McFilter

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 23rd 2017

• I haven't experienced imposter syndrome, and maybe you haven't either. 'Do these people doubt themselves? have moments questioning whether they deserve to be where they are? Of course they do! It is a key part to being a humble, likable, open-minded developer. They aren’t “suffering” from a “syndrome”.' Perpetual confidence is a bug, not a feature.
• The Boring Designer. Good advice, not just for designers.
• The Ethical Minefields of Technology. "Instead of looking at technologies programmed to enable human beings to better navigate the world I see technologies optimized to help corporations better navigate and manipulate human behaviour.”
• DING: A magazine about the internet and things. #1 AUTUMN 2017. Interesting reading. A little strange for such a Web/Internet-centric organisation to be publishing things as a PDF, but still...
• Showing the Algorithms Behind New York City Services. An interesting proposal in New York to make its algorithms more visible.
• 13 things I learned from six years at the Guardian. Lots of good insight on what's important for organisations in the modern world, including this gem: "people who do the flashy things are plentiful, and people willing and able to graft on the stuff that just incrementally makes things better are in sadly short supply."

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 2nd 2017

• The Coming Software Apocalypse. Interesting appeal for more formal verification in software. We do need to get better at building software, although I think formal verification should be matched with more design or systems thinking education/recognition too. Having had to write a bunch of Z (a formal specification language) during my Computer Science degree, I wonder if TLA+ is actually usable. Z was painful to use, and I had first-year degree maths too, so it's not that I'm completely inept at maths.
• Unpublishable: Censored Emails From Noam Chomsky. Redaction as art. Lovely.
• Smell of data. Beautiful metaphor and well-chosen alert mechanism for data leaks.
• Autopsy of a slow train wreck. Building a business is hard, exhibit A.
• Things learned while running your own self-funded startup. Building a business is hard, exhibit B.
• Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee. Sage career advice for anyone wanting to work in the tech/startup world.
• The 21st floor. Harrowing stories of the families who lived (and survived and died) on just one of the floors of Grenfell Tower. It continues to be a disgraceful affair, and Chelsea council and the Government aren't showing any signs of improving.
• Introducing The National Algorithm. Excellent look at the development of modern army uniforms, and how to create a true Dutch camouflage.
• The inside story of what it took to keep a Texas grocery chain running in the chaos of Hurricane Harvey. Excellent report on how one supermarket chain dealt with hurricane Harvey. What sort of decisions they needed to make, how they adapted their supply chain, and so on. The ability to do this sort of exception handling is so often lost as systems are computerised for "better efficiency".

Cennydd Bowles: Ethics in the AI Age from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 25th 2017

• Beautiful 30-day time lapse of a cargo ship’s voyage. What it says on the link. Gorgeous shots out at sea, and interesting port traffic and unloading footage.
• Want to make more ethical tech choices? Check your Tech. Good to see doteveryone pushing on with their work to bring some ethics into the tech world.
• How do you solve a problem like technology? A systems approach to digital regulation. More sharing-their-workings from doteveryone.
• Business As Usual. Kilfoyle, sadly, spot on with the latest round of fantastical figures being claimed for Liverpool regeneration circus.
• Thinking about permission. Giles capturing some of the nuance of organisational transformation.
• The worm has turned. All the regeneration-types claiming that Liverpool Waters will attract company X to the city would be advised to heed "selection of a firm’s headquarters usually comes down to one thing: where does the CEO want to live or spend more time … full stop."
• Understanding Uber: It’s Not About The App. In-depth and measured look at what's behind Transport for London's (correct) decision not to renew Uber's licence.

