Pinboard (jm)
https://pinboard.in/u:jm/public/
recent bookmarks from jmSigns that it’s time to leave a company… | by adrian cockcroft2024-01-05T11:19:29+00:00
https://adrianco.medium.com/signs-that-its-time-to-leave-a-company-5f8759ad018e
jm
Founder led companies often have problems maintaining their innovation culture when the founder moves on. I think this is part of the problem at Amazon, and I was happy to be leaving as Andy Jassy took over from Jeff Bezos and Adam Selipsky took over AWS. Jeff Bezos was always focused on keeping the “Day 1” culture at Amazon, and everyone I talk to there is clear that it’s now “Day 2”. Politics and micromanagement have taken over, and HR processes take up far too much of everyone’s time.
There’s another red flag for me when large real estate construction projects take up too much management attention.
[...] We now have the situation that Amazon management care more about real estate than product. Where is the customer obsession in that?
There’s lessons to be learned, and that the delusion that they can roll back work from home and enforce RTO without killing off innovation is a big problem that will increasingly hurt them over time. I personally hired a bunch of people into AWS, in my own team and by encouraging people to join elsewhere. Nowadays I’d say a hard no to anyone thinking of working there. Try and get a job at somewhere like NVIDIA instead.
See also https://justingarrison.com/blog/2023-12-30-amazons-silent-sacking/ -- Justin Garrison's post about Amazon's Return-To-Office strategy really being "silent sacking" to downsize Amazon's staff, which has been confirmed by other AWS insiders.]]>aws amazon adrian-cockcroft how-we-work culture rto silent-sacking downsizinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:bd4683ce8d26/We just saw the future of war2023-10-12T11:13:09+00:00
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2023/10/10/we-just-saw-the-future-of-war-00120788
jm
[..] The famous maxim “‘The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” — apocryphally attributed to the writer William Gibson — takes on a very different meaning from the one now commonly understood. Big, rich states might inflate their defense budgets and boast of systems like Israel’s Iron Dome, but the extent to which sophisticated technology is “distributed” across a broad consumer landscape is enough for highly motivated smaller actors to do whatever violence they wish.
]]>culture politics world war israel tech gaza palestinehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:13a6c09d752c/The Disappearing Art Of Maintenance2023-09-19T08:53:20+00:00
https://www.noemamag.com/the-disappearing-art-of-maintenance/
jm[The maintainance team's] knowledge is only worth so much, however. The real challenge is creating an economic system that values labor outside of profit-driven production. Many have rightfully called for a revaluing of care work in recent years. Maintenance workers deserve a similar revival in attention — but not only that. The price mechanism, and the labor system built around it, is fundamentally opposed to maintenance, both in its narrowest practical applications and in its broadest philosophical implications. The fact that the failures of capitalism happened to encourage maintenance practices at the margins is not worth emulating, and we shouldn’t be waiting around for climate change to recreate that austerity at a global scale. It must be valued on its own terms, and that means tearing down the economic system that rejects it.
(via Keith Dawson)]]>via:kdawson maintenance repair technology infrastructure culture capitalism sustainabilityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:77b18b36d291/Naomi Klein on following her ‘doppelganger’ down the conspiracy rabbit hole – and why millions of people have entered an alternative political reality | Naomi Klein | The Guardian2023-08-26T21:07:55+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/26/naomi-klein-naomi-wolf-conspiracy-theories
jmAlmost everyone I talk to these days seems to be losing people to the Mirror World and its web of conspiracies. It’s as if those people live in a funhouse of distorted reflections and disorienting reversals. People who were familiar have somehow become alien, like a doppelganger of themselves, leaving us with that unsettled, uncanny feeling. The big misinformation players may be chasing clout, but plenty of people believe their terrifying stories. [...]
When looking at the Mirror World, it can seem obvious that millions of people have given themselves over to fantasy, to make-believe, to playacting. The trickier thing, the uncanny thing, really, is that’s what they see when they look at us. [...] on either side of the reflective glass, we are not having disagreements about differing interpretations of reality – we are having disagreements about who is in reality and who is in a simulation. [...]
To return to the original question: what is Wolf getting out of her alliance with Bannon and from her new life in the Mirror World? Everything. She is getting everything she once had and lost – attention, respect, money, power. Just through a warped mirror. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Lucifer, a fallen angel, thought it “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven”. My doppelganger may well still think Bannon is the devil, but perhaps she thinks it’s better to serve by his side than to keep getting mocked in a place that sells itself as heavenly but that we all know is plenty hellish in its own right.
]]>culture politics naomi-klein naomi-wolf us-politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b5b7d8dc0644/AI and the American Smile. How AI misrepresents culture through a facial expression2023-03-30T11:23:01+00:00
https://medium.com/@socialcreature/ai-and-the-american-smile-76d23a0fbfaf
jmThere are 18 images in the Reddit slideshow [a series of Midjourney-generated images of "selfies through history"] and they all feature the same recurring composition and facial expression. For some, this sequence of smiling faces elicits a sense of warmth and joyousness, comprising a visual narrative of some sort of shared humanity [...] But what immediately jumped out at me is that these AI-generated images were beaming a secret message hidden in plain sight. A steganographic deception within the pixels, perfectly legible to your brain yet without the conscious awareness that it’s being conned. Like other AI “hallucinations,” these algorithmic extrusions were telling a made up story with a straight face — or, as the story turns out, with a lying smile. [...]
