joshuamerrill

It’s impressive to see simulation training for floods, tornadoes, and wildfires. But it’s also kind of baffling that a city full of Waymos all seemed to fail simultaneously in San Francisco when the power went out on Dec 22.

A power outage feels like a baseline scenario—orders of magnitude more common than the disasters in this demo. If the system can’t degrade gracefully when traffic lights go dark, what exactly is all that simulation buying us?

Well, it’s a good example of social media’s negative externalities.

Taking your questions at face value, the difference is incentives and feedback loops.

Books are static. They do not watch you, adapt to you in real time, or optimize themselves to keep you reading at any cost. Social media does. It measures behavior, runs constant experiments, and tunes feeds to maximize engagement, often by amplifying outrage, fear, or tribalism.

The evidence is pretty clear, and it keeps growing. Social media causes real harm, both to individuals and to society. It is addictive by design, it worsens mental health especially for kids, and it rewards outrage and misinformation. In that way, social media looks a lot like smoking. It was widely adopted before we understood the risks, then aggressively pushed because it was profitable.

Meta did more than just take part in this system. It perfected it, scaled it worldwide, and resisted meaningful change until public pressure or regulation forced its hand.

That is why it is worrying to see Meta present itself as a trusted builder of the next major technology wave. When a company repeatedly puts growth ahead of social harm, skepticism is not bias. It is common sense. Giving that company even more powerful and less transparent tools should cause us alarm.

Amazon has every incentive to show tariff rates to the customer. They don't want to be the bad guy overcharging in the transaction.

Neither do local merchants when they collect a sales tax.

Neither does the homeowner when they rent their guest room on Airbnb.

Neither does Lady Gaga when she sells a ticket through Ticketmaster.

This isn't controversial. It's price transparency for the consumer and it helps them make better choices.

What's unusual is the White House attacking a private sector retailer for a reasonable choice that's clearly theirs to make. Seeing the "+145% tariff" on your checkout page would puncture a hole in the narrative we've heard for years from Donald Trump that "China pays the tax."

No, you and I pay the tax. And both the U.S. and China will suffer.

Facts are stubborn things.

Scientists achieved “a milestone” by charting the activity and structure of 200,000 cells in a mouse brain and their 523 million connections

The fact that nobody on the thread spoke up and said "we shouldn't be talking about this on Signal" worries me greatly.

One possible explanation is that it happens all the time.

Because I don't know whether either of those are appropriate.

There aren't many comparable breaches to this one. The closest in modern times may be Hillary Clinton's email server being used for government business. In that case, the FBI investigated and declined to bring charges, under the expectation that a jury would be unlikely to render a guilty verdict.

Okay, fine. But the FBI investigated and laid out the facts.

My fear is that the current administration sees this as a PR problem. No, this was an operational failure. We should feel lucky that merely an American journalist was added by mistake.

We should expect the FBI to investigate this, too. But I worry the facts are too inconvenient for even that level of accountability.

I began my career in a classified environment working on government satellite programs.

In my first week on the job, I was told, explicitly, that if I shared Classified or Controlled Unclassified information over unapproved channels, I would be reprimanded—likely fired, or less likely, prosecuted.

It was also made clear that safeguarding the nation's secrets from the carelessness of others was my responsibility, too.

It is mind-boggling that 18 people were on this thread, and none of them ever suggested that this discussion would be better served in a SCIF. To say nothing of SecDef starting the thread on Signal in the first place.

How many other such threads are active at the highest levels of government right now?

Does Chinese intelligence know?

I'm not suggesting punishment, or even prosecution, for the people involved. But the idea that this breach can occur with no accountability, consequences, or operational changes is unacceptable.

Founder liquidity events are done in secret in startup land. There's a simple reason for that.

It's wrong.

Startup employees, especially early ones, take on most of the risk that founders do. They take pay cuts. They work insane hours. They sacrifice.

And they have the same liquidity needs, too.

It's wrong to make them wait a decade for a fraction of the liquidity that founders got in the Series B.

It's wrong to force them to absorb the risk of the Series B, C, D, E, F, and IPO. All while the founders were set for life years ago.

If founders are going to take money off the table, they should extend the same liquidity offer, pro-rata, to their employees. Period.

This is to show how much employees own of the company they work for. The vast majority of employees do not have access to this information today, unbelievably.

Full disclosure: I work at eShares (and love it).