Console #16: Fake Like Factories and Surviving the Surveillance Apocalypse

01/05/2020

Inside the Fake Like Factories

This talk from the Chaos Computer Club was interesting. I’d read similar research papers back when I was part of the data science lab at Utah State University.

Qassim Suleimani

The big news this week was the drone strike that killed Qassim Suleimani. The market reacted accordingly with the S&P down .73% and U.S defense stocks up anywhere between .93% and 5.7%.

Successful Entrepreneurs Are Usually Liars

What a fitting title considering Lambda School is currently operating illegally…

In all seriousness though, Austen has a good point here that I don’t think enough people take into consideration when listening to interviews with entrepreneurs.

Zebra’s Fix What Unicorns Break

I’ve been interested in the indie-hacker movement for the last few weeks. I’ve always found the idea of starting small businesses interesting (1,2,3), but they were always interesting hobbies more than anything else.

After reading Rework and investigating DHH’s philosophy, I’m starting to see it more as a revolt against VC than as people trying to get rich through side businesses. A big reason I never took the businesses seriously is because I knew they’d never grow into million-dollar businesses, but the whole point (which I was missing) of the indie-hacker movement is that it’s OK not to grow the business to a million dollars, and in fact, that doesn’t even need to be the goal if you haven’t taken VC funding. 

Another reason I hadn’t put more time and energy into these side businesses is I saw the life of a side business as:

bootstrap -> find product-market fit -> grow -> take VC funding -> grow more -> exit -> profit

However, the point of this movement is, there isn’t anything wrong with this instead:

bootstrap -> find product-market fit -> grow -> profit

This is a much more appealing idea to me than the alternative.

Twitter Lists

I continue to be bullish on Twitter as an investment, particularly as an alternative to Facebook. Twitter’s P/E is less than half of Facebook’s.

Possible Ethereum Attack

Why was no one talking about this? Because it happened during New Year’s Eve? Because it didn’t actually lead to an attack? I found articles, but almost no one on my social media feed was discussing this.

How We Survive the Surveillance Apocalypse

“The truth is, most of us don’t have the time or expertise to defend ourselves from the smartest minds in Silicon Valley, many of whom say they want to improve the world but hooked their own financial success onto grabbing as much data as possible.” 🔥🔥🔥

In the article above, Geoffrey mentions his use of the privacy app Jumbo, which I checked out. 

I’m a software engineer and I don’t even know where to look on the various platforms for the privacy settings. Jumbo takes care of all that for you. 

Jumbo also has a data breach feature, which told me that I’d been a part of two data breaches (one in 2016 and one in 2017) which I had no idea about. Many of my complaints related to privacy are that if it’s too much work for me to maintain, how can I expect family and friends to do the same? Privacy protection is only effective if everyone takes part in it. Jumbo makes it straightforward for anyone to protect their privacy.

Brian Armstrong’s Decade in Crypto

Here’s how the founder of Coinbase saw the last decade of crypto.

---

This week’s newsletter not your cup of tea? Check out some of the more popular weeks below!

Console #13: The Next Phase of the Internet

GitHub Acquires Semmle, Vitalik’s Time Machine, and Condolences to the Facebook Engineer

The $1 Billion Bitcoin Whale, A $243,000 Deepfake, Pre-Mature Optimization, and The Yandhi Leak

---

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter, add me on Facebook, follow me on Medium, or subscribe to the Console newsletter to get the newsletter directly in your email. I post a review of topics I find interesting every week. I’m always looking for new topics to cover, so if you have anything you find interesting and would like to discuss please reach out!