Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Some new writing
Hi everyone, I’ve started an experimental newsletter over at Substack. You can signup here. Gavin
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The SpaceX (and Tesla) masterplan (Part 1)
(This is a followup post to (now) four earlier posts on forecasting. The first in May 2015 forecast both blimp-based and dedicated building-based drone deployments (later patented by Amazon); The second in October 2015 largely predicted Elon Musk’s Tesla Masterplan Part Deux by 9 months The third in July 2016 among other things correctly hypothesised…
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Will SpaceX become the world’s biggest telecoms provider? Probably.
By launching 11,943 satellites SpaceX will do to telecoms what WhatsApp/Facebook Messenger did to SMS and in doing so capture a $1tn+ business — and there’s fringe benefits for Tesla. (This is a followup post to three earlier posts on forecasting. The first in May 2015 forecast both blimp-based and dedicated building-based drone deployments (later patented by Amazon);…
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Working to fix the YouTube hate speech problem
Last week The Times in London published a story concerning hate speech videos and the advertising surrounding them. The story by investigations editor Alexi Mostrous began: Google is to be summoned before the government to explain why taxpayers are unwittingly funding extremists through advertising, The Times can reveal. The Cabinet Office joined some of the…
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Recommended viewing
Given everything that’s going on in the world, I think it’s important to re-familiarise ourselves with history. I highly recommend watching all of the following. “That which has happened is a warning. To forget it is guilt. It must be continually remembered. It was possible for this to happen, and it remains possible for it…
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The next 40 years, not the next four
Eight years ago, I was in an unseasonably warm Grant Park in Chicago when Barack Obama was elected: I had visited Georgia six weeks previously, after the brief war there with Russia. This is what was left of the tiny Georgian Navy: I then visited Aleppo, Hama, Palmyra and Damascus in Syria, 10 months after…
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The international story of empathy you’ve probably never heard
There is something hauntingly beautiful about “Kindred Spirits” by Alex Pentek. The sculpture consists of nine 20-foot (6.1 m) stainless steel eagle feathers arranged in the shape of a bowl, with no two feathers being identical. It was built in 2015 in the Irish town of Midleton, Co Cork. The sculpture is to commemorate the…
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5 lessons on building a newsroom from scratch
In the early days at Storyful there was a mission to build a team (and later technology) to monitor the globe for breaking news events. The mission could be summed up as: …find all breaking news events likely to generate eyewitness content (videos particularly), in any language, in any geography, at any time, from any device,…
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On authoritarianism
… the authoritarian threat has grown unabated, and almost all the protections I’ve seen such as a “free and vigilant press,” are being eroded or have already been destroyed. The biggest problem we have now, in my view, is authoritarianism. It has placed America at one of those historic cross-roads that will profoundly affect the…
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Thought exercises on war and the internet
Late last October David Sanger and Eric Schmitt wrote an interesting story in the New York Times outlining US concerns about Russian navy activity near the world’s undersea cables. They said: Russian submarines and spy ships are aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications, raising concerns among some…
Got any book recommendations?