Mike Masnick on politicians on both sides of the aisle complaining to Google about bias. “That’s bullshit. It’s a search engine. The entire point is bias. It is literally ranking the search result to try to bring up the most relevant, and that, inherently, means bias. The attacks on free speech are not from Google trying to serve up more relevant search results, but from politicians of both parties sending these competing threat letters to try to pressure Google into modifying search results to get their own preferred search results shown.”
Two part series on the a16z blog about the Ethereum merge. Definitely worth reading in full. Part two includes a human readable description of shadow forks, “the process of copying real Ethereum data to a testnet to simulate a mainnet testing environment.” Danny Ryan: “We should have been doing shadow forks for the past four years. They’re great; they’re really cool. I essentially take a number of nodes that we control — call it like 10, 20, 30 — and they think a fork’s coming, so they’re on mainnet or one of these testnets and then at some fork condition, like block height, they all go, ‘Okay, we’re on the new network.’ And they fork and they then hang out in their own reality, but they have the mainnet-size state.” Wild.
Ken Norton: CEOs and Product Leaders. If you’re a product leader working with a product-oriented CEO (cough), then this is definitely worth reading.
M.G. Siegler on iOS 16. Holy shit, haptic feedback on the keyboard. I’ve wanted this since 2008.
Eric Seufert on the modal presented when you tap to purchase Netflix outside of the Netflix iOS app. “Once again we see the use of heavy-handed, intimidating language in intransigent, disruptive modals designed to suppress consumer use of off-platform services. This is clearly a significant hurdle to open payments and commerce. And the privacy point is absurd.”