Werd I/O

I realized that the existence of my mailing list was encouraging me to post less often and to not publish short posts at all, for fear of swamping peoples' inboxes with short messages.

The simple solution to that is: the newsletter is back to sending digest posts on an every-other-day cadence. If you want to receive posts more often, you can subscribe via the RSS feed (or the all items feed if you also want my link posts, photos, etc).

At this point, I’m assuming that nothing’s happening in person until spring or summer 2022.

People thought I was being super-negative when, last year, I suggested that it would probably be a long wait before we were on top of covid. Looking back now, I was probably too optimistic: I thought we’d be back in action early this year, and that vaccinations would stop the spread more quickly than they have (partially because I didn’t expect there to be hordes of people who refused to take them).

I haven’t arranged to be at any events this year, but I now see that the ones I tentatively booked tickets for in winter 2022 aren’t going to happen - or at least, I’m probably not going to be there. That’s a bummer for me, because I was really looking forward to them, but the more important thing is to stay safe and stop the spread.

So here’s the policy: unless something major changes, I’ll refuse any in-person business meetings or events this year and in winter 2022. (Socially, I’ll hang out with other fully-vaccinated people outside.) I’ll re-evaluate in the winter to see if it’s safe. If we have to take a third jab - or more - I’ll be first in line if they let me.

If you haven’t been vaccinated yet: please consider doing it today. It’s safe and makes you much more likely to survive an encounter with the virus. The disinformation out there surrounding vaccinations is not reality-based. You’ve probably already been vaccinated for a bunch of things (at least, I hope you have) - this is just one more.

I’m really looking forward to the day when we can talk about this period of time with a historical lens rather than being in the midst of a global, deadly pandemic.

At Matter Ventures, Corey Ford developed a method for figuring out a founder’s mindset early on. It went as follows.

We’d get the startup founders to figure out the biggest assumptions they were making across user risk (do people want this?), business risk (can this be the center of a viable business?), and feasibility risk (can we build this in a scalable way with the time, team, and resources potentially at our disposal?). And then we’d ask them to go out and figure out how to de-risk those assumptions in the real world, usually by talking to experts and asking smart questions.

The answers didn’t matter as much as how the founders reacted to those answers.

Some founders felt that confidence was the key. “We didn’t find any blockers,” they’d say. “We validated our plan.” Often they believed in their own expertise so much that they didn’t even fully test their assumption.

Other founders were transparent, discussed the issues they’d discovered with clarity and lack of hubris, and figured out what their next steps should be based on what they discovered.

Every time we invested in a founder from the first group, it was a deadly mistake. Founders who weren’t precious about their ideas and were willing to take a test-driven approach were exponentially more likely to succeed. It’s easier said than done - particularly when you’re emotionally invested in an aspect of your idea - but sometimes you have to let go to succeed.

I’ve found that outside of the investing world too: colleagues who were willing to say, “I don’t know, let’s ask” were significantly more effective than ones who tried to bluster through an answer or try and figure out a problem based on their own smarts alone. Time and time again, ego proves itself to be a kind of myopia.

A fixed mindset is never as good as a growth mindset. Everyone can learn something new, and it’s never a weakness to have to reach out and ask. Any time you find yourself saying, “I’m just going to assert that ...” in answer to an unknown, you need to stop, take a step back, and find someone who really knows.

I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week, I'm donating to the Anti Police-Terror Project. Based in Oakland, APTP is leading the way in pushing for criminal justice reform. And make no mistake, American criminal justice needs deep reform. Violence is pervasive and abuse is rampant, particularly against communities of color.

APTP describes its mission as follows:

The Anti Police-Terror Project is a Black-led, multi-racial, intergenerational coalition that seeks to build a replicable and sustainable model to eradicate police terror in communities of color. We support families surviving police terror in their fight for justice, documenting police abuses and connecting impacted families and community members with resources, legal referrals, and opportunities for healing. APTP began as a project of the ONYX Organizing Committee.

