Pinboard (jm)
https://pinboard.in/u:jm/public/
recent bookmarks from jmCooperative DCs2026-04-20T12:17:13+00:00
https://en.reset.org/a-future-vision-of-data-centres-from-big-tech-builds-to-community-owned-cooperatives/
jmin Belgium, Nubo Cooperative offers an email service, cloud storage, digital calendar and domain name, all run on local, Nubo-owned servers. When you purchase any of these services, you become a member of Nubo and can participate in decision-making as part of the cooperative. “This allows users to place trust in the structure that manages the services,” Nubo writes on its website. It compares this to a private company, where “the lack of transparency makes trust impossible”. The cooperative commits to allocating profits to achieve social objectives rather than using them to enrich shareholders.
This is actually a very interesting idea...]]>community datacenters cooperatives society nubo coops tech hosting cloudhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3fa09e9cb608/TurboQuant: Redefining AI efficiency with extreme compression2026-03-25T16:29:26+00:00
https://research.google/blog/turboquant-redefining-ai-efficiency-with-extreme-compression/
jm
- High-quality compression (the PolarQuant method): TurboQuant starts by randomly rotating the data vectors. This clever step simplifies the data's geometry, making it easy to apply a standard, high-quality quantizer (a tool that maps a large set of continuous values, like precise decimals, to a smaller, discrete set of symbols or numbers, like integers: examples include audio quantization and jpeg compression) to each part of the vector individually. This first stage uses most of the compression power (the majority of the bits) to capture the main concept and strength of the original vector.
- Eliminating hidden errors: TurboQuant uses a small, residual amount of compression power (just 1 bit) to apply the QJL algorithm to the tiny amount of error left over from the first stage. The QJL stage acts as a mathematical error-checker that eliminates bias, leading to a more accurate attention score.
QJL: The zero-overhead, 1-bit trick
QJL uses a mathematical technique called the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transform to shrink complex, high-dimensional data while preserving the essential distances and relationships between data points. It reduces each resulting vector number to a single sign bit (+1 or -1). This algorithm essentially creates a high-speed shorthand that requires zero memory overhead. To maintain accuracy, QJL uses a special estimator that strategically balances a high-precision query with the low-precision, simplified data. This allows the model to accurately calculate the attention score (the process used to decide which parts of its input are important and which parts can be safely ignored).
PolarQuant: A new “angle” on compression
PolarQuant addresses the memory overhead problem using a completely different approach. Instead of looking at a memory vector using standard coordinates (i.e., X, Y, Z) that indicate the distance along each axis, PolarQuant converts the vector into polar coordinates using a Cartesian coordinate system. This is comparable to replacing "Go 3 blocks East, 4 blocks North" with "Go 5 blocks total at a 37-degree angle”. This results in two pieces of information: the radius, which signifies how strong the core data is, and the angle indicating the data’s direction or meaning). Because the pattern of the angles is known and highly concentrated, the model no longer needs to perform the expensive data normalization step because it maps data onto a fixed, predictable "circular" grid where the boundaries are already known, rather than a "square" grid where the boundaries change constantly. This allows PolarQuant to eliminate the memory overhead that traditional methods must carry.
]]>ai tech vectors search quantization turboquant research algorithms compression papers qjl error-detection polarquanthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1abb51ace2eb/Persona identity verification is a GDPR nightmare2026-02-24T13:16:07+00:00
https://thelocalstack.eu/posts/linkedin-identity-verification-privacy/
jm
For a three-minute identity check, this is what Persona collected:
- My full name — first, middle, last
- My passport photo — the full document, both sides, all data on the face of it
- My selfie — a photo of my face taken in real-time
- My facial geometry — biometric data extracted from both images, used to match the selfie to the passport
- My NFC chip data — the digital info stored on the chip inside my passport
- My national ID number
- My nationality, sex, birthdate, age
- My email, phone number, postal address
- My IP address, device type, MAC address, browser, OS version, language
- My geolocation — inferred from my IP
And then there’s the weird stuff:
- Hesitation detection — they tracked whether I paused during the process
- Copy and paste detection — they tracked whether I was pasting information instead of typing it
Behavioral biometrics. On top of the physical biometrics. For a LinkedIn badge.
Persona didn’t just use what I gave them. They went and cross-referenced me against what they call their “global network of trusted third-party data sources”:
- Government databases
- National ID registries
- Consumer credit agencies
- Utility companies
- Mobile network providers
- Postal address databases
They use uploaded images of identity documents — that’s my passport — to train their AI. They’re teaching their system to recognize what passports look like in different countries. They also use your selfie to “identify improvements in the Service.”
The legal basis? Not consent. Legitimate interest. Meaning they decided on their own that it’s fine. Under GDPR, they’re supposed to balance their “interest” against your fundamental rights. Whether feeding European passports into machine learning models passes that test — well, that’s a question worth asking.
I came for a badge. I stayed as training data.
The whole thing took three minutes. Scan, selfie, done.
Understanding what I actually agreed to took me an entire weekend reading 34 pages of legal documents.
I handed a US company my passport, my face, and the mathematical geometry of my skull. They cross-referenced me against credit agencies and government databases. They’ll use my documents to train their AI. And if the US government comes knocking, they’ll hand it all over — even if it’s stored in Europe, even if I’m European, and possibly without ever telling me.
It seems they are also linked to Roblox and Reddit as an age verification provider, which is worrying -- this level of deeply-intrusive background check is massive overkill for a simple age verification process.
ORG are calling for regulation of the age verification industry, BTW: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/online-safety-act-org-calls-for-regulation-of-age-assurance-industry/
]]>age-verification discord reddit roblox linkedin tech peter-thiel org persona gdpr privacy data-protection data-privacyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9170ebca7ec9/What Would “Good” AI Look Like?2025-11-10T11:03:13+00:00
https://www.anildash.com//2025/05/02/what-would-good-ai-look-like/
jmai llms future good-ai anil-dash techhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a37704a9a596/An exploration on what could be a leftist position on generative AI2025-11-10T11:00:15+00:00
https://www.jacky.wtf/essays/2025/left-ai/
jmhow-we-work socialism jacky-alcine politics left-wing black ai llms future techhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:00f817eb44f5/Today is when Amazon brain drain finally caught up with AWS (The Register)2025-10-21T10:01:47+00:00
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/aws_outage_amazon_brain_drain_corey_quinn/
jmAWS has given increasing levels of detail, as is their tradition, when outages strike, and as new information comes to light. Reading through it, one really gets the sense that it took them 75 minutes to go from "things are breaking" to "we've narrowed it down to a single service endpoint, but are still researching," which is something of a bitter pill to swallow. To be clear: I've seen zero signs that this stems from a lack of transparency, and every indication that they legitimately did not know what was breaking for a patently absurd length of time. [...]
