Eugene Wei @eugenewei Twitter profile

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

6 years

The rhetorical style of any Twitter account that continues to gain followers converges on that of a fortune cookie.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

May be time to revisit our views of this brave man in his N95 mask who ordered a quarantine of Manhattan over the objections of the public and whose primary foe was a man infected by a bat

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

The original Blade runner was set in 2019, and wow did it ever nail some predictions about life today!

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

I'm ready for the U.S. to just turn over vaccine distribution to @MrBeastYT

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

“In essence (and this is only a tiny exaggeration): a quarter of the Internet was saved from hacking by adding emoji support.”

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

“Let me know how I can be helpful”

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

6 months

I just watched Napoleon. Very touching when he returns from exile in Elba and thousands of soldiers are tweeting “France is nothing without its Emperor” and Napoleon takes the time to quote tweet each with “❤️ ❤️ ❤️“

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

It doesn’t take long for process knowledge to evaporate

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

Twitter: weak opinions, strongly yelled

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

This now deleted tweet is hilarious. TFW your own algorithms and monetization incentives are to blame for behavior that you rib your creators for.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

We would have a better understanding of many social networks if we regarded them as Status as a Service (SaaS) businesses. Not all network effects work the same way. Status is a powerful motivator but inherently volatile.

Status as a Service (StaaS) — Remains of the Day

Editor's Note 1 : I have no editor. Editor’s Note 2 : I would like to assure new subscribers to this blog that most my posts are not as long as this one. Or as long as my previous one . My long break...

www.eugenewei.com

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

I'd never heard of this strategy described by @kevin2kelly for understanding research papers, and wow, forget a book club, I need to join a journal club! So many papers are such a dense forest for me to hack through, but the few journal club videos I've seen are solid.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

Since most startups fail, I like to think of entrepreneurship as a temporally reversed mystery: you are trying to solve your murder in the future before it occurs.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

6 years

For all its faults, SF is remarkable for how many busy, important people will make time for a coffee w/o asking for anything in exchange. Good luck trying that in, for example, Hollywood.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

Frankly I’m just disappointed that I’m not the only person who used to come into work like this each morning

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

6 years

Invisible asymptotes: your customer may say they want a faster horse, but at least you learned that they want to travel faster.

Invisible asymptotes — Remains of the Day

"It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if...

www.eugenewei.com

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

This scene in Interstellar always gives me goosebumps

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

Everyone has a Substack, and everyone is raising a SPAC, but I am starting a SubSPAC. I don't know what it means, but it's provocative, gets the people going.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

Someone in my condo building connected to my Bluetooth speaker and is randomly streaming a Great Course lecture on Higgs Boson into my living room. This is the most social interaction I’ve had in months.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

2020 screenwriters: “What if we count urban counties and mail-in ballots last so that half the country has a heart attack, half is elated, then it reverses overnight? Is that too gimmicky?” [Whole writer’s room bursts into laughter]

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

Nigel Richards, three time winner of the English-language Scrabble World Championship, studied the French dictionary for two months and then won the French-language Scrabble World Championship. He still doesn’t speak French.

Winner Of French Scrabble Title Does Not Speak French

It took about two months for Nigel Richards to memorize a French Scrabble dictionary. The New Zealand native has won many English-language Scrabble tournaments.

www.npr.org

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

OMG who made this

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

Me: "Damn, so glad to put 2020 behind us and forget about Covid for an evening." New Years:

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

Facebook/Instagram should’ve just made Reels a shameless pixel for pixel copy of TikTok. Would be less confusing for users and more honest. No one is going to give them any credit for originality here anyhow, why even pretend?

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

Finally published my long-overdue third piece on TikTok, "American Idle." It's about the network effects of creativity, as promised, but also includes a bunch of other thoughts on TikTok as a product and an experience.

