Thanks, this is a great idea!

Since it seems the list is going to grow fairly long, it might be helpful to have some organization and/or short descriptions for each podcast so it’s easy to pluck out items of interest. Some topics are obvious based on the podcast names, but others are much less so.

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Requiescat in pace, sir.

o7

V.v.V

Today is the first day of my new job!

As much as I want this week’s agenda to be to share all the ideas I’ve had for the product over the last couple months, I know that’s not what someone should be doing in their first week. Or month. Or three.

This week I’m going to find my bearings. I’m going to feel out the culture, acquaint myself with people, and fit in. I’m going to try to understand more of the fundamentals of their product, development process, culture, and industry. A lot of new information is about to come at me and I expect to be a bit overwhelmed and exhausted, but that’s the game.

I’m excited and nervous and all of the usual emotions. Wish me luck!

This was a really fun read! Thanks for sharing.

I’d recommend this article to any Lobster with even a passing interest in cryptocurrency.

This is a really stellar article. I mean really fabulous. The article perfectly distills years of rumination into simple points and subpoints. If you expect to have to design an API at some point in your career (spoiler alert: you will), you absolutely need to give this article a read.

When using a poorly-designed API, I always find myself wondering why it was designed so poorly. Was the API just an afterthought which grew more popular than expected? Was it made by a first-time API designer? Is it a reflection of a poorly-designed existing system?

My pet theory is that in the back of our minds we don’t think about other developers as users. Of course, they’re not users in the traditional sense, but they are still users. We think they’ll just be able to handle whatever we throw at them, and to some extent we’re right—they will hem and haw and grumble and use the API. They’ve used kludgey APIs before, right?

For work: I’m re-implementing some abandoned cart handling in the CMS we’re migrating to.

For me: I’m continuing work on siftrss, fleshing out my unit test suite to better cover edge cases concerning feeds with off characters, encodings, namespaces, etc. Ahhh, they joys of working with XML for no money. :)

Wow, this couldn’t have landed in front of me at a better time. An email hit my inbox this morning from a local technical college where I serve on an IT advisory committee, asking me if I’d like to come in and talk to the students about my job. I was leaning toward politely declining, but now I’ll have to reconsider.

Seems plausible Google didn’t go over Buganizer as carefully as they do many public-facing products because it seemed like an internal product, and the external audience that gets access (folks who successfully reported a security bug) seemed semi-trusted. I bet there are a lot of security issues in code that’s meant for semi-trusted audiences like this: a company’s vendors, say, or a small number of special high-value clients, or employees (when employees have access to a tool but shouldn’t all have ‘root’ on it). Place to look for issues in our own stuff potentially.

Hey, Lobsters! I’ve been sitting on this project for a while and a buddy recently recommended sharing it here. I built it to scratch my own itch, so it’s still very MVP. Its biggest shortcoming is definitely the lack of the ability to apply AND and OR boolean logic to filters. In the long term I’d like to add the ability to combine multiple feeds into one as well, assuming there’s demand.

My girlfriend was looking for a new job in a rather niche field so I had subscribed to some RSS feeds, only to find they were country-wide and there was no good way to narrow it down geographically. I didn’t want to wade through hundreds of job postings just to nab a couple, so I built siftRSS. Laziness really is a virtue.

I’d really appreciate any feedback. Thanks!

I desperately want someone to make a font from his handwriting. It’s gorgeous.