For the first time, a spacecraft has sent back pictures of the sky from so far away that some stars appear to be in different positions than we’d see from Earth.

After finally making a pure sourdough bread I decided to kill my sourdough starter. Too much work, too much wasted flour for really, rather negligible increase in taste. Now that I finally managed to secure 3 tins of dried yeast, I am sticking to poolish based breads.

The whole master branch debate might be as ridiculous as the rubocop one. Oh well.

Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as “yellowist”, as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you’ll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you’ll find yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you’re mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction. Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot. The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want.

Which is why I’m not going to spend more time on this here, except for adding another quote:

The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it’s also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.

Watched Apocalypse Now for the first time.

Hey soldier, do you know who’s in command here?

Ain’t you?

I spent the last 3 days removing and unliking everything on Facebook, in a preparation for the ultimate step which was deleting my account - which I did today. I’d been thinking about this move for a long time, but the straw that broke the camel back was /Mindf*ck/, a mind-blowing book by Christopher Wylie, one of the data scientists working at Cambridge Analytica. Instead of reviewing the book let me just share a quote from it:

“Scale is the elephant in the room. When Silicon Valley executives excuse themselves and say their platform’s scale is so big that it’s really hard to prevent mass shootings from being broadcast or ethnic cleansing from being incited on their platforms, this is not an excuse—they are implicitly acknowledging that what they have created is too big for them to manage on their own. And yet, they also implicitly believe that their right to profit from these systems outweighs the social costs others bear. So when companies like Facebook say, “We have heard feedback that we must do more,” as they did when their platform was used to live-broadcast mass shootings in New Zealand, we should ask them a question: If these problems are too big for you to solve on the fly, why should you be allowed to release untested products before you understand their potential consequences for society?” Let me also say that I know quite a lot about social media, data science, privacy, twitter firehose, neural networks, machine learning etc. yet what I read still made my hair stand on end.

Well, this blog is a consequence of me quitting Facebook and it will now be my main place to share stuff with people outside of emails and signal. And talking about emails, I got really excited by what the Basecamp folks have been working on, and that’s Hey. Looks really slick. Can’t wait to get my hands on it. Thanks to Paul for mentioning it.