Recent campaigns have included support for Black communities after Covid, in the light of historic, systemic inequalities, mental health focused responder reform, and effective police oversight in Oakland. This is vital work.

I donated. If you have the means, I encourage you to join me here.

#justice

I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week, I’m highlighting two organizations involved in providing access to abortions and reproductive health for women in Texas. I find the Supreme Court’s failure to block the state abortion ban to be extremely troubling. The law itself is horrific, allowing anyone to sue anyone who helps a woman obtain an abortion, with no requirement to have any connection at all to the person being sued. There are no exceptions for rape and incest.

It’s abhorrent. Women have domain over their bodies, as men do. Abortion bans rob them of this.

In addition to the organizations below, I’ve donated to the ActBlue Texas abortion fund, which splits donations to abortion funds across Texas. If you need an abortion in Texas, or know someone who does, Need Abortion contains resources to find providers and financial assistance.

The Texas Equal Access Fund helps low-income people get access to abortions in north, east, and west Texas. Abortion bans disproportionately hurt people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The organization describes its mission as follows:

Texas Equal Access Fund believes that when it comes to abortion, there is no choice if there is no access. Restrictions on abortion access and funding are discriminatory because they especially burden people with low incomes, young people, people in rural areas, and people of color. We oppose all efforts to restrict abortion rights and are committed to fighting for access to abortion for all. We believe that abortion is a fundamental feature of health care, and that it is the responsibility of government to cover abortion as part of social safety net programs. However, in the absence of government funding, we believe it is our duty to act now to support those who want abortions and cannot afford them.

TEA notes that “almost half of our clients are already parenting at least one child and 70% of the people we fund are people of color.”

If you have the means, I encourage you to donate here.

The Afiya Center provides refuge, education, and other resources to Black women. In addition to helping provide access to abortions, TAC provides a range of important services, including HIV/AIDS support, reproductive justice, and work on maternal mortality (Black women are the most likely to die in childbirth in Texas).

It describes its mission as follows:

The Afiya Center (TAC) was established in response to the increasing disparities between HIV incidences worldwide and the extraordinary prevalence of HIV among Black womxn and girls in Texas. TAC is unique in that it is the only Reproductive Justice (RJ) organization in North Texas founded and directed by Black womxn.

At TAC we are transforming the lives, health, and overall wellbeing of Black womxn and girls by providing refuge, education, and resources; we act to ignite the communal voices of Black womxn resulting in our full achievement of reproductive freedom.

If you have the means, I encourage you to donate here.

#justice

This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for August, 2021. Once again, this is a lighter list: I spent a lot of my month with family, helping to organize my mother’s memorial. Apart from that, it's been a time for reflection rather than consumption.

Books

100 Boyfriends, by Brontez Purnell . Raw in a way that transcends honesty, these confessional short stories are full of uncomfortable life. The writing is incredible. I’m not sure what I took away, exactly, but I think it’s time for a shower.

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, by bell hooks. Although it’s written for teachers, there are lessons here that transcend that field to be insightful for anyone in a hypothetical position of authority. Today, the topics and even its writing style are still cutting edge. When it was written a quarter century ago, it must have been incredibly radical. I wish every teacher and manager in my life had read it.

Notable Articles

Business

One Medical Employees Accuse Concierge Care Provider Of Less Focus On Patients. “Dozens of One Medical employees are trying to unionize as a response to what they say has been mismanagement of the organization’s COVID-19 response, poor working conditions for staff and, they allege, a declining focus on patients.” I’m a long-term One Medical customer and have definitely (but anecdotally) noticed this in the quality of care I’ve received over time.

Inclusive icebreakers. “To ‘break the ice’ is a metaphor for dissipating tension in a group of people who don’t know each other very well. Word Histories gives a bit of background behind the phrase, which seems to be hundreds of years old. However, there are still some common activities being used that have the opposite effect for some people – making them feel even more disconnected from the rest from the group.” An important point with some great suggestions.