At the end of 2023, Justin Garrison left AWS and roasted them on his way out the door. He stated that AWS had seen an increase in Large Scale Events (or LSEs), and predicted significant outages in 2024. It would seem that he discounted the power of inertia, but the pace of senior AWS departures certainly hasn't slowed — and now, with an outage like this, one is forced to wonder whether those departures are themselves a contributing factor.
You can hire a bunch of very smart people who will explain how DNS works at a deep technical level (or you can hire me, who will incorrect you by explaining that it's a database), but the one thing you can't hire for is the person who remembers that when DNS starts getting wonky, check that seemingly unrelated system in the corner, because it has historically played a contributing role to some outages of yesteryear.
When that tribal knowledge departs, you're left having to reinvent an awful lot of in-house expertise that didn't want to participate in your RTO games, or play Layoff Roulette yet again this cycle. This doesn't impact your service reliability — until one day it very much does, in spectacular fashion. I suspect that day is today.
Ouch. This is a very painful read and I'd say AWS are not happy to see it....]]>aws amazon layoffs tech how-we-work lses outages us-east-1 rto brain-drain workhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:dfb5b53a1fe3/To make AI safe, we must develop it as fast as possible without safeguards2025-09-24T10:45:35+00:00
https://directing.attention.to/p/to-make-ai-safe-we-must-develop-it
jmAs the leader of an AI company which stands to benefit enormously if I convince enough investors that AGI is inevitable, it’s clear to me that AGI is inevitable. But developing superintelligence safely is a complex process. It would take time and require difficult discussions — discussions that everyone in society should have a say in, not just the small number of researchers working on it. If we pursue that path, there's a real risk that somebody else will make AGI first and destroy all human life before we have a chance to ourselves. That would be unacceptable.
To stop bad actors developing AGI that could kill us all, we need good actors to develop AGI that could also kill us all.
I've come to realise that our best hope is to race at breakneck speed towards this terrifying, thrilling goal, removing any safeguards that risk slowing our progress. Once we've unleashed the technology's full destructive power, we can then adopt a "stable door" approach to its regulation and control — after all, that approach has worked beautifully for previous technologies, from fossil fuels to microplastics.
]]>agi ai-safety satire funny comedy tech futurehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6e381d1b762d/EFF gets it wrong on AI2025-03-19T11:17:38+00:00
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/californias-ab-412-bill-could-crush-startups-and-cement-big-tech-ai-monopoly
jm
California legislators have begun debating a bill (A.B. 412) that would require AI developers to track and disclose every registered copyrighted work used in AI training. At first glance, this might sound like a reasonable step toward transparency. But it’s an impossible standard that could crush small AI startups and developers while giving big tech firms even more power.
Back in the early 2000s, we wrote SpamAssassin, a machine-learning driven antispam system which was trained on user-submitted data. We tracked the attribution of every item of input used to train that system. We weren't even a startup, we were an open source project.
If we could do it, why can't modern AI systems? And don't say "because the existing large language models didn't do it" -- that's just accepting past shitty behaviour as a fait accompli.
Extremely disappointed in the current state of the EFF if this is what they think.]]>ai llms training copyright eff politics tech startupshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:599ee125077b/18F's shutdown page2025-03-03T13:26:18+00:00
https://18f.org/
jm
For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving you to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effective, and to save money for American taxpayers.
However, all employees at 18F – a group that the Trump Administration GSA Technology Transformation Services Director called "the gold standard" of civic tech – were terminated today at midnight ET.
]]>policy government programming tech software politics 18f maga dogehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:81bb84dd83dd/Artsy's Technology Choices evaluation process2025-01-24T10:25:47+00:00
https://github.com/artsy/README/blob/main/playbooks/technology-choices.md
jmWe want to accomplish a lot with a lean team, which means we must choose stable technologies. However, we also want to adopt best-of-breed technologies or best-suited tools, which may need work or still be evolving. We've borrowed from ThoughtWorks' Radar to define the following stages for evaluating, adopting, and retiring technologies:
- Adopt: Reasonable defaults for most work. These choices have been exercised successfully in production at Artsy and there is a critical mass of engineers comfortable working with them.
- Trial: These technologies are being evaluated in limited production circumstances. We don't have enough production experience to recommend them for high-risk or business-critical use cases, but they may be worth consideration if your project seems like a fit.
- Assess: Technologies we are interested in and maybe even built proofs-of-concept for, but haven't yet trialed in production.
- Hold: Based on our experience, these technologies should be avoided. We've found them to be flawed, immature, or simply supplanted by better alternatives. In some cases these remain in legacy production uses, but we should take every opportunity to retire or migrate away.
(Via Lar Van Der Jagt on the Last Week In AWS slack instance)]]>via:lwia tech technology radar choices evaluation process architecture planning toolshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d0c16f0acc37/Watch Duty2025-01-12T12:32:28+00:00
https://gizmodo.com/watch-duty-hits-1-on-apple-app-store-as-wildfires-rage-in-california-2000547740
jmThe [Watch Duty] app gives users the latest alerts about fires in their area [in California] and has become a vital service for millions of users in the western U.S. struggling with the seemingly constant threat of deadly wildfires—one major reason it had over 360,000 unique visits from 8:00-8:30 a.m. local time Wednesday. And the man behind Watch Duty promises that as a nonprofit, his organization has no plans to pull an OpenAI and become a profit-seeking enterprise.
]]>non-profits tech watch-duty apps mobile public-goodhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a6363b412c60/Why did Silicon Valley turn right?2024-12-17T13:18:12+00:00
https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/why-did-silicon-valley-turn-right?
jmNo-one now believes - or pretends to believe - that Silicon Valley is going to connect the world, ushering in an age of peace, harmony and likes across nations. [...] A decade ago, liberals, liberaltarians and straight libertarians could readily enthuse about “liberation technologies” and Twitter revolutions in which nimble pro-democracy dissidents would use the Internet to out-maneuver sluggish governments. Technological innovation and liberal freedoms seemed to go hand in hand.
Now they don’t. Authoritarian governments have turned out to be quite adept for the time being, not just at suppressing dissidence but at using these technologies for their own purposes. Platforms like Facebook have been used to mobilize ethnic violence around the world, with minimal pushback from the platform’s moderation systems [...]
My surmise is that this shift in beliefs has undermined the core ideas that held the Silicon Valley coalition together. Specifically, it has broken the previously ‘obvious’ intimate relationship between innovation and liberalism.
