{ "key_code": "home" }],
            "type": "basic"
        },
        {
            "conditions": [
                {
                    "name": "sixty_edit_mode",
                    "type": "variable_if",
                    "value": 1
                }
            ],
            "from": {
                "key_code": "o",
                "modifiers": { "optional": ["any"] }
            },
            "to": [{ "key_code": "end" }],
            "type": "basic"
        },
        {
            "conditions": [
                {
                    "name": "sixty_edit_mode",
                    "type": "variable_if",
                    "value": 1
                }
            ],
            "from": {
                "key_code": "n",
                "modifiers": { "optional": ["any"] }
            },
            "to": [{ "key_code": "delete_forward" }],
            "type": "basic"
        },
        {
            "conditions": [
                {
                    "name": "sixty_edit_mode",
                    "type": "variable_if",
                    "value": 1
                }
            ],
            "from": {
                "key_code": "y",
                "modifiers": { "optional": ["any"] }
            },
            "to": [{ "key_code": "page_up" }],
            "type": "basic"
        },
        {
            "conditions": [
                {
                    "name": "sixty_edit_mode",
                    "type": "variable_if",
                    "value": 1
                }
            ],
            "from": {
                "key_code": "h",
                "modifiers": { "optional": ["any"] }
            },
            "to": [{ "key_code": "page_down" }],
            "type": "basic"
        }
    ]
}

If these keys don’t work for you, and you are handy with JSON, you can probably figure out how to edit this.

If you aren’t handy with JSON or aren’t a Karabiner expert, paste the code above into your favorite chatbot, tell it this is a Karabiner-Elements complex rule, and use plain english to describe what you want to change. It will do a pretty good job of making the changes for you.

Authors v. AI

2025-08-11T03:45:00+00:00

Anthropic bought paper copies of books, scanned them, and used the resulting data to train their large langugage models. Authors sued, claiming this was not fair use under copyright law, and got their case certified as a class action.

The case was assigned to District Judge William Alsup, a seasoned US district court judge with deep experience in technology law, including two jury trials in the Google v Oracle saga over the Java APIs in Android. Last month Judge Alsup ruled that it’s fair use for legally obtained books to be used to train large language models. That’s a big win for Anthropic and the other frontier model companies.

However, Anthropic is also accused of pirating digital copies of more than 7 million books, and these illegally acquired works are not part of the fair use ruling. Judge Alsup also ruled that Anthropic must face a trial over the author’s piracy complaints.

US Copyright law includes statutory damages of up to $150,000 for willful copyright infringement of a single work. With 7 million works in question, Anthropic faces potential damages of up to a trillion dollars.

In their first major filing since Judge Alsup’s ruling, Anthropic is appealing the certification of the class. It’s their best tactic to reduce their financial exposure. Ashley Belanger summarizes Anthropic’s appeal for Ars Technica:

Confronted with such extreme potential damages, Anthropic may lose its rights to raise valid defenses of its AI training, deciding it would be more prudent to settle, the company argued. And that could set an alarming precedent, considering all the other lawsuits generative AI (GenAI) companies face over training on copyrighted materials, Anthropic argued.

No, Anthropic won’t lose any rights if they decide to settle. They made their choice when they willfully decided to pirate copyrighted works and hoped nobody would notice. Now that everyone knows, they may choose to settle and avoid a trial because if they lose at trial it’s a company ending event. Yes, the precendent would be ground-breaking, but it’s only alarming if you are infringing author’s rights. If other frontier model companies have done the same thing, they should have to face lawsuits as well.

Copyright class action lawsuits are incredibly complex, the case against Anthropic will take a long time, and the outcome is far from certain. Authors Guild v. Google took 10 years for the appeals court to finally rule that Google’s Books project of scanning copyrighted works and publishing them on the internet “provides a public service without violating intellectual property law”. It was appealed to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case.

I’ll be following Authors Guild v. Anthropic with great interest, even if the certification of the class is overturned. If the individual authors win against Anthropic, the floodgates will be open for claimants to sue every frontier model company. We already know that Meta pirated 7.5 books and 81 million research papers. If there is a precedent set in Authors Guild v. Anthropic, I’ll bet it will only take one phone call to find a lawyer who will help you sue Meta, OpenAI, and Google on the same grounds. A trillion dollars of damages from Anthropic, another trillion from Meta, and pretty soon you are talking real money.

Tear Down This Wall

2025-05-07T15:22:00+00:00

Apple created an iconic commercial for the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. The punchline: “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984”. 40 years later, Apple has become Oceania.

