Threads for Todd
-
I’m at a competition law/antitrust conference where I presented a paper (link) which proposes to let consumers choose which advertising network they would like to use with digital platforms (i.e. it proposes interoperability between online platforms and how the platform is monetized).
Such regulation would also allow consumers to use one ad network across all digital platforms online, which I think would be a huge win for privacy. It would also inject competition into digital markets, which should spur innovation and lead to lower prices in adjacent markets. If anybody has feedback, I’m interested :)
-
I’m currently reading the following:
- The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn by Richard Hammond, a great book, with lots of insights into how to be a good scientist from somebody who was present at the beginning of the computer revolution.
- Game Theory: An Introduction by Steve Tadelis: I’m reading this for a university course on game theory. It’s good and clear, and am enjoying doing the exercises.
- Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss: I just finished chapter 1, so not much to report yet.
- The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels: I’m not a communist but I am a political scientist so I figured I’d take a look. Meh.
- The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday: This is my second year reading the daily stoic (I read it in 2019, and plan on reading it again in 2021). I subscribe strongly to virtue ethics and a lot of that is derived from stoicism. This book is a great way to integrate practical philosophy into my day-to-day life.
I’d like to read more philosophical fiction this year (after really enjoying Atlas Shrugged last year), so I’m hoping to read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Invisible Cities this year. My readings lists are here: 2021 (growing), 2020, 2019.
-
The Communist Manifesto isn’t a very representative work, it’s just short enough to occasionally include on children’s reading lists etc… It was written quite early on in his life, and Marx backed away from several of the key points as he grew older. If you want to better understand the ideas of his that continue to have significant influence on politics, I would strongly recommend the book An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital by Michael Heinrich for a fairly short overview, written by one of the world’s foremost Marx scholars who also does a great job of applying criticism to the ideas that haven’t shaken out the way that Marx imagined.
I found “Foundations of Economics” by Yanis Varoufakis (he was an econ professor at the time, this is before he became the Greek Finance Minister during their 2008 crisis) to be an excellent follow-up that traced the history of economics since Smith, through Ricardo and Marx and into the neoclassical era, and showing how many of the Marx’s ideas continue to be highly influential outside of Economics, not because they are poor predictors of behavior, but because of the significant effort to “de-politicize” the field of Economics. This book is a lot heavier on math, but it’s loaded with a lot of interesting modern political perspectives as well, and the math-y bits can be skipped pretty easily.
If you are interested in even more recent global political economics, I would strongly recommend the book Global Political Economy by Ravenhill. The bits about Bretton Woods, inequality growth since its dissolution in 1971, and various global financial institutions are excellent.
-
Glad to hear more stoicism going around. I have not read the daily stoic yet, I’ll get myself a copy immediately. Idk if you have already read pigliucci’s “how to be a stoic”, if not, I’d recommend it. Also I’d love to have a good conversation about those things, but I’ve not found the right forum yet.
-
I’ve read How to be a Stoic, and to be honest, I don’t rate it as highly as other books on stoicism. I guess the book is somewhat unusual in how it tries to get the core ideas across using pseudo dialogs with Epictetus, I can see how others would like that (e.g. I think it worked well in Godel, Escher and Bach).
As for other stoicism books (if anybody is interested), I can strongly recommend “Lessons in Stoicism: What Ancient Philosophers Teach Us about How to Live” by John Sellars. It’s a short book (with a beautiful cover), which neatly explains the core aspects of stoicism. I think it’s a great introduction to practical stoicism.
-
-
That we, as software engineers, are talking about these issues and developing a dialog is a huge issue in itself. Big +1 for the Lobsters community for fostering the discussion.
I think the argument is well constructed and the post well written. Yet as mentioned by the top comment (from @arp242), it doesn’t seem to take into account the impact of writing more efficient code versus the impact of other similarly beneficial activities.
As far as I can see, spending time advocating for, designing or learning about solutions to climate change on a political or social level is likely more effective than whatever we’re able to do from inside a text editor; basically trying to solve the problem at the right level of abstraction. For me, that somewhat invalidates the whole discussion, though I can see how it’s relevant to talk about minimising our climate impact as participants in the software industry.
