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Tom Bowker's personal channel. Find me on Twitter @TomBowk, and on Mastodon at https://mastodon.cloud/@TomBowk
AllexandreMZ (Twitter)
As manifestações de hoje foram super pacíficas por uma razão muito simples: a polícia não esteve na via para lançar gás lacrimogéneo ou balas. Poderia ser perfeito sempre, mas as ordens desnecessárias de repressão não ajudam. A polícia é muitas vezes agente causador da violência.
#lifestories 🐶
Exactly 18 years ago today, I launched VK—my first large company. Below is the story of how it happened.
I graduated from Saint-Petersburg University in the summer of 2006. I wanted to keep in touch with my former classmates, but I knew it would be hard without a website where everyone could find each other. So, in late August 2006, I set a goal—to build a social network for university students and graduates in four weeks.
I was pretty good at coding. At 12, I built web-based games with vector animations and sound effects. At 13, I was already asked to teach older kids Pascal (a computer language) in summer camps for programmers.
And yet, planning to build a fully-fledged social network in four weeks was overconfident. To make it worse, I decided not to use any ready-made third-party modules. I wanted to create everything from scratch: from profiles and private messages to photo albums and search.
The task seemed too large to grasp. Where do I even start? Back then, my brother Nikolai lived in Germany. Nikolai is a brilliant mathematician and algorithmic programmer, but he’s always considered web development beneath him. At that time, he was focused on his Math thesis at the Max Planck University in Bonn. He refused to help with the code but gave advice: “Write the code for user authorization first,” he said. “You’ll get through.”
This made sense. I started with a login page that generated session IDs. Sessions could then be used to identify users, show them their profile pages, and allow them to edit them. Even the sign-up process could wait: I prepopulated the entries for the first few users manually in the database.
That's when I first understood it clearly: Every complex task is just a combination of many simple ones. If you split a big project into manageable parts and arrange them in the right order, you can get anything done. In theory. In practice, you also encounter all kinds of technical obstacles that test your persistence.
In September 2006, I typically wrote code for 20 hours in a row, had one meal and then slept for 10 hours. After a day of work, I’d boil myself a bucket of pasta and eat it with a generous amount of cheese. No other food was required. I didn’t care whether it was day or night outside. Social connections stopped existing. All that mattered was the code.
I tried to make each section of my project flawless, and that took time. Obsessing over details didn’t help to get everything done in four weeks. But being the only team member allowed me to minimize time spent on internal communication. And since I knew every line of the code base by heart, I could find and fix bugs faster.
On October 10, 2006, I had a beta version of the social network up and running. I called it VKontakte (VK), which means “in contact”. It took me six weeks instead of four to create it. But the result was worth it. Users that I invited from my previous project—a students’ portal I’d been building since 2003—signed up by the thousands and started to invite friends.
I kept adding new features quickly, and competitors struggled to catch up. A few months later, I hired another developer. By that time, VK already had a million members. Within seven years, VK would reach 100 million monthly users. At that point, I was fired by the board of VK, so I left the company to focus fully on Telegram.
That experience of single-handedly building the first version of VK in 2006 was so valuable that it defined my career. As the sole member of the product team, I had to do the work of a front-end developer, back-end developer, UX/UI designer, system administrator, and product manager—all at once. I got to understand the basics of all these jobs. I learned the tiniest details of how a social network works.
I also learned that there are no complex tasks in this world—only many small ones that look scary when combined. Split a big task into smaller parts, organize them in the right sequence—and “you’ll get through”.
The rank sexism in Mozambican politics. President Nyusi gets a barracks named after him; they name the canteen after his wife...
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Pavel Durov Charged with 12 Crimes
“Novaya Gazeta Europe” has obtained access to a press release from the French prosecutor's office, highlighting several of the alleged offenses:
• Complicity in administering an online platform for conducting illegal transactions by organized groups.
• Refusal to provide law enforcement agencies with information or documents required for investigation and prosecution.
• Complicity in storing child pornography.
• Complicity in drug distribution.
• Complicity in cybercrimes.
• Complicity in fraud committed by organized criminal groups.
TASS, a Russian news agency, reports that the investigation against Pavel Durov began on July 8. According to the agency's information, the entrepreneur may remain in custody until August 28.
Emmanuel Macron was the first from the entire French government to issue an official statement, emphasizing the independence of the judiciary system and stressing that Pavel Durov's arrest is not politically motivated but is in accordance with the legal framework protecting citizens' rights.
In response to a request from RIA Novosti, the European Commission said they are monitoring the situation and are ready to cooperate with French authorities. The United Nations does not yet have sufficient information. Previously, in response to an inquiry from TASS news agency, the European Commission declined to comment: “This is a national investigation, we do not intend to comment on it, you should refer to the French authorities.”
#arrest
⚠️ Intense Cold!
21-25 decrees C
(OK OK that's the maximums, they should say what the minima is they're worried about)
Sorry, come again - you met at *COP28* to discuss how you were going to build a rail-to-port project through a protected nature reserve, dedicated to exporting coal? Gotcha.
