Favorites October 23rd 2022

Google Bayview, September 2022

JD Ross @justindross

WhatsApp had 35 engineers for 450 million users, and grew to a team of 50 for 900 million users. Twitter cutting to 2,000 employees from 7,500 is not a "skeleton staff"

There's discussion that Musk wants to cut Twitter's headcount by 75%. It seems unlikely to help with their newfound security problems or content moderation, but folks are making some reasonable arguments why it's not crazy.

Toby Muresianu 🇺🇦 @tobyhardtospell

“Community input,” where the 0.001% of the population who shows up to meetings gets to veto the actions of people elected by over half of it, is just voter suppression with extra steps.

As an example, he cites a prop in LA that passed with a million votes, 77% in favor, "But then when it comes to picking a site for homeless housing, 30-300 people show up to a "community meeting," complain it shouldn't be there, and it's blocked."

robert ouimet @bigsnit

What fun. Palette.fm uses AI to colorize black and white photos. Free and online, will be playing with this for days. Here's an example of a scan of a black and white negative from 1958. Zero tweaking by me.

palette.fmpalette.fmA new AI colorizer. Colorize anything from old black and white photos 📸, style your artworks 🎨, or give modern images a fresh look 🌶. It’s as simple as instagram, free, and no sign-up required!

AI Colorizing isn't new, but this one's interface, where you provide a text prompt to help the model, seems to work really well. Ars Technica has an article about it

Threads

• Argument from Paul Poast that if Republicans take the house, they probably won't stop aid to Ukraine. I hope he's right.