Mark, as always, does it his way. His recent announcement to relinquish control of Zynga is quintessential Mark, doing what he thinks the right thing is.

As an ex-Zynga employee, I am well aware of many things that we did that we are not proud of, and there are many things I wish we could have changed. And this is not the moment to rehash everything.

I wish the biggest problem in social media today was that we had too many cows. I really wish the world today had a game that 100 million people were playing. And that game was about a city where everyone was friendly. I wish we had a founder of a social media company who was more concerned about getting people to play together and having real social connections, not just randomly driving growth numbers.

And when we launched Zynga, the amount of hate we got from the gaming industry surprised me.

And after gamergate, I wonder if the problem that Zynga had was that we were the first company to build games that I could play while my kid was awake.

And when one of our games crossed the lines, Mark told them to go back.

For all of our flaws, we did not let our platform be a place you you could stalk or promote hate.

We did not let our games be sexist, misogynistic, etc.

We just wanted people to have fun,

Mark did it his own way.

Godspeed.

The past week I finished “Straight to Hell”.  The book describes the debauchery and decadence of the lives of the bankers in the pre-Lehman’s era. The stories are amusingly written, and horrifying. Although it’s easy to demonize an entire group of people because of a salacious book, the book does force you to ask the question: if you were in a similar environment what would you do?

And this past week, with the discussion of a boycott of Twitter, I thought to myself, maybe I am in such an environment.

Over the last several years, I have been a devoted user of Twitter. I enjoyed the ability to participate in conversations about the Montreal Canadiens. I enjoyed learning in real-time about the chaos of the world.

I found people who were really interesting. Lauren Duca and Teen Vogue. I learned about the Death of Expertise. I learned about how Snowden was a Russian tool from the very beginning.

I learned about Russian counter-espionage.

I learned about Deep Tech, following Matt Ocko.

I saw daily art.

And at the same time, I saw how Twitter refuses to police its own platform. Twitter allows the President of the USA to speak to people in a way that if he was in my house, I would ask him to leave.

Working at VMware, I am made aware of how leadership style and tone are crucial. Pat Gelsinger is an amazing leader and a man of high moral standing. And what I admire most about him, is that he doesn’t tolerate the use of crude language in his presence. And as a result, this percolates down.

VMware is probably the least profane place I have ever worked at.

And that makes VMware special.

And that got me thinking about Twitter and this book I just read.  Donal Trump sets the bar for what is acceptable on Twitter. If the President of the USA can use ethnic slurs (Pocahantas Warren),  then so can Spencer. If David Duke can tell a woman like Lauren Duca to go back into the kitchen, then so can every asshole on the platform.

And I was morally conflicted. On the one hand, Twitter has enriched my life. On the other, I can no longer ignore the tone of Twitter. And when I routinely see Twitter refuse to remove violent language from its feed, it tells me who Twitter wants to hang out with.

And because I hang out on Twitter, Twitter’s decisions reflect on me.

My grandfather who was a very moral person, would have looked at Twitter, and said: I thought I raised my daughter better. He would have been so appalled with my choices, that he would look to my mother for her choices and how she raised me.

And that made me stop and think.

In my life, and I want to work with people like Pat. I want to interact with people who value civility and decency.

Going off Twitter isn’t a permanent thing. There is a lot that I value. And I learn a lot. And I am just one lousy irrelevant person.

But the company I choose to keep says a lot about me. And so I’ll walk away for a while.

 

 

 

Facebook is one of the most important new developments in human history, providing an efficient mechanism for people to connect with other people and find other people.

Facebook makes it possible for a Santorinian ex-pat like myself to connect with his fellow Santorinians on a regular basis.

I love the platform, I am a devoted consumer of Facebook’s. And I want them to succeed.

However, Facebook’s business model has a problem.