But even if you want to keep your focus to being code related, if your objective is to minimise total suffering on ~utilitarian grounds, then I strongly suspect that time invested in other activities such as learning about tech ethics or how technology impacts democracy would pay off more in terms of their positive impact. Now more than ever, the code we write has real impact on how society operates; I propose that even in cases where our moral impact is relevant, the morally relevant effects of our code will arise from what it does rather than how long it takes to run.
-
Personal: I’ve been working on a recipe website after some friends and I got frustrated at how bloated existing recipe sites are. It is privacy friendly, fairly accessible and hopefully easy to use.
University: My next university semester starts this week (I’m studying part time as well as working). I’m doing reading-heavy courses this semester so I’ll have to spend time working through the assigned papers.
Work: Trying to keep productive while working from home, partially succeeding :)
-
-
-
Counterpoint:
Your hands are covered in ground beef, eggs and spices. You want to know what the next part to the recipe is but it’s sitting on the counter a few feet away. If the font is big everything is cool. Otherwise, you’re going to need to wash your hands, check the recipe, stick your hands back in the mixture, finish and wash your hands again. (Or try to use that one knuckle that’s clean on the trackpad, but I don’t recommend it.)
Sure you can zoom at the start, but if you forgot you may be SOL in the middle of some steps.
-
I agree. The default font size on the web is standard, it’s something like 16 CSS
pxif I remember correctly. Every website should use this size for body text. But hopefully one CSSpxis not one pixel on the display and good web browsers support adjusting this ratio through zooming. I don’t remember how to do this on Android (from memory it was a bit awkward on Chrome), but on iOS there’s the “aA” button at the left of the URL bar and you can also set a default level in the settings.
-
-
Thanks! I’ll think about ways we can cater for this, though I’d prefer not to increase the default font size too much. Perhaps we could have a setting that increases the font size, but would probably have to have a cookie notice if we were to make it persistent between visits (I think?). Another idea we’ve discussed was having a ‘viewing mode’ just for tablets in the kitchen
-
-
-
-
-
-
Thank you! We just want to grow the number of high quality recipes that are on there to maximise the public good that the website can bring. We’re not looking to make a living or anything. The idea is to keep the features simple and people-first (privacy first, accessibility first, etc). Hopefully then we will naturally gain usage, and full bellies :)
-
-
-
-
-
-
Thanks a lot! At the moment, we’re taking suggestions via email (suggestions@minimalrecipe.com) but might let people submit PR’s directly in the future.
-
-
I’m also working on one of these! We have a recipe database but all the individual recipes are still on bloated websites and it’s very frustrating.
Do you use the canonical recipe format?
-
-
-
Amazing! I’m excited to check it out.
-
-
-
-
-
Do you have plans to open source the recipe website? I am looking to build my own collection.
-
-
-
You can combine your two options and use org-roam in Emacs. I use this and it works great for me!
-
-
I’m a disappointed in the lack of e-ink ubiquity as I am in the fact we never got the flying noodle-bars promised by science fiction. I want walls of e-ink. That stuff should be everywhere.
-
I agree. There was a post here a month or so ago where someone had made a pretty large e-ink display to hang on his wall. The entire thing cost around 4k USD if I remember correctly. It’s stupid expensive for something that should be ubiquitous. Same goes for OLED displays. I really want to have rooms plastered in them to have cool effects on the walls. Patterns and videos and whatnot.
And while we’re at it…. Where’s my flying cars?!
-
We do have hover bikes to be fair
-
-
-
-
Mostly patents I think. Those that can afford to license them are mostly interested in selling commercial signage. It’s definitely not the refresh rate, the use-cases where refresh rates really matter are always going to be better suited to emissive displays, e-ink has value because it keeps state.
-
-
-
-
-
-
Mine is https://todddavies.co.uk
Happy browsing!
