Various old computers had their keyboards adorned with unique symbols. Companies like Commodore, Atari, Amiga, or even – in its previous life – Apple chose to put their company logos on keys, and there were other weird and obscure keys on weird and obscure keyboards.

But it was Apple’s recent push to move their American keyboards closer to European ones by embracing more iconography, that made me think of forgotten key symbols less obscure, ones that belonged to platforms we still use today. Even on a Mac and a PC, some key symbols didn’t make it to modern times. So let’s start with the PC side today since that part of the story begins earlier, and do Macs in a follow-up post.

For a lot of 20th century, a battle has been waging between words and icons. The first salvo was, perhaps, the traffic signs: America embraced words, while Europe relied more on iconography. (As much as it looks like it, it wasn’t just “graphic design vs. not”; as a more varied continent with multiple languages, Europe needed a more universal visual language to help people travelling between countries.)

This, I understand, trickled down to other things: home electronics, and computers. There, iconography also made it easier to make one product and sell it across all of Europe, without needing to introduce many SKUs with different UI strings.

Here’s IBM’s Selectric typewriter from the 1970s, in its American and European edition:

(If you’re curious, Express was a very fast Backspace, and Index moved the page down; both were prototypes of future arrow keys.)

Here’s IBM’s early 1130 computer from 1965, which sported an unusual symbol for space:

Some IBM laboratory and scientific computers in the 1970s and even 1980s veered more into iconography, but eventually lost to text as office PC users rejected the confusing symbols. As their keyboards morphed into PC/Windows keyboards we know today, only four symbols remained and gained widespread acceptance: ⇧ for Shift, ↵ for Enter, ⇥ for Tab, and some version of an arrow for Backspace.

But let’s look at those old symbols, some beautiful, all interesting.

The two symbols below are: Print Screen (old CRT screen turning into a piece of paper) and key beep – popular when people were transitioning from loud typewriters to relatively quiet keyboards:

Here – on the front edge of the also-forgotten Reverse Tab – you can see Home, which historically meant “return to the top left corner of the screen” and sometimes even “clear the screen”:

But my favourites were these, for Insert (now gone) and Delete (still with us):

These seem inspired by proofreader marks, which feels wonderfully old-time’y:

Building on that visual language, one could also find invert/​reverse video, blinking, and underline:

And this absolute beauty, which I think meant “delete word”:

The really interesting thing is that some of those symbols survive today in Unicode. I spotted at least ⎀, ⎃, ⎁, and ⎂. The last two are for contiguous and non-contiguous underline, which I feel is a story I should know, but I don’t (yet).

Games may be life with all the hard bits removed, but they provide a way to study why people make the choices they make. Traditional games are usually played against a static background: the rewards per outcome are constant. That limits their relevance to behavior because, in real life, the rewards and consequences of strategic choices are ever changing. Now, researchers have used a mathematical model to study a series of games that include evolving strategies and randomly varying returns.

A bit of history

Perhaps the most famous game-theory contest is the prisoner’s dilemma. In the prisoner’s dilemma, a pair of thieves have been captured and are being separately interrogated by the police. If both clam up, they will be punished for a lesser crime. If one prisoner makes a deal (defects) then that prisoner gets to go free and the other gets a heavier sentence. If both make a deal, they both get an in-between punishment.

The person running the game can start it with different rewards for cooperating and defecting to explore how the optimum strategy varies with reward and risk, which the players can figure out by varying the strategies across multiple rounds. Depending on the balance between the reward for staying silent (cooperating) and betrayal, the game stabilizes with everyone betraying everyone. In this simple situation, everyone loses.

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I don’t think anyone particularly enjoys typesetting in monospace.

Regular text is okay – at least as okay as it can be:

Right aligning is also fine, as long as you don’t mind counting spaces, but centering already gets tricky, as you don’t have a half space to make things truly even:

And full justification is where things get particularly weird. The spaces are just too large, and cannot be distributed evenly, creating a really unpleasant feeling:

The solution used in typesetting elsewhere is hyphenation, but in monospace hyphenation also feels unpleasant, with the hyphens drawing too much attention to themselves (and subsequently messing up copy and paste):

This is why you don’t see full justification in text files very often.

