January 04, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 4th 2016

  • The Resistance. Voices dissenting the techno-utopians.
  • Tell me who you are. Excellent (but long) essay about identity. How do you change your password when your password is your fingerprint?
  • The Website Obesity Crisis. Another Maciej talk, another must read/watch.
  • “If creativity is the field, copyright is the fence.” Copyright extension is just rent extraction.
  • 5 things the media does to manufacture outrage. Must feed the news cycle... (n.b. I haven't checked the sources in this article, so it's possible it's just a massive troll...)
  • Hacking the City. A new model for urban renewal. A good overview of the work Renew Newcastle (that's the Australian one, not one of the UK Newcastles) is doing.
  • Machining of brass again. A write up from Julian, a friend of mine who's been working on a new CNC mill here at DoES Liverpool. Mostly included here for this paragraph: "Recall that, after 20 years writing the software that generates CNC toolpaths, I’d not ever operated a machine or worked with someone operating a machine in that time period. I’m not unusual among my programming peers. This is an outrageous state of affairs, and tells you everything you need to know about the effectiveness of all those layers of businessmen, managerial staff, supervisors, and resellers who have inserted themselves like slabs of toffee between those who write the software and those who use the software. Even if I wasn’t interested in operating a machine, someone should have forced me to spend some time making at least one thing to a standard of quality at some point in my career as it would have paid off enormously. "
  • Shields Down. On digging into the real reason people quit jobs.
  • Paul Graham is Still Asking to be Eaten. Maybe the reason startups get paid so well by VCs is that it's the only way to persuade them not to work on something more valuable to society...
Posted by Adrian at January 4, 2016 11:18 AM | TrackBack

This blog post is on the personal blog of Adrian McEwen. If you want to explore the site a bit further, it might be worth having a look at the most recent entries or look through the archives or categories over on the left.

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Comments

Ah, "Maybe the reason startups get paid so well by VCs is that it's the only way to persuade them not to work on something more valuable to society..." really strikes a chord :)

Posted by: Laura at January 4, 2016 01:56 PM

Thanks. It was actually prompted more by the Metafilter thread about Paul Graham's essay but I liked it too much not to use it :-)

Posted by: Adrian at January 5, 2016 12:43 PM
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