Stuff I read: 19 September 2022

19 September 2022

The Washington Post Should Commit to Local on A Media Operator. Argues that WaPo should pitch local news orgs on doing bundled subscriptions with them as a way to compete with The New York Times.

Lawful but Awful? Control over Legal Speech by Platforms, Governments, and Internet Users by Daphne Keller. A straightforward overview of the pitfalls (in the US, at least) of regulating social media, and recommendations on the best path forward. See also What Will “Amplification” Mean in Court? on Tech Policy Press, which includes several citations to Keller's work.

We are reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles from MIT Admissions. An informative piece about the benefits of standardized tests. I'm glad I'm out of school.

The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero by Patrick McKenzie. It's an obvious point IMO, in the same way that e.g. reducing pollution to zero wouldn't be worth the cost, but still an interesting read.

So, how’s that retirement thing going, anyway? by Joel Spolsky. Also links to More on Sabbaticals…: "I really like the formula of working for four years, and then taking one year off." Amusingly this is kinda-sorta the inverse of what I've done: I worked for one year after college and now have spent almost the past four years attempting to build my own startup. I'm already in pretty deep at this point, but I've written previously that I think I would've been better off had I had planned on taking a 1-year sabbatical instead, with the expectation that I'd get a job again afterwards—and if it just so happened that one of my projects seemed to have strong business potential, only then would I think about treating it as a startup.

Interview: Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe on Noahpinion. Kind of interesting.

Paul Graham is Wrong by Aaron Swartz. That'll show him. (RIP Aaron).

And something I wrote: The Sample algorithm update; upcoming Yakread features. I also made this beautiful pun about it which I hope someone who does SEO notices.

I don't write this newsletter anymore but am too lazy to disable this signup form. Subscribe over at tfos.co instead.