A few weeks ago, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers made a landmark ruling in the Epic v. Apple case started in August 2020. After a trial, Judge Rogers issued the first ruling in September 2021. Apple won 9 of the 10 counts, but the court found Apple’s prohibition on linking to web for “outside the app” payments was anticompetitive and issued an injunction. Apple appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, who declined to take up the case. Meanwhile Apple continued with what many have labeled malicious compliance. There is an extensive record in this case: the April 30 order is the 1,508th item in the docket. This latest ruling is not a rushed one, the Judge has had enough. These are the first two sentences or the order:

For the reasons set forth herein, the Court FINDS Apple in willful violation of this Court’s 2021 Injunction which issued to restrain and prohibit Apple’s anticompetitive conduct and anticompetitive pricing. Apple’s continued attempts to interfere with competition will not be tolerated.

It gets worse:

In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option. To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein, more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate.

This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction. Effective immediately Apple will no longer impede developers’ ability to communicate with users nor will they levy or impose a new commission on off-app purchases.

And here’s her closer:

Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover- up made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple.

It has taken years, but the European Digital Markets Act combined with this ruling in the United States has finally opened the gate to more meaningful competition in Apple’s walled garden. The costs have been staggering, as you might expect when going up against one of the most valueable companies in the world, who also has an enormous cash reserve. In the May 6 episode of his Channels podcast, Peter Kafka interviewed Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games. Tim says they spent more than $100 million in legal feeds on Epic vs Apple.

Naturally Apple is appealing this recent order, but I think it’s unlikely to be successful. Meanwhile, they are finally complying with the injuction issued way back in 2021. Amazon added a “Get Book” to the Kindle app. Spotify now shows links in their app to buy various subscription plans on the web. Patreon updated their app to allow fans to subscribe on the web, bypassing Apple’s 30% fee.

The gate is open, let’s tear down this wall.

Shot Heard Round The World

2025-04-19T15:22:00+00:00

Old North Bridge
National Park Service Photo Archives

250 years ago to the day, the simmering anger between the American colonists and the British crown spilled into a shooting war. We don’t know whether the first shots that day were fired on the Lexington green or at the Old North Bridge. Wherever it was, that day marked a key moment on the path to independence.

As a child, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s father watched the events at the Old North Bridge from his nearby home. In that same home, Emerson would later write:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

− Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord Hymn”

My eighth great-grandfather Peter Crapo was one of those American farmers, living in nearby Freetown, MA. He was too far away to have been at the Old North Bridge, but records from that day document that he marched with Captain Levi Rounsevell’s Company on “the alarm of April 19, 1775”.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts commemorates these events as Patriots’ Day. I mark the day with gratitude for the sacrifices of my ancestors to secure the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I likewise honor all who have served, and who serve today for the same noble cause.

OpenBSD Satellite Time Sensor

2024-08-03T14:57:00+00:00

I just added a new Guide describing how to add a GPS Receiver to your OpenBSD NTP Server which increases resiliance and ensures accurate time when internet connectivity is not available.

The Cloud Under The Sea

2024-04-17T00:44:00+00:00

There are 800,000 miles of cables the size of a garden hose that carry the world’s international communications. Josh Dzieza writes a delightful long form piece at The Verge about these cables and the ships that repair them: The Cloud Under The Sea

If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. The financial system would immediately freeze. Currency trading would stop; stock exchanges would close. Banks and governments would be unable to move funds between countries because the Swift and US interbank systems both rely on submarine cables to settle over $10 trillion in transactions each day. In large swaths of the world, people would discover their credit cards no longer worked and ATMs would dispense no cash. As US Federal Reserve staff director Steve Malphrus said at a 2009 cable security conference, “When communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt. It snaps to a halt.”

Corporations would lose the ability to coordinate overseas manufacturing and logistics. Seemingly local institutions would be paralyzed as outsourced accounting, personnel, and customer service departments went dark. Governments, which rely on the same cables as everyone else for the vast majority of their communications, would be largely cut off from their overseas outposts and each other. Satellites would not be able to pick up even half a percent of the traffic.

The Legal Foundation of American Bureaucracy Is At Risk

2024-01-18T19:32:00+00:00

Over the last 40 years, the Chevron doctrine has been cited as the legal justification for a wide range of government agency regulation and rulemaking. This precedent was created by a 1984 ruling of the Supreme Court in the Chevron v. National Resources Defence Council case. The Court ruled that courts should defer to a government agency’s interpretation of the law as long as the interpretation is reasonable. If Congress has been ambiguous or silent, the agency’s reasonable reading should govern. Of crucial importantance, agencies can do more than interpret overly broad Congressional lawmaking; they can create new regulations never debated and approved by Congress as long as they are “reasonable”. There are some limits to the deference courts must give, but they are narrow in scope and too complex to enumerate here. Chevron has become a pillar of administrative law and has been cited in more than 15,000 court cases.