In many ways, their model reminds me of the story of the horse and the scorpion. The scorpion asks the horse to cross the river. The horse says: You will kill me. The scorpion says: If I do we will both die. The horse takes the scorpion on his back, and then halfway across the river, the scorpion poisons the horse. The horse says: But now we will both die. And the scorpion says: It could not be helped, it is in my nature.

The scorpion is people full of hate who want to destroy the people creating Facebook.

There are some who argue that that would be a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. And as someone who comes from the Balkans, I know a lot of people with no nose.

But enough with analogies.

Facebook makes money from selling ads to companies that want to find specific people.

And there are two kinds of ads: political and commercial.

Political ads come in two flavors, products that are bought, and stories that are designed to go viral and spread a message.

Facebook’s mission is to connect the world. And the business is to profit from that connection by selling those connections.

To be a universal platform, Facebook must allow anyone to connect to anyone.

And here’s where things get messy.

The bad actors use those connections to push their bad product.

Facebook’s default response is that the consumer must protect himself. The danger is that this kind of thinking created The Third Reich.  The consumer can be manipulated and exploited.

The consumer can be manipulated and exploited.

And there is a staggering amount of science that enables bad-actors to do that predictably. At Zynga I met a firm that specialized in exactly that.

And so Facebook must choose to either control the content when it comes in or after the fact.

At Zynga, I watched how I could exploit Facebook channels to get consumers to do whatever I wanted.

Facebook, finally realized that algorithmic approaches to dealing with our exploitation of their channels was impractical and just forcibly shut down our channels.

The problem with shutting down Zynga for Facebook was that it may have alienated some users who only used Facebook to play games. Facebook did a cost-benefit analysis and came to the correct conclusion that the number of people playing games was less than the number of people who would use Facebook and moved on.

Right now they have a similar problem with the Russian Spies.

There is a large audience for hate and lies. And that large audience wants to consume hate and lies. And that hate is being directed to political objectives.

If Facebook were to shut down that content, they may lose users. They would enable the creation of another platform for people who want hate and lies. And their value as a business would decline.

Even if they didn’t lose users, they would lose ad revenue as the spies would use other media to reach people: mail, phone, etc.

On Facebook, I have met an anti-semite who wants all Jews killed. I have seen vile anti-Muslim hate. I have seen comments about Obama and people of color that are appalling.

I will never forget the white female executive unfollowing friend after friend on Facebook because she said: I am not those people.

And the question for Facebook and their team is:

Is growth of the platform worth providing a platform for hate?

And the broader question for the coastal elites creating growth-at-any costs social media platforms:

Are we creating the platform that will destroy us?

And how accountable are we?

In the big media era, I met press barons who said that they would rather have fewer readers and a paper that they could read from cover to cover to their children than have more readers and not be able to read their paper to their children.

I wonder if a universal social media platform is desirable?

And finally, I wonder if this matters at all?

Haters will hate.

People who want to exploit their hate will exist.

And Facebook cannot change that.

 

As is tradition!

Because some Americans thought it was okay to elect a p**y grabber.

And then millions of women decided to say no.

And then hundreds of people decided to tell advertisers that advertising on Breitbart wasn’t okay.

And then an NPS  ranger decided to say no when Trump told her to shut up.

And then when Bannon told the press to shut-up, the press said no.

And when Miller told us that our brothers couldn’t come from abroad, the ACLU and hundreds showed up to say no.

And when Paul Ryan wanted to give me a tax cut, a cut I didn’t want, thousands reached out to their representatives and said no.

And so when Bill O’Reilly got exposed as the ass-hat that he apparently is, we were all very used to saying say no.

Or perhaps, in terms, Mr. O’Reilly understands, if we liberals are a bunch of snowflakes, enjoy the winter.

The Trump White House would really like for all of us immigrants to go home. His chief advisor thinks we have too many Asians as CEO’s in Silicon Valley.

And so the question is how?

For those who are US citizens, the obvious approach is to create an impossible set of choices. Suppose you have an elderly parent in Yemen. And now the US government won’t let you bring her into the USA. As a family person you have two choices, abandon her in Yemen or leave.