How we smile, when we smile, why we smile, and what it means is deeply culturally contextual.
]]>ai america culture photography midjourney smiling smiles context historyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f1284c2778e7/OpenAI's Whisper is another case study in Colonisation2023-02-07T13:14:28+00:00
https://blog.papareo.nz/whisper-is-another-case-study-in-colonisation/
jmUltimately, it is up to Māori to decide whether Siri should speak Māori. It is up to Hawaiians to decide whether ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi should be on Duolingo. The communities from where the data was collected should decide whether their data should be used and for what. It's called self determination. It is not up to foreign governments or corporations to make key decisions that will affect our communities.
But then it gets complicated. Who in those communities decides on behalf of the community? Does a single individual from that community speak on the community's behalf? No. Does a government department such as Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori speak on behalf of Māori to make key decisions around te reo Māori? No. We quickly get into the internal politics of indigenous peoples and their communities, and that's when you need to stay in your lane.
Our organisation seeks advice and support from our kaumātua (elders). They help guide us in making key decisions for our people; in fact, the kaumātua decided in 2013 that Te Hiku Media should build a digital platform and put the language of the people online so that those who live outside of the haukāinga (local tribal lands) could have access to their language and culture. In building te reo Māori tools, we've sought the advice and the support of kaumātua and of people who've worked in the language revitalisation and Māori sovereignty space for decades. We are reminded that we are a blip in time. Data sovereignty didn't start 8 years ago, as one AWS employee put it, it started the day of first contact with the coloniser. Indigenous people have been fighting for their rights for centuries. So many people have come before us. They marched to parliament. They wrote and legislated the Māori Language Act. Many of these people who fought so hard have since passed away. Today we continue that fight in a digital society ensuring the final frontier of colonisation, the extraction of our data, fails.
]]>maori languages colonialism hawaii te-reo-maori extractivism culture languagehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8607ddf8c9e6/The LPA Cycle2022-10-03T21:43:18+00:00
https://twitter.com/buccocapital/status/1576909546164928513/photo/1
jmlpa google fail promotions how-we-work culturehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:71e62edacc23/Facebook Engineers Don’t Know Where They Keep Your Data2022-09-08T10:56:35+00:00
https://theintercept.com/2022/09/07/facebook-personal-data-no-accountability/
jmIn the March 2022 hearing, Zarashaw and Steven Elia, a software engineering manager, described Facebook as a data-processing apparatus so complex that it defies understanding from within. The hearing amounted to two high-ranking engineers at one of the most powerful and resource-flush engineering outfits in history describing their product as an unknowable machine. [...]
The fundamental problem, according to the engineers in the hearing, is that [...] the company never bothered to cultivate institutional knowledge of how each of these component systems works, what they do, or who’s using them.
]]>data engineering facebook meta privacy fail culture workhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f425923a47a2/Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid - The Atlantic2022-04-19T10:19:14+00:00
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/
jmWhat changed in the 2010s? [..] A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly 1 billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.
]]>communication culture democracy politics social-media facebook twitter trollshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:06a2ad42f8ab/Steve Yegge on deprecation policies2021-09-23T09:07:56+00:00
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc
jmThis lack of a support culture, combined with a “let’s break it in the name of making it prettier” deprecation treadmill, is alienating their developers. And that’s not a good thing if you want to build a long-lived platform.
Google, wake the fuck up. It’s 2020. You are still losing. It’s time to take a hard look in the mirror and answer for yourselves whether you really want to be in the Cloud business.
If you do, then stop breaking shit. You guys are rich. We developers are not. So when it comes to shouldering the burden of compatibility, you need to pay for it. Not us.
This is absolutely correct -- API deprecation is a lovely thing when you're the one doing the deprecating, but it's a disaster for the user experience, and sometimes that should be the most important thing.]]>deprecation compatibility google apis support culturehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b6592f19ab22/For want of a screenless MP3 player2021-08-10T09:38:26+00:00
https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s10e02-for-want-of-a-screenless-mp3-player/
jmYes, I know about Pi-Hole. If you are telling me about Pi-Hole you are inadvertently proving my point, which is that responsibility or intentionally parenting these days involves a frankly unreasonable and untenable amount of both content moderation both passive and interactive and at this point a quite enraging amount of goddamn systems administration.
]]>culture tech ads spam pi-hole home parenting lifehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:78c14f2555bc/Toxic Positivity2021-01-26T10:15:06+00:00
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-14/what-is-fono-toxic-positivity-is-doing-more-harm-than-good
jmCall it FONO, or fear of a negative outlook. Also known as “dismissive positivity,” it’s expressed as an overbearing cheerfulness no matter how bad things are, a pep that denies emotional oxygen to anything but a rictus grin.
(via JK)
]]>happiness psychology culture positivity fono outlook mindset via:johnkehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:64e15221b2bc/The #1 bug predictor is not technical, it's organizational complexity (August Lilleaas' blog)2019-12-19T12:06:35+00:00
https://augustl.com/blog/2019/best_bug_predictor_is_organizational_complexity/
jmOrganizational Complexity. Measures number of developers working on the module, number of ex-developers that used to work on the module but no longer does, how big a fraction of the organization as a whole that works or has worked on the module, the distance in the organization between the developer and the decision maker, etc.