This ruling has allowed for the broad expansion and proliferation of regulations, rules, policies, and guidance that go far beyond what Congress has authorized. For example, the Food and Drug Administration went from a formal rule-making approach, to an informal rule-making approach which skips the cumbersome public hearings, to issuing non-binding guidelines¹ which are very difficult or impossible to challenge in court and are therefore effectivly legally binding:

After courts decided that the residual rulemaking authority in the statute empowered the FDA to issue binding regulations on matters not specifically covered by the formal rulemaking provision, the agency began to utilize “notice-and-comment” procedures for the promulgation of rules. The courts also, however, allowed interested parties to bring pre-enforcement challenges to such rules. Although “informal” rulemaking avoided the cumbersome hearings required with formal rulemaking, searching judicial review on the merits and increasing procedural demands added by all three branches of government have made it increasingly difficult. As a result, the FDA and other agencies have experimented with further shortcuts for issuing regulations.

As informal rulemaking became more difficult, the FDA shifted from promulgating binding rules to issuing nonbinding guidelines. For instance, rather than go to the trouble of amending its then 25-year-old regulations delineating “current” good manufacturing practices (cGMPs) for drugs, the FDA decided to issue guidance for the adoption of innovative quality control technologies by the pharmaceutical industry. Similarly, even as prescription drug advertising has become increasingly sophisticated, reflecting greater ingenuity and the emergence of brand new media such as the Internet, the FDA has not revised regulations that it issued during the 1960s, relying instead on various types of guidelines.

I am in favor of some of the regulations now in place because of Chevron. Most of the developed world models their regulation of pharmaceuticals after the United States Food and Drug Administration, and the FDA is undeniably the world-wide gold standard in safety and efficacy.

However, I am vigorously opposed to the relentless sprawl of administrative bureaucracy in government over the last 40 years, much of which has been justified and enabled by Chevron. It gives agencies wide-ranging latitude to interpret, expand, and elaborate on laws passed by Congress. It improperly shifts the balance of power from the judicial and legislative branches to the executive branch. It consolidates rule-making and rule-enforcement into an unaccountable government agency. You can vote your Congressional representative out of office. What can you do about those who work in the Office of Training and Communications, Division of Communications Management, Drug Information Branch, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the Food and Drug Administration? Yes, that’s one of the official names for the people who issue guidelines on drug advertising. There are at least two other offices and/or centers within the FDA which may be part of issuing these guidelines. After a couple hours of digging, I couldn’t be sure whether or how all these offices worked together, or didn’t, to produce the advertising guidelines drug manufacturers must abide by.

Yesterday, the justices on the United States Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases which challege this long-standing principle of legal deference to government agencies. Each case involves a fishing company challenging a National Marine Fisheries Service requirement that herring boats cover the cost (approx $700 per day) of government-approved observers aboard their vessels.

The court could chose to rule only on the specific fishing-related question in these cases, but most court observers expect them to rule more broadly, and limit or even possibly strike down Chevron deference.

Reporting for Bloomberg, Jennifer A Dlouhy and Greg Stohr articulate both sides of the issue clearly:

“The idea of deference is a fundamental mechanism for all of the agencies to do their jobs,” Green said during a discussion organized by the Center for American Progress and Democracy Forward. “Agencies have more expertise, they are more specialized and they are more flexible – so they can address new problems and crises that inevitably arise over time that Congress can’t foresee.”

True.

Philip Hamburger, founder of the conservative New Civil Liberties Union, said the Supreme Court should sweep away a fundamentally flawed doctrine that unfairly tilts legal proceedings. Chevron compels “a systematic favoring of the most powerful party” in regulatory disputes – the very agencies that wrote the rules – said Hamburger, whose group represents fishing industry clients in one of the high court cases.

Also true.

I expect that the current court will do more than narrowly resolve the two fishing cases that were heard today. If they do, it could be one of the most impactful rulings of the John Roberts era.

Lars Noah, The Little Agency That Could (Act with Indifference to Constitutional and Statutory Strictures), 93 Cornell L. Rev. 901 (2008) ↩

Utah Supreme Court Rules Cell Phone Passcodes Are Protected By The 5th Amendment

2024-01-16T05:32:00+00:00

The United States Supreme Court has yet to issue a ruling on whether someone accused of a crime can be compelled to provide the passcode to their cell phone.

I believe the 5th Amendment protects cell phone passcodes, and defendents can refuse to provide the passcode to their phone, even if law enforcement has a warrent for the contents of the cell phone.

The Utah Supreme Court has ruled that not providing a passcode should not be held against a criminal defendant, or used against them at trial.

More of this please.

The Most Important Copyright Battle of Our Lives

2023-04-22T17:45:00+00:00

In the last 12 months, what the lay person would call artificial intelligence has taken a major jump forward. OpenAI launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022 and probably has the fastest growing user base of any product in history. I say probably, because OpenAI hasn’t disclosed any usage data. But it went from a thing that didn’t exist to the thing that everyone was using in just a few months.