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 18th 2017

• Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch. The end-game of advertising-as-business-model. I see it more from Instagram than Facebook, although that's also owned by Facebook. Twitter does this too, but at least you can turn (most of) it off.
• Unemployment in the UK is now so low it's in danger of exposing the lie used to create the numbers. The graph of job rates by gender is particularly illuminating. The trend of both men/women to converge on the combined-genders line bodes well for equality, although the fact that it's at the cost of rising unemployment levels for men maybe explains some of the problems we're seeing in society. Either way, actually reducing the overall unemployment level is what we should be aiming for (universal basic services notwithstanding)

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 11th 2017

• Essential Developer Skills with Tom Stuart. An excellent exploration of what a software developer is, and how you go from a beginner to an experienced dev. Lots of nuggets about the challenges of helping people on that journey.
• Why Kickstarter Decided To Radically Transform Its Business Model. Nice article on Kickstarter's choice to switch to a public benefit company (a for-profit that isn't solely focused on shareholder returns)
• Gardening, Dark Matter, Grey Havens and the Background Radiation of Maker/Hack spaces. Ross reflecting on DoES Liverpool and maker culture. He's really good at getting, and articulating, the why of things. There are too many bits of this I wanted to quote. Someone should pay him to do more of that.
• Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You. In the aftermath of Equifax showing shockingly bad security practices and allowing a massive amount of US citizens' data to be stolen, some sensible actions for individuals caught in it to take.

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 4th 2017

• Large Companies Considered Harmful. Lots to like here, and probably not just companies, I wonder if you can argue that part of the reason the unions were emasculated in the 80s was because they'd become too big and powerful. Still, today I think it's easy to see that it's companies who are the bigger threat.
• Grenfell Tower - How did it happen?. "Just before filing this article, I visited Grenfell Tower. [...] There, huge and devastated, is the physical presence, the physical consequence, of a thousand decisions made to get things done a bit more cheaply, to make a bit more money, to clinch that deal." I remember feeling as though this might bring down the Government when it happened, such was the level of shock and anger and dismay. Yet now, barely a few months on, it already feels as though it's slipping into history rather than galvanising us into making the country a better, safer place for us all. As if the only thing that matters is that everyone can pass the buck onto someone else and say "we did what we were supposed to" and omit pointing out how, if they'd bothered to look at the situation a bit more broadly and if other people's lives were allowed to—every now and then—come before money, they played a part in the death's of eighty people.
• Social.coop: A Cooperative Decentralized Social Network. Good interview with the founders of social.coop about that co-operative version of Twitter. The Mastodon (which is what social.coop runs) instance that I use - mastodon.me.uk is set up in similar fashion. (I'm @amcewen@mastodon.me.uk if you're a Mastodon user...)
• RFCs not IPOs (i.e. open standards not venture-capital funding). Amen to that.
• What should you think about when using Facebook?. Detailed yet readable dive into the lots of the information Facebook gathers about you.

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 28th 2017

• Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic. An excellent proposal for a better tech culture, from Allison Parrish.
• Decentralize It!. "There’s a whole world of fun potential consumer products that let people do computer things that don’t involve reading ads on Facebook or viewing promoted tweets. No one tells you that, but there is."
• Co-op/Capital. Can democratic tech improve your deal-flow?. Interesting slide deck pitching co-operative conversions for startups to their VCs.

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 21st 2017

• Eliminating the Human. Perfectly capturing something that's bothered me for a while now. Although I totally understand the desire to design human interactions out of everything (given that I'm not great in social/unfamiliar situations myself), I also think that we shouldn't do it. Some of the friction and discomfort is useful for us.
• Study of the Week: Of Course Virtual K-12 Schools Don’t Work. See last point...

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 31st 2017

• The new Patreon economy. James Governor talking sense (as ever) about increasing the ways we support open source.
• "A cohort of young nerds believes they've hit on the solution to a Big Problem & it involves code...". Good Twitter thread from Jon Stokes on history, power, and naively optimistic coding.
• A Rant on Usable Security.
• Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance! "a fantasy common among Silicon Valley types: that the best path forward is to scrap existing reality and start over from scratch". Yep, less fawning over the shiny, more recognising the ongoing work of making things work, please.
• Hill for the data scientist: an xkcd story. Excellent explanation of some statistical issues, through the medium of xkcd cartoons.

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 24th 2017

• This long twitter thread of conference notes from Kevin Marks does a better job of piquing my interest in "blockchain" than any of the breathless "this is the next big thing" articles.
• On my second birthday we landed on the moon. Mike Monteiro talks about us.
• Young explorers. Delightful films of toddlers setting out into the brave wide world.