]]>culture management programming organisations bureaucracy bugs qualityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a2b0fa7101a6/The Decade the Internet Lost Its Joy2019-12-11T16:28:22+00:00
https://gen.medium.com/the-decade-the-internet-lost-its-joy-4898c2c44cb4
jmon a systemic level, it’s impossible to ignore the immense effect of capitalistic forces on how we experience the internet today. The pockets of fun will continue to erode until we are all flattened into a single pancake of behavioral data. To rediscover joy on the internet will mean reforming it entirely. When Deadspin was shuttered by its private equity-instilled bosses earlier this year, I blogged that instead of looking backward, we needed to imagine something entirely different. The same goes for the internet as a whole — we need a digital world that is built to take care of us instead of profit from us.
]]>culture internet future capitalism web nostalgia joy fun silicon-valleyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e413c009af96/Paul Vixie's answer to "was DNS intentionally designed to be insecure?"2019-09-12T15:54:03+00:00
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/dnsop/ch3dM6_y2FSBVnSfwvA09nnVXIo
jm
no. nor ip itself, or ncp which preceded it, or tcp, or udp, or icmp, or smtp,
ot http. it was insecure because it evolved in a safe, germ free academic
bubble. absolutely none of it was designed with billions of people in mind, or
the full cross section of humanity which would include criminals and national
intelligence services. the world of the internet in 2019 would have been seen
as a total freak show by the community who deployed dns in the 1980's.
nothing that can be abused won't be. you may or may not believe this; it's
considered controversial, and there are arguments being had about it today.
but noone considered that now-controversial near-truism at all when the core
internet protocols were first designed and implemented. the idea of abuse was
considered novel in the 1990's when commercialization and privatization
brought abuse into the internet world and burst the academic bubble. a lot of
old timers blamed AOL and MSN and even Usenet for the problems, but in
actuality, it's what humans _always_ do at scale. putting the full spectrum of
human culture atop a technology platform designed for academic and
professional culture should have been understood to be a recipe for disaster.
]]>ietf computers abuse internet security dns paul-vixie history scale culturehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1b1ad7b60bf8/The Surprising Reason that There Are So Many Thai Restaurants in America - VICE2019-06-17T13:33:42+00:00
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/paxadz/the-surprising-reason-that-there-are-so-many-thai-restaurants-in-america
jmThe Ministry of Commerce’s Department of Export Promotion [..] drew up prototypes for three different “master restaurants,” which investors could choose as a sort of prefabricated restaurant plan, from aesthetic to menu offerings. Elephant Jump would be the fast casual option, at $5 to $15 per person; Cool Basil would be the mid-priced option at $15 to $25 a head; and the Golden Leaf prototype would cost diners $25 to $30, with décor featuring “authentic Thai fabrics and objets d’art.” (Does your favorite Thai spot have objets d’art? The restaurant may have been built from a government prototype.)
(Guinness do exactly the same thing for Irish pubs worldwide.)]]>cuisine culture food government marketing thai thailand guinness restaurants franchisinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:143759ab1dca/The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet2019-05-27T23:17:01+00:00
https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-7dc3e68a7cb1
jmThe internet of today is a battleground. The idealism of the ’90s web is gone. The web 2.0 utopia — where we all lived in rounded filter bubbles of happiness — ended with the 2016 Presidential election when we learned that the tools we thought were only life-giving could be weaponized too. The public and semi-public spaces we created to develop our identities, cultivate communities, and gain knowledge were overtaken by forces using them to gain power of various kinds (market, political, social, and so on). [...]
The dark forests grow because they provide psychological and reputational cover. They allow us to be ourselves because we know who else is there. Compared to the free market communication style of the mass channels — with their high risks, high rewards, and limited moderation — dark forest spaces are more Scandinavian in their values and the social and emotional security they provide. They cap the downsides of looking bad and the upsides of our best jokes by virtue of a contained audience.
]]>culture internet dark-forests future web privacy abuse communityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4ad4627f2fe1/Tim Robinson's townland index for Connemara and the Aran Islands | NUI Galway Digital Collections2019-04-30T13:09:07+00:00
https://digital.library.nuigalway.ie/islandora/object/nuigalway%3Arobinson
jmAn extensive card catalogue compiled by Tim Robinson throughout the 1980s and 1990s, drawn from his field notes. The series has been arranged by Robinson into civil parishes, and further divided into townlands. For most of the townlands, there are several record cards that give a detailed description of the local landscape. These describe historical, ecclesiastical, geological, and archaeological features. Anecdotes and local lore also feature in these. Robinson adds the names of people who helped him compile his information, usually local people, and often correspondents who sent him information helping him identify the origins of placenames, or certain landmarks and artefacts.
The cards also credit several secondary sources, including the OS maps and corresponding Field Name Books, Hardiman's History of Galway, Alexander Nimmo's map of the bogs in the West of Ireland, and many more.
In all cases in this series, the placename Tim Robinson used as his title appears as the title here. Many are in Irish, and some are in English. The corresponding translation is provided in the description.
