Paul Hansel

Author: paul

  • Pack it up, Mark: a 15-year Thanksgiving retrospective

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    Way back in January 2009, I joined Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Poke! It’s now November 2024. I’m not yet 30, so 15 years is a majority of my life. In that time, Facebook’s valuation grew from $10 billion to $1,400 billion, Mark changed up his fit, Myanmar’s military exploited Facebook to execute an ethnic cleansing, and…

  • Regularized by cars

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    The most American activity is driving. The high-volume production car? Invented in America. Coast-to-coast highway systems? America. The car-centric city, car-centric suburb, desert road trip culture? USA! USA! USA! Driving is liberating. The freedom of the road. Adventure in a pedal. The thrill of adventure, the surprise of speed. It’s completely heretical to claim that…

  • Silicon Valley Engineers: The Visionaries Who Are Changing Everything

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    Imagine if every cracked engineer in the world converged on Silicon Valley (which, let’s be real, is already happening). Intel would likely leapfrog TSMC. Apple’s phones might actually run cutting-edge AI models locally and boast solid-state batteries. We’d see mobile silicon fabrication units popping up everywhere – and spent units almost as common by the…

  • You need to be albedomaxxing.

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    You need to be spending all your time blotting out the sun for the greater good. You need to be casting the largest possible shadow. You need to reflect so much light back into space that a new Ice Age begins. You need to shine so brightly you slice holes in clouds. You need to…

  • Popping the tire pressure monitoring relearn tool bubble

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    [2024-07-06: Updated to include simulation results and more scope traces.] If you own a car, you’ve no doubt encountered this mystery at least once. The tire pressure monitoring system tells you your flat tire is on the driver’s side front, but it’s actually on the passenger side rear. This is a relatively modern car ownership…

  • Why create a blog?

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    paul
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    Internet Protocol space is a curious place. There are millions of websites hosted on the internet. Perplexingly, only a vanishingly small percentage of the cumulative time that humans spend on their electronic devices is spent on the open web (off-platform). Why? Individual, independent content has lost its shine. If you can’t serve your content to…