2026-03-04
When I was at Meta, it was always at precise moment that team had momentum and chain of command and partner teams aligned on strategy that some re-org would happen. It's been so nice the past 4y to just kick ass on the same problem with the same team and not worry about PSCs.
Wall Street Journal
Sources: Meta is creating a new applied AI engineering organization, which will have an ultra-flat structure, to help bolster Meta's superintelligence efforts
2026-03-03
When I was at Meta, it was always at precise moment that team had momentum and chain of command and partner teams aligned on strategy that some re-org would happen. It's been so nice the past 4y to just kick ass on the same problem with the same team and not worry about PSCs.
Wall Street Journal
Sources: Meta is creating a new applied AI engineering organization that will have an ultra-flat structure and help bolster Meta's superintelligence efforts
2024-08-15
I don't know about Google, but bulk of my FB experience was a lot of furiously working long hours on things that largely ultimately only made sense in an internal frame of reference. I think there is an abundance of hustle in FANGs but for the wrong things.
Wall Street Journal
Eric Schmidt says he “misspoke” when he said Google was losing the AI race because the company decided that “working from home was more important than winning”
Ex-Google CEO had said the tech company's work-life balance was ‘more important than winning’
2024-05-15
Unfathomable to me. I miss many aspects of Workspace and Slack doesn't entirely fit the bill.
TechCrunch
Meta plans to shut down its enterprise tool Workplace in August 2025, making it read-only until May 2026; Meta will continue to use the product internally
2024-05-03
The satellite then immediately played a U2 album that was unintentionally auto-loaded on it and had to be paused.
TechCrunch
Hubble Network, which is building a satellite network for Bluetooth devices, says it has made a Bluetooth connection directly to a satellite for the first time
Hubble Network has become the first company in history to establish a Bluetooth connection directly to a satellite …
2024-01-23
The lawnmower analogy is gold. I'm gonna have to use that.
New York Post
Some current and former employees publicly blast Google, criticizing its lack of “visionary” leaders, choice not to deliver layoff news face-to-face, and more
Ariel Zilber / New York Post :
2024-01-10
My only criticism of rabbit r1 is its keynote pitch commits what I'll call “the OpenDoc fallacy” of purporting that apps don't interoperate for lack of a sufficiently clever sw abstraction to replace “app”, not bc of impedance mismatch of biz models of apps and platforms.
Wired
Startup Rabbit debuts the R1, a $199 handheld AI device meant to be a virtual assistant to complete tasks without a smartphone, shipping in late March 2024
The startup has developed a virtual assistant that learns whatever digital errands you teach it. The interface is extra cute …
2023-05-02
Wonderful essay. The thesis of wanting more “tools” and less “operated machines” is exactly what I've felt for years but hadn't found succinct way to express. https://wattenberger.com/...
Amelia Wattenberger
Why chatbots are not the future of interfaces for LLMs: the best prompts are not obvious, people will get sick of typing, responses are isolated, and more
Unfortunately for the countless hapless people I've talked to in the past few months, this was inexorable.
2023-04-19
@Techmeme @sarahintampa WeChat did this 10 years ago. I felt like this was obvious move when I was at FB (seeing the latent behavior of using these services), but political obstacle at time was all the teams trying to add specific buttons for bespoke features for specific verticals/integrations.
TechCrunch
Mark Zuckerberg announces Instagram now lets users add up to five links to their account bios, challenging Linktree, Beacons, and other “link in bio” services
I am delighted for you that for the moment Meta has given you the ability to put up to to 5 links in your bios. How long they will allow that will be interesting to see. Maybe it...
2023-04-08
@Carnage4Life Leaders at FANGs can bitch about entitlement and perk/comps, but the alternative is a lot of people (that they were formerly targeting with this stuff) being less afraid to start companies, freelance/consult, go indie path, etc.
Washington Post
Sources: Meta is giving some VR developers compensation packages of $600K to $1M, significantly more than most gaming companies, despite a push to rein in costs
Programmers' high pay is just a sliver of the company's multibillion-dollar metaverse investment
@Carnage4Life In late 2000s I had zero interest in ever working for a big tech co — salaries and perks were relatively low and a lot of indie stuff + startups were in same ballpark. By ~2015 or so, it was vastly different order of magnitude with comp/perks and no-brainer for lots of folks.