]]>tim-robinson ireland history connemara via:voxhib galway maps mapping culture nuighttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:bb2f45e53922/How Gudetama, a lazy egg yolk with a butt, became an unstoppable cultural phenomenon - Vox2019-04-08T14:51:08+00:00
https://www.vox.com/2017/4/3/14685348/gudetama-sanrio-hello-kitty-explained
jmGudetama isn’t so much about relaxation as about the unbearableness of the world around it. Gudetama, in its golden nakedness, questions the meaning of life. If idleness is true bliss, Gudetama asks, then isn’t anything more than that painful?
]]>characters culture japan gudetama eggs odd ass yolks idleness lazinesshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:89920fa1e0fe/Why Do so Many Egyptian Statues Have Broken Noses? - Artsy2019-03-15T17:55:15+00:00
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-egyptian-statues-broken-noses
jmegypt culture art history noseshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e65f93db4a0f/YouTube, the Great Radicalizer - The New York Times2018-03-11T21:53:22+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html
jmIt seems as if you are never “hard core” enough for YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. It promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes. Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.
]]>youtube culture politics radicalization crazy machine-learning google zeynep-tufekcihttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:bc466ddc73da/Do algorithms reveal sexual orientation or just expose our stereotypes?2018-01-15T11:31:24+00:00
https://medium.com/@blaisea/do-algorithms-reveal-sexual-orientation-or-just-expose-our-stereotypes-d998fafdf477
jmculture facial-recognition ai papers facial-structure sexual-orientation lgbt computer-visionhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c9d1f4c5d33b/A Clash of Cultures2017-11-08T22:07:10+00:00
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5046
jmIn short, I am in support of Naomi Wu. Rather than let the Internet speculate on why, I am sharing my perspectives on the situation preemptively.
As with most Internet controversies, it’s messy and emotional. I will try my best to outline the biases and issues I have observed. Of course, everyone has their perspective; you don’t have to agree with mine. And I suspect many of my core audience will dislike and disagree with this post. However, the beginning of healing starts with sharing and listening. I will share, and I respectfully request that readers read the entire content of this post before attacking any individual point out of context.
The key forces I see at play are:
Prototype Bias – how assumptions based on stereotypes influence the way we think and feel
Idol Effect – the tendency to assign exaggerated capabilities and inflated expectations upon celebrities
Power Asymmetry – those with more power have more influence, and should be held to a higher standard of accountability
Guanxi Bias – the tendency to give foreign faces more credibility than local faces in China
All these forces came together in a perfect storm this past week.
]]>culture engineering maker naomi-wu women stereotypes bias idols power china bunniehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d988f6d57a9f/This Future Looks Familiar: Watching Blade Runner in 20172017-10-06T13:24:08+00:00
https://www.tor.com/2017/10/03/this-future-looks-familiar-watching-blade-runner-in-2017/
jmI told a lot of people that I was going to watch Blade Runner for the first time, because I know that people have opinions about Blade Runner. All of them gave me a few watery opinions to keep in mind going in—nothing that would spoil me, but things that would help me understand what they assured me would be a Very Strange Film.
None of them told me the right things, though.
]]>culture movies film blade-runner politics slavery replicantshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8c9bf5cce3d2/The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death - The New Yorker2017-03-23T10:48:47+00:00
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/the-gig-economy-celebrates-working-yourself-to-death
jmAt the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system. The contrast between the gig economy’s rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink in our thinking especially clear.
]]>capitalism culture gig-economy lyft fiverr work jobs employment self-reliancehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0ca0dce8f0b5/Video Games Are Boring2016-11-08T11:55:36+00:00
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-11-07-video-games-are-boring
jmI'm not remotely interested in shockingly good graphics, in murder simulators, in guns and knives and swords. I'm not that interested in adrenaline. My own life is thrilling enough. There is enough fear and hatred in the world to get my heart pounding. My Facebook feed and Twitter feed are enough for that. Walking outside in summer clothing is enough for that. I'm interested in care, in characters, in creation, in finding a path forward inside games that helps me find my path forward in life. I am interested in compassion and understanding. I'm interested in connecting. As Miranda July said, "all I ever wanted to know is how other people are making it through life." I want to make games that help other people understand life.
We are all overwhelmed with shock, with information, with change. The degree of interactivity in our lives is amazing and wonderful and I wouldn't exchange it for anything, but it is also shocking and overwhelming and it's causing us to dig in and try to find some peace by shutting each other out. On all sides of the political spectrum we've stopped listening to each other and I fear we are all leaning toward fascist thinking. We should be using this medium to help us adapt to our new, interactive lives. This is how we become relevant.
]]>essay feminism society culture games gaming life arthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:23d3685d0a2e/How Fucked Up is Your Management?2016-10-07T12:48:42+00:00
https://mfbt.ca/how-fucked-up-is-your-management-8a1086eeb4a9#.gt7wsrxbs
jmScore 1 “My management culture is fucked up” point for each of the following:
We have an unlimited vacation policy;
We don’t do regular 1:1s, but we have open office hours/are super available if anyone wants to chat;
We don’t have a process for interviewing, we just hire awesome people when we meet them;
We super care about diversity, but we don’t want to lower the bar so we just hire the best person for the job even if it means diversity suffers;
We don’t have defined levels and career paths for our employees, we’re a really flat org;
We don’t have formal managers for every staff member, everyone just gets their work done;
We don’t have, like, HR HR, but our recruiter/office manager/only female employee is super good if you want someone to talk to;
We don’t do performance improvement plans for employees that are struggling. We just have a super honest conversation about how they aren’t a good fit and fire them;
We would have some hard explaining to do if our salary list accidentally became public.
]]>startups management culture work vacation hiring office-hours managers diversity careers hrhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:846dc226ee4b/Remarks at the SASE Panel On The Moral Economy of Tech2016-10-04T15:35:35+00:00
http://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm
jmTreating the world as software promotes fantasies of control. And the best kind of control is control without responsibility. Our unique position as authors of software used by millions gives us power, but we don't accept that this should make us accountable. We're programmers—who else is going to write the software that runs the world? To put it plainly, we are surprised that people seem to get mad at us for trying to help. Fortunately we are smart people and have found a way out of this predicament. Instead of relying on algorithms, which we can be accused of manipulating for our benefit, we have turned to machine learning, an ingenious way of disclaiming responsibility for anything. Machine learning is like money laundering for bias. It's a clean, mathematical apparatus that gives the status quo the aura of logical inevitability. The numbers don't lie.
Particularly apposite today given Y Combinator's revelation that they use an AI bot to help 'sift admission applications', and don't know what criteria it's using: https://twitter.com/aprjoy/status/783032128653107200]]>culture ethics privacy technology surveillance ml machine-learning bias algorithms software controlhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c89bd2605bdf/Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study - The Washington Post2016-03-29T09:58:10+00:00
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/03/28/mass-surveillance-silences-minority-opinions-according-to-study/
jmElizabeth Stoycheff, lead researcher of the study and assistant professor at Wayne State University, is disturbed by her findings. “So many people I've talked with say they don't care about online surveillance because they don't break any laws and don't have anything to hide. And I find these rationales deeply troubling,” she said.
She said that participants who shared the “nothing to hide” belief, those who tended to support mass surveillance as necessary for national security, were the most likely to silence their minority opinions.
“The fact that the 'nothing to hide' individuals experience a significant chilling effect speaks to how online privacy is much bigger than the mere lawfulness of one's actions. It's about a fundamental human right to have control over one's self-presentation and image, in private, and now, in search histories and metadata,” she said.
]]>culture privacy psychology surveillance mass-surveillance via:snowden nothing-to-hide spiral-of-silence fearhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:50cf34291590/How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal2015-12-31T12:35:56+00:00
http://danluu.com/wat/#fn1
jmnormalization-of-deviance deviance bugs culture ops reliability work workplaces processes normshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:fd971ab1609c/re:Work - The five keys to a successful Google team2015-11-26T12:09:33+00:00
https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/
jmWe learned that there are five key dynamics that set successful teams apart from other teams at Google:
Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high quality work on time?
Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?
Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?
Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?
]]>teams google culture work management productivity hrhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3ac2508c267d/Ignoring ESR won't do anymore2015-11-07T14:15:03+00:00
https://plus.google.com/117846245886876007441/posts/JaHJf2KyGsP
jmI'm tired of this shit. Full stop tired. It's 2015 and these turds who grope their way around conferences and the like can make allegations like this, get a hand wave and an, "Oh, that's just crazy Raymond!" Fuck that. Fuck it from here to hell and back. Here's a man who really hasn't done anything all that special, is a totally crazy gun-toting misogynist of the highest order and, yet, he remains mostly unchallenged after the tempest dies down, time after time. [...]
I'm sure ESR will still be haunting conferences when your daughters reach their professional years unless you get serious about outing the assholes like him and making the community a lot less toxic than it is now.
Amen to that.]]>esr toxic harassment conferences sexism misogyny culturehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ee4abd3fd665/Further reading on just culture and blameless post mortems2015-10-02T16:58:48+00:00
http://rc3.org/2015/10/02/further-reading-on-just-culture-and-blameless-post-mortems/
jmpost-mortems culture etsy rafe-colburn rc3 john-allspaw ops coeshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:fd7088d03208/The price of the Internet of Things will be a vague dread of a malicious world2015-09-30T11:50:33+00:00
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/rinesi20150925
jmSo the fact is that our experience of the world will increasingly come to reflect our experience of our computers and of the internet itself (not surprisingly, as it’ll be infused with both). Just as any user feels their computer to be a fairly unpredictable device full of programs they’ve never installed doing unknown things to which they’ve never agreed to benefit companies they’ve never heard of, inefficiently at best and actively malignant at worst (but how would you now?), cars, street lights, and even buildings will behave in the same vaguely suspicious way. Is your self-driving car deliberately slowing down to give priority to the higher-priced models? Is your green A/C really less efficient with a thermostat from a different company, or it’s just not trying as hard? And your tv is supposed to only use its camera to follow your gestural commands, but it’s a bit suspicious how it always offers Disney downloads when your children are sitting in front of it. None of those things are likely to be legal, but they are going to be profitable, and, with objects working actively to hide them from the government, not to mention from you, they’ll be hard to catch.