ChapGPT is more properly categorized as a large language model, and there are many new implementations of these models which can generate images, video, and music. All these models had to be trained on something, and they were all trained on data from on the internet, which creates a legal dilemma under current US law.

Just because this blog post is available on the web doesn’t mean that I have relenquished the copyright. Neither the statue nor the case law are clear on whether using a copyrighted work to train a large language model is fair use. In the short few months since these models became wildly popular, this has been mostly a thought exercise. Getty Images brought the first notable cases in this area of the law by suing Stability AI in both the US and the UK. Getty alleges:

Stability AI has copied more than 12 million photographs from Getty Images’ collection, along with the associated captions and metadata, without permission from or compensation to Getty Images, as part of its efforts to build a competing business.

Court cases take a long time. DCMA takedown notices get processed much faster. Nilay Patel explains:

The AI Drake track that mysteriously went viral over the weekend is the start of a problem that will upend Google in one way or another — and it’s really not clear which way it will go.

Here’s the basics: there’s a new track called “Heart on My Sleeve” by a TikTok user called @ghostwriter877 with AI-generated vocals that sound like Drake and The Weeknd.

This track was posted to YouTube, and then Google got a DMCA takedown notice from Universal Music Group:

But then TikTok and YouTube also pulled the track. And YouTube, in particular, pulled it with a statement that it was removed due to a copyright notice from UMG. And this is where it gets fascinatingly weedsy and probably existentially difficult for Google: to issue a copyright takedown to YouTube, you need to have… a copyright on something. Since “Heart on my Sleeve” is an original song, UMG doesn’t own it — it’s not a copy of any song in the label’s catalog.

So what did UMG claim? I have been told that the label considers the Metro Boomin producer tag at the start of the song to be an unauthorized sample, and that the DMCA takedown notice was issued specifically about that sample and that sample alone.

Nilay explains Google’s predicament with “Heart on My Sleeve”, but it’s merely another skirmish in the broader war. We have large language models that can pass the bar exam. But only when trained on a corpus of data with legally disputed provenance. The lawyers are gonna make a lot of money over the next decade as we sort this all out.

The Gambler Who Beat Roulette

2023-04-22T17:22:00+00:00

I’m a sucker for a good heist story, and this is a good heist story.

“It is practically impossible to predict the number that will come up,” Stephen Hawking once wrote about roulette. “Otherwise physicists would make a fortune at casinos.” The game was designed to be random; chaos, elegantly rendered in circular motion.

… The green 0 pocket (with an additional 00 pocket on American wheels) means even the highest-odds bets, on red or black for example, have a slightly less than half chance of success. Everyone loses eventually.

Except for Niko Tosa and his friends. When the Croatian left the casino in the early hours of March 16, he’d turned £30,000 worth of chips into a £310,000 check. His Serbian partner did even better, making £684,000 from his initial £60,000. He asked for a half-million in two checks and the rest in cash. That brought the group’s take, including from earlier sessions, to about £1.3 million.

Leading From The Heart

2023-04-22T16:37:00+00:00

Fred Wilson cofounded Union Square Ventures, and has invested in hundreds of companies.

He says that leading from the heart is very powerful.

I have watched so many leaders over the years in my various roles as lead investor, board member, board chair, investor, and advisor.

And one thing I have learned from this front-row seat is that leading from the heart is very powerful.

A leader can be the most brilliant product person, strategist, entrepreneur, and business builder, but if they cannot get people to follow them, trust them, and care for them, they will not be an effective leader.

I am now working in my eighth tech startup. Much is expected from leaders in any company. Even more is expected from leaders of startups. I’ve experienced the full spectrum of emotional leadership. The most fun and most personally rewarding companies I’ve worked at all had leaders with a high emotional quotient.

Platform enshittification

2023-04-22T16:29:00+00:00

Cory Docterow with a wickedly insightful take on the lifecycle of any platform:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

He calls this process ‘enshittification’, which is a glorious and perfect word for this process:

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

No Customer Data

2023-04-22T15:43:00+00:00

I’ve been a happy Mullvad VPN user for a long time. They don’t have the cheapest VPN service, but they also don’t do any slimey paid sponsoring of VPN review sites. The performance has always been top notch; I’ve never had stuttering or lag while streaming video up or down.

But most importantly, their privacy policy and associated operational procedures state that they don’t store user data. They don’t even have your email address, they issue you a random number for your user id.

When a squad of police officers showed up at Mullvad’s offices with a search warrant, they left empty handed, because there was nothing for them to sieze:

We argued they had no reason to expect to find what they were looking for and any seizure would therefore be illegal under Swedish law. After demonstrating that this is indeed how our service works and them consulting the prosecutor they left without taking anything and without any customer information.

If they had taken something that would not have given them access to any customer information.

Privacy is important to me. Mullvad just proved they follow their privacy policy and don’t store any customer data.