American Idle — Remains of the Day

TikTok’s Warp Scan filter is a bizarre concept for a filter in and of itself, but the myriad of ways TikTok users put it to use just shows what happens when you throw random tools to the masses and...

www.eugenewei.com

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

TFW you just started a new video game and haven't unlocked any of the better characters yet

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

Time to share a bit of Silicon Valley lore and etymology. Few know that the term "vesting" came from the fact that the traditional gift on reaching your fifth anniversary with a company was a company-branded vest.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

Movies: “Zoom in on his face. Enhance.” Computer scans a database, pulls up dossier on the person. Reality: Unmasked people waltz into the Capitol, nation watches it live, video and photos all over social media. FBI: “Please help us ID these people, who could they be?”

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

6 years

Three most anticompetitive acquisitions in Bay Area history: 1. Google acquires YouTube 2. Facebook acquires Instagram 3. Warriors acquire Kevin Durant

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

New blog post, this the first of maybe a 3 part series on the company du jour, TikTok. This first piece isn't about the possible ban or divestment or the security or geopolitical issues but about what makes it so unique and fascinating to me.

TikTok and the Sorting Hat — Remains of the Day

NEXT POST: Part II of my thoughts on TikTok, on how the app design is informed by its algorithm and vice versa in a virtuous circle.

www.eugenewei.com

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

Tzi Ma limps in Mulan because he has had to carry the burden of being the Asian father in every Hollywood film for two decades. #goldopen #mulan

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

Now that the hardcover window has passed, and since people don't read, here's a Tweetstorm summary of Status as a Service, which I'll abbreviate as StaaS (h/t @naval ) to disambiguate from SaaS.

Status as a Service (StaaS) — Remains of the Day

Editor's Note 1 : I have no editor. Editor’s Note 2 : I would like to assure new subscribers to this blog that most my posts are not as long as this one. Or as long as my previous one . My long break...

www.eugenewei.com

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

The struggle is real

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

Look, I'm always going to have a gazillion browser tabs open. Wish someone would build a different UI metaphor to help me navigate them because tabs just aren't an ideal solution to this problem.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

6 years

I never met him but knew he would’ve eaten chicken feet, or any number of unique Chinese dishes, with me, without reservation. For me, a kid who had to bring the ethnic lunch to school, Bourdain’s cosmopolitanism was an act of deep empathy.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

Was walking over a subway grate in NY and one of my AirPods fell out. Out of pure instinct I reached out and snatched it mid-air. Probably the greatest athletic feat of my life.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

While an open office floor plan allows you to cram a lot of workers into a small space, the lesser known “work buddy” configuration, paired with upside down desks equipped with laptop/monitor magnets, can double worker density in that same space.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

You either die a villain (from acute respiratory failure) or live long enough to see yourself become the hero.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

The “Has Fallen” films are the MCU of films so mediocre and simple that I’ll only watch them on an airplane. Great news for my cross country flights the next five or so years.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

@typesfast

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

“We are all status-seeking monkeys”

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

Me when someone suggests closing some of my several hundred open browser tabs

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

Two mantras I learned from Stewart Brand tonight. One, paraphrasing Buckminster Fuller: “You have about 10 minutes to act on an idea before it recedes back into dreamland.” So write down all your ideas immediately.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

I’m sure Benioff and Weiss are happy to be off Game of Thrones, with its deeply particular and unforgiving fans, and on to Star Wars, whose fans are famously nonchalant about what happens to their NEAR RELIGION.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

In 1988 Shenzhen had a population of 30,000. By 2008, its population was 12 million. 🤯

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

Me on Zoom calls 10 days ago // me on Zoom today

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

TikTok is like MTV back in the day in its power to plant music tracks in my brain almost Inception-style. Earworm distribution at scale. (If you use the app regularly will know all these song clips)

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

Screenshots of highlighted paragraphs from esoteric books are the foam latte beauty photos of Twitter

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

The first rule of GPT-3 Club: you must talk about GPT-3

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

6 years

Remove the legend from your line graphs, I wrote. Could've just been a tweet. Then the thought ran away from me, and I chased:

Remove the legend to become one — Remains of the Day

When I started my first job at Amazon.com, as the first analyst in the strategic planning department, I inherited the work of producing the Analytics Package. I capitalize the term because it was...

www.eugenewei.com

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

Werner Herzog: “What haunts me is that in Anakin’s face I saw no kinship, no mercy, only the overwhelming indifference of nature. His blank stare speaks only of a primal interest in affirmation and power. But for Obi-Wan, this boy was the Chosen One.”