-
-
I started studying a masters degree (part time) in Politics and Technology, so I expect to learn a lot about politics. My aim in the degree is to understand the area between politics (and policy decisions in particular) and technology better, possibly with a view to moving into a policy role in the future (away from being a software engineer at the moment). That said, I’m keeping an open mind about the degree, and it’s possible I’ll learn entirely different things.
In parallel, I’d also like to learn more maths, improve my German (I live in Germany so that’s always important), and continue my (hopefully) natural growth as a software engineer at work.
-
I just subscribed and will slowly port my repos, builds & issues over to Sourcehut.
Drew, I think your philosophy (and that of sr.ht) is deeply inspiring, thank you.
-
Books I enjoyed in 2018 and think are worth reading include:
- [fiction] Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality; basically the Harry Potter universe except Harry is taught the scientific method from a young age, which leads him to approach magic in a completely different way. I never thought I’d like any fan fiction, but this was really amazing!
- [non-fiction] Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order; this book examines the phenomenon of synchronisation, looking at examples from nature and from man-made machines. It’s very accessible and a fairly easy read, while going into enough detail to be thought provoking.
- [fiction] Old Man and the Sea; I think this is one of Hemmingway’s shortest stories (which is why I read it). I found the book very powerful and worth the time.
- [fiction] The Kite Runner; Another very popular book about somebody who grows up in 80’s Afganistan, sees the transition from it being a peaceful country to it being a war torn one, and then moves to the US as a refugee. It was probably one of the most moving books I’ve ever read, and I want to read ‘A thousand splendid suns’, which is by the same author, soon.
- [non-fiction] Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto; A rather opinionated take on climate change and politics. Makes very strong arguments for technological solutions to climate change such as nuclear power and GMO’s, though it is controversial in the field for precisely this reason. It’s quite long, but I really enjoyed it.
-
Loved the Kite Runner, can indeed recommend that you read more of the same author. It does get a bit “same, same” after a while. So I also recommend reading a few other authors before you come back.
The Old Man and the Sea, funnily enough, didn’t really fascinate me. Might have to read it again.
Your last book reminds me of “The Wizard and the Prophets”, which I haven’t read, but was paraphrased in the Freakanomics podcast episode “Two (Totally Opposite) Ways to Save the Planet (Ep. 346)”. Found it thought-provoking and irritating – but in a good way. Quote from the podcast description: “The environmentalists say we’re doomed if we don’t drastically reduce consumption. The technologists say that human ingenuity can solve just about any problem.”
-
+1 for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. That and the concept of rationality from Yudkowsky changed the way how I look at the world.
-
-
-
- Reading more of “Why Nations Fail”, which attempts to explain why some nations are more prosperous than others. So far, it’s been a great book and has really helped me see a more nuanced view on many political topics.
- Starting to read “Technology and the Virtues”, which is an ethics book aimed at technologists. I think as a software engineer, it’s important to have thought long and hard about the ethical implications that the software I build could have. Sometimes it seems too easy to ignore or underestimate the (sometimes unintended) impact of a software engineers’ work.
-
I have some extra vacation days to use up, so I’m planning on doing the following:
- Sewing bags to give Christmas presents in instead of wrapping them in wrapping paper.
- Reading more of “Why Nations Fail”, which attempts to explain why some nations are more prosperous than others. So far, it’s been a great book and has really helped me see a more nuanced view on many political topics.
- Reading “Technology and the Virtues”, which is an ethics book aimed at technologists. I think as a software engineer, it’s important to have thought long and hard about the ethical implications that the software I build could have. Sometimes it seems too easy to ignore or underestimate the (sometimes unintended) impact of a software engineers’ work.
- Packing to go to my parents place to visit my family over Christmas :)
-
Sewing bags to give Christmas presents in instead of wrapping them in wrapping paper.
Great idea! We have a couple bags that we reuse for core family stuff. We also are going retro this year to brown wrapping paper (which in contrast to glossy/waxed paper is recycleable), decorated by my 7-year old son.
-
-
Interesting article. Nothing to do with computers.
-
Hence the ‘science’ tag. There’s a range of topics covered by this tag over the years and sometimes something is just interesting.
-
-
-
Is there an official word on what is appropriate or not? That Other Site has IMHO a good guide to what’s on- and what’s off-topic.
-
-
So, we have a rule for tech stuff only and a science tag. An apparent contradiction. There’s two interpretations:
-
Science articles are an exception to the tech rule since technologists are often interested in science.
-
One can only post articles that mix science and technology. Medical tech is an easy example here.
I don’t have a lot to go on since science submissions are pretty rare. I say rare since some stories with the tag maybe didn’t need it. Anyway, what little I’ve seen in terms of votes and enforcement says No. 1 is the de facto rule. The votes in this thread, esp for GeoffWozniak’s and Todd’s comments, corroborate No. 1 being the community’s preference. I waited a while to reply to make sure the votes didn’t swing.
-
This debate about what’s appropriate on a tech news aggregator site goes back at least 15 years, to slashdot and the like.
The closest we came to ideal was to describe the mix as a kind of omelette. Main parts consisting of tech stories, some science and related fields thrown in, with a pinch of just random interesting stuff and news from the scope of humanities.
It’s just my opinion but one of the things that keeps holding IT back is a myopic focus on purely technical matters, when in reality it’s more and more interconnected with different fields/areas, especially including areas falling under soft sciences.
-
They are often myopic. However, we can also specialize forums to focus on one thing. The people wanting this to be just tech, esp deep stuff, might be on other forums for politics, science, etc. Similarly, most people wouldn’t protest Popular Science blocking articles that do in-depth analysis of bills on C-SPAN. People interested in that stuff have law journals or blogs to read.
-
-
-
Under interpretation 1, it wouldn’t matter since we allow science in general. Under No 2, write-ups on the tech behind the analysis would be allowed but not the original article.
-
So much science cannot be done without technology (would an article on how we take ice cores be on topic? Very few people here will ever have to take an ice core, but I would find such an article very interesting!) Is just reporting on the tech allowed, or are the conclusions drawn valid to discuss?
As long as there’s a “science” tag kind of article is on-topic. History is science after all [pdf]
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Some historical perspective on the origins of our industry:
- Computers and tabulating machines prior to the 20th century were mainly concerned with generating tables of numbers (mostly useful for gunnery and navigation), census-taking, and accounting (naked capitalism).
- Analog and digital computers as we know them in the 20th century were developed and used for the first decades of their existence to do mostly military work: calculating ballistic tables, simulating physics of interest to fission, tracking and controlling anti-aircraft guns, targeting missles, and so forth.
- The first networked computing systems in common use were for Naval ships coordinating fire control and for ground anti-aircraft and missle systems.
- MIT via Lincoln Laboratory and Bells Labs did extensive defense work, dating back to the very founding of those institutions.
- Integrated circuits exist so we could make better missle warheads. Huge amount of defense funding.
- GPS exists to help deploy military units, mark artillery targets, and guide missles. The street found its own uses for these things.
We can point to visionaries like Vannevar Bush and their pure dreams for things like augmenting human intellect with hypermedia but those same people never ceased to work for their country on horrifically powerful weapons.
DARPA is probably one of the only reliable sources for decades-out basic research, arguably better than the NSF.
It is not popular in our circles to discuss such things, but then truth remains: military projects have been and continue to be sources of major innovation in our industry.
Further, there’s this bizarre political idea of globalization and open-borders I’ve often seen supported seemingly without thought by folks doing these protests.
Globalization can and does endanger workers by allowing companies to escape what a country might consider to be reasonable regulations.
Not all border-control and immigration enforcement is a bad thing–look no further than the experience of Ukraine in the last few years when faced with an influx of undocumented immigrants.
Frankly, while I support the desire for Labor to organize against Capital when they see their livelihoods and morals threatened, I really do wish they could do so with a bit more of an eye towards reality and strategy. It’s like nobody learned from the Occupy protests. :(
-
I recognize all this history, believe me. What I can say, without getting into a detailed debate, is that the positions you mention are not taken thoughtlessly, and I would encourage everybody to have these conversations about what exactly right and wrong mean to the tech industry. There are certainly a lot of perspectives that deserve to be included, yours among them.
