Winter Rant

"I’m utterly disgusted. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself." – Miyazaki

Blog

rant.vpalepu.com/

Profile

rant.vpalepu.com/author/vpalep

Homepage

rant.vpalepu.com

  • Prediction: Elon boosts Twitter’s DAU by bringing back Trump

    I mean, what else can he do to kick up the numbers here? The advertisers are fleeing. And even if the site’s most active users continue, you need to kick up the usage to stratospheric levels to throw a serious bone to those advertisers… all to get them back. He is already hoping to do…

  • post.news: Pay-for-read, News-centric Social Network

    Who knows if this will work. But this is the closest that any platform may have gotten to helping journalistic organizations monetize (written) content on social media – at scale. post.news seems to be on a useful mission. But like all things in social tech, it will come down to how the crowd uses this…

  • Clippy is a cultural success story for Microsoft

    Hate it all you want, but Clippy is the single best thing that Microsoft worked on to gain cultural relevance in the world. It is the OG of smart assistants — it was the precursor to Alexa, Google, Siri and (yes) Cortana. I never understood why it got all the hate, I loved it! (In…

  • Humanity fails its children, again.

    Humanity is dead. Again. Every time people opt for connivence over protecting the most vulnerable amongst us, we fail. And humanity fails. Again. I am going to see how long it takes for govts. to issue the declaration of emergency. Not holding my breath – just my kid. – vijay, #microblogging from Outlook

  • Free speech means you host content that you cannot monetize?

    Elon continues to prove himself to be an idiot everyday. But this freedom of speech vs reach is just about as stupid an idea that I have ever seen. Let’s assume that you have some magical way to filter out content that is objectionable based on an impartial billionaire’s whimsical definition of “objectionable”. Assuming you…

  • Elon Musk is Joker

    This GIFF has been playing in my mind all week. I am not sure if Elon planned it out like this, but he is effectively Joker from The Dark Knight. And I never thought it was possible to see money burn in real life. – vijay (get Outlook for iOS)

  • Never seen trends like this…

    In the days to come, I will be unwinding properly and write down thoughts and lessons from the last few weeks. But suffice to say that this trend list on Twitter, on the night of Twitter’s mass exodus, was something I have never seen. Aside from some silly NHL/NFL game(s) that was happening, every trend/hashtag…

  • Well, I am here now…

    (here == winterrant.wordpress.com) Still in the middle of moving my writings to one place. Plan is to syndicate to everywhere from this blog. Let’s see how this works. Been on Mastadon for a while now, but that seems to have its own set of issues. So, do not quite trust it just yet. So, going…

  • Is federation the future of every (social) tech platform?

    I am not sure if humanity should adopt federation of every service on the internet. I am wondering, if humanity will. Consider what would have happened if there was federation from the get-go: we would not need to make different social media accounts on different platforms, because a Facebook account would have been able to…

  • Social Media Tech firms are about to sh… soil the bed 🍿

    Twitter already did it — more is yet to come. Facebook — and by extension Instagram and Whatsapp — are about to do it (I am not calling it/them Meta). Snap already did it (you may have not know about it). Call the orderlies with clean sheets for this is about to get messy. And one can only hope that this…