Greg Vincent

Let's be friends!

[TRUMP SUPPORTER @_Postive_Vibes]

Chicago local stuns Don Lemon into silence with his reply.

RESIDENT: "If you're here illegally, you gotta go! Plain and simple."

Lemon: "So do you want the president to go?"

Resident: "He's not here illegal... He's the best president we've ever had."

[La femme merveilleuse invisible @larwoolf]

RIP Terence Stamp

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert 1994

[Mike Solana @micsolana]

The Tech Insurgent's Battle for the Future

an interview with paul buchheit (@paultoo), the man who built gmail: the story behind his revolutionary product, the gatekeepers’ war against insurgents, and conquering our national decay

When Paul Buchheit launched Gmail in 2004, it didn’t just change Google, or the technology industry — though it certainly changed both. It changed the world.

Zoomers will find this impossible to believe, but in the early 2000s people were still deleting email. The habit was partly a holdover from our analog culture, but mostly due to space. When Yahoo launched Mail in 1997, one of the most popular email services in the country, users were limited to 4MB of free storage. That’s about the size of an iPhone photo.

Today, the concept of digital storage for human memory is kind of just the oxygen we breathe. Where did I say we were going last week? “Danny, pull it up.” But twenty years ago, Gmail launched a revolution with a status-shattering proposition: “unlimited email.” In practice, Google was only offering 1GB of free storage. But this was something like 250 to 500x what competitors were offering, and it’s hard to overstate how crazy it seemed at the time — to the extent that many people thought the product was an April Fools’ Day prank. Gone were the days of sorting email into folders, where they were quickly lost to memory, or trashing them completely. Gmail was designed for searching all your old correspondences, documents, notes, which unlocked a new way of working. Now, it was possible to query your old thoughts.

How could something so transformative be built inside a company so sclerotic as Google? It must have been a very different place in the early 2000s. But if the company really was so different at the time, and that different culture enabled the success of products like Gmail, why would the company allow innovation-crippling sclerosis to set in? I had a million questions, and no obvious answers. So I reached out to the architect of Gmail, the legendary hacker Paul Buchheit. [Editor’s Note: check out the full transcript, partially edited for clarity, on Pirate Wires]

“Incentives,” he explained.

Gatekeepers, which comprise the overwhelming majority of employees (and probably people), are incentivized to stasis, risk-averse to the point of paralysis, and terrified — sometimes for good reason — of change. Insurgents are basically insane by society’s standards, anathema to the status quo, and often destructive. But they’re the source of everything new in the world. From the moment a company is founded, always by insurgents, incentives to short-term survival attract gatekeepers, who naturally fear and try to isolate new radicals, then tirelessly work to grow the team of more gatekeepers. On a long enough time horizon, the gatekeepers always take the company. Then, it dies. Gmail, a firebomb happily tossed at the status quo, was fundamentally an insurgent product. It could not have been built at Google even ten years later.

The question for insurgents is how to beat the gatekeepers back long enough to build something new, and with it a lifeboat to keep us all alive a little longer.

Paul has worked in the technology industry since he was a teenager in the 1990s, tinkering with prototypical web-based email. He was an engineer at Microsoft, Intel, Google (employee 23, credited along with Amit Patel — who coincidentally shared the name of Paul’s childhood hero — as the men responsible for the company’s famous former motto, “Don’t be Evil”), and Facebook. Today, he’s an investor, both as an angel and in his capacity as a Group Partner at Y Combinator. We talked about the secret to Gmail’s success, the early days of Microsoft and Google, Paul’s insight into the primal war of bureaucratic gatekeepers against society’s insurgents that has decayed our country to its core, and a little hope for builders moving forward.

━━━━━━━━━━

This is the beginning of my interview with Paul. Read the rest on our site for free, or subscribe to @piratewires on @X to read it in full.

[Linus ✦ Ekenstam @LinusEkenstam]

This is Air

And it’s 500ms away from making a lot of jobs redundant

It can perform full 5-40 minute long sales & customer service calls over the phone that sound like a human

It can perform actions autonomously across 5,000 unique applications

🧵

https://t.co/Lv5DbcpwXX

[Greg Vincent @gjv]

@ggreenwald @davidmirandario 🥺

[Greg Vincent @gjv]

@cmdrtaco how about toast of london?
https://t.co/UXGI2DENbq

[Greg Vincent @gjv]

@ThomasJTobin1 Is the bishop is leaking?
https://t.co/JIH0P1yek5

[Greg Vincent @gjv]

@LoblawsON #mishandled tisk tisk https://t.co/PrxRc9eDyX

[AmpuTO 🇨🇦🦿🦿 (He/Him) @ampu_to]

Hey @LoblawsON and @nofrillsCA - why are you forcing an amputee to use your cart that she can’t push in your store when she’s brought a cart to assist her with her shopping needs? Your policy, apparently. #accessibility #accommodation #AODA #fail @DavidLepofsky, thoughts?

[Ryan Calo @rcalo]

omg 🤤

[altruismbilal @f1r3wAll_dA3m0n]

Retweeted the grugq (@thegrugq):

Give a man an 0day and he'll have access for a day, teach a man to phish and he'll have access for life.

[The Poke @ThePoke]

The 'Hey Jude' flowchart.

[Nic van ‘t Schip (Not active on the bird app atm) @NicvantSchip]

"Your password must contain at least 8 letters, a capital, a plot, a protagonist with good character development, a twist & a happy ending."

[James St James @JSJdarling]

“@jyondarisu: Man destroys Kate Bush’s interpretation of Bronte classic, leaves me in a puddle http://t.co/adnzIrdCxv via @JSJdarling”

[Algorithms R Us @mahemoff]

Full 2001 Linux documentary, interviews with the usual suspects - Linus, RMS, ESR … http://t.co/q0kTK2ePdy #playlater

[Steve Christey Coley, BS 🐀 @SushiDude]

RT @thegrugq: goto fail; <-- cool bug actually. "if at first you don't fail, try, try again"

[Lessig 🇺🇦 @lessig]

Our NH walk begins on the day we lost #aaronsw: http://t.co/1CD2WUf0BK. BMag's piece: Losing Aaron http://t.co/7CfwTb494c

[Greg Vincent @gjv]

I just liked "Tartine Bread" on Vimeo: http://t.co/OuAGcIof

[Tim O'Reilly @timoreilly]

FWIW, I do think we should be taking a different approach to nuclear. There's a lot of potential in Thorium http://t.co/JEyDIVj