I’ve actually been very frustrated that I don’t see these conversations happening much in the public sphere. Or rather, everybody talks about the tech industry and its moral dilemmas, but I seldom see members of the industry engaging with it, other than CEOs, who therefore wind up representing all of us by default. That really needs to change, and the sooner the better.
I’m tempted to blame the lack of dialogue on the fact that most places where engineers come together are oriented towards technical discussion to the exclusion of politics. But that’s really not the root cause; the root cause is that, in some sense, anyone making an engineer’s salary is part of the establishment and benefits from the establishment, and that makes it a very frightening thing to question whether the establishment is good.
-
I really appreciate your thoughtful input, and I think if everybody had your mindset then discussion would be much easier. Good for you for taking the time to contribute in this manner. Yet, I also find that there are lots of people who are intolerant of other’s perspectives if they differ from there own, which can make discussion unappetizing for people who’s primary goal at work is to get work done and not engage in public debate.
However, writing this comment has made me realise that if I want to help encourage a more thoughtful and nuanced debate within the industry (which I believe is vitally important), I have to be part of making it happen. I guess this involves taking the risk of people not liking me if my views differ from theirs, being honest about why I hold my own views, and open to changing them though constructive, respectful discourse and reflection.
-
-
I’m tempted to blame the lack of dialogue on the fact that most places where engineers come together are oriented towards technical discussion to the exclusion of politics.
There’s a reason for this. Most people’s political beliefs are held at least as strongly as their religious beliefs and they are just as difficult to change. When people talk about political and religious beliefs, they like to talk about why they think their own beliefs are right and occasionally why someone else’s might be wrong. This will almost always cause friction between the participants of the conversation unless they happen to have the same beliefs or unless the participants are unusually diplomatic with each other. Since most people are not always super diplomatic when discussing strongly held beliefs, and generally have a desire to get along with the people they work with and socialize with, it’s usually better for all involved to just avoid the big three volatile topics altogether: sex, religion, and politics.
Of course, all of this goes out the window as soon as you login to twitter.
-
Yes, absolutely understood. I would say that what you’re describing is that people are choosing to prioritize being part of their community over their desire to discuss political ideas. In general, I find this admirable; it takes a lot of maturity to stay off of the topic. But when our industry is at a cross-roads, I think that we have to discuss what comes next, even despite the good reasons not to.
This is all true in a wide variety of contexts - lobste.rs, Twitter, at work, … In the specific case of conversations at work, staying off of politics is a particularly understandable choice because it might well be necessary for continued employment. This is what I was trying to get at with my mention of benefiting from the establishment.
-
-
-
How things were, how things are, how things should be, and how things will be are different things.
It’s 100% true that the modern industry was bootstrapped by military investment and funding. But we shouldn’t forget that the funding is all coming from the same gov’t, and we can choose to have the investment and funding, without having it be in the purpose of blowing people up.
Getting military contracts is a good tactic for a single company to get some success and revenue, and for research to fund itself. But we can also aspire to fund this research directly.
There’s a spectrum of “reasonable military research” here, and it’s totally not black and white. But without guiding principles it’s hard to motivate strong political causes. The tea party did not feel the need to hold back on their principles and now control all three branches of gov’t
-
and we can choose to have the investment and funding, without having it be in the purpose of blowing people up.
It sounds true at first that you can separate from them. Then, looking at big picture, you can’t if you’re dependent on infrastructure, tech, and/or research designed by people fine with that for the purpose of doing that. The Net getting funded was one of those. INFOSEC was another that came from military with highest levels still classified as a munition far as I can tell. GPS was another where it’s constantly helping us find things and helping military kill things. It does both by design. The ISP’s are taking piles of money from NSA for spying on people per Snowden leaks but their opponents still pay for Internet from ISP’s. The major platforms, hardware and software, are often DOD suppliers who make money contributing to blowing people up which their buyers support indirectly. That includes Red Hat with its contributions to Linux.
