To Read

If you loved Andy Weir’s The Martian, let me tell you it’s 10 years since publication.

Even better, Andy Weir wrote a “lost chapter” for the book that you can read here.

Via Kottke

I’ve recently seen this news:

Yahoo and AOL, kings of the early internet, saw their fortunes decline as Silicon Valley raced ahead to create new digital platforms. Google replaced Yahoo. AOL was supplanted by cable giants.

Now they will become the property of private equity. Verizon, their current owner, agreed to sell them to Apollo Global Management in a deal worth $5 billion, the companies announced Monday.

The business housing the two brands, Verizon Media, is to be renamed (yet again) to Yahoo (sans the brand’s stylized exclamation point), and the sale will also include its advertising technology business. Verizon will retain a 10 percent stake in the newly formed media group, the company said in a statement.

From here: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5 Billion – The New York Times.

In 2008 I was working for Yahoo! in Romania. I was there for a year, until early 2009.

Around the time they hired me, Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo! for $33 per share, at an effective price of about $46B. Jarry Yang, the Yahoo! co-founder and then-CEO, said he wanted at least $37 per share. Microsoft ended the bid around May 2008. Then the 2008 crash came and Yahoo! never quite got to the value it had again (except a short period in 2013).

Jerry Yang got sacked soon and this actually impacted me, because the new CEO (Carol Bartz) decided to close the push to extend the company in Eastern Europe and, by extension, they didn’t need me there anymore. Which was actually a good thing for me at that time, since I was kinda disenchanted with working in a big corporation, I had my own projects, and I wanted to just leave. But I might have stayed longer, because being the “Yahoo! representative in Romania” was a big thing then in a country where Yahoo! Messenger reigned supreme.

Well, what goes up, must come down.

When I was a kid I read as much as I could about UFOs and unresolved mysteries of the past and the present. Of course, as I grew up, I kinda forgot about UFOs and it became this funny thing from childhood and the interesting part of some SciFi TV series I watched.

Today, though, I found an “>interesting article in New York Times asking the reader to make an effort and imagine that UFOs are actually real and that governments around the world hid this from everyone for a long time. What happens then?

One immediate effect, I suspect, would be a collapse in public trust. Decades of U.F.O. reports and conspiracies would take on a different cast. Governments would be seen as having withheld a profound truth from the public, whether or not they actually did. We already live in an age of conspiracy theories. Now the guardrails would truly shatter, because if U.F.O.s were real, despite decades of dismissals, who would remain trusted to say anything else was false? Certainly not the academics who’d laughed them off as nonsense, or the governments who would now be seen as liars.

“I’ve always resisted the conspiracy narrative around U.F.O.s,” Alexander Wendt, a professor of international security at Ohio State University who has written about U.F.O.s, told me. “I assume the governments have no clue what any of this is and they’re covering up their ignorance, if anything. That’s why you have all the secrecy, but people may think they were being lied to all along.”

The article is worth reading since it’s really thought provoking: Even if You Think Discussing Aliens Is Ridiculous, Just Hear Me Out.

Photo from The National Archives UK – Close up of light in sky, Sri Lanka Uploaded by PDTillman

About 15 years ago or so a friend asked me why I didn’t play World of Warcraft. I didn’t know too much about the game, so I asked why she did. She answered something like “you can be part of groups, you meet online, you talk, you make money, you fight”. And I said, without trying to be an ass, even though I probably sounded like one: “Oh, but I do that in real life!”

Assholery aside, I always felt that life, in general, can feel like a game sometimes.

Well, Packy McCormick from Not Boring actually wrote an article on it and it’s pretty good.

But crypto itself is not the game. It’s just the in-game currency for a much bigger game, played across the internet, that involves CEOs, influencers, artists, researchers, investors, and regular people, like you and me. That’s a much more fun topic to explore than which asset class is outperforming which. This is bigger, more permanent than day-to-day market fluctuations.

We’re all playing a Great Online Game. How well we play determines the rewards we get, online and offline.

The Great Online Game is played concurrently by billions of people, online, as themselves, with real-world consequences. Your financial and psychological wellbeing is at stake, but the downside is limited. The upside, on the other hand, is infinite.

Social media is the clearest manifestation of this meta-game. Beginner-level Twitter feels weird, like a bunch of people exposing their personal thoughts to the world. Medium-level Twitter is Threads and engagement hacks. Twitter Mastery is indistinguishable from an ongoing game. This is also true for Reddit, Discord, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and other social networks.

Read it all here: The Great Online Game – Not Boring by Packy McCormick.

This hits really close to home, unfortunately.

“It might sound crazy, but I’d rather go to Twitter and check out a few people I trust than take guidance from the CDC, or WHO, or Fauci,” Baca, the Colorado truck driver, told me. Other no-vaxxers offered similar appraisals of various Democrats and liberals, but they were typically less printable.

From here: What Are No-Vaxxers Thinking? – The Atlantic.

And these are the people they follow on Twitter or Facebook:

Berenson’s TV appearances are more misdirection than outright fiction, and his Twitter feed blends internet-y irony and scientific jargon in a way that may obscure what he’s actually saying.
[…]
The current score in the competition between non-senior pandemic deaths and conclusive vaccine deaths is 100,000–0.

One hundred thousand to zero. That might be the most important statistic in this whole mess. Berenson doesn’t tweet blatantly falsifiable statements about the vaccines every day. For the most part, he peddles doubt, laced with confusing and expert-sounding jargon, which may seem compelling at first but can’t survive contact with expert opinion.

From here: Alex Berenson: The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man – The Atlantic.

Featured photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash

I genuinely love this kind of articles, animated and full of information. This is particularly interesting because it’s about the last 1000 years of pandemics for humanity and what happened with them.

I, for one, didn’t know the bubonic plague still kills people now (even if not a lot, sure) and that smallpox is the biggest ever success for vaccines, since it is the only human disease completely eradicated.

And as the eradication of smallpox proved, when the world’s scientific community comes together, great things are possible.

Although the new coronavirus is a much trickier challenge, because of its high levels of asymptomatic transmission, Prof Riley is optimistic the “incredible” global quest for a solution will win through.

“The world has never had a shared project like this before,” he says. “Hopefully it becomes a shared success at some point.”

However, it may serve us well to remember that most of the pathogens that rampaged through societies in pandemics in the past are still around. While the crises ended, the viruses and bacteria – and their resulting infections – remain.

From here: Covid-19: How do pandemics end? – BBC News.

An interesting article on the power of fans. As well as some interesting points of view on NFTs.

It’s easy to see how this plays out going forward: Swift probably doesn’t even have to remake another album; she has demonstrated the willingness and capability to remake her old records, and her fans will do the rest. It will behoove Shamrock Capital, the current owner of Swift’s masters, to buy-out Braun’s share of future upside and make a deal with Swift, because Swift, granted the power to go direct to fans and make her case, can in fact “change history, facts, and re-frame any story [she] want[s] to fit with any narrative [she] wish[es].”

What is notable about Swift’s tactics is that they are the opposite of what she urged in that 2014 op-ed. Instead of treasuring “Fearless”, Swift devalued it; instead of asking for what her masters are worth, Swift is simply taking them. Patel was right that while art may be important, on the Internet it’s not rare; what he missed is how that makes Swift more powerful than ever.

From here: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift – Stratechery by Ben Thompson.