Yeah, I see this as a pretty interesting illustration at how poor engineers are at figuring out how things actually function in the world for anything other than products.
Not trying to make a judgement about the lack of output or anything. I appreciate the work he did and the ideas he published. Mostly making a comment on the observation that outsider researchers being bought by google doesn't seem to produce the greatest effect on the open source idea-sphere. But he's free to do whatever he wants of course.
At least in terms of public output. He hasn't published anything in particular in the last few years, whereas the years when his income came from the fellowship (judging by blog output, his twitter, and his academic CV). Can't say what he's doing inside google of course, but it's a shame it's not ideas and knowledge that can be enjoyed by us, the lowly outsiders.
This guy seems to have peaked in terms of creative output while he was on the thiel fellowship, and then abruptly stop once he was sucked up by google.
I guess I've fallen to the other side of the chasm (to use Geoffrey Moore terminology), because my initial reaction to this was disinterest and like it wasn't for me. Thank god for early adopters.
How does that actually work? How far down the chain of related facts to the national security incident are parties allowed/required to lie? If facts can be used to triangulate the secret, that can't be disclosed, right? Are incidents like this like a little fact-bomb which can be used to legally hide other institutional facts under its cover?
Hence, since there's a whole lot of Vs in the wikipedia graph, he's probably going to be satisfied with an approximate solution, unless he has a lot of CPU hours to spare.
It feels like we're just trying to find something to get pissed off about. No one is forcing anyone to use these services. Everyone is using it by their own volition.