But there is one more option. You can rewrite the text to choose only words that precisely add up to the line length to avoid any double spaces.

This is exactly what rs1n did in the late 1990s for his guide to Super Metroid:

It’s astonishing, as it goes like this on for 17,000 more words, each right margin perfectly ending on a letter, no twin spaces in sight.

The author lightly covers in the FAQ at the bottom:

What program did you use to justify the text?

None. I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up on the right hand side. Everything was done with an ASCII editor.

I’m sharing this mostly as a curiosity; some rewrites for physical books are par the course to avoid widows and orphans, but you don’t see them as much in onscreen writing.

At the same time, who among us didn’t nod in recognition at least, having once spent hours massaging a button UI string or a tooltip just to get it to fit under the certain width in a densely packed interface?

I like pets, but, for various reasons, I can’t have one. So I flirt with other people’s pets. There is a black cat across the road who likes sitting in my driveway. So I had to buy a new car with a backup camera to make sure the cat is safe. As you can imagine, I couldn’t skip this problem about cats posted by Konstantin Knop on Facebook.

Puzzle. One cat eats one stick of sausage in 27 minutes. You have four identical sticks of sausage and five cats. Using only the cats and the sausages, measure exactly one minute.
All the cats eat at the same constant rate, and all the sausage sticks are identical. You may measure time intervals only between moments when cats finish sausage sticks. At each such moment, you may redistribute the cats among the remaining sausage sticks.

We really, really need to talk about venture capital. Because it’s not “venture capital” anymore.

There’s a huge disconnect between what most people think of VC, where an investor has a big fund and cuts checks to help a founder build a company, and the current reality, where a handful of billionaire extremists use the cover of “VC” to advance an outrageous agenda where they’re accountable to no one.

I’m gonna explain this from a standpoint that almost never gets articulated: I’ve personally raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding as CEO of startups, and been directly involved as a board member or advisor in raising hundreds of millions more. I’ve sat in board rooms, across the table from the people I’m talking about here, or been at the industry events that they frequent. So this isn’t sour grapes because these VCs wouldn’t cut me a check, or some chip on my shoulder about these investors due to a business deal. This is what I know about these bad actors because I’m part of the community of creators and inventors who build the things that they used to invest in — back when they still cared about innovation.

Many of the trends in society and politics that people are most angry about, from data centers being forced down everyone’s throats, to all of our favorite apps and services being enshittified, to politicians being paid to ignore the will of the people, are all being supercharged by these cancer capitalists. They have warped the structure of venture capital into a form of oligarchy that answers to no market, no regulators, and no voters. So it’s worth understanding exactly how they did it.

How Venture Capital became Cancer Capital

I’ll be breaking these points down in further detail, but just to begin framing the concept, I’ll lay out the core idea here in some bullet points (so that you’re not tempted to run this whole thing through an LLM):

• Venture capital was only supposed to be a tiny segment of the overall capital market, but it has expanded to become the primary form of funding that new companies consider — it was never the only way, and it didn’t used to be the default one
• VC was meant to be a small percentage of overall investment because it represents the high-risk, high-reward part of a portfolio; to be healthy, most of a portfolio — or most of an economy — needs to focus on assets that are more stable and predictable. But a cancer grows from a cell that a body needs in small, healthy amounts, and that turns deadly when it grows without limit until it harms, or even kills, its host.
• As regulations have gotten looser in recent years, a handful of venture capital firms have become “do everything” funds that combine private equity with their existing VC businesses, and expand to manage massive stockpiles of tens of billions of dollars
• The 1% of VC firms that get this big stop being exposed to the risk in their own investments at all — when you collect 2% a year to manage $50 billion, that’s a billion dollars landing in your pocket annually whether any company you funded lives or dies. Those firms also stop legally even being venture capital firms, making them unaccountable to markets, founders, or the law — and that’s how they become “Cancer Capital”
• Meanwhile, the 99% of “normal” VCs don’t have the power or funding of the Cancer Capital firms, but are forced to play on the field that those firms define, even if they don’t like the way they do business
• Since the Cancer Capital firms have become so powerful, the overall balance of power between founders and VCs has flipped; instead of founders having a company that VCs would try to fund, now VCs publish extremist political manifestos, and “founders” are just the people who are selected to carry out parts of those plans
• The rest of the world doesn’t know: New founders and workers entering the tech industry are unaware that Cancer Capital has taken over, so many are still trying to play by the old rules, and can’t figure out why their ideas are being pushed into serving the goals of the Cancer Capital firms
• Politicians and media still look at VC as if it works like it did 10 or 20 years ago, and cheer them on like they’re funding job creation or enabling new companies to grow, when their primary goal is concentrating power and wealth into the hands of the Cancer Capital tycoons. They keep getting fooled by this, over and over.
• These days, venture firms are increasingly getting their funds from pension funds and retail retirement accounts, meaning the public (you!) are increasingly holding the bag for the parts of their portfolios that actually have some risk, even if you never intentionally made that choice
• The shift away from IPOs in the tech industry has also encouraged these Cancer Capital firms to find ways to cash out long before companies ever go public, meaning they can make a massive return off of companies that never make a penny of profit, even if regular investors get screwed by the stock of a company once it actually gets listed on the public stock market.
• Part of why this has gotten so corrupt is the way the Cancer Capital firms have transformed themselves into their post-VC forms. Because they’re not legally VC firms anymore, they’re free to buy shares directly from founders, or hold unlimited amounts of publicly-traded stock — exactly what they couldn’t do as regular VCs. They can even sell their investment in a company as an asset to another one of their own funds, and then book the increase in value as a profit, all without the company ever having made a penny. Another racket: a company that’s raised a bunch of cash in a funding round can buy out its early investors if they’re one of these post-VCs, so they can get paid off even if their portfolio company has never made a penny in profits or revenues.

All of this self-dealing, and the way that they’re isolated from any accountability, has made these firms become more and more shameless in their behavior. Former Andreessen Horowitz partner John O’Farrell publicly called out the firm (a rarity — the company is notoriously vindictive towards those who it decides are disloyal) for what he called its “political infiltration” of AI policy. Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and their firm have put $115.3 million into this midterm cycle — nearly double their $63 million in 2024, and more than any other billionaire donor in the country, even including Elon Musk. Molly White, whose Tech Influence Watch tracks this money against FEC filings, shows that a16z alone accounts for more than 20% of all political contributions from the entire cohort of crypto and AI companies it follows. And they’re funneling these funds to candidates in both parties. This is a huge escalation from the tentative baby steps that folks like Zuckerberg were making in the Obama era, working on benign issues like trying to help immigrants.

And of course, it gets a lot worse than just their lobbying. As I have frequently noted, Andreessen Horowitz hired a man as a partner at their firm despite his having no background or qualifications in tech, finance, or startups whatsoever. His only discernible qualification was that he had choked my unarmed neighbor Jordan Neely to death on a subway car.

This is how brazen, how toxic and destructive, we’ve allowed the industry formerly known as venture capital to become. We must understand that it is no longer a financial machine that is used to fund startups, but a political and social machine focused on dismantling democracy and civil society. And it’s time to act accordingly.

Up next: we’ll dive into the specifics of many of the points laid out above, to understand more about how we got here.

Another researcher is challenging OpenAI about the data driving its increasingly impressive array of mathematical discoveries. Just days after a bitter row erupted over whether the company's models benefited from unpublished work, a second mathematician has come forward accusing the AI giant of unethical and "dishonest" behavior and a lack of transparency about the origins of its training data.

In a series of posts on Mastodon, mathematician Andreas Thom raised concerns that interactions he and his colleagues had had with the ChatGPT chatbot before OpenAI's triumphant announcement may have contributed to its success in the field. One of the …

Read the full story at The Verge.