(And thanks for the pics of the beautiful coastline you're planning to ruin!)
https://x.com/filipe_nyusi/status/1811743350988345346
William Mitchell – Modern Monetary Theory
Progressive journalists in Britain so easily become willing mouthpieces for mainstream economic lies
Imagine if you are a UK Guardian reader and wanting to assess the options for an almost certain victory by Labour in the upcoming general election. Your understanding of the challenges facing the next government will be conditioned by what you have been reading in that newspaper. Unfortunately, there have been a stream of articles…
My draft leader for the Zitamar Daily Briefing today
#MMT #deficitmyth
Good afternoon. The IMF delivered one of its customary warnings about public spending yesterday, pointing to the alarming statistic that 73% of Mozambique's fiscal revenues is spent on public sector salaries — which are received by just 3% of the country’s population.
The spending on public sector salaries, which increased sharply with the introduction of the new TSU public salary scale in 2022, “undermines efforts for fiscal sustainability,” according to a presentation given yesterday by the Fund’s resident representative in Mozambique, Alexis Meyer-Cirkel.
The presentation also highlighted how public sector salaries have grown in relation to Mozambique’s gross domestic product, to reach 18%, versus a regional average of 8%.
But what is not explained is why we should be worried about these numbers — or if we should be worried at all.
Absent from the statistics in Meyer-Cirkel’s slideshow is how much of public spending goes on salaries. The total spending is not restricted to fiscal revenues; the treasury can and does also borrow, to spend more than it receives — running a fiscal deficit.
Government deficits also tend to worry people, who worry that the public debt will reach unsustainable levels. Such levels, however, never seem to be reached; and nor can anyone ever say what an unsustainable level would be. The truth is that a sovereign country borrowing in its own currency, which it itself has the power to issue, never needs to worry about going bust.
Rather the main risk with running a deficit — that is, putting more money into the economy than the government takes out through taxes — is inflation. More money spread over the same amount of goods and services will lead to higher prices for those goods and services.
But if there is spare capacity in the economy — if people could produce more, to meet higher demand — then it will lead to economic growth. So even if the vast majority of public spending is just going to 3% of the population, if those public servants have more money to spend at the market, at the take-away stand, on employing domestic staff, on building a house — that provides employment in the rest of the economy.
There will be a limit to how much money can be pumped into the Mozambican economy without causing runaway inflation. For all the underemployment in the economy, Mozambique lacks the skills and capital to respond to a huge spike in demand. But it can respond to increased demand for food, construction, basic services, and so on.
But with inflation now running at around 3% per annum, public spending does not need to be reined in. Public sector salaries may well need reform and rationalisation, for other reasons. But austerity from the public sector would only lead to further poverty and hardship in the country.
Elon Musk’s Diplomacy: Woo Right-Wing World Leaders. Then Benefit. - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/12/technology/elon-musk-world-leaders.html
Kushner Deal in Serbia Follows Earlier Interest by Trump - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/17/us/politics/kushner-deal-serbia-trump.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb
Les Ukrainiens se battent non seulement pour leur liberté, mais aussi pour la sécurité de l'Europe. Notre engagement ne faiblira pas.
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I think about this quite often. I am not brave. RIP Navalny
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james/111881606753157812" rel="nofollow">https://bne.social/@james/111881606753157812
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https://bsky.app/profile/tombowk.bsky.social/post/3l6uj5gmfxo2y
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Yeesh. Glad I went for the free trial of Adobe Pro first.
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https://bsky.app/profile/doriantaylor.com/post/3l3ttdxd6wn24
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The Mozambican opposition should print this quote on t-shirts. Elections ahoy in October...
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This flack knows how to make email clickbait for an editor, damn
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tombowk/112631039097492698" rel="nofollow">https://econtwitter.net/@tombowk/112631039097492698
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🚨 BREAKING: Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico was shot today after a government meeting, local media reported, suffering injuries to his head and chest before he was taken from the scene by his security detail.
Updates here.
Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former US President Donald Trump, wants to demolish an informal memorial to the 1999 NATO bombing in Belgrade and put a glitzy development in its place.
For many Serbs, it’s as if the Taliban wanted to build a luxury apartment compound on the site of New York’s Twin Towers.
Read the story.
Only one thing for it: just go all in to kick Russia out of Ukraine /channel/politicoeurope/206
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Very powerful podcast on the current situation in Ukraine. This episode and the whole daily podcast, to be honest. https://pca.st/podcast/24275080-7c48-013a-d7c8-0acc26574db2
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https://bsky.app/profile/naomialderman.bsky.social/post/3kljtakkhhj27
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William Mitchell – Modern Monetary Theory
Anything we can actually do, we can afford
I often make the point in talks that the fictional world that mainstream economists promote leads to poor decisions in the real world by our policy makers. We saw that in the 1980s and 1990s with the large scale privatisations of public enterprises, touted as employment-enriching, productivity-boosting strategies to provide ‘more money for government to…