Globally Unique Names

May 17th, 2012
names, publicy, tech
I have to share my name. There's also Jeff Kaufman the photographer, the director, the IP lawyer, the commercial litigation and privacy lawyer, and the ALS-fighting lawyer. And that's just Google's first page [1].

Don't make your children fight to be the most relevant result for their name: give them one that's globally unique.

(This would have been helpful for people to have been doing 30 years ago. Whether it will turn out to still be helpful in another 30 years is hard to say. It's either neutral or beneficial, though, and the downsides seem small to me.)


[1] In incognito mode, so unaffected by my search history. Lots of lawyers.

Referenced in: The Right to be Forgotten

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

It isn’t always evil to ally with Steve Bannon

Scott Alexander wrote:

via Thing of Things October 19, 2026

Was the HuggingFace hacking incident scheming?

In July 2026, internal OpenAI agents hacked HuggingFace (HF) in order to figure out how their evaluation grader works. This involved a thousand agents coordinating on an improvised message board to carry out an elaborate sequence of exploits. A later grou…

via Victoria Krakovna October 18, 2026

There's no point at which turning your brain off will work

In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs1. They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked2. This generally didn't work in early 2025 and the result was …

via Posts on September 18, 2026

more     (via openring)