]]>culture bots criticism ieet iot internet-of-things law regulation open-source applianceshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d3b1c7b3dc50/Kate Heddleston: How Our Engineering Environments Are Killing Diversity2015-09-14T02:43:43+00:00
https://www.kateheddleston.com/blog/how-our-engineering-environments-are-killing-diversity-introduction
jmvia:xaprb culture tech diversity sexism feminism engineering work workplaces feedbackhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:808de83cc640/grsecurity2015-08-28T12:24:23+00:00
https://grsecurity.net/announce.php
jmThis announcement is our public statement that we've had enough. Companies in the embedded industry not playing by the same rules as every other company using our software violates users' rights, misleads users and developers, and harms our ability to continue our work. Though I've only gone into depth in this announcement on the latest trademark violation against us, our experience with two GPL violations over the previous year have caused an incredible amount of frustration. These concerns are echoed by the complaints of many others about the treatment of the GPL by the embedded Linux industry in particular over many years.
With that in mind, today's announcement is concerned with the future availability of our stable series of patches. We decided that it is unfair to our sponsors that the above mentioned unlawful players can get away with their activity. Therefore, two weeks from now, we will cease the public dissemination of the stable series and will make it available to sponsors only. The test series, unfit in our view for production use, will however continue to be available to the public to avoid impact to the Gentoo Hardened and Arch Linux communities. If this does not resolve the issue, despite strong indications that it will have a large impact, we may need to resort to a policy similar to Red Hat's, described here or eventually stop the stable series entirely as it will be an unsustainable development model.
]]>culture gpl linux opensource security grsecurity via:nelson gentoo arch-linux gnuhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:53dd8bf92d26/Unlocking the Power of Stable Teams with Twitter’s SVP of Engineering - First Round Review2015-03-30T15:59:51+00:00
http://firstround.com/review/Twitter-Engineering-SVP-Chris-Fry-on-the-Power-of-Stable-Teams/
jmfeature-team culture development teams coding twitter work teamworkhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c5073baa8104/Richard Stallman’s GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty2015-03-22T11:16:32+00:00
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-gnu-manifesto-turns-thirty
jmrms gnu fsf culture history new-yorker profileshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0c011d0e08df/Avleen Vig on distributed engineering teams2015-01-05T11:05:39+00:00
http://silverwraith.com/blog/2014/12/the-case-for-distributed-teams/
jmI've been involved in the New York start up scene since I joined Etsy in 2010. Since that time, I've seen more and more companies there embrace having distributed teams. Two companies I know which have risen to the top while doing this have been Etsy and DigitalOcean. Both have exceptional engineering teams working on high profile products used by many, many people around the world. There are certainly others outside New York, including Automattic, GitHub, Chef Inc, Puppet... the list goes on.
So how did this happen? And why do people continue to insist that distributed teams lower performance, and are a bad idea?
Partly because we've done a poor job of showing our industry how to be successful at it, and partly because it's hard. Having successful distributed teams requires special skills from management, which arent't easily learned until you have to manage a distributed team. Catch 22.
]]>business culture management communication work distributed-teams avleen-vig engineeringhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:63a4aa8ccc65/Zeldman on Facebook's "Year In Review" feature2014-12-29T11:47:42+00:00
http://www.zeldman.com/2014/12/28/unexamined-privilege-is-the-real-source-of-cruelty-in-facebooks-your-year-in-review/
jmWhen you put together teams of largely homogenous people of the same class and background, and pay them a lot of money, and when most of those people are under 30, it stands to reason that when someone in the room says, “Let’s do ‘your year in review, and front-load it with visuals,’” most folks in the room will imagine photos of skiing trips, parties, and awards shows— not photos of dead spouses, parents, and children.
So it comes back to this. When we talk about the need for diversity in tech, we’re not doing it because we like quota systems. Diverse backgrounds produce differing points of view. And those differences are needed if we are to put the flowering of internet genius to use actually helping humanity with its many terrifying and seemingly intractable problems.
]]>best-practices sensitivity culture design silicon-valley youth privilege facebookhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4d86836aae34/Shanley Kane of Model View Culture Challenges a “Corrupt” Silicon Valley | MIT Technology Review2014-12-09T21:42:24+00:00
http://www.technologyreview.com/qa/533096/a-feminist-critique-of-silicon-valley/
jmIf their interests were better serving the world, using technology as a force for social justice, and equitably distributing technology wealth to enrich society … sure, they’d be acting against their interests. But the reality is that tech companies centralize power and wealth in a small group of privileged white men. When that’s the goal, then exploiting the labor of marginalized people and denying them access to power and wealth is 100 percent in line with the endgame. A more diverse tech industry would be better for its workers and everyone else, but it would be worse for the privileged white men at the top of it, because it would mean they would have to give up their monopoly on money and power. And they will fight that with everything they’ve got, which is why we see barriers to equality at every level of the industry.