And yet, here your comment is via lots of tech developed and/or funded by the groups blowing people up. Hard to escape given all the companies trying to get at their money. I don’t know if there’s a single vendor of MCU’s/CPU’s that doesn’t sell to war industries. All we can do is reduce the damage. Then again, DARPA and NSF do the most funding of stuff that can protect people from lots of threats. Pissing them off might hurt a lot of people depending on what you’re working on even if they might hurt others with a weaponization of it. The morality isn’t clear. I guess my compromise so far is government/military work is worth supporting if it can do more good than harm with a decent chance of good being developed outside the government.
-
-
The problem is that to organize, you need to class solidarity. If your allegiance to your class comes before allegiance to your nation-state, then you cannot arbitrarily decide that some workers have more rights to work inside the borders of your nation-start than others, even if this directly impacts your well-being and even if this means driving down salaries in your country.
Renouncing these values means renouncing the values that should motivate you into the class struggle and give in to individualism, that is a tool to maintain the status quo.
Globalization is a tool of the Capital to achieve profit but fighting it now will just lead to a worse alternative. Also defining what’s possible and realistic according to what the neoliberal paradigms dictates is a tool of the Capital but you seem to deal with it pretty fine.
-
If your allegiance to your class comes before allegiance to your nation-state, then you cannot arbitrarily decide that some workers have more rights to work inside the borders of your nation-start than others, even if this directly impacts your well-being and even if this means driving down salaries in your country.
I agree with your analysis here, and that is why I don’t use that ordering. I would wryly suggest that what is needed is some way of balancing class concerns in such a a way as to favor Labor with an eye towards political boundaries, but the natural English branding of such a thing–national socialism–has rather a lot of baggage.
-
-
I’ll add that both INFOSEC that stops governments (more often) and Tor came out of military research. NSF, DARPA, and CIA continue to fund these types of things. Hell, such dual-use, protective projects are some of best reasons to continue funding these organizations. At least NSF and DARPA anyway.
Military R&D are a necessity. We can’t control whether the techs will be abused. The U.S. can’t get behind on tech. So, my compromise is we keep investing, keep the ratio toward positive stuff, and get the crooks out of top of government and military. The latter are who abuse the military tools.
-
bizarre political idea of globalization and open-borders I’ve often seen supported seemingly without thought by folks doing these protests
“Globalization” is an overloaded term. The most popular, “negative” meaning is global capitalism. Protestors probably don’t support that kind of globalization. Open borders for individuals, that makes sense, I’m not sure how it’s bizzare.
-
Open borders for individuals, that makes sense, I’m not sure how it’s bizzare.
Why does it make sense? What answer would you give for that example of Ukraine, where a bunch of armed individual Russians decided to make use of inadequate border control.
If you want to make the argument that we no longer use Westphalian sovereignty, that’s fine, but unless that’s the case a nation must have control over its borders to be considered a sovereign nation.
-
-
-
-
-
I’m back in Munich again after quite a lot of travelling recently, so the first thing I want to do is to clean and tidy my apartment.
I’ll be meeting friends today (Saturday) for lunch and then a drink in the evening (with perhaps a little shopping in-between). On Sunday, I’ll do some work for Munchner Tafel; I’m helping them to integrate with Salesforce so that they have an easier time doing all the HR things they need to do.
-
I’m at another debating tournament, this time in Cologne :)
There’s a good chance that I’ll get knocked out of the tournament today and won’t compete tomorrow, if that’s the case, then I’ll explore the city tomorrow. If not, then I guess I’ll try and win the tournament!
-
I’m visiting my Brother in Sheffield which should be good (depending on the sanitary condition of his student house…).
-
Most of the week will be spent cleaning up some technical debt, but the highlight will be giving a talk at the university I graduated from, which is happening on Wednesday :)
-
I’m on vacation in Porto :) Have a great week everybody!
I’ll spend the weekend putting the finishing touches on my paper which proposes to split advertising networks from online platforms. Hopefully the submission process to a journal won’t be too arduous. If you’re interested, comments are appreciated.