If you leave, you take your family and your community with you.

For those who are not US citizens, you don’t let them come in as students. That ensures that we don’t have those pesky students who stick around and create value for all of America, thus again reducing the number of annoying (Muslim) people – also called Vermin …

For those who are Green Card holders, you make it clear that any point time their Green Card status can be revoked. But wait you say, it’s only a temporary travel ban. Except a temporary travel ban that lasts 6+ months can result in you losing your Green Card. And if you have a mortgage, and can’t work for six months, then you can’t pay the mortgage so again you are forced to abandon your community and family or never travel. And then you see the problem about your family and you start to make alternative plans about your plans in this country.

The goal of the executive order is to force people to choose between family and America. To terrorize them into abandoning America.

In the Balkans, we just send killers to rape women and massacre children. I suppose it’s says something about the USA that we dress our ethnic cleansing in fine legalese about protecting America.

 

Why am I writing this today? Because an old friend shared a story of a crime. In 1941, his great grandfather was granted a visa to the USA. Unfortunately the USA joined the war, the next day, and there was no way to go the USA. He was a Jew. He was murdered in Auschwitz 12 months later. We know this because of great grandfather’s diary.  I am alive because another bureaucrat in Athens made another decision. When I see what the Trump administration is doing with Muslim refugees, I can not remain silent. And will not. I do not apologize to those who are offended or wish I wrote about tech.

I grew up in Canada. I happened to go a great progressive school in Montreal called St. Georges. In that great progressive school, there was a book about the Holocaust. In 1979 or was it 1980, at the age of 7 or 8, I learned what the Holocaust was.

Later on in life, I found out about the horrors Nazi Germany practiced on my people in Greece. I am alive because my grandparents were villagers, and my great grandmother is Italian, and during the great famine of Athens, some Italian bureaucrat decided her life was worth saving.

And even later in my teens, I learned about Kalavryta.

And still, later I learned of the ten day Nazi occupation of Santorini, and how in those ten days, the Nazi’s managed to hang several young men.

And I later on in life learned about the resentment that some Greeks had towards the Jews appropriating the entirety of the Nazi evil. And I also learned that a lot of Greeks were anti-semitic. And I had the misery of sitting a dinner table once, where a bunch of respected Greeks was discussing how Hitler wasn’t all that bad. And I had a classmate in Greece make a series of Holocaust jokes (jokes about one person dying are not funny. never was. still isn’t.)

And then I learned from a Jewish friend in Greece, why there are so few Jews in Greece. And  I found out that this man had stayed in a friend’s house in Northern Greece where he had presided over resettlement … you know the mass extermination of the Jews.

And I could forgive those Greeks, because well it’s easy to hate something you don’t know.

The Holocaust was not just another garden variety massacre. The world had many of those.

The holocaust was a systematic attempt to kill Jews. Others were caught in the vortex. However, this is the only important fact, Jewish babies were consigned to die because their grandparents were Jewish. And the world just watched. Babies, that happened to be born, were killed with no appeal to any humanity because they were deemed non-human.

And yet this was only part of the horror.

 

The actual horror of the Holocaust I learned later.

What most people don’t get, is that Germany, in spite of the mess known as the first world war, was viewed as the most civilized place on Earth before Hitler. The German working class, the German intellectual, were admired. The German military was respected. Being a Philo-German, was a matter of pride for many of my great-grand father’s generation.

Germany was the place a Jew could assimilate. Germany was safe from the insanity of a barbaric world.

And so to discover, that the most civilized, the best part of Western Civilization could decide to kill Jews because they were Jews, and deploy the full arsenal of the state to kill them was horrifying.

It was like discovering that your dad was a serial killer. Your mother butchered her family. The idea that the Germans would do this was inconceivable.

Now, that the Germans have spent 70+ years atoning for the evil of their grandparents, it’s easy to forget that they were once not viewed as evil.

