Amazon is performing astonishing jujitsu on Google.

The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the privacy and data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.

Interesting. Wish I could repost the whole thing. Go read it.

Screw New York for housing the most emotionally unavailable, career-obsessed and attractive people.

A race of races.

I agree!

Code is a creative endeavor. You need to be in the right mindset to create high-quality code.

Think back to the last time you were depressed or angry. How productive were you? Now think back to the last time you were truly productive. Code flying from your fingertips. Not just the sheer quantity- the sheer quality of that code. When you’re in the right mindset, your best day of coding can trump weeks of frustrated keyboard-tapping.

I tend to agree. A lot.

I’ve written a piece for one of my other blogs where I detail the fall of men.  One of the telling statistics is that for every 100 college-educated 23-year-old men in America, there 164 college-educated 23-year-old women.  Another is that single young men earn 8% less than their female counterparts–a sharp contrast with the historical income advantage that men held.

I f-n love this track.

I am convinced that autonomy is profoundly important to most of us, and that the sort of self-rental involved in the employment relation is regularly experienced as a lamentable loss of autonomy, if not humiliating subjection. I think a lot of us would rather not work for somebody else. It's not necessarily that we're burgeoning entrepreneurs eager to start small businesses. It just sucks to have a boss. And I think many young people are staying in college or heading to grad school not so much to improve their job prospects later, but to postpone entering into an arrangement in which "enough money is made out of you to buy an automobile for some other fellow's son", in F. Scott Fitzgerald's words.

Word!

Edit Ants

Reminds me of 4064 St-Laurent, aka, SNAP! Salon.

It's the back label of this wine that really excites me, as it is filled with information about the pedigree of the wine (and why it is, in my opinion, absolutely worth $45 per bottle).

I love Tina Fey. I'd love to see her Improv.

This is pretty cool.

First person to use the term 'cat' to describe a person.