VCs are financing a servant economy. “But this is more than just the most recent unicorn-bubble fad. It’s bringing us one step closer to living in a servant economy. The world’s most powerful VC investors are funding an economy where technology allows a ‘ruling class’ to command an ‘underclass’ of servants with the swipe of an app.”

Court rules California gig worker initiative is unconstitutional, a setback to Uber and Lyft. “A California judge on Friday ruled that a 2020 ballot measure exempting rideshare and food delivery drivers from a state labor law is unconstitutional because it infringes on the Legislature’s power to set workplace standards.” Great news!

The Secret Bias Hidden in Mortgage-Approval Algorithms. “We found that lenders gave fewer loans to Black applicants than White applicants even when their incomes were high—$100,000 a year or more—and had the same debt ratios. In fact, high-earning Black applicants with less debt were rejected more often than high-earning White applicants who have more debt.” Alternative credit scores are vital - Classic FICO disproportionately harms people of color.

What If People Don’t Want A Career? “In May I ended up on Burnout TikTok, where every 5th video offered withering commentary on the futility and frustration of toiling away for long hours at a job they didn’t particularly like. I can’t find the video anymore but the one that sticks in my head was a TikToker venting about how the idealized career is — when you think about it — a raw deal. It went something like this: You devote the bulk of every day for 30-40 years in the prime of your life to various companies to make them and their shareholders money and then you get ten years near the end of your life to do what you please. Sounds like a bad arrangement.”

Crypto

Remarks Before the Aspen Security Forum by SEC Chair Gary Gensler. “Right now, large parts of the field of crypto are sitting astride of — not operating within — regulatory frameworks that protect investors and consumers, guard against illicit activity, ensure for financial stability, and yes, protect national security.”

Chelsea Manning Is Back, And Hacking Again, Only This Time For A Bitcoin-Based Privacy Startup. “Halpin asked Manning to look for security weaknesses in his new privacy project, which eventually became Nym, a Neuchâtel, Switzerland-based crypto startup. Halprin founded Nym in 2018 to send data anonymously around the Internet using the same blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin. To date, Nym has raised some $8.5 million from a group of crypto investors including Binance, Polychain Capital and NGC Ventures. The firm now employs 10 people and is using its latest round of capital to double its team size.” I’ve known Harry for a long time, and was privileged to meet Chelsea when she was an advisor to his previous startup (which we invested in at Matter). I’m excited to see this collaboration.

Culture

What Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings looked like as two Weinstein movies. “My script review became the second part of a carefully coordinated one-two punch. At that point, Ain’t It Cool was a useful platform for filmmakers who were trying to convince studio heads that there was an audience out there for serious-minded genre fare produced with all of the resources required, and it was not always an easy sell. I was happy to make the case: The scripts were great enough that Jackson deserved the chance to see them through.”

‘Bloody’ overtaken as the UK’s most popular swear word, study suggests. I’ve been self-censoring since I got to the US - people swear much less often here - but I’m being less diligent over time.

My dead dad’s journal: How I finally met a man I knew for my entire life. “It was a window into the mind of a loving father. It was a look into the fraught thought process of a deeply analytical man. A religious man who knew he was sinning. An addict who was self-aware, and still couldn’t pull himself out from the abyss. It was Jekyll talking to Hyde. Bruce Banner talking to the Hulk. And, in honor of my dad I feel I must also include: It’s Data talking to Lore.”

Feels Good Man! Pepe, copyright, and NFTs. “And then NFT craze hits, and Pepe becomes a star in the non-fungible token markets. I’ve spent countless hours in NFT platforms in the last months, every time I open a new page, there’s usually an animated Pepe waiting for me. Many NFT artists are part of the meme generation that grew up on Pepe and other memes, so these tend to feature heavily on their output (probably only beaten by Doge). Instead of fighting the trend, Furie joined the NFT revolution, and started making lots of money off Pepe “originals”, and allowing most other NFTs of Pepes to continue.”