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

6 years

Childhood developmental milestones: * Smiles * Rolls from stomach to back and vice versa * Track objects that move behind other objects * Says "mama" and "dada" * Walks without support * Presses "Skip ad" button on YouTube

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

😂 I’d never heard of this but it would make for a humorous salesperson interview test. PowerPoint Karaoke: present a deck you’ve never seen before as fluently as possible.

PowerPoint karaoke - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

Spoke to realtor about selling my condo in SF today and it confirmed that I'm going to take a bath on it because of the pandemic, and that's if I can even unload it. I missed the great migration out of SF. I'm like Werner Herzog's nihilist penguin, left behind.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 months

My friend sent me this pic from the Foster City Costco. Ah, that old reliable business model: lure them in with the $5 rotisserie chicken, then get them with the case of DRC for $44K.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

2 years

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

Look at how quickly David Dobrik surpassed his YouTube follower count on TikTok. That is a near seamless port of his fan base from one network to another. Amazing.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

Hilarious how the indictment today casually throws shade at the University of San Diego.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

Coase’s Art of War (if he’d written his version): a good way to compete with a big company is to do something that forces two different divisional VP’s there to cooperate and coordinate

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

To prevent one person from dominating Zoom meetings, we need Zoom for the Peloton. To speak, you have to generate some minimum output. As you talk, the resistance gradually increases until you are totally out of breath.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

Despite all the things I hate about SF, if an ultra ambitious kid asked me where to go, I’d still have them spend some time in the Bay Area because it’s a place that will amplify that ambition like no other.

Kevin Kwok

@kevinakwok

5 years

Caro on how encouragement and the moments when the people around you have significant impact on your ambition

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

10 months

My first piece in a while, How to Blow Up a Timeline, is on how Twitter lost its vitality as a social network. (I wrote this before the rate-limiting fiasco and accelerated launch of Threads, so I'll have to leave that discussion for another day)

How to Blow Up a Timeline — Remains of the Day

www.eugenewei.com

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

6 years

Nobel Prize in play here (seriously, though, there is still a ton of innovation to come in the grocery store)

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

With news of the Pfizer CEO promising he'll take their COVID vaccine himself if it passes FDA approval, I'm reminded that Jonas Salk tested the polio vaccine on his 9-year old son (who wasn't exactly happy about it at the time). In other words, "kin in the game."

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

This was the year I was going to get a chiseled six-pack and gorilla biceps. Then the pandemic hit.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

8 years

Quality of a slam dunk contest can be judged solely based on audience reactions. Aaron Gordon...😳

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

Wow, this may be the first time I'll use the LinkedIn congrats feature!

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

I feel like everyone watches with subtitles on way more than we used to even for our native tongues. Why is that? Easier to turn them on because of digital? More complex dialogue? Dialogue being mixed lower? We are all losing our hearing? Trying not to wake others?

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

6 years

One way to sum up @patrickc ’s advice here: most kids spend their youth trying to fit in only to spend the remainder of their adult lives trying to stand out. If you can get a head start on the latter you’ll be ahead of the game.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

6 years

This Lee Kuan Yew retelling of his meeting with striking Singapore Airlines pilots is straight gangsta, like some scene out of Game of Thrones. “Whoever governs Singapore must have that iron in him.”

