Under pressure from Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg to monetize WhatsApp, [Acton] pushed back as Facebook questioned the encryption he'd helped build and laid the groundwork to show targeted ads and facilitate commercial messaging. Acton also walked away from Facebook a year before his final tranche of stock grants vested. "It was like, okay, well, you want to do these things I don't want to do," Acton says. "It's better if I get out of your way. And I did." It was perhaps the most expensive moral stand in history. Acton took a screenshot of the stock price on his way out the door — the decision cost him $850 million.
Seems like he's a lot happier serving as the executive chairperson of Signal.
In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace imagines a film (also called Infinite Jest) so entertaining that anyone who starts watching it will die watching it, smiling vacantly at the screen in a pool of their own soiling. It’s the ultimate gripper of eyeballs. Media, in this absurdist rendering, evolves past parasite to parasitoid, the kind of overly aggressive parasite that kills its host.
[...]
Now, media is always with me, always trying to snag my attention and siphon away as much as possible to sell to advertisers. It feels like it’s evolved from a cute little pet into a frighteningly efficient parasite.
I want to help folks. That’s one of my driving forces in software development. I don’t want to simply build for the sake of building, my code nothing more than a digital ouroboros. There needs to be a sense of purpose to what I’m investing my time in, something greater than “hey, look at this thing I made, aren’t I oh-so-clever?”. I’ve always found deep satisfaction in finding out when my work can truly help others. Otherwise, I’m writing code for the sake of writing code, and that way leads to petty arguments, a territorial “us” vs “them” attitude, rather than what does the most good.
Perhaps one of the best-resonating articles I've read on the philosophy of why I do what I do, the culture, and aspirations behind it. A true gem from over 7 years ago.
Christophe Haubursin reverse-engineered a Tinder scam.
[W]hat is software brain? The simplest definition I’ve come up with is that it’s when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code.
But: [...] The entire human experience cannot be captured in a database. That’s the limit of software brain. That’s why people hate AI. It flattens them.
Defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively.
[I]f you’re goal is to put a GPU farm in orbit and have it turn on, all of these issues can be defeated via the power of giant piles of money. So none of this is saying you can’t build a datacenter in orbit. I just want to point out physical limitations that make it really questionable to me as to why you’d view this as a solution to anything.
Lovely little essay by Terry Godier on attention, notifications, and simplicity.
A groundbreaking hack for Microsoft’s 'unhackable' Xbox One was revealed at the recent RE//verse 2026 conference. This console has remained a fortress since its launch in 2013, but now Markus ‘Doom’ Gaasedelen has showcased the 'Bliss' double glitch.
Top Meta staff allegedly compared Instagram to a drug and worked for years to obscure the social media platform’s potential dangers from parents and children, even as they appeared to acknowledge their technology was harmful, according to newly unsealed internal communications cited in a court filing.
See also Reuter's reporting on the lawsuit:
Meta shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook after finding causal evidence that its products harmed users’ mental health, according to unredacted filings in a lawsuit by U.S. school districts against Meta and other social media platforms.
[...]
The internal documents cited by the plaintiffs allege:
Meta intentionally designed its youth safety features to be ineffective and rarely used, and blocked testing of safety features that it feared might be harmful to growth.
Meta required users to be caught 17 times attempting to traffic people for sex before it would remove them from its platform, which a document described as “a very, very, very high strike threshold."
Meta recognized that optimizing its products to increase teen engagement resulted in serving them more harmful content, but did so anyway.
Meta stalled internal efforts to prevent child predators from contacting minors for years due to growth concerns, and pressured safety staff to circulate arguments justifying its decision not to act.
[...]
In a text message in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg said that he wouldn’t say that child safety was his top concern “when I have a number of other areas I’m more focused on like building the metaverse.” Zuckerberg also shot down or ignored requests by Nick Clegg, Meta's then-head of global public policy, to better fund child safety work.
I might not want to live in Meta's metaverse...