I don’t see anyone arguing that Silicon Valley innovation is the best way of spreading liberal democratic awesome around the world any more, or for keeping it up and running at home. Instead, I see a variety of arguments for the unbridled benefits of innovation, regardless of its benefits for democratic liberalism. I see a lot of arguments that AI innovation in particular is about to propel us into an incredible new world of human possibilities, provided that it isn’t restrained by DEI, ESG and other such nonsense. Others (or the same people) argue that we need to innovate, innovate, innovate because we are caught in a technological arms race with China, and if we lose, we’re toast. Others (sotto or brutto voce; again, sometimes the same people) - contend innovation isn’t really possible in a world of democratic restraint, and we need new forms of corporate authoritarianism with a side helping of exit, to allow the kinds of advances we really need to transform the world.
]]>essays henry-farrell tech politics silicon-valley fascism democracy liberalismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:556e35193a52/The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine2024-08-12T22:45:05+00:00
https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everything/communities-of-practice/the-soul-of-maintaining-a-new-machine/1
jmThey ate together every chance they could. They had to. The enormous photocopiers they were responsible for maintaining were so complex, temperamental, and variable between models and upgrades that it was difficult to keep the machines functioning without frequent conversations with their peers about the ever-shifting nuances of repair and care. The core of their operational knowledge was social. That’s the subject of this chapter.
It was the mid-1980s. They were the technician teams charged with servicing the Xerox machines that suddenly were providing all of America’s offices with vast quantities of photocopies and frustration. The machines were so large, noisy, and busy that most offices kept them in a separate room.
An inquisitive anthropologist discovered that what the technicians did all day with those machines was grotesquely different from what Xerox corporation thought they did, and the divergence was hampering the company unnecessarily. The saga that followed his revelation is worth recounting in detail because of what it shows about the ingenuity of professional maintainers at work in a high-ambiguity environment, the harm caused by an institutionalized wrong theory of their work, and the invincible power of an institutionalized wrong theory to resist change.
]]>anthropology culture history maintenance repair xerox technicians tech communities-of-practice maintainers opshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d3cd7af91775/Heather Burns farewells Ross Anderson2024-04-29T13:45:53+00:00
https://heatherburns.tech/2024/04/29/cheers-ross/
jm"The idea that complex social problems are amenable to cheap technical solutions is the siren song of the software salesman and has lured many a gullible government department on to the rocks."
touché...]]>aphorisms ross-anderson tech risks government technologyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:cb5d5dd45a1c/The EU should support Ireland’s bold move to regulate Big Tech2024-01-04T11:49:17+00:00
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4380369-the-eu-should-support-irelands-bold-move-to-regulate-big-tech/
jm
...a simple, easily enforceable rule that could change the game: All recommender systems based on intimately profiling people should be turned off by default. In practice, that means that the big platforms cannot automatically run algorithms that use information about a person’s political views, sex life, health or ethnicity. A person will be able to switch an algorithm on, but those toxic algorithms will no longer be on by default. Users will still have access to algorithmic amplification, but they will have to opt in to get it.
Great idea. The toxicity driven by "personalized feeds" has been extremely harmful.]]>cnm regulation ireland tech personalisation algorithmic-feeds tiktok instagram facebook twitter social-mediahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:aece7c98ad57/A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”2023-11-23T10:56:50+00:00
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/03/13/144721/a-startup-is-pitching-a-mind-uploading-service-that-is-100-percent-fatal/
jmThe product is “100 percent fatal,” says McIntyre. “That is why we are uniquely situated among the Y Combinator companies.”
]]>
life-extension science tech y-combinator startups funny fatal braaaainshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c7537c17fc32/Posthumanism’s Revolt Against Responsibility2023-11-15T11:15:49+00:00
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/kirsch-revolt-gertz-post-human-transhumanism-haraway-climate
jmit is somewhat misleading to say we have entered the “Anthropocene” because anthropos is not as a whole to blame for climate change. Rather, in order to place the blame where it truly belongs, it would be more appropriate— as Jason W. Moore, Donna J. Haraway, and others have argued— to say we have entered the “Capitalocene.” Blaming humanity in general for climate change excuses those particular individuals and groups actually responsible. To put it another way, to see everyone as responsible is to see no one as responsible. Anthropocene antihumanism is thus a public-relations victory for the corporations and governments destroying the planet.
]]>technology tech posthumanism anthropocene capitalism humanity future climate-change tescrealhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d2a43f6d5964/Cruise self-driving cars fail to perceive kids or holes in the road2023-11-08T01:37:34+00:00
https://theintercept.com/2023/11/06/cruise-self-driving-cars-children/
jm
'The materials note results from simulated tests in which a Cruise vehicle is in the vicinity of a small child. “Based on the simulation results, we can’t rule out that a fully autonomous vehicle might have struck the child,” reads one assessment. In another test drive, a Cruise vehicle successfully detected a toddler-sized dummy but still struck it with its side mirror at 28 miles per hour.
The internal materials attribute the robot cars’ inability to reliably recognize children under certain conditions to inadequate software and testing. “We have low exposure to small VRUs” — Vulnerable Road Users, a reference to children — “so very few events to estimate risk from,” the materials say. Another section concedes Cruise vehicles’ “lack of a high-precision Small VRU classifier,” or machine learning software that would automatically detect child-shaped objects around the car and maneuver accordingly. The materials say Cruise, in an attempt to compensate for machine learning shortcomings, was relying on human workers behind the scenes to manually identify children encountered by AVs where its software couldn’t do so automatically.'
also:
'Cruise has known its cars couldn’t detect holes, including large construction pits with workers inside, for well over a year, according to the safety materials reviewed by The Intercept. Internal Cruise assessments claim this flaw constituted a major risk to the company’s operations. Cruise determined that at its current, relatively miniscule fleet size, one of its AVs would drive into an unoccupied open pit roughly once a year, and a construction pit with people inside it about every four years.'
The company's response? Avoid driving during the daytime, when most kids are awake. Night time kids better watch out, though.]]>
cruise fail tech self-driving cars vrus kids safety via:donalhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d8c7cf4090a7/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/Automation Bias2023-08-08T10:39:14+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation_bias
jmautomation bias complacency future ai ml tech via:etienneshrdluhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:760d2ba11e5d/Why the United States should prioritize autonomous demining technology2023-05-24T11:08:04+00:00
https://thebulletin.org/2023/05/why-the-united-states-should-prioritize-autonomous-demining-technology/
jmInvestments in and development of technologies for autonomous demining operations, post war, are long overdue and consistent with the White House’s push for a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, which vows to use autonomy for the public good. Alas, while the Defense Department has pursued autonomous systems for the battlefield and the unincentivized private sector has focused on producing dancing robotic dogs, efforts to develop autonomous demining technology have stagnated. The United States should provide funding to energize those efforts, regardless of what decision is made in regard to sending cluster bombs to Kiev.
]]>demining ai future warfare mines techhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5c89c397f7aa/Holly Herndon on AI music2023-04-20T11:57:08+00:00
https://twitter.com/joecoscarelli/status/1648797779827863555
jmholly-herndon ai music ml future tech sampling spawninghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8bdda1f4afb5/The tech tycoon martyrdom charade2023-03-01T11:36:59+00:00
https://anildash.com/2023/02/27/tycoon-martyrdom-charade/
jmIt's impossible to overstate the degree to which many big tech CEOs and venture capitalists are being radicalized by living within their own cultural and social bubble. Their level of paranoia and contrived self-victimization is off the charts, and is getting worse now that they increasingly only consume media that they have funded, created by their own acolytes.
In a way, it's sort of like a "VC Qanon", and it colors almost everything that some of the most powerful people in the tech industry see and do — and not just in their companies or work, but in culture, politics and society overall. We're already seeing more and more irrational, extremist decision-making that can only be understood through this lens, because on its own their choices seem increasingly unfathomable.
]]>vc tech anil-dash radicalization politics us-politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e9d970830ee7/Cory Doctorow Wants You to Know What Computers Can and Can’t Do2022-12-05T23:38:44+00:00
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/cory-doctorow-wants-you-to-know-what-computers-can-and-cant-do
jm"Do you think that the concern over A.I.’s expanding capabilities is misplaced?
I do. I think that the problems of A.I. are not its ability to do things well but its ability to do things badly, and our reliance on it nevertheless. So the problem isn’t that A.I. is going to displace all of our truck drivers. The fact that we’re using A.I. decision-making at scale to do things like lending, and deciding who is picked for child-protective services, and deciding where police patrols go, and deciding whether or not to use a drone strike to kill someone, because we think they’re a probable terrorist based on a machine-learning algorithm—the fact that A.I. algorithms don’t work doesn’t make that not dangerous. In fact, it arguably makes it more dangerous. The reason we stick A.I. in there is not just to lower our wage bill so that, rather than having child-protective-services workers go out and check on all the children who are thought to be in danger, you lay them all off and replace them with an algorithm."]]>ai ml cory-doctorow tech future capitalismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5e77362ce6fe/Dan Luu on the "cold boot" scenario2022-11-16T15:21:16+00:00
https://mastodon.social/@danluu/109344381163075225
jmWhen I was in Azure, I asked around about what the plan was if "the really big one" hit since deep expertise was nearly totally concentrated in Redmond and, at the time, Azure was guaranteed to have a global outage if a major earthquake incapacitated Redmond. Of course the plan was that there was no real plan and people expected that Azure would have a very extended global outage and an org that was on its way to becoming a $1T business unit would have its value basically wiped out.
]]>cold-boot software tech it ops disaster-recovery azure dan-luuhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4571a84cf709/Uber's still not profitable2022-08-08T14:45:00+00:00
https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/05/a-lousy-taxi/#a-giant-asterisk
jmBut every bezzle ends. The Saudi royals – who provided much of the billions used to prop up the Uber bezzle in its first decades – cashed out with the company's IPO. The company may lure in some new suckers and delay the exodus of current bag-holders with its current fantasy of infinite price-hikes and wage theft, but that's a fantasy, too.
]]>uber business technology scams hubert-horan techhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:556c6c865f70/Zuboff’s Cycle of Dispossession2022-06-23T17:17:49+00:00
https://biancawylie.medium.com/zuboffs-cycle-of-dispossession-e9cf54a2ba3c
jmcapitalism tech dispossession shoshana-zuboff future democracy embrace-extend-extinguishhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d6e7fb01e3f2/"The first Starlink war"2022-05-10T08:41:10+00:00
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1523791050313433088.html
jmUkraine's 'GIS Art for Artillery' app combined with Starlink actually gives the Ukrainian military measurably better than US Military standard artillery command and control. The Ukraine War is the first Starlink War & the side with Starlink is beating the side without.
This is pretty nuts. On the other hand, though, Starlink's operational security is now critically important, and doubtless being heavily targeted by Russian hackers, and Ukraine's tactics are reliant on the vagaries of Elon Musk...
Source twitter thread: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1523791050313433088]]>starlink artillery internet gis elon-musk warfare tech gis-arthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:40748bc13e4f/New lithium-air battery technology doubles current battery performance2022-02-07T13:05:24+00:00
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/01/220120140724.htm
jmclimate-change flight travel power batteries lithium-air science techhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2d7bad05d0dd/Kiwix2022-01-01T13:22:00+00:00
https://www.kiwix.org/en/about/
jmAn offline reader for [...] Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, or TED Talks. It makes knowledge available to people with no or limited internet access. The software as well as the content is free to use for anyone.
Will run on an Android phone, and is used by 'more than 4 million users in 200 countries', which is pretty impressive.]]>kiwix developing-world wikipedia project-gutenberg compression apps mobile techhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ff6dbe8f5b8d/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/Cryptocurrency is an abject disaster2021-04-28T11:00:21+00:00
https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disaster.html
jmI’ve had to develop a special radar for reading product pages now: a mounting feeling of dread as a promising technology is introduced while I inevitably arrive at the buried lede: it’s more crypto bullshit. Cryptocurrency is the multi-level marketing of the tech world. “Hi! How’ve you been? Long time no see! Oh, I’ve been working on this cool distributed database file store archive thing. We’re doing an ICO next week.” Then I leave. Any technology which is not an (alleged) currency and which incorporates blockchain anyway would always work better without it.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cryptocurrency scams and ponzi schemes trussed up to look like some kind of legitimate offering. Even if the project you’re working on is totally cool and solves all of these problems, there are 100 other projects pretending to be like yours which are ultimately concerned with transferring money from their users to their founders. Which one are investors more likely to invest in? Hint: it’s the one that’s more profitable. Those promises of “we’re different!” are always hollow anyway. Remember the DAO? They wanted to avoid social arbitration entirely for financial contracts, but when the chips are down and their money was walking out the door, they forked the blockchain.
]]>blockchain bitcoin crypto cryptocurrency abuse capitalism bullshit techhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:494b6b1717b6/I Thought My Job Was To Report On Tech In India. Instead, I’ve Watched Democracy Decline.2021-04-12T09:51:35+00:00
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/indian-government-using-tech-destroy-democracy
jmI love tech. But watching it intersect with a Hindu nationalist government trying to crush dissent, choke a free press, and destroy a nation’s secular ethos doesn’t feel like something I bought a ticket to. Writing about technology from India now feels like having a front-row seat to the country’s rapid slide into authoritarianism. “It’s like watching a train wreck while you’re inside the train,” I Slacked my boss in November.
]]>india technology whatsapp facebook twitter scary authoritarianism dystopia techhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4fbaf295eccc/Iona Technologies' 30 year anniversary2021-03-19T11:41:32+00:00
https://techarchives.irish/anniversaries-1990-1999/#march1991
jmiona-technologies history ireland tech software corba tcdhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6a8df82ee21b/Stripe’s first negative emissions purchases2020-05-19T09:02:33+00:00
https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases
jmLast year, Stripe announced our Negative Emissions Commitment, pledging at least $1M per year to pay, at any price, for the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and its sequestration in secure long-term storage. We’ve since built a small team within Stripe to focus on creating a market for carbon removal by being an early customer for promising negative emissions technologies.
Today, after a rigorous search and review by a panel of independent scientific experts, we’re excited to announce our first purchases. Our request for projects garnered a wide range of negative emissions technologies which came in two broad categories.
The funded projects are: Climeworks, Charm Industrial, Project Vesta, and CarbonCure.]]>climate climate-change emissions carbon-sequestration stripe negative-emissions techhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b66af6036583/Unified research on privacy-preserving contact tracing and exposure notification for COVID-19 - Google Docs2020-04-03T16:57:26+00:00
https://docs.google.com/document/d/16Kh4_Q_tmyRh0-v452wiul9oQAiTRj8AdZ5vcOJum9Y/edit
jmdocs gdocs contact-tracing privacy apps coding tech covid-19 collaborationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:404df94aa455/Microsoft announces it will be carbon negative by 20302020-01-17T10:38:27+00:00
https://www.fastcompany.com/90452229/microsoft-is-going-carbon-negative-will-reduce-more-carbon-than-it-has-emitted-in-its-history-as-a-company
jmclimate-change microsoft good-news carbon techhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8427fac401b0/Algorithms interviews: theory vs. practice2020-01-06T11:07:59+00:00
https://danluu.com/algorithms-interviews/
jmAt this point, we've gone through a few decades of programming interview fads, each one of which looks ridiculous in retrospect. Either we've finally found the real secret to interviewing effectively and have reasoned our way past whatever roadblocks were causing everybody in the past to use obviously bogus fad interview techniques, or we're in the middle of another fad, one which will seem equally ridiculous to people looking back a decade or two from now.
Without knowing anything about the effectiveness of interviews, at a meta level, since the way people get interview techniques is the same (crib the high-level technique from the most prestigious company around), I think it would be pretty surprising if this wasn't a fad. I would be less surprised to discover that current techniques were not a fad if people were doing or referring to empirical research or had independently discovered what works.
]]>interviews interviewing hiring tech software jobs fads algorithms dan-luuhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:004563f1528d/In The 2010s, We All Became Alienated By Technology2019-12-17T16:45:55+00:00
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/in-the-2010s-decade-we-became-alienated-by-technology
jmLooking back from the shaky edge of a new decade, it’s clear that the past 10 years saw many Americans snap out of this dream, shaken awake by a brutal series of shocks and dislocations from the very changes that were supposed to "create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace.” When they opened their eyes, they did indeed see that the Digital Nation had been born. Only it hadn’t set them free. They were being ruled by it. It hadn’t tamed politics. It sent them berserk. And it hadn’t brought people closer together. It had alienated them.
]]>alienation wired future 2010s america tech silicon-valley internet history digital cyberspacehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:57bf04285ab2/Facing the Great Reckoning Head-On - danah boyd - Medium2019-09-13T22:47:53+00:00
https://medium.com/@zephoria/facing-the-great-reckoning-head-on-8fe434e10630
jm“Move fast and break things” is an abomination if your goal is to create a healthy society. Taking short-cuts may be financially profitable in the short-term, but the cost to society is too great to be justified. In a healthy society, we accommodate differently abled people through accessibility standards, not because it’s financially prudent but because it’s the right thing to do. In a healthy society, we make certain that the vulnerable amongst us are not harassed into silence because that is not the value behind free speech. In a healthy society, we strategically design to increase social cohesion because binaries are machine logic not human logic.
]]>medialab mit speech tech society danah-boydhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8052b24749b0/Margaret Hamilton interviewed by The Guardian2019-07-19T09:50:17+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/13/margaret-hamilton-computer-scientist-interview-software-apollo-missions-1969-moon-landing-nasa-women
jmmargaret-hamilton tech software the-guardian interviews history apollohttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7cc44ba87085/Soonish: The Lost Chapter2019-06-18T16:05:26+00:00
http://smbc-comics.com/soonish/lostchapter/index.html
jmnukes nuclear-power power future soonish smbc tech reactorshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e405061d6412/The Existential Crisis Plaguing Online Extremism Researchers2019-06-05T10:01:42+00:00
https://www.wired.com/story/existential-crisis-plaguing-online-extremism-researchers/?fbclid=IwAR21A3r5QnFl1PZg2jNmidfV6x2BvkI9Nw3MmBS-dfY2ABX8gpgj4GTPnmo
jmMany researchers in the field cut their teeth as techno-optimists, studying the positive aspects of the internet—like bringing people together to enhance creativity or further democratic protest, á la the Arab Spring—says Marwick. But it didn’t last.
The past decade has been an exercise in dystopian comeuppance to the utopian discourse of the '90s and ‘00s. Consider Gamergate, the Internet Research Agency, fake news, the internet-fueled rise of the so-called alt-right, Pizzagate, QAnon, Elsagate and the ongoing horrors of kids YouTube, Facebook’s role in fanning the flames of genocide, Cambridge Analytica, and so much more.
“In many ways, I think it [the malaise] is a bit about us being let down by something that many of us really truly believed in,” says Marwick. Even those who were more realistic about tech—and foresaw its misuse—are stunned by the extent of the problem, she says. “You have to come to terms with the fact that not only were you wrong, but even the bad consequences that many of us did foretell were nowhere near as bad as the actual consequences that either happened or are going to happen.”
[.....] “It's not that one of our systems is broken; it's not even that all of our systems are broken,” says Phillips. “It's that all of our systems are working ... toward the spread of polluted information and the undermining of democratic participation.”
(via Paul Moloney)]]>future grim dystopia tech optimism web internet gamergate wired via:oceanclubhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d6f23e41a4fd/Changing my Mind about AI, Universal Basic Income, and the Value of Data2019-06-04T17:17:59+00:00
https://theartofresearch.org/ai-ubi-and-data/
jmIn this piece I’ll be talking about two particular bits of rhetoric that have found an apparently unlikely partnership in the past five years. The impending obsolescence of humanity locked eyes across the room with a utopian vision of all-powerful AI that sees to all our needs. They started a forbidden romance that has since enthralled even the most serious tech industry leaders.
I myself was enthralled with the story at first, but more recently I’ve come to believe it may end in tragedy.
]]>ai philosophy ubi future techhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ab1928d561e1/Opinion | The Uber I.P.O. Is a Moral Stain on Silicon Valley - The New York Times2019-05-02T14:57:57+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/opinion/uber-ipo.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
jmUber — and to a lesser extent, its competitor Lyft — has indeed turned out to be a poster child for Silicon Valley’s messianic vision, but not in a way that should make anyone in this industry proud. Uber’s is likely to be the biggest tech I.P.O. since Facebook’s. It will turn a handful of people into millionaires and billionaires. But the gains for everyone else — for drivers, for the environment, for the world — remain in doubt. There’s a lesson here: If Uber is really the best that Silicon Valley can do, America desperately needs to find a better way to fund groundbreaking new ideas.
]]>startups uber silicon-valley morality ethics future work techhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9be30a695295/Artist Mario Klingemann on Artificial Intelligence, Technology and our Future | Interviews | Sotheby's2019-02-26T10:57:47+00:00
https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/artist-mario-klingemann-on-artificial-intelligence-art-tech-and-our-future
jmmario-klingemann art ai gans neural-networks sothebys faces techhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5adc4616a3db/Facial Recognition Is the Perfect Tool for Oppression2019-01-30T16:03:31+00:00
https://medium.com/s/story/facial-recognition-is-the-perfect-tool-for-oppression-bc2a08f0fe66
jmtech surveillance facial-recognition faces oppression future chilling-effectshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4a02a457aaa5/Don’t buy a 5G smartphone—at least, not for a while | Ars Technica2019-01-02T13:01:23+00:00
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/dont-buy-a-5g-smartphone-at-least-not-for-a-while/
jm5g 4g mobile-phones mobile tech hardware radiohttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d684dd50c911/Google used a Baidu front-end to scrape user searches without consent2018-12-18T11:33:01+00:00
https://theintercept.com/2018/12/17/google-china-censored-search-engine-2/
jmThe engineers used the data they pulled from [acquired Baidu front-end site] 265.com to learn about the kinds of things that people located in mainland China routinely search for in Mandarin. This helped them to build a prototype of Dragonfly. The engineers used the sample queries from 265.com, for instance, to review lists of websites Chinese people would see if they typed the same word or phrase into Google. They then used a tool they called “BeaconTower” to check whether any websites in the Google search results would be blocked by China’s internet censorship system, known as the Great Firewall. Through this process, the engineers compiled a list of thousands of banned websites, which they integrated into the Dragonfly search platform so that it would purge links to websites prohibited in China, such as those of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and British news broadcaster BBC.
Under normal company protocol, analysis of people’s search queries is subject to tight constraints and should be reviewed by the company’s privacy staff, whose job is to safeguard user rights. But the privacy team only found out about the 265.com data access after The Intercept revealed it, and were “really pissed,” according to one Google source.
]]>china search tech google privacy baidu interception censorship great-firewall dragonflyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e1259bd9e654/A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley - The New York Times2018-10-31T15:43:03+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/phones-children-silicon-valley.html
jmJohn Lilly, a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist with Greylock Partners and the former C.E.O. of Mozilla, said he tries to help his 13-year-old son understand that he is being manipulated by those who built the technology.
“I try to tell him somebody wrote code to make you feel this way — I’m trying to help him understand how things are made, the values that are going into things and what people are doing to create that feeling,” Mr. Lilly said. “And he’s like, ‘I just want to spend my 20 bucks to get my Fortnite skins.’”
]]>kids technology education parenting screentime apps tech phoneshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:da2368df777e/Atlassian Boosted Its Female Technical Hires By 80% — Here’s How2018-10-22T13:07:29+00:00
https://firstround.com/review/atlassian-boosted-its-female-technical-hires-by-80-percent-heres-how/
jmvia:caro recruiting diversity hiring inclusion meritocracy techhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ad54e2b78368/Common Cyborg | Jillian Weise | Granta2018-09-25T14:56:20+00:00
https://granta.com/common-cyborg/
jmWhen I tell people I am a cyborg, they often ask if I have read Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’. Of course I have read it. And I disagree with it. The manifesto, published in 1985, promised a cyberfeminist resistance. The resistance would be networked and coded by women and for women to change the course of history and derange sexism beyond recognition. Technology would un-gender us. Instead, it has been so effective at erasing disabled women that even now, in conversation with many feminists, I am no longer surprised that disability does not figure into their notions of bodies and embodiment. Haraway’s manifesto lays claim to cyborgs (‘we are all cyborgs’) and defines the cyborg unilaterally through metaphor. To Haraway, the cyborg is a matter of fiction, a struggle over life and death, a modern war orgy, a map, a condensed image, a creature without gender. The manifesto coopts cyborg identity while eliminating reference to disabled people on which the notion of the cyborg is premised. Disabled people who use tech to live are cyborgs. Our lives are not metaphors.
(Via Tony Finch)]]>via:dotat cyborg technology feminism essay disability tech jillian-weise grantahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f30af1357836/Software Development and GDPR2018-06-08T14:18:00+00:00
http://www.oisin.blog/2018/06/03/programming-and-gdpr.html
jmYou could think, as a developer, that the lawyers worry about this kind of fine-grained issue. They don’t. This is one of those situations where they say, well, here’s the risk, you have to make a decision, document it, and be ready to back that up in front of a judge should the soup hit the fan.
In this particular case it’s straightforward enough. Are you in control of the presence of data in your database? Yes. It’s up to you to delete it when requested. Are you in control of the data on your harddrive? Yes. It’s up to you to delete it when requested. Are you in control of the operating system implementation or database implementation of deletion? No. Could you get the data back if you wanted to? Yes – but that’s not part of your usual run of business, so why would you explicitly do that? What if some bad dude steals your harddrive and then rummages through it? Ok we are getting a little far-fetched here for most businesses that are not keeping special category data, but if this does happen, then you have failed in your security controls.
I guess my overall point here is that GDPR Compliance is a continuum, not a tickbox. You want to be doing the best you can with it and document why you can go so far and not further. The companies that will be getting the big legislative fines are the guys that are willy-nilly exporting special category data out of the EEA en masse without the knowledge of the people associated with that data. The rest of us just need to muddle along as best we can.
]]>gdpr privacy dev tech coding data-protection law eu storagehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c663de250cbd/Steven Bellovin on Bitcoin2018-01-01T23:45:31+00:00
https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2017-12/2017-12-30.html
jmWhen you engineer a system for deployment you build it to meet certain real-world goals. You may find that there are tradeoffs, and that you can't achieve all of your goals, but that's normal; as I've remarked, "engineering is the art of picking the right trade-off in an overconstrained environment". For any computer-based financial system, one crucial parameter is the transaction rate. For a system like Bitcoin, another goal had to be avoiding concentrations of power. And of course, there's transaction privacy.
There are less obvious factors, too. These days, "mining" for Bitcoins requires a lot of computations, which translates directly into electrical power consumption. One estimate is that the Bitcoin network uses up more electricity than many countries. There's also the question of governance: who makes decisions about how the network should operate? It's not a question that naturally occurs to most scientists and engineers, but production systems need some path for change.
In all of these, Bitcoin has failed. The failures weren't inevitable; there are solutions to these problems in the acdemic literature. But Bitcoin was deployed by enthusiasts who in essence let experimental code escape from a lab to the world, without thinking about the engineering issues—and now they're stuck with it. Perhaps another, better cryptocurrency can displace it, but it's always much harder to displace something that exists than to fill a vacuum.
]]>steven-bellovin bitcoin tech software systems engineering deployment cryptocurrency cypherpunkshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4f78659ed032/The Guardian view on patient data: we need a better approach | Editorial | Opinion | The Guardian2017-07-06T09:54:02+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/05/the-guardian-view-on-patient-data-we-need-a-better-approach
jm
The use of privacy law to curb the tech giants in this instance, or of competition law in the case of the EU’s dispute with Google, both feel slightly maladapted. They do not address the real worry. It is not enough to say that the algorithms DeepMind develops will benefit patients and save lives. What matters is that they will belong to a private monopoly which developed them using public resources. If software promises to save lives on the scale that drugs now can, big data may be expected to behave as big pharma has done. We are still at the beginning of this revolution and small choices now may turn out to have gigantic consequences later. A long struggle will be needed to avoid a future of digital feudalism. Dame Elizabeth’s report is a welcome start.
Hear hear.
]]>privacy law uk nhs data google deepmind healthcare tech open-sourcehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ac7e968296a3/GitHub's new Balanced Employee IP Agreement (BEIPA) lets workers keep the IP when they use company resources for personal projects — Quartz2017-03-21T14:24:54+00:00
https://qz.com/937038/github-now-lets-its-workers-keep-the-ip-when-they-use-company-resources-for-personal-projects/?s=1
jmIf it’s on company time, it’s the company’s dime. That’s the usual rule in the tech industry—that if employees use company resources to work on projects unrelated to their jobs, their employer can claim ownership of any intellectual property (IP) they create.
But GitHub is throwing that out the window. Today the code-sharing platform announced a new policy, the Balanced Employee IP Agreement (BEIPA). This allows its employees to use company equipment to work on personal projects in their free time, which can occur during work hours, without fear of being sued for the IP. As long as the work isn’t related to GitHub’s own “existing or prospective” products and services, the employee owns it.
]]>github law tech jobs work day-job side-projects hacking ip copyrighthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:59c1f2763a9b/Maniac Killers of the Bangalore IT Department2017-02-23T10:53:44+00:00
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-15/maniac-killers-of-the-bangalore-it-department
jmTechnology was supposed to deliver India from poverty, but in Bangalore it’s also deepened the division between rich and poor, young and old, modern and traditional. As the city has grown richer, it’s also become unruly and unfamiliar. If the tech worker is the star of the Indian economy, then the techie is his shadow— spoiled, untrustworthy, adulterous, depressed, and sometimes just plain senseless. (“TECHIE WITH EARPHONES RUN OVER BY TRAIN.”) In one occupational boogeyman, Bangaloreans can see their future and their fears. [....]
“TECHIE’S WIFE MURDERED” read the headlines in both the Hindu and the Bangalore Mirror. “TECHIE STABS FRIEND’S WIFE TO DEATH” ran in the Deccan Herald. To read the Indian newspapers regularly is to believe the software engineer is the country’s most cursed figure. Almost every edition carries a gruesome story involving a techie accused of homicide, rape, burglary, blackmail, assault, injury, suicide, or another crime. When techies are the victims, it’s just as newsworthy. The Times of India, the country’s largest English-language paper, has carried “TECHIE DIES IN FREAK ACCIDENT” and “MAN HELD FOR PUSHING TECHIE FROM TRAIN”; in the Hindu, readers found “TEACHER CHOPS OFF FINGERS OF TECHIE HUSBAND” and “TECHIE DIED AFTER BEING FORCE-FED CYANIDE.” A long-standing journalistic adage says, “If it bleeds, it leads.” In India, if it codes, it explodes.
]]>crime tech india bangalore pune society techies work jobshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c93af94ece2d/Commentary: The ‘Irish’ Startup Attribution Problem2016-12-05T13:47:21+00:00
http://www.dublinglobe.com/ecosystem/opinion/the-irish-startup-attribution-problem
jmSuccessful Irish tech companies have a skewed geographic profile. This presents a data gathering problem for the data companies but its also a strong indicator of the market reality for Irish startups. The size of the local market and a focus on software business in particular means many Irish startups are transitioning to the US (some earlier and with more commitment than others), and getting backed by a spectrum of local and international VCs.
Correcting for this put Ireland's tech venture investment in the second half of 2014 at $125m, midway between Sweden and Finland, 8th in Europe overall.]]>ireland tech startups investment vc europe euhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:36907f01f208/Algorithmic management as the new Taylorism2016-09-13T11:12:25+00:00
https://www.ft.com/content/88fdc58e-754f-11e6-b60a-de4532d5ea35
jmalgorithms labour work labor taylorism management silicon-valley tech deliveroo uber piece-workhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e0e5ffae9927/What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly2016-06-16T14:04:22+00:00
http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/03/26/summly/
jm[Summly] licensed the core engine from another company. They are the quintessential bolt-on engineers, taking a Japanese bike engine, slapping together a badly constructed frame aligned solely by eyeballs, and laying down a marketing blitz. That's why the story sells. "You, too, can do it." But do you want to? [...] it's critical to keep tabs on the ratio known as "glue versus thought." Sure, both imply progress and both are necessary. But the former is eminently mundane, replaceable, and outsource-able. The latter is typically what gives a company its edge, what is generally regarded as a competitive advantage. So, what is Yahoo signaling to the world? "We value glue more than thought."