Washington Post
Sources: Meta is giving some VR developers compensation packages of $600K to $1M, significantly more than most gaming companies, despite a push to rein in costs
Programmers' high pay is just a sliver of the company's multibillion-dollar metaverse investment
2022-11-28
There was a popular Medium article ~3y ago about same phenomenon revealing the thousands of hours of kids entertainment generated specifically for YouTube's ranking algorithm. This is a more humanizing profile, but still somehow unsettling in same way. https://www.wsj.com/...
Wall Street Journal
How live-action YouTube kids channels Vlad and Niki, Like Nastya, and Kids Diana Show, with a total of ~300M subscribers, are building global franchises
R.T. Watson / Wall Street Journal : Tweets: @dangrover , @wsj , and @thevirginiagen1 See also Mediagazer Tweets: Dan Grover / @dangrover : There was a popular Medium article ~3y a...
2022-11-27
There was a popular Medium article ~3y ago about same phenomenon revealing the thousands of hours of kids entertainment generated specifically for YouTube's ranking algorithm. This is a more humanizing profile, but still somehow unsettling in same way. https://www.wsj.com/...
Wall Street Journal
How live-action YouTube kids channels Vlad and Niki, Like Nastya, and Kids Diana Show, with a total of ~300M subscribers, are building global franchises
Vlad, Niki, Diana and Nastya party on yachts, ride in Ferraris and travel the world. Their massive audience of fellow kids can't get enough. Tweets: @dangrover , @wsj , and @thevi...
2022-07-26
@CaseyNewton It is possible that by the time the changes show up in whatever quantifiable metrics that Kylie Jenner is a leading indicator of, everyone involved will have gotten whatever promos they were seeking, and the institutional memory otherwise wiped away by re-orgs/turnover.
Insider
Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian post Stories sharing a petition to “Make Instagram Instagram Again” and “stop trying to be TikTok” that has 100K+ signatures
- Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian called on Instagram to “stop trying to be TikTok” on Monday.
Maybe Kylie Jenner is a dying relic of the old Instagram, the loudest voice for a sentiment that proved statistically insignificant on any quantifiable metric of user behavior affected by such changes. https://twitter.com/...
Insider
Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian post Stories sharing a petition to “Make Instagram Instagram Again” and “stop trying to be TikTok” that has 100K+ signatures
- Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian called on Instagram to “stop trying to be TikTok” on Monday.
2022-06-27
Great article. @mims is becoming my favorite writer on global logistics/supply chain stuff. Liked the comparison of finding a garlic press to Borge's library of babel. https://www.wsj.com/...
Wall Street Journal
A look at Amazon's fight with China-based sellers of generic items trying to game its algorithm to develop Marketplace brands and get the “Amazon's Choice” tag
Jeff Bezos wanted to build the ‘everything store’—and now the company is drowning in China-based sellers hawking the same items under a dizzying array of brands
2022-06-18
Having worked on privacy infra before, I feel for them. You'd think it'd be simple, but there are a 100 shades of gray in what you mean by “US user”, what you mean by “user data”, what you mean by “from”, and what you mean by “China”, and how purpose/scope of use plays into it. https://twitter.com/...
BuzzFeed News
Leaked audio from 80+ internal TikTok meetings: ByteDance staff in China repeatedly accessed data about US TikTok users between September 2021 and January 2022
For years, TikTok has responded to data privacy concerns by promising that information gathered about users in the United States …
2022-03-04
This article makes me feel like such a wuss for all the whining over past couple years about having to work during “a pandemic” and “the sky being orange for a day”. I can't imagine going to a normal tech job when there is an active war in one's country! https://www.wsj.com/...
Wall Street Journal
Many Ukrainian tech workers, unable to leave the country, have relocated to the Lviv tech hub, with some joining Ukraine's ad hoc hacking army attacking Russia
2021-12-16
Seems very smart! You could use it as a Gumroad replacement, but it also integrates with YouTube. I used to work on transaction tools for creators/SMBs for FB and always felt problem with approach was it assumes other websites don't exist. https://twitter.com/...
TechCrunch
Google's in-house incubator Area 120 launches Qaya, which helps US creators set up online storefronts to sell products and services directly to customers
A team at Google is today launching a new service called Qaya, which will allow creators to easily set up new web storefronts …
2021-07-29
My condolences to the teams at Twitter who will have to spend the next year debating whether webviews or replicating parts of the purchasing funnel natively is better and why. https://twitter.com/...
The Verge
Twitter says it is testing Shop Module, a new shopping section that brands can add to the top of their profiles, launching in the US on iOS
Starting with a pilot of around a dozen brands — Twitter is piloting a new feature that allows businesses to add a shopping section to the top of their profiles, the company has ...