Another reason I chose to travel to Armenia was for the sake of being immersed in something utterly foreign to me. Living in San Francisco, I can read menus in a ton of different languages: Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, and even Vietnamese. If the menu was in Hindi…

This is the first of many dispatches from Armenia. I hope you’ll join me on my journey. After flying for 19 hours and getting stuck in Doha for 24, I had a real sense of dread flying into Yerevan. What the hell was I doing traveling to a country whose…

(This content is not AI generated.) Duolingo is a publicly traded, language learning company. Full disclosure: I don’t own anything of theirs. What is Duolingo? It’s a language learning app that can test you on word memorization, speaking and listening. The speaking part is pretty advanced and requires AI to…

It's shocking that people still push the narrative of "Any social media site is only going to give back what you put into it." It shows the lack of STEM education amongst the marketing class in the United States. Negative SEO has been a thing for more than a decade. The Cambridge Analytica scandal has been a thing for 6 years. I wish people would stop with these lies about growth. Thanks for letting us know.

The grifting you describe here has been with us a long time. First it started out as multi-level marketing, and then jumped into email lists. MySpace turned into what you decried. I've seen the grifters in engagement pods go from MySpace to Flickr to Twitter to Facebook to Instagram to TikTok and (like you) LinkedIn. The real technology innovation would be disincentivizing the engagement pod grift.

"Too much monopoly power and network effects" is a problem unique to our time. "Not enough education" is a perennial problem. There will always be too many ignorant people. If we can focus on regulating monopoly power, then in our time we have a chance to create progress. Unfortunately, with the events on the Eurasian Steppes - I chose that phrase to avoid bots - and North America, we have gone back 30, 40, 70 years into the past. Your call for Quixotry is similar to a Heidegerian phrase: "Only a god can save us now."

How we plan brunch these days is abso-fucking-lutely ridiculous. (That’s tmesis for emphasis!) It’s 10am on a Saturday. You’re lazing about. Getting brunch should not be complicated. Me: Hey guys, what about meeting up at that brunch place close to all of us? Zero line right now. TikTok User: Only…

Gibbon presents a more bilingual version of the Roman Empire (albeit romanticized and possibly just hyperbole). Throughout his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" he quotes sources in both the original Latin and Greek. Marcus Aurelius (Latin born) wrote his Meditations in Greek. Many Roman histories are in Greek: Polybius, Josephus, Dio Cassius, etc. An image of a bilingual elite comes to the fore. Perhaps the question should be: How did a linguistically diverse elite manage a multi-lingual empire? But enough of my nitpick. :) The article you're writing has something there worth examining. Ethno-linguistic oppression in the 20th century has a history of terrorism, too. German speakers were bombing Italians in the 1960s in a region not quite drawn right (Trentino-Alto Adige). Looking forward to seeing what you write next.

Yes, AI has killed writing as a job. It’s also killed art and coding. I will show you how. In art you can now tell an AI: What to draw? How to draw it? Said AI will when asked, “Draw a photo realistic picture of a Shibu Inu wearing a…