The tech interview is a legible, reasonably well-designed process. | MOND←TECH MAGAZINE
Basically a review of ‘Seeing Like a State’. And some other thoughts.| MOND←TECH MAGAZINE
Basically a review of ‘Seeing Like a State’. And some other thoughts.| MOND←TECH MAGAZINE
Archives for July 2010| www.ribbonfarm.com
For the last week, John Muir quotes have been floating into my head. Uninvited, but not unwelcome. This one in particular has been gently tugging at my attention:| ribbonfarm
This entry is part 4 of 15 in the series Psychohistory| ribbonfarm
Our cartoon view of history goes straight from the Flintstones to Jetsons without developmental stages of any consequence in between. Hunter-gatherers and settled modern civilizations loom large, as bookends, in our study of history. The more I study history though, the more I realize that hunter-gatherer lifestyles are mostly of importance in evolutionary prehistory, not in history proper. If you think about history proper, a different lifestyle, pastoral nomadism, starts to loom large, and ...| ribbonfarm
Long-time reader and astute commenter, Xianhang (Hang) Zhang wrote a very interesting post a couple of weeks ago on his blog: The Evaporative Cooling Effect. It is part of a fascinating series he is doing on social software. The post explores a phenomenon that is very close to the status illegibility phenomenon I explored two weeks ago, and in fact draws inspiration from the same Groucho Marx/Lake Wobegon observations that I started with.| ribbonfarm
Discover how embracing chaos and messiness can boost creativity, resilience, and real-world productivity.| Forte Labs
Throughout the last year, I’ve been increasingly troubled by a set of vague thoughts centered on the word addiction. Addiction as a concept has expanded for me, over the last few months, beyond its normal connotations, to encompass the entire consumer economy. Disturbing shows like Hoarders have contributed to my growing sense that conventional critiques of consumerism are either missing or marginalizing something central, and that addiction has something to do with it. These vague, troub...| ribbonfarm
This entry is part 10 of 15 in the series Psychohistory| ribbonfarm
Meta steps through the black mirror with the launch of AI user profiles.| Andrew Stiefel
Infrastructure as historical object, as political object, as *world*| folklore.mirror.xyz
The apparent rate of biomedical progress has never been greater.| Markov Bio
Each of them – and they constitute 80% of humanity – is born the most beautiful baby in the world. Each is an above-average child; in fact the entire 80% is in the top 20% of human beings (it’s crowded up there). Each grows up knowing that he or she is deeply special in some way, and destined for a unique life that he or she is “meant” to live.| ribbonfarm
The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World, Charles C. Mann (Picador, 2018). There used to be famines. Poor harvests and crop failures have been with us since the development of agriculture. Archaeological evidence makes it clear that farmers have always lived on the knife’s edge of subsistence, often hungry or malnourished, and it doesn’t take much to push them over the edge into famine: too much rain or not enough, volcani...| www.thepsmiths.com
For the last hundred years, individuals have worked for firms, and, by historical standards, large ones.| ribbonfarm
Opinions about relying on other people's work.| Thinking about dependencies
On 8 June, a Scottish banker named Alexander Fordyce shorted the collapsing Company’s shares in the London markets. But a momentary bounce-back in the stock ruined his plans, and he skipped town leaving £550,000 in debt. Much of this was owed to the Ayr Bank, which imploded. In less than three weeks, another 30 banks collapsed across Europe, bringing trade to a standstill. On July 15, the directors of the Company applied to the Bank of England for a £400,000 loan. Two weeks later, they wa...| ribbonfarm
If you work in government IT, you’ve probably heard this before: “We’ve got one standard database product.” “We’ve standardized on this programming language.” “This software is our standard for case management systems,” and so on. There are a number of important downsides, though, to standardization efforts: one size all ends up fitting nothing well, they act as a placeholder for more informed technical discussions, and they end up being a barrier to continual change.| sboots.ca
One of the most common mistakes I see people make when looking at data is incorrectly using an overly simplified model. A specific variant of this that has derailed the majority of work roadmaps I've looked at is treating people as interchangeable, as if it doesn't matter who is doing what, as if individuals don't matter.| danluu.com
The other day, I was failing to teach my 3-year-old son about measurement. He wanted to figure out if something would fit in an envelope, and I was “helping” by showing him how to measure the width of the envelope, then comparing it to the width of the paper he was trying to insert. It turns out that this is a trickier concept than I had assumed; the ability to understand even simple measurements requires a fair amount of cognitive maturity. 3-year-old kids can compare directly, but the c...| ribbonfarm
In my previous post on TikTok I discussed why its For You Page algorithm is the connective tissue that makes TikTok work. It is the bus on its motherboard that connects and closes all its feedback loops.| Remains of the Day