And I later learned in my life, that the neo-Nazi movement did a lot to fight the holocaust. First, they tried to deny it’s existence, and then they tried to normalize the event. And you normalize the Holocaust by making it just another historical crime no different than any other.

And because I know you’re not a neo-Nazi Mr. Preibus, I’ll assume your support of the Trump announcement comes from that well of resentment I, as a Greek,  know too well.

And so, Mr. Preibus, I, a Gentile,  a Greek who is alive because of an Italian,  remember the holocaust because the most civilized people on earth decided to exterminate other women, and children and babies and old men and old women, because they were alive and had the wrong grandparents. This underlying evil in our souls, this willingness to do such evil acts, can not and must not be forgotten.

 

Just to name a few notable Iranian-Americans who are REALLY MAKING AMERICA GREAT!
#dontbeignorant #geteducated #lettheworldknow #iraniansarenotterrorist #nobannowall #sickofpolitics #peaceandlove

• Salar Kamangar, CEO of YouTube, VP of Google’s web applications
• Pierre Omidyar, Founder of e-Bay
• Dara Khosrowshahi, President and CEO of Expedia, Inc.
• Sean Rad, Founder & CEO of Tinder
• Farzad Nazem, CTO of Yahoo!
• Ali Rowghani, COO of Twitter
• Ali Partovi & Mehdi Partovi, Founders of Code.org
• Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President of Google
• Hamid Akhavan, CEO of Siemens Enterprise Communications
• Arash Ferdowsi, Co-Founder & CTO of Dropbox
• Goldy Kamali, Founder & CEO of FedScoop
• Dr Firouz Naderi, NASA director of Mars project
• Lotfi A. Zadeh, mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley and Father of Fuzzy Logic
• Gholam A. Peyman, Inventor of LASIK eye surgery
• Anousheh Ansari, the world’s first female space tourist, co-founder and chairman of Prodea Systems, Inc., co-founder and former CEO of Telecom Technologies, Inc. (TTI)
• Mark Zandi, economist and co-founder of Economy.com.
• Christiane Amanpour, anchor of ABC Sunday morning political affairs program, former CNN chief international correspondent
• Shahram Dabiri, video game producer, lead producer of World of Warcraft
• Davar Ardalan, NPR producer of Tell Me More
• Azita Raji, United States Ambassador to Sweden
• Leila Vaziri, The current world record holder of the 50 m women’s backstroke
• Andre Agassi, professional Tennis player
• Cyrus Habib, 16th Lieutenant Governor of Washington, first and so far only Iranian-American elected to state office
• Sina Tamaddon, Senior Vice President of Applications for Apple Computer
• Hamid Dabashi, Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City
• Pardis Sabeti, world-renowned computational geneticist, Associate Professor at Harvard University
• Homayoun Seraji, Senior Research Scientist, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Nouriel Roubini, one of the leading economists of our age, professor of economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University and chairman of RGE Monitor
• Ghavam Shahidi, IBM Fellow, Director of Silicon Technology
• Babak Hassibi, Gordon M. Binder/AMGEN Professor of Electrical Engineering, Caltech
• Payam Heydari, Professor of Electrical Engineering, University of California, Irvine
• Hamid Jafarkhani, leading communication theorist University of California, Irvine
• Ali Khademhosseini, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School,
• Abbas Milani, Director of Iranian Studies Program, Stanford University
• Ray Aghayan, Emmy Award winning costume designer
• Shohreh Aghdashloo Academy Award-nominated film/television actress
• Mayor Jimmy Delshad, Mayor of Beverly Hills, California
• Ross Mirkarimi, Former Member of San Francisco City Council and current San Francisco Sheriff
• Shayan Modarres – Civil Rights Lawyer and Activist, 2014 Democratic primary candidate for the U.S. House from the 10th district of Florida
• Faryar Shirzad, former Deputy National Security Advisor and White House Deputy Assistant for International Economic Affairs to President George W. Bush
• Maz Jobrani, comedian and actor
• Max Amini, comedian and actor
• Antonio Esfandiari OFFICIAL FAN PAGE, champion poker player

