Maciej Ceglowski <maciej@ceglowski.com> (415) 610-0231
I'm a programmer and writer who has spent the past two decades engaging with the social and political impacts of technology, both as a commentator and a practitioner. I'm a widely-cited author, industry critic, and conference speaker, and have testified as an invited witness before the U.S. Senate on the topic of data privacy. I'm also the founder and operator of Pinboard, a profitable one-man business I've run since 2009.
I'm looking for the opportunity to do meaningful work on the social and civilizational consequences of AI, including research, writing, and policy development for organizations that recognize the transformative nature of the technology, but are uneasy about the cramped terms of the current debate.
Pinboard is a paid bookmarking site and personal web archive that I run as a solo project. Responsible for design, code, operations, hosting, marketing, and everything else. The project has been profitable every year since launch, with 12,000 active users and over 60 terabytes of archived bookmarks.
In 2017 I acquired my once-famous competitor, del.icio.us, for $35K (del.icio.us had sold to Yahoo in 2004 for $21 million.)
A subscription newsletter on space exploration and science topics adjacent to Mars settlement. The newsletter has amassed nearly 300 paying subscribers in its first six months, converting free readers to paid at roughly three times the platform average.
Led and coordinated a discreet effort by security professionals to help prominent journalists and candidates running for Congress better secure their personal email and devices against Podesta-like attacks. As part of this work, I conducted onsite tech trainings for about 40 campaigns and a couple of dozen journalists.
A Washington Post op-ed I wrote about this work goes into more detail.
Designed and built an internal data warehouse for Twitter. Redesigned and built dynamic ad server infrastructure at SixApart.
First engineer hired at Yahoo's internal startup incubator.
Worked as a backend developer, community manager and bug squasher on the Pipes visual Web programming environment. Designed and implemented a visual airfare search tool called FareMaps (last seen entering Yahoo Legal).
Designed and built a JavaScript web application for bookmarking New York City restaurants. Created an iTunes recommendations engine using principal component analysis for France Telecom. With utter lack of shame, co-founded and wrote codebase for Podlinez, a service for listening to podcasts over a regular phone line (sold in December 2006). Built recommendations engine for upcoming.org
Worked in the Research in Information Technology program. This was an abortive effort by Mellon to get involved in funding open-source software that could be of use to higher education.
Built a number of open-source search engines and visualization tools for university use. These included a latent semantic search engine, a set of Perl modules for spreading activation search, a part-of-speech tagger for English, unsupervised clustering tools, and a weblog census.
I've done most of my recent work on Pinboard with Python, TypeScript, PHP, and MySQL, with AI-assisted workflows around testing, code gardening, and new feature development. My earlier career was in Perl, which I feel prepared me well for the current coding paradigm of muttering inscrutable incantations at an AI.
Seventeen years of solo work have taught me how to stay unruffled under pressure, and to translate high-level business goals into features and working code without needing a lot of supervision.
You can find my full list of conference talks here.
Some highlights:
Senate testimony on "Privacy Rights and Data Collection in a Digital Economy", where I make the case for regulating privacy in a way that avoids the mistakes of the GDPR.
Superintelligence, the Idea that Eats Smart People, my 2015 critique of Bostrom and Yudkowsky-like hard takeoff scenarios for AI.
Haunted by Data, an argument that we should treat pervasive data collection the way we do radioactive waste, rather than mining it as a resource.
Our Comrade the Electron, a meditation on the life of Lev Termen and the difficulty of predicting the impacts of truly revolutionary technology.
B.A., Middlebury College, 1997 (double major in Russian and Studio Art). Graduated summa cum laude. Languages spoken: English, Polish, French, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin.