Things I Like
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Bilinguals overwhelmingly report that they feel like different people in different languages. It is often assumed that the mother tongue is the language of the true self. In many ways, it remains the primal vehicle. A person who has spoken English most of her life is always going to speak English when she stubs her toe (or, according to spycraft, at the moment of orgasm). But, if first languages are reservoirs of emotion, second languages can be rivers undammed, freeing their speakers to ride different currents. People are more likely to say they’d push a man off a bridge—in order to save five other people about to be hit by a train—when the dilemma is presented in their second language.
A really lovely piece about language, love, and communication. I speak a second language and I related to a lot of the bits and pieces that she talked about as she was learning. If you like language, this is well worth reading.
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I know this much: I don’t want to be a part of a community like Twitter if the previous offenses are an accepted part of that community. Twitter isn’t a country, it’s a service. And as a store gets to decide what products it sells, services decide what is and is not permissible. Twitter finds a lot of horrible things permissible, is what I’m saying, and it doesn’t want you to be able to filter or curate your experience. They want to sell you shit. They sure as hell don’t want to behave as responsible community arbiters. It doesn’t want to protect its users or act with any kind of moral authority lest they be judged for daring to not permit everything under the guise of consequence-free first amendment protection.
This is from 2014 and Fraction nails it. Still so true.
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After settling this question, we all moved on to bemoaning the strange tendency of the younger lefty generation to censor or silence speech or opinions they consider in some way wrong: no-platforming, safe spaces, and the rest of it. We were all right about that, too. But then, from the corner, on a sofa, the cleverest among us, who was at that moment feeding a new baby, waited till we’d all stopped bloviating and added: “Well, they got that habit from us. We always wanted to be seen to be right. To be on the right side of an issue. More so even than doing anything. Being right was always the most important thing.”
Really interesting piece on Brexit and the vote. There are lessons here for Americans with what is going on in our current election.
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When we take a “gut feeling” sense of someone’s seniority without specific criteria, there is basically no way to counteract our own biases, but we still make a judgement. It’s completely possible for a person applying to multiple dev jobs to be evaluated as junior at one, mid-level at another, and even senior at another, with very little feedback as to why.
I really like the way this is defined and talked about. Job titles, in particular when you are senior or not, are a difficult thing and the proposed way to define them here is really interesting.
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The “dumbbell” design was conceived to give each tenant its own floor and create an entrance and outdoor common area sheltered from the busy intersection. The result allows for retail space on the ground floors and 10 floors of office space, each 4,000 square feet, which he said was ideal for a 12- to 15-person company. The building is 44 percent preleased as of late last year. Mr. Cavenaugh reserved one floor of the building for co-working space that his company will manage; this will be his third co-working space in Portland.
This building, as you'll see if you click through to see the rendering, has been controversial, to say the least. People either love it or hate it. But that is exactly why I like it. Great buildings often are controversial when built. In addition, the developer is a super interesting guy who does non traditional projects, but his projects are successful (as defined by being fully leased out). He spoke at the Portland Creative Mornings and I recommend that talk as well.
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That tech (and, increasingly, media—and oh, that boundary is nothing if not fluid) also speaks of scalability in religious terms puts Tsing’s contention here in an even more interesting light. Scalability is expressed not only in the external artifacts of an organization—the software, the servers, the business model—but also the people who work for it and the people who interact with it as customers, clients, and, increasingly, inconstant laborers. That latter category—the Uber drivers, TaskRabbits, and Postmates—seems especially relevant to notions of scalability. Uber can scale, but the single parent who works as a driver and can’t predict what they’ll make from week to week cannot.
The book, The Mushroom at the End of the World has now moved up on my reading list. I want to finish what I have started and then it will get to the top. But the way Mandy talks about tech in relation to scale and the questions we should be asking about it are interesting and I think vital. If scale, as she says at the end of this piece, is the solitary success metric, there are problems. Because when you scale what do you lose? What do you leave behind? And how does scale affect people?
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We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called "technology " at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers -- as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe...
I love Le Guin and it's my dream to bump into her on the bus someday here in Portland.
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But it’s rare that technology provides a robust solution to a social problem by itself. Successful technological approaches to solving social problems usually require changes in laws and norms, as well as market incentives to make change at scale.
This is a long piece, but very well thought out. We in tech have a problem with thinking that tech alone can solve all the problems of the world. But in actuality it is just one piece of the puzzle and Zuckerman does a good job of showing how that could possibly work.
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The first step towards a better tech economy is humility and recognition of limits. It's time to hold technology politically accountable for its promises. I am very suspicious of attempts to change the world that can't first work on a local scale. If after decades we can't improve quality of life in places where the tech élite actually lives, why would we possibly make life better anywhere else?
As usual Maciej has made me think. I agree with a lot of the points in here, but I also think that there are counter arguments to be made, that there is more gray than this piece alludes to. And I thank Cennydd for helping me see that.
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But whenever that impulse returns, that impulse to come on now be serious, I lose the magic again. It happened most recently getting ready for my upcoming art show. That stupid voice started saying: This is a gallery show. This is Art. I need to be serious.
This is a really huge reason that my drawing right now is still just for me, just in a sketchbook and I share crappy iPad photos of it on Flickr. I feel like making it more would make it tighten up and it would lose the magic for me.
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Engineers should be solving new and interesting problems, not rebuilding the same apps over and over. That is a job for robots.
I don't agree with absolutely everything in this article but I do agree that we seem to do the same things over and over again in many ways when we make things for the web. And I wonder if we still need to do this or if there is a better way.
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This might seem paradoxical. Aren’t road trips supposed to be as spontaneous as possible? Of course. My rules sought to enhance spontaneity by making sure I noticed it when it happened. They made a big difference for my trip, and they should work for other travelers as well.?
We're doing road trips a lot for our vacations lately for a number of reasons. I love all these rules. And to be honest, it's how we try and make things happen when we are out on the road.
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The bullet journal enthusiasts insist that filling notebooks is about far more than just getting things done or crossing off lists—it’s also about paying attention to, and taking stock of, your life. It’s an act of agency—deciding who you want to be and what you want to do and setting those decisions down in pen on paper where they cannot be deleted or ignored or erased. It’s an act of archiving—recording what you’re thinking, what your goals are, what your handwriting looks like, at a very particular moment in time, and then being able to look back and see just how far you’ve come since you were the 12-year-old who wrote in big pencil letters in a blue plastic spiral-bound homework planner about shoveling snow in a driveway that didn’t exist (and also, of course, being able to see just how much you still have in common with her). It’s this combination of productive, therapeutic, aesthetic, historical, and spiritual elements that makes notebook-keeping such an addictive and potent activity, even—or perhaps especially—in a world of countless productivity apps, online to-do lists, and gamified habit-building tools.
I don't do bullet journalling, but I really love the way the notebook was talked about in this piece. I've gone non digital for journaling and sketching and it's been really great for me. I love the act of writing with a pen, of taking stock, of drawing, and it relaxes me in ways nothing else does lately.
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The new pattern created several frequent lines that the British would call orbitals. Radial lines go into and out of the center, but orbitals orbit the center, at various distances out. They intersect the radials, offering useful connections, but never go downtown themselves. And instead of hauling big volumes of commuters into and out of downtown, they serve thousands of little trips that are all a bit different, among diverse neighborhoods and destinations. It works: these orbital lines are among the busiest in the city.
I live a few blocks from the 75 and take it if I'm going to the airport (it gets me to one of the radials) or to a few different appointments or friends' houses. I really like this take on it. And, we are using transit more as we are going carless, so it's interesting to think about the orbitals and radials I'll be making use of.
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What we need to understand is that, as people in tech, we have a collective responsibility. We keep pretending that the technology we build is neutral. We still believe that we can be apolitical as people in tech. We keep pretending that our algorithms are neutral. We don’t care about ethical aspects of our work. And most of us are in a position where we don’t have to care. But it’s our responsibility to understand: Technology is not neutral, our code is not neutral. Our work is political. And our work has consequences on actual lives.
This is a really great piece. So much great thinking about how we operate as an industry and so much good stuff on how we can change.