]]>culture feminism tech mit-tech-review shanley-kane privilege vcs silicon-valleyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9152cca57c9a/Scaling email transparency2014-12-09T17:40:07+00:00
https://stripe.com/blog/scaling-email-transparency
jmcommunication culture email management stripe cc transparency civil-inattentionhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6ec7214e73f1/The Oral History Of The Poop Emoji (Or, How Google Brought Poop To America)2014-11-19T10:06:14+00:00
http://www.fastcompany.com/3037803/the-oral-history-of-the-poop-emoji-or-how-google-brought-poop-to-america
jm'I went over to Japan right around the time Takeshi was deciding which emoji were going to make it into the first cut of Gmail emoji. The [PILE_OF_POO emoji] was absolutely one of the necessary emoji that Takeshi said we have to have. There was actually conflict because there were people back at headquarters who had no idea what emoji were, and thought that having an animated [turd] in their Gmail was offensive.'
'[The poop emoji] got very popular when a comic called "Dr. Slump" was broadcast in Japan back to the ‘90s. Such poop was not an object to be disliked, but it had a funny meaning. This was a very popular comedy animation where a girl played a trick on other people using the poop. The poop was this funny object to play with. It was never serious.' 'In Japanese that’s called “unchi.” It’s a child word with a benign meaning. '
]]>culture emoji google pile-of-poo turd poo japan gmail unchi dr-slumphttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8bed631660a1/A Teenager Gets Grilled By Her Dad About Why She’s Not That Into Coding2014-10-30T21:36:36+00:00
https://medium.com/matter/you-should-learn-to-code-is-the-new-you-should-go-to-law-school-talk-dads-love-to-have-b03bd22b3c99
jmculture tech coding girls women feminism teenagers school jay-rosen stemhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:09cddc52f7ff/The Future Of The Culture Wars Is Here, And It's Gamergate2014-10-15T16:59:32+00:00
http://deadspin.com/the-future-of-the-culture-wars-is-here-and-its-gamerga-1646145844
jmLike, say, the Christian right, which came together through the social media of its day — little-watched television broadcasts, church bulletins, newsletters—or the Tea Party, which found its way through self-selection on social media and through back channels, Gamergate, in the main, comprises an assortment of agitators who sense which way the winds are blowing and feel left out. It has found a mobilizing event, elicited response from the established press, and run a successful enough public relations campaign that it's begun attracting visible advocates who agree with the broad talking points and respectful-enough coverage from the mainstream press. If there is a ground war being waged, as the movement's increasingly militaristic rhetoric suggests, Gamergate is fighting largely unopposed.
A more important resemblance to the Tea Party, though, is in the way in which it's focused the anger of people who realize the world is changing, and not necessarily to their benefit.
]]>culture gaming journalism gamergate tea-party grim-meathook-future culture-wars misogynyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9e1c2e636399/Tech’s Meritocracy Problem — Medium2014-10-13T13:00:25+00:00
https://medium.com/@jocelyngoldfein/techs-meritocracy-problem-a6e5e0a56157
jmMeritocracy is a myth. And our belief in it is holding back the tech industry from getting better.
]]>culture hiring diversity meritocracy tech software jobs work misogynyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5f4c3622ff43/YOU AND YOUR DAMNED GAMES, JON STONE — Why bother with #gamergate?2014-10-06T22:53:59+00:00
http://jonstonechannel2.tumblr.com/post/99246356388/why-bother-with-gamergate
jmSo what is #gamergate? #gamergate is a mob with torches aloft, hunting for any combustible dwelling and calling it a monster’s lair. #gamergate is a rage train, and everyone with an axe to grind wants a ride. Its fuel is a sour mash of entitlement, insecurity, arrogance and alienation. #gamergate is a vindication quest for political intolerance. #gamergate is revenge for every imagined slight. #gamergate is Viz’s Meddlesome Ratbag.
]]>gamergate culture gaming 4chan mobs feminismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0ab2cd688273/Older programmers aren't gone, they're just outnumbered2014-06-24T13:29:04+00:00
http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html
jmculture coding software age career reputation stack-overflow staffinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:cfac18dfe929/No, Nate, brogrammers may not be macho, but that’s not all there is to it2014-03-19T11:13:49+00:00
https://medium.com/technology-and-society/2f1fe84c5c9b
jmEvery group, including the excluded and disadvantaged, create cultural capital and behave in ways that simultaneously create a sense of belonging for them in their existing social circle while also potentially denying them entry into another one, often at the expense of economic capital. It’s easy to see that wearing baggy, sagging pants to a job interview, or having large and visible tattoos in a corporate setting, might limit someone’s access. These are some of the markers of belonging used in social groups that are often denied opportunities. By embracing these markers, members of the group create real barriers to acceptance outside their circle even as they deepen their peer relationships. The group chooses to adopt values that are rejected by the society that’s rejecting them. And that’s what happens to “weird nerd” men as well—they create ways of being that allow for internal bonding against a largely exclusionary backdrop.
(via Bryan O'Sullivan)
]]>nerds outsiders exclusion society nate-silver brogrammers sexism racism tech culture silicon-valley essays via:bos31337https://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a43b81f239dd/Hero Culture2014-01-28T17:45:53+00:00
http://www.activestate.com/blog/2014/01/devops-hero-culture
jmNow imagine that most of the team is involved in fire-fighting. New recruits see the older recruits getting praised for their brave work in the line-of-fire and they want that kind of praise and reward too. Before long everyone is focused on putting out fires and it is no ones interest to step back and take on the risks that long-term DevOps-focused goals entail.
