Cdixon Tumblog

Jan 25

“Cloud computing arrived, making VC deal terms economic only as growth capital for Internet startups, leaving the early-stage field clear to angels (and bootstrapping).”

Deprogramming VC & Reprogramming SWOT

Jesus, Rafer is so smart sometimes. This is the best rendering I’ve seen of a thought I’ve had for a few months.

(via giantrobotlasers)

Exactly. So now VCs trying to play in the <$1mm range have had to figure out how to scale their operations to make (and contribute value to) many more (smaller) investments than they were 10 years ago.

(via caterpillarcowboy) (via mikehudack)

Generally agree. Although people have always been the biggest expense in tech startups and the price of great programmers hasn’t gone down.

“War is among the greatest horrors known to humanity; it should never be romanticized. The means of war is force, applied in the form of organized violence. It is through the use of violence, or the credible threat of violence, that we compel our enemy to do our will. Violence is an essential element of war, and its immediate result is bloodshed, destruction and suffering. While the magnitude of violence may vary with the object and means of war, the violent essence of war will never change. Any study that neglects this basic truth is misleading and incomplete.” Warfighting, official training guide of U.S. Marine Corps

“

In 2005, the online chess-playing site Playchess.com hosted what it called a “freestyle” chess tournament in which anyone could compete in teams with other players or computers. Normally, “anti-cheating” algorithms are employed by online sites to prevent, or at least discourage, players from cheating with computer assistance. (I wonder if these detection algorithms, which employ diagnostic analysis of moves and calculate probabilities, are any less “intelligent” than the playing programs they detect.)

Lured by the substantial prize money, several groups of strong grandmasters working with several computers at the same time entered the competition. At first, the results seemed predictable. The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.

The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

” The chess master and the computer, by Gary Kasparov

Jan 24

Retweaks

Jan 22

“How ironic that smug Democrats in the Administration refused to allow the single payer, medicare-for-all option to even be considered as a possibility for America. They declared it off the table, pushing a “public option” plan that was quickly jettisoned by an Administration happy to cut deals with the drug and insurance lobbies. The result is a massive mess difficult to understand with shrinking public support. It was hung like an albatross around the neck of Martha Coakley, the loser in the Scott Brown race. If the Obama Administration had embraced the single payer option — some type of which is in place in every country that does have universal medical coverage — it could have ignited the Democratic grassroots and educated the public. Instead, the health care debacle has become a massive political train wreck, and Barack Obama’s Democratic Party is pinned in the wreckage.”

John Stauber (via azspot) (via marco)

ha, no. the problem wasn’t that obama didn’t go more left on healthcare. the problem is he should have pulled out of Iraq & Afghanistan, put heavy new (Volcker) regulations on Wall Street, and talked incessantly about jobs. These Mother Jones democrats are totally out of touch.

Jan 21

me as avatar

Jan 15

Google, China and Milton Friedman

“There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” - Milton Friedman, The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits

Google has received wide and well-deserved praise for their rejection of China’s censorship. In my opinion, a more profound implication of Google’s move is an implicit rejection of the orthodox view - most famously associated Milton Friedman - that a business’ sole responsibility is to increase profits (without breaking the law).

Jan 12

femmebot:

(via continuum: thelatestbuzz: thechocolatebrigade)

“SIR – Having read your article about difficult languages (“Tongue twisters”, December 19th) I scoff at Tuyuca and Kwaio for having only two words for “we”, inclusive and exclusive. In English we have three: the regular we meaning you and I, as in “we had dinner together”; the royal we meaning I, as in “we are not amused”; and the marital we meaning you, as in “we need to take out the garbage.” Letters to The Economist (via Erin McKean)

Jan 11

Me, Albert Wenger and Nicholas Carlson on Brian Lehrer show. (part 1)

(part 2 is here)

Cdixon Tumblog

Hello, my name is Chris Dixon and this is my personal tumblog. I also blog in longer form here.

Retweaks

me as avatar

Google, China and Milton Friedman

Hello, my name is Chris Dixon and this is my personal tumblog.

I also blog in longer form here.