Iranian-Americans Reported Among Most Highly Educated in U.S.
Iranian-Americans also contribute substantially to the U.S. economy

http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/article/2004/01/20040113191603atarukp0.6147425.html#axzz4X5qoxG00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Iranian_Americans

http://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabethmacbride/2015/12/20/100-influential-iranian-americans-in-silicon-valley-and-beyond/#4d10467b4e52

http://www.ranker.com/list/notable-iranian-americans/famous-iranians

Click to access Factsheet.pdf

When you sit and wonder who these people are, read this list.

Over the last several years, I have two discrete sets of workflows:

1. Kostadis, the developer who wants a full Linux experience
2. Kostadis, the guy who interacts with product managers, engineering managers and business leaders who require a complete Windows experience.

When IBM used to make the Think Pad, the solution was obvious: use VMware Workstation to create a Linux VM.

However, after IBM sold the ThinkPad to Lenovo, and Lenovo couldn’t retain the same quality, and the improvements of the Mac made the Mac an attractive compromise.

You could use a Mac and use Windows software like Outlook, while simultaneously having a native Unix development experience without dealing with the complexity of virtual machines.

The experience wasn’t Linux, and the quirkiness of Mac OS made things annoying, and yet it was close enough.

At some point in time, pre-Nadella, the crappiness of the Windows software on the Mac made a choice painful.  And at some point, the pain was significant enough to cause me to switch back to Windows.

A few months with the best Dell and Lenovo had to offer, and that transition lasted less than a year.

And after the utter underwhelming release of the latest Mac hardware, the opportunity to check out Windows hardware became an option.

And so I looked at what IT had to offer and discovered the Dell Precision 5510. The power of a modern PC coupled with improvements in virtualization software has meant that the overall value proposition of the PC + VMware + Linux to be superior to the Mac + Crappy Microsoft Apps + Not Quite Linux or Mac + VMware w Linux and Vmware with Windows or some flavor of those.

 

 

Many moons ago, I read a book about Admiral Pointdexter, and in this book, there was a reference to his Ph.D. in physics. What struck me was that the Ph. D. was a computation. He did the work of a computer.

And then this article popped up:

All The Mathematical Methods I Learned In My University Math Degree Became Obsolete In My Lifetime

Dr. Devlin began his career being a computer. And when calculators and the computers and then the cloud emerged, his ability to be a computer was displaced with ever increasingly sophisticated and faster computers.

What to do then:

So what, then, remains in mathematics that people need to master? The answer is the set of skills required to make effective use of those powerful new (procedural) mathematical tools we can access from our smartphone. Whereas it used to be the case that humans had to master the computational skills required to carry out various mathematical procedures (adding and multiplying numbers, inverting matrices, solving polynomial equations, differentiating analytic functions, solving differential equations, etc.), what is required today is a sufficiently deep understanding of all those procedures, and the underlying concepts they are built on, in order to know when, and how, to use those digitally-implemented tools effectively, productively, and safely.

In short, jobs that rely on the ability to execute repetitive tasks without understanding are going away to be replaced with jobs that require adaptability and are non-repetitive.

The downside to these new jobs is that their outcome and payout is less predictable.

The other downside to those new jobs is that they are not the old ones.

And the final downside is that the skills necessary to do the new jobs are different from the old ones.

And the real foundational challenge is that we are preparing our children in our schools for the old world order.

We are like a company caught in a huge disruption. On the one hand, the old business pays but is going away, and the new one is too small.

And the next 20 to 30 years will be gut-wrenching. What the Trump voters experienced, will be experienced across every form of human endeavor. If your job is to fit into a machine, the machine will replace you. If your job is to figure out what tools to use or how to invent new machines, then there is a place for you.

Teaching kids to find the white space is the only important thing that we should be teaching them.