Molly White asks if Web3 is bullshit. Short and excellent talk.
Things are going well with the Metaverse:
In a follow-up memo dated September 30th, [Vishal] Shah1 said that employees still weren’t using Horizon enough, writing that a plan was being made to “hold managers accountable” for having their teams use Horizon at least once a week. “Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it. Get in there. Organize times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds but also the public build so you can interact with our community.”
He went on to call out specific issues with Horizon, writing that “our onboarding experience is confusing and frustrating for users” and that the team needed to “introduce new users to top-notch worlds that will ensure their first visit is a success.”
Shah said the teams working on Horizon needed to collaborate better together and expect more changes to come. “Today, we are not operating with enough flexibility,” his memo reads. “I want to be clear on this point. We are working on a product that has not found product market fit. If you are on Horizon, I need you to fully embrace ambiguity and change.”
I’m assuming that asking “What the fuck are we spending $70 billion on again?” wouldn’t be a recommended way to embrace ambiguity.
Update
Kate Duffy with Business Insider:
Zuckerberg told employees this year to have their meetings on Meta’s Horizon Workrooms app, where people can come together as avatars in virtual workspaces, a person familiar with the matter told The Times.
[…] The source, who remained anonymous, told The Times that many Meta employees didn’t have VR headsets this year or hadn’t gotten around to setting them up. Those staff then had to rush to purchase headsets and register them before their managers realized, the source told The Times.
And the kicker:
Included in the Times report was inside information from two employees who told the newspaper that some workers call important metaverse projects “make Mark happy,” abbreviating it to “MMH.”
Won’t someone think of our mad king? I’m going to return to the office only to be forced to attend meetings virtually. MMH 🥲
Update
VP Metaverse (at Meta, that is. I don’t know how governance works in the Metaverse). ↩︎
I can’t see a thing on the surface of Venus. Why not? Because it’s covered with a dense layer of clouds. Well, what are clouds made of? Water, of course. Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it. Therefore, the surface must be wet. Well, if the surface is wet, it’s probably a swamp. If there’s a swamp, there’s ferns. If there’s ferns, maybe there’s even dinosaurs.
It was only in 1922 that:
[…] fantasies of a wet, swampy Venus started to fade. Astronomers analyzing the visible light reflected from the planet’s atmosphere found no signs of the wavelengths which would have been given off by oxygen or water. Venus, they proposed, may instead be barren and dusty, a desert-like place.
which, as that article notes, still did not prevent us from imagining a Wet-Ass Venus well into the 1950s. Here are some pictures of its surface.
The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer,” Milton said. “That’s the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let’s [sic] us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language. It’s not a bunch of separate systems that somehow still manage to communicate.
Note that the company still had a market cap of $5B at the time of this writing.
Our learning objectives are straightforward. After taking the course, you should be able to:
- Remain vigilant for bullshit contaminating your information diet.
- Recognize said bullshit whenever and wherever you encounter it.
- Figure out for yourself precisely why a particular bit of bullshit is bullshit.
- Provide a statistician or fellow scientist with a technical explanation of why a claim is bullshit.
- Provide your crystals-and-homeopathy aunt or casually racist uncle with an accessible and persuasive explanation of why a claim is bullshit.
Further,
We will be astonished if these skills do not turn out to be among the most useful and most broadly applicable of those that you acquire during the course of your college education.
I don’t think there’s more critical a juncture than now for courses like these. Just wish more people took them.
No. It’s just a fucking operating system1. A giant program on a computer. What weird, disconnected, embarrassing bullshit ‘spiritual’ techbro nonsense.
“We made a website full of memes you can search through, powered by Bitcoin and Machine-Learning (of course), and are changing the world.” No. Stop it.
I think I’m cranky because I’m hungry 🍕
Aquarius (Jan 23 - Feb 22)
You have an inventive mind and are inclined to be progressive. You lie a great deal. You make the same mistakes repeatedly because you are stupid. Everyone thinks you are a fucking jerk.
Pisces (Feb 23 - Mar 22)
You are a pioneer type and think most people are dickheads. You are quick to reprimand, impatient and full of advice. You do nothing but piss-off everyone you come in contact with. You are a prick.
Aries (Mar 23 - April 22)
You have a wild imagination and often think you are being followed by the FBI or CIA. You have minor influence on your friends and people resent you for flaunting your power. You lack confidence and are a general dipshit.
Taurus (April 23 - May 22)
You are practical and persistent. You have a dogged determination and work like hell. Most people think your are stubborn and bullheaded. You are nothing but a goddamed communist.
Gemini (May 23 - June 22)
You are a quick and intelligent thinker. People like you because you are bisexual. You are inclined to expect too much for too little. This means your are a cheap bastard. Geminis are notorious for thriving on incest.
Cancer (June 23 - July 22)
You are sympathetic and understanding to other people’s problems, which makes you a sucker. You are always putting things off. That is why you will always be on welfare and won’t be worth a shit. Everyone in prison is a Cancer.
Leo (July 23 - Aug 22)
You consider yourself a born leader. Others think you are an idiot. Most Leos are bullies. You are vain and cannot tolerate criticism. Your arrogance is disgusting. Leo people are thieving motherfuckers and enjoy masturbation more than sex.
Virgo (Aug 23 - Sept 22)
You are the logical type and hate disorder. Your shit-picking attitude is sickening to your friends and co-workers. You are cold and unemotional and often fall asleep while fucking. Virgos make good bus drivers and pimps.
Libra (Sept 23 - Oct 22)
You are the artistic type and have a difficult time dealing with reality. If you are a male you are probably queer. Chances for employment and monetary gain are nill. Most Libra women are whores. All Libras die of venereal disease.
Scorpio (Oct 23 - Nov 22)
You are the worst of the lot. You are shrewd in business and cannot be trusted. You shall achieve the pinnacle of success because of your total lack of ethics. You are the perfect son-of-a-bitch. Most Scorpios are murdered.
Sagittarius (Nov 23 - Dec 22)
You are optimistic and enthusiastic. You have a reckless tendency to rely on your luck since you have no talent. The majority of Sagittarians are drunks. You are a worthless piece of shit.
Capricorn (Dec 23 - Jan 22)
You are conservative and afraid of taking risks. You are basically chickenshit. There has never been a Capricorn of any importance. You should kill yourself.
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
Via co-worker DH. Dara Ó Briain on how Racism is better than Astrology:
Racism is one of the worst social evils they can imagine. “How dare you do that?” they say. "How dare you ascribe to me personality traits? You don’t even know me, but you tell me that you know me, and you know these things about me, and you say I share these personality traits with this huge group of people, and I don’t know them, you don’t know them, and you say not only do we have the same character traits, but we have some sort of common history and some common destiny, and you make all of these horrible presumptions on the back of what? On the back of a fluke of birth. How dare you do that?
What? Ooh, Capricorn.
Roel Nieskens “leveraged the synergy of ligatures” to create a free typeface called Sans Bullshit Sans.
It turns this
The value proposition of our agile mindset and scrum methodology is to enable the emergence of disruptive, convergent, crowdsourced platforms that allow our clients to lean in and engage in collective mindshare on established design patterns using the latest usercentric technologies empowered by the cloud.
into this
Here’s how he made it. Fucking brilliant. I saved a list of the terms and phrases that cause the ligatures. On a related note, I’d be bullshitting myself if maintain any hope of finishing this tiny book at some point.
