Look Ma, I’m a Tech Blog

Boom.

Adrian Holovaty is getting back to benevolently dictating Django development

This is such great news.

What is true is that for a VC’s business model to work, it’s necessary for you to give up your life in order for him to become richer.

Follow the fucking money. When a VC tells you what’s good for you, check your wallet, then count your fingers.

—

Jamie “JWZ” Zawinski calls Arrington out for disingenuously using Zawinski’s blog posts from 1994 as some sort of rallying cry about how to make it in Silicon Valley.

It’s a damn shame more people listen to self-aggrandizing idiots like Arrington than people who actually build things.

(Buzz has a smarter retort than mine and the Hacker News thread on Zawinski’s post is great.)

In any case like this that touches on the transparency of financial markets whose gyrations have so depressed our economy and debilitated our lives, there is an overriding public interest in knowing the truth.

—Federal Judge and hero-of-the-day Jed S. Rakoff in declaring that Citigroup must stand trial and not be allowed to simply settle for allegedly defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Apparently, everyone I follow on twitter is annoyed that their inbox is filled with CyberMonday spam. Bummer! Here’s a fix if you’re using Gmail (I found this somewhere else years ago, I can’t recall where).

Create a new filter.

In the field for “has the words” copy and paste the following:

"added you" OR "is now following" OR "opt-out" OR unsubscribe
OR "viewing the newsletter" OR "privacy policy" OR enews 
OR "edit your preferences" OR "email notifications" 
OR "update profile" OR smartunsubscribe 
OR secure unsubscribe OR "manage your account"
OR "group-digests"

Click the “Next Step” button

Check the “Skip the Inbox” field

Check the “Apply the Label” field and give it a good label – I call mine “Bacn”

Save your filter.

As an added bonus, those dozens of email subscriptions that aren’t really all that important but you can’t bring yourself to unsubscribe from will be filtered away. Be sure to check it every once in a while.

It’s probably too late for this year’s CyberMonday but just leave it there and your inbox will suddenly be magically cleaner.

My pal Ross, who is smart, asks a good question: why bother with Stamped. It’s a fair response anytime yet another social network crops us asking us to stop what we’re doing and “like” shit.

Still. I like Stamped.

It’s a clever idea that’s well executed, first and foremost. Unlike the other high-profile rate the real world thing that launched recently, Stamped is simple and constrained. You only sign off on the things that you absolutely approve of, there’s no mishmash of ratings and new verbs, and it’s wide open enough that you can rate anything1 but smart enough to know the difference between a movie and a restaurant. Best of all, there’s no game at work, no way to “win”.

What I like most, though, is the idea of Stamped, or something like it, achieving enough critical mass that I get a curated view of the real world, when I want it. Yelp is borderline useless, Foursquare checkins are noisy. I want to be able to pick up my phone and see a friend-fenced list of movies or books or shows I should check out or be in a new part of town and pull up a map with recommendations from people I trust.

I almost always like the recommendations I get from my friends better than the ones I get from algorithms. So go stamp some stuff.

Because you can rate anything, clever people are having plenty of fun with it, in ways surely unintended. Most of these I chuckle at, I don’t think it’s worth much handwringing since it’s easy enough to just unfollow anyone. If the jokes ruin Stamped, then it wasn’t good enough to begin with. ↩︎

Serious turkey face (photo by the wonderful Mr. Patrick Gibson)

I, for one, welcome our land-walking octopi overlords.

Survey Says

Louis vs. Rick is back and it’s as great as ever.

You should, by law, only use force to protect someone’s life or to protect them from being bodily injured OK? If you’re not protecting somebody’s life or protecting them from bodily injury, there’s no need to use force. And the number one thing that they always have in their favor that they seldom use is negotiation–continue to talk, and talk and talk to people. You have nothing to lose by that. This bullrush–what happened last night is totally uncalled for when they did not use negotiation long enough.

—Retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis on NYPD’s raid on the Occupy Wall Street protestors.