McFilter

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 29th 2018

• Did I Make a Mistake Selling My Social-Media Darling to Yahoo?. Nice look back at the sale of a Web2.0 darling. This bit in particular rings true with my experience - "I think a lot of time that selling is not the victory it seems. It takes away all of your forward momentum."
• Unfeeling Fire. Very readable slides/notes about the threat/risks of AI from Bolster.
• It’s not for you. I like this (which presumably means that it is, in this case, for me.

And a great talk from Anand Giridharadas (as featured in last week's Interesting Things...) challenging us to make actual progress on society, rather than looking for not-really-effective-but-inoffensive-to-propose "win-win" solutions...

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 20th 2018

• Elites like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos think they’re being philanthropic. But they could do so much more. This is all good. There were too many sections I wanted to quote here, so just go read it all.
• Destroy Bitcoin. Smash the mining rigs "Is this how it will actually end? With the hum of a billion mining rigs ultimately drowned out by the gurgling inrush of the sea?"
• Sidewalk Toronto has only one beneficiary, and it is not Toronto. "If we are to build viable digital cities for the benefit of Canadian citizens, we will need transparency and accountability between the government and its citizens, not a secret deal between an unelected, rogue public corporation and a foreign multinational in the business of mass surveillance."

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 8th 2018

• Launching the Trust & Technology Initiative. A good primer on the dangers of not caring about how we trust technology
• If the Point of Capitalism is to Escape Capitalism, Then What’s the Point of Capitalism? I'm not sure, but in our finer moments you can see glimpses of this post-capitalist world in the DoES Liverpool community, in the pursuit of ideas rather than money. And I suppose a lot of it comes down to a community managing the commons for the good of its members.
• Second System Syndrome. Nice. A name for something I've long noticed (and perpetually resisted) in software teams: the desire to throw everything away and start from scratch. Actually, it occurs to me that's a similar urge to the pattern for grand masterplanning in the built environment. It's the wrong answer there too.

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 1st 2018

• The Myth of the Ethical Shopper. Turns out our ethics and principles might need us to do more than just buy things.
• If Software Is Eating the World, What Will Come Out the Other End? "The world is still real. Software hasn’t eaten it as much as bound it in a spell, temporarily I hope, while we figure out what comes next."
• Preparing a conference talk. Good explanation of how to prep a talk. I don't follow this completely, blurring the work out the narrative and the write the slides parts, but the general principles are all sound.
• Corbyn Now. "Corbyn’s critics[...], not the electorate, are unwilling to tolerate any serious challenge to a political status quo which is extreme when judged by the same comparisons – to history, to other nations, to public opinion – that show how moderate Corbynism is. The neoliberal character of the status quo doesn’t reflect a public consensus, and it hasn’t for a long time: for example, no opinion poll since the mid-1980s has shown popular support for public sector privatisation."
• Reading Adam's latest essay on smart cities, Shaping Cities contribution, “Of Systems and Purposes: Emergent technology for the skeptical urbanist”, I realised that my mantra of "judge us (and others) on what we do, not what we say" is a people equivalent of Stafford Beer's "the purpose of a system is what it does"