Lee Kuan Yew versus the SIA Strikers

The full context of Lee Kuan Yew's famous "iron" quote.

www.youtube.com

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

People used to say Amazon was a business that had to drive out competition then raise prices to be profitable. But that business is actually ridesharing.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

We laid my grandmother to rest in Atlanta this morning. She was not ill, but she had said for months now that she was ready to move on. The lack of any fear of death gave her a mysterious power. She was practical, undaunted, to the end.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

The "Keep me logged in" checkbox is the "Close Door" elevator button of the web.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

Spoiler: movie ends with him finally finding acceptance, and raising a seed round, in San Francisco.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

I really wanted black AirPods. Two more generations before they come in many colors? Things in people’s ears are like jewelry, so a variety of color options is more important to many users than it would be for other hardware.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

Mother’s Day will be heavy for the rest of my life, but I am comforted, seeing old photos like this, that we shared more time than I can ever remember

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

For better and worse, the U.S. can’t move as quickly on vaccines as it once did. (from Vaccinated, the story of Maurice Hilleman, the surprisingly unknown scientist who has saved more lives than all other scientists combined )

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

OG thirst trap

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

Many companies stall out at offering just utility. A lot of messaging and communication apps fall into this category. They can be massive companies, but competing on raw utility is a Hobbesian jungle.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

Amazing. Alibaba’s DingTalk, often describes as China’s Slack, was forced on Chinese school kids studying from home. Then they realized they could get the app booted from app stores by mass down-rating it.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

If you say platform three times a VC will DM you for coffee

SwiftOnSecurity

@SwiftOnSecurity

5 years

You live in a society whose every production industry is based around a government-subsidized chemical feedstock. Corn is not a _food_. Corn is a _platform_.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 months

Sociologists bemoaned the death of the third place in American Life. Then companies shifted to remote work, and we got rid of second places. We just live in our first and only places now, in our sweat pants.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

People are like why are NBA ratings down 50%, is it because players are too woke, and I’m like have you watched some of the competition, I was riveted cheering this guy on in some bonkers sport I’ve never heard of, what is this?!

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

There should be a business awards show where they play reels of your most dramatic moments in meetings. “I guess we’ll just have to AGREE TO DISAGREE.” “What’s the agenda? WHY ARE WE EVEN HERE?!” “I repeat, WHO’S ON THE DIAL IN?!” [standing ovation]

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

The power of naming.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

Lyft suspending service at midnight today. I have dinner in Peninsula tonight, will be racing the clock to get a ride home before then, like Cinderella.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

Published the 2nd of my pieces on TikTok, "Seeing Like an Algorithm." My last piece was about how the algorithm makes TikTok work, but this piece is almost the reverse, about how TikTok's design makes the algorithm work.

Seeing Like an Algorithm — Remains of the Day

www.eugenewei.com

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

@typesfast

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

All of my doctor friends have the same horrifying story. They're all having to send people who present with flu symptoms but test negative for flu back out into the world coughing and hacking and feverish because there are no tests available.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

I want ability to create a shared audio channel on my AirPods at really loud restaurants and bars so we can all hear each other

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

"Arrakis is a death trap," they told me.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

3 years

TRUMP: "Hey Rudy, did you book the luxury hotel like I asked?" GIULIANI <confused>: "Wait, what?" "I told you to book the Four Seasons." "Four Seasons...Total Landscaping." "Four Seasons...Luxury Hotels." <single tear> "Landscaping." <turning red> "Hotel!" CUT TO:

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

6 months

Just as there is technical debt, there is such a thing as narrative debt. Marvel fans are no longer willing to incur it. Disney needs to do with the MCU what almost all long-running infinite narratives have to do at some point to clear the ledger: reboot.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

The year is 2023. N95 face masks have replaced t-shirts as the corporate swag of choice. I sit on the subway wearing a free mask that reads “AI-powered personalization for marketplaces.” Some guy in a Supreme face mask looks at me. I avert my gaze, embarrassed.

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

Wow I have so many Facebook notifications, must be urgent, let’s see what’s going on...

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

A life often tough, but throughout she was tougher. She didn’t choose all the circumstances of her life, but she always chose how she met them. That is a life in full. FIN

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Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

4 years

Now that I’ve tried AirPods Pro with the noise cancellation I want this even more. Sometimes augmenting reality merely means lowering the distractions. Should be easy to build a UI for proximity based channel sharing/discovery

Eugene Wei

@eugenewei

5 years

I want ability to create a shared audio channel on my AirPods at really loud restaurants and bars so we can all hear each other

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