]]>glue thought glue-vs-thought summly yahoo acquisitions licensing tech startups outsourcing open-sourcehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e32dbf85a322/Six Years of Hacker News Comments about Twilio2016-05-30T09:12:41+00:00
https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/six-years-of-hacker-news-comments-about-twilio/
jmtwilio hn hackernews funny techhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3f121d40c3b8/Historic computers look super sexy in this new photo series by Docubyte and Ink2016-05-13T14:27:47+00:00
https://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2016/may/historic-computers-look-super-sexy-in-this-new-photo-series-by-docubyte-and-ink/
jmThe IBM 1401 and Alan Turing’s Pilot ACE (shown below) are among the computers featured in the series by photographer Docubyte and production studio Ink.
]]>ibm computers history tech docubyte ink bletchley-parkhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e11a48cacdb3/A poem about Silicon Valley, made up of Quora questions about Silicon Valley2016-04-29T09:33:36+00:00
http://fusion.net/story/295515/quora-poetry-silicon-valley/
jm
Why do so many startups fail?
Why are all the hosts on CouchSurfing male?
Are we going to be tweeting for the rest of our lives?
Why do Silicon Valley billionaires choose average-looking wives?
What makes a startup ecosystem thrive?
What do people plan to do once they’re over 35?
Is an income of $160K enough to survive?
What kind of car does Mark Zuckerberg drive?
Are the real estate prices in Palo Alto crazy?
Do welfare programs make poor people lazy?
What are some of the biggest lies ever told?
How do I explain Bitcoin to a 6-year-old?
Why is Powdered Alcohol not successful so far?
How does UberX handle vomiting in the car?
Is being worth $10 million considered ‘rich’?
What can be causing my upper lip to twitch?
Why has crowdfunding not worked for me?
Is it worth pre-ordering a Tesla Model 3?
How is Clinkle different from Venmo and Square?
Can karma, sometimes, be unfair?
Why are successful entrepreneurs stereotypically jerks?
Which Silicon Valley company has the best intern perks?
What looks easy until you actually try it?
How did your excretions change under a full Soylent diet?
What are alternatives to online dating?
Is living in small apartments debilitating?
Why don’t more entrepreneurs focus on solving world hunger?
What do you regret not doing when you were younger?
]]>funny tech poetry silicon-valley humour bitcoin soylent 2016https://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1cf5df57bb68/I am Alex St. John’s Daughter, and He is Wrong About Women in Tech — Medium2016-04-22T15:50:04+00:00
https://medium.com/@milistjohn/i-am-alex-st-john-s-daughter-and-he-is-wrong-about-women-in-tech-4728545e7c0e#.jnczmb18o
jmsexism career tech amilia-st-john alex-st-john jobs work feminismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:00ab366c5e01/Improving Our Engineering Interview Process2016-04-13T16:01:28+00:00
http://engineering.foursquare.com/2016/04/04/improving-our-engineering-interview-process/
jmhiring interviewing foursquare hr phone-screens tech jobshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0b4f4460c54c/Nest Reminds Customers That Ownership Isn't What It Used to Be2016-04-06T12:15:39+00:00
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/nest-reminds-customers-ownership-isnt-what-it-used-be
jmCustomers likely didn't expect that, 18 months after the last Revolv Hubs were sold, instead of getting more upgrades, the device would be intentionally, permanently, and completely disabled. ....
Nest Labs and Google are both subsidiaries of Alphabet, Inc., and bricking the Hub sets a terrible precedent for a company with ambitions to sell self-driving cars, medical devices, and other high-end gadgets that may be essential to a person’s livelihood or physical safety.
]]>nest legal tech google alphabet internetofshit iot lawhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e93c83a0e7e5/Not 'Going Dark': 15 Out Of 15 Most Recent EU Terrorists Were Known To The Authorities In Multiple Ways | Techdirt2016-04-06T10:47:33+00:00
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160331/09092134063/not-going-dark-15-out-15-most-recent-eu-terrorists-were-known-to-authorities-multiple-ways.shtml
jmComprehensive surveillance appears as seemingly inexpensive because it is a solution that scales thanks to technology: troubleshooting at the press of a button. Directly linked with the aim of saving more and more, just as with the State in general. But classic investigative work, which is proven to work, is expensive and labor intensive. This leads to a failure by the authorities because of a faith in technology that is driven by economics.
]]>tech surveillance techdirt terrorism brussels crypto going-darkhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:60e2d992b5d6/When It Comes to Age Bias, Tech Companies Don’t Even Bother to Lie2016-04-06T09:00:34+00:00
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-comes-age-bias-tech-companies-dont-even-bother-lie-dan-lyons
jmHubSpot’s CEO and co-founder, Brian Halligan, explained to the New York Times that this age imbalance was not something he wanted to remedy, but in fact something he had actively cultivated. HubSpot was “trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain Gen Y’ers,” because, “in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated,” Halligan said.
I gasped when I read that. Could anyone really believe this? Even if you did believe this, what CEO would be foolish enough to say it out loud? It was akin to claiming that you prefer to hire Christians, or heterosexuals, or white people. I assumed an uproar would follow. As it turned out, nobody at HubSpot saw this as a problem. Halligan didn’t apologize for his comments or try to walk them back. The lesson I learned is that when it comes to race and gender bias, the people running Silicon Valley at least pay lip service to wanting to do better — but with age discrimination they don’t even bother to lie.
]]>hiring startups tech ageism age hubspot gen-y discriminationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ed33a17f80ee/Tim O'Reilly vs Paul Graham: fight!2016-01-26T10:47:30+00:00
https://medium.com/the-wtf-economy/in-his-essay-on-income-inequality-paul-graham-credited-me-for-pre-publication-feedback-ff8a0b295a1b#.ifk3uil78
jm'In his essay on Income Inequality, Paul Graham credited me for pre-publication feedback. Because he didn’t do much with my comments, I thought I’d publish them here.'
... 'Mostly, I think you are picking a fight with people who would mostly agree with you, and ignoring the real arguments about what inequality means and why it matters.'
]]>inequality silicon-valley tech paul-graham tim-oreilly piketty politics economics wealth startups history work stock-optionshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b5c2af032e83/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/