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A bit surprised OpenAI didn’t acquire coda. Solid leadership team and the product would be a nice complement to OAI’s current portfolio. Lots of AI usage will seamlessly live in productivity tools which means OAI is disintermediated at point of use by its biggest rival Google (workspace) or its frenemy MSFT (office). Coda’s tools seemed well built and available for a fraction of the cost of buying eg Notion.

I would love to do this.. if only there were Uber/Lyft options on the watch

Sure—that seems like it can in certain instances be a great system. In general I think a fair/free labor market means individuals should have as many options as possible, including a government backstop, to leverage when negotiating with firms who want to buy their time.

This seems like terrible legislation. Yes, part time gig workers are exposed to harms that employees don’t face (i.e. lack of health insurance). But the ability to work flexibly and between lots of companies has huge upside for them and for firms. Why not tax companies who use these workers and put the tax revenue toward a special health insurance / social safety net specifically for gig workers? Mitigates many of the downsides and preserves flexibility.

I’m not sure I agree with the last line that these groups prize unity at the expense of truth. My takeaway from the rest of the article is that trust (performed as social cohesion) is the underlying social value that we are actually talking about in many of these conversations. Both verifiable truth (e.g. scientific predictions that we can trust) and fictions (e.g. elaborate stories that give us a shortcut to trust, as mentioned in the article) play a part in building trust. Successful organizations understand the right mix of truth and fiction to inspire trust—the morals of bible stories are powerful because they are “true” for many people to the extent that seem to reflect many people’s day to day experience. So, rather than unity vs truth, maybe we should think of unity as a function of a variety of strategies, one of which is truth? And successful organizations as ones that find the right balance?

It seems like they're following the "Donald Trump" strategy of publicity: (1)do something scandalous (2)get picked up by mainstream media for a cycle of handwringing/counter-handwringing, (3)profit (in form of outsize impact): you have the left angry, the right banding together in indignation, and the truly undecided unsure if what they're seeing is this "fake news" they've heard about. No billions required.

I hope other companies follow Stripe's lead here. Anecdotally, I've never been as happy and productive as I've been the past few years as a remote worker. It seems to me too few companies are taking advantage of the opportunity here. The few challenges I've encountered seem solvable: (1) effective team culture building: can be solved with travel budget & prioritization of good team cultural norms by team leads (2) whole team collaborative brainstorming (particularly when facing a "fire drill"-type time-constrained challenge): more challenging to solve from what I've seen, but might be solved by some combination of better tech and better work practices

I'm interested to hear how Stripe addresses these and which challenges they find.

One question at a higher level: what are the immigration law impacts here? Does Stripe need to get H1Bs for internationally located workers? I hope not: effective remote work is fantastic step toward bringing labor mobility more in line with capital mobility, with potentially positive effects on income, taxation, and social policies for people around the world.

I deleted it Jan 1 2018 and am trying to decide whether to reactivate Jan 1 2019. No part of me misses News Feed or mindless scrolling, but Events and Groups have become an essential part of discovering and organizing social events for my peers (I’m late 20s, live in Europe, am in grad school). I don’t think I will reactivate, but I find it interesting that those have become the “stickiest” part of Facebook: I have so many other channels for close interaction (email, text) and interaction with strangers (Twitter, Medium) but that mid-range acquaintance circle is most easily accessible (only accessible?) on Facebook