]]>coding ops admin hero-coder hero-culture firefighting organisations teams culturehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6a7887fc4297/To my daughter's high school programming teacher2013-09-24T22:02:14+00:00
https://www.usenix.org/blog/my-daughters-high-school-programming-teacher
jmDuring the first semester of my daughter's junior/senior year, she took her first programming class. She knew I'd be thrilled, but she did it anyway.
When my daughter got home from the first day of the semester, I asked her about the class. "Well, I'm the only girl in class," she said. Fortunately, that didn't bother her, and she even liked joking around with the guys in class. My daughter said that you noticed and apologized to her because she was the only girl in class. And when the lessons started (Visual Basic? Seriously??), my daughter flew through the assigments. After she finished, she'd help classmates who were behind or struggling in class.
Over the next few weeks, things went downhill. While I was attending SC '12 in Salt Lake City last November, my daughter emailed to tell me that the boys in her class were harassing her. "They told me to get in the kitchen and make them sandwiches," she said. I was painfully reminded of the anonymous men boys who left comments on a Linux Pro Magazine blog post I wrote a few years ago, saying the exact same thing.
I am sick to death of this 'brogrammer' bullshit.]]>brogrammers sexism culture tech teaching coding software educationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:96b124f6e81d/12 DevOps anti-patterns2013-04-01T23:23:26+00:00
http://blog.devopsguys.com/2013/02/20/twelve-devops-anti-patterns/
jm
3. Rebrand your ops/dev/any team as the DevOps team
CIO: “I want to embrace DevOps over the coming year.”
MGR: “Already done, we changed the department signage this morning. We are so awesome we now have 2 DevOps teams.”
Yeah great. And I bet you now have lots of “DevOps” engineers walking round too. If you’re lucky they may sit next to each other at lunch.
]]>devops ops dev company culture work antipatterns engineeringhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8ced531282ea/OscarGodson.js | What I Learned At Yammer2013-03-06T22:20:50+00:00
http://oscargodson.com/posts/what-i-learned-at-yammer.html
jmyammer startups testing analytics culture workhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ecefbdb6163a/Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant2012-07-03T16:28:14+00:00
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-downfall-emails-steve-ballmer
jmmicrosoft bureaucracy stack-ranking hr culturehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:262b1db3ada7/Many Niches » Blog Archive » On Working At Amazon2012-06-11T23:26:45+00:00
http://www.manyniches.com/professional/on-working-at-amazon/
jmamazon culture workhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7acbd629ccaa/Indian Street Graphics - a set on Flickr2011-05-09T21:27:32+00:00
http://www.flickr.com/photos/meanestindian/sets/72157594428155937/
jmvia:bruces art culture design flickr indiahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:773a910074fb/brandnewretro | scans from the past2011-04-19T08:56:45+00:00
http://brandnewretro.wordpress.com/
jmfanzines irish ireland history 1980s 1970s dundalk culture scanshttps://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2a82cd6c0734/What Larry Page really needs to do to return Google to its startup roots2011-03-30T20:48:49+00:00
http://slacy.com/blog/2011/03/what-larry-page-really-needs-to-do-to-return-google-to-its-startup-roots/
jmgoogle management culture aws corporate-culture gossiphttps://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1614ea427117/Gamasutra - News - Opinion: Minecraft And The Question Of Luck2011-02-04T13:46:19+00:00
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/32760/Opinion_Minecraft_And_The_Question_Of_Luck.php
jmtribes viral minecraft gaming analysis games culture gamasutra via:nelson future software marketinghttps://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:343e55c0d6e5/The Moon Museum2010-11-23T10:12:25+00:00
http://greg.org/archive/2008/02/28/the_moon_museum.html
jm1960s art culture funny hack history museums space nasa apollo andy-warholhttps://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:12df7ad73b27/The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City « Viceland Games2010-05-11T12:40:29+00:00
http://www.viceland.com/blogs/uk-games/2010/05/10/the-totalitarian-buddhist-who-beat-sim-city/
jmwhoa mental architecture culture gaming society video simcity urban vicehttps://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f9f02bda9b91/PeteSearch: How to split up the US2010-02-08T15:25:42+00:00
http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-split-up-the-us.html
jmclusters facebook data statistics maps culture analytics datamining demographics socialnetworking graph datavizhttps://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:11f5af518b1b/Op-Ed Contributor - Microsoft’s Creative Destruction - NYTimes.com2010-02-05T10:41:42+00:00
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html?pagewanted=all
jmcleartype microsoft software bureaucracy politics culture management corporate nytimeshttps://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:90930a59d76c/A Whole Lotta Nothing: In Defense of Twittering During Tragedy2009-12-19T00:00:30+00:00
http://a.wholelottanothing.org/2009/12/in-defense-of-twittering-during-tragedy.html
jminternet twitter media culture tragedy public facebook phones familyhttps://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2a9efca4d05a/Science fiction: The stories of now - 16 September 2009 - New Scientist2009-09-18T23:47:57+00:00
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327263.200-science-fiction-the-stories-of-now.html?full=true
jmsf science-fiction uk scifi kim-stanley-robinson new-scientist culture toread bookshttps://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2d52f75e1804/