Politics

Afghanistan Meant Nothing. A Veteran Reflects on 20 Wasted Years. “And so I sit here, reading these sad fucking articles and these horrified social media posts about the suffering in Afghanistan and the horror of the encroaching Taliban and how awful it is that this is happening but I can’t stop feeling this grim happiness, like, finally, you fuckers, finally you have to face the thing Afghanistan has always been. You can’t keep lying to yourself about what you sent us into.”

Science

Atlantic Ocean currents weaken, signalling big weather changes. “The Atlantic Ocean’s current system, an engine of the Northern Hemsiphere’s climate, could be weakening to such an extent that it could soon bring big changes to the world’s weather.”

A Major Report Warns Climate Change Is Accelerating And Humans Must Cut Emissions Now. “Global climate change is accelerating and human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases are the overwhelming cause, according to a landmark report released Monday by the United Nations. There is still time to avoid catastrophic warming this century, but only if countries around the world stop burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible, the authors warn.”

Rain falls at Greenland ice summit for first time on record. “That meltwater is streaming into the ocean, causing sea levels to rise. Already, melting from Greenland’s ice sheet --the world’s second-largest after Antarctica’s -- has caused around 25% of global sea level rise seen over the last few decades, scientists estimate. That share is expected to grow, as global temperatures increase.” We’re increasingly screwed.

Evolution is now accepted by a majority of Americans. “The level of public acceptance of evolution in the United States is now solidly above the halfway mark, according to a new study based on a series of national public opinion surveys conducted over the last 35 years.” That number is 54%, which is absolutely pathetic.

Society

Nearly half of American workers don’t earn enough to afford a one-bedroom rental. “Rents in the US continued to increase through the pandemic, and a worker now needs to earn about $20.40 an hour to afford a modest one-bedroom rental. The median wage in the US is about $21 an hour.” Some absolutely dire statistics here.

2020 Census data: The United States is more diverse and more multiracial than ever. “While the under-18 population decreased during the last decade, it is rapidly diversifying. Non-White US residents younger than 18 now make up 53% of the population among minors, up from 47% in 2010.” (NB: I don’t like the “non-white” framing; white is not the default.)

Disability Advocates Fight Ruling Allowing Electric Shock Treatment Back In Mass. Residential School. “students wear backpacks equipped with electrical stimulation devices around the clock. Workers at the residential school employ the shocks using a remote control device when the students display a range of unwanted behaviors.” WTF?

‘It’s not hard work for me’: At 101 years old, this Maine lobsterwoman still works the water. “Virginia Oliver is the oldest licensed lobsterer in Maine and possibly on the planet. But in her eyes, it’s simply what she does. Her world has changed in once-unimaginable ways since 1920, but in other ways it’s hardly changed at all.” Come for the story, stay for the amazing photo.

Afghanistan's all-girls robotics team frantically trying to flee Taliban. “Members of the team, who range in age from 12 to 18, have overcome war and other hardships to pursue their love of engineering and robotics and strike a blow for national pride. They’ve made global headlines as a symbol of a more progressive Afghanistan.”

Op-Ed: As a doctor in a COVID unit, I’m running out of compassion for the unvaccinated. Get the shot. “I can pretty much guarantee we would have never met had you gotten vaccinated because you would have never been hospitalized. All of our COVID units are full and every single patient in them is unvaccinated. Numbers don’t lie. The vaccines work.”

Feds Deliberately Targeted Black Lives Matter Protesters, A Report Says. “Movement leaders and experts said the prosecution of protesters over the past year continues a century-long practice by the federal government, rooted in structural racism, to suppress Black social movements via the use of surveillance tactics and other mechanisms.”

What I Learned While Eavesdropping on the Taliban. “When people ask me what I did in Afghanistan, I tell them that I hung out in planes and listened to the Taliban. My job was to provide “threat warning” to allied forces, and so I spent most of my time trying to discern the Taliban’s plans. Before I started, I was cautioned that I would hear terrible things, and I most certainly did. But when you listen to people for hundreds of hours — even people who are trying to kill your friends — you hear ordinary things as well.”

Parents Are Not Okay. “School is only just starting and already kids are being quarantined in mind-boggling numbers: 20,000 across the state of Mississippi, 10,000 in a single district in Tampa, Florida. They’re getting sick too, with hospitalizations of kids under 17 across the country up at least 22 percent in the past month, by the CDC’s count, and each new week sets pediatric hospitalization records for the entire pandemic.”

Technology

Electric cars have much lower life cycle emissions, new study confirms. “But Bieker’s analysis says that there is no future for internal combustion engine vehicles if we are to actually decarbonize. HEVs only reduce lifecycle emissions by about 20 percent, and PHEVs are little better in Europe (25–27 percent lower than gasoline), a little worse in China (6–12 percent lower than gasoline), and adequate in the US (42–46 percent lower than gasoline). But compared to BEVs, a PHEV will have much greater lifetime emissions in all three areas. (India has almost no PHEVs, apparently.) And the advantage of BEVs over HEVs and PHEVs only grows as the grid decarbonizes more.”

Why Silicon Valley’s Asian Americans Still Feel Like a Minority. “On her way out she asked her likely successor, a White man, if he needed help navigating the company. She says he told her, “I don’t really need to prepare that hard—the manager has my back.” [Bo] Ren was floored. She’d spent more than 100 hours preparing for the same interviews so she could prove she deserved the spot. Being White, she says, is “like having a skip pass at Disney World. I realized there is a bamboo ceiling, and I’d have to work 100 times harder.””

The voices of women in tech are still being erased. “When we look at the impact of women’s voices in tech today, we can see both that they have led calls for accountability and also that they have been literally and figuratively undervalued. From doing voiceover work that becomes the basis for voice tools that millions use, without being paid or acknowledged accordingly, or doing work on the foundational concepts of AI, women are often present in tech without being listened to.”

Global organizations urge Apple to drop child safety features. “More than 90 civil liberties organizations around the world sent a letter to Apple’s Tim Cook Thursday, urging the CEO to walk back its plans to use machine learning to automatically detect child sexual abuse material on users’ devices.” Although everybody wants to protect children, the implications are unfortunately enormous.

On TikTok, misogyny and white supremacy slip through ‘enforcement gap’. “News investigations have nevertheless revealed that TikTok is used by Islamic State militants and to promote neo-Nazism. While the platform has started releasing transparency reports with details about the content it has removed for violating its guidelines, it is not yet part of a consortium of tech giants such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube involved in an industry anti-terrorism effort to collaboratively track and review content from white supremacists and far-right militia groups.”

Why are hyperlinks blue? “As a user experience designer who has created websites since 2001, I’ve always made my links blue. I have advocated for the specific shade of blue, and for the consistent application of blue, yes, but I’ve never stopped and wondered, why are links blue? It was just a fact of life. Grass is green and hyperlinks are blue. Culturally, we associate links with the color blue so much that in 2016, when Google changed its links to black, it created quite a disruption. But now, I find myself all consumed by the question, WHY are links blue? WHO decided to make them blue? WHEN was this decision made, and HOW has this decision made such a lasting impact?”

The future needs files. “I want all OSs, including mobile ones, to properly support real files as they are amazing, inspiring, and possibly the future of how we build our digital future.”

I wrote this piece to read at my mother's memorial on Saturday, August 28. I don't want to lose it, so I'm posting it here, to my personal space.

This is terrifying to me, which is why I’ve decided to write something down. I can’t possibly hope to represent Ma well. Even finding a story to tell is incredibly hard because there are so many of them: a lifetime of happy stories from a childhood that always felt like a kind of wheatgerm-fueled adventure where we lived on our own terms in spite of what the world might have wanted from us.

I started calling her Ma as a term of endearment when I was an adult. “Mum” is too British; “Mom” doesn’t sound right coming out of my mouth. “Mom”. So I confess, I absolutely stole Ma from [our cousins] the Neales, who have similar accent difficulties, and who I admire in lots of ways.

But when we were growing up, I called her Debbie. We were a very respectful but non-hierarchical household: we called our parents by their first names, we were encouraged to take things apart and ask how things worked, and we were consulted on all kinds of things that children are not necessarily best-equipped to weigh in on - but we were trusted, and that was wonderful, and a reflection of how both my parents think and thought. It’s a mindset rooted in equality, growth, and learning.

So. What do I want you to know about Ma?

Everything. Or at least, quite a few things. But let’s start here:

I want you to know that she was really freaking smart.

In my line of work, which is working in product and engineering in the tech industry, people often say things like, “explain this like you were explaining it to your mother.” It’s obviously a completely sexist line of thinking, which is kind of a reflection of the tech industry to be honest, and I take great satisfaction in telling them that my mother taught me to program. Not only that, but she learned assembler, which is one of the most intricate ways to program.

She would sit patiently with me for hours on end, and together we’d plug source code into our 8-bit Atari. She taught me BASIC, and then later on, we moved on to more complicated languages together.

When we didn’t have the money to get the latest and greatest PC, she organized a computer club at a local business in Oxford so that I’d have access. Every Thursday night, a bunch of kids from across the city would play games, make art, learn to code, and become computer literate together under her gentle guidance.

She studied the telecommunications industry, and knew that both the internet and the mobile revolution were coming. She understood the implications, and spoke to many of the people who were making things happen. She wrote detailed analyses of the forces that would reshape much of society over the coming decades.

She took me with her to industry shows in Cannes, and as a family we went to technology conferences across Europe, where we’d go sightseeing (and I might sneak into an event or two) and she’d be running panels and conducting interviews.

She was unassuming about it; she wasn’t self-important, but if she’d been someone else, she could have become a billionaire.

Instead, she withdrew from the industry, retrained, became a middle school science teacher in one of the most impoverished towns in California, and never looked back. I don’t remember her as happy at work as when she was teaching those kids. Even when she started to get sick, she went into work every day with an oxygen tank on her back, looking like a Ghostbuster. Even when she couldn’t work anymore, she helped her school get grants and organized an educational program with NASA. She was dedicated and she loved it.

She would engage in debate about anything. It was common to see her and my dad watching a documentary or lecture on any number of obscure topics and discussing it late into the night and sometimes days later. She became fascinated by science and space. She could speak a bunch of languages and would read and analyze academic reports in languages she didn’t even know yet. She was well-read, and read voraciously - often with multiple books on the go at once, which even this year she’d alternate between during dialysis and while she was getting her tube feeds in bed - and was hungry for knowledge.

So, sure, I’ll explain it like I’m explaining it to my mother. I’ll include all the detail, know that she’ll understand the implications better than I will, and be ready for a series of informed, insightful questions - and to be, more than anything else, challenged on the ethics of it.

What do I want you to know about Ma?

I want you to know that she cared. She wasn’t just kind and forgiving, willing to see the best in absolutely everyone and go out of her way to help - although she was definitely all of those things. But more than that, she really cared deeply: about people and the intricacies of their lives, about the world, and particularly about fairness.

Before I was born, both my parents were involved in struggles to support affirmative action and tenants’ rights. She described herself as having been radicalized early on, but it’s not particularly that she was radical: she could just see past the social templates that everyone is expected to adhere to, and which perpetuate systemic injustices, and could see how everything should operate to be fairer.

That was true on every level. She wanted she and Steve and Erica to all be treated equally, and would make it known if she thought the others were getting a raw deal. She tried her best to treat Hannah and I equally. If someone made a sexist or a homophobic remark around her, she would call it out. If someone was xenophobic, or unthinkingly imperialist, she would bring it up. She was outspoken - always with good humor, but always adamant about what really mattered.

Later in life, when she had a little bit more money, she gave to causes she believed in: representation for women, reproductive rights, racial justice, voting rights, and the environment. She was glued to the Presidential debates, appalled by the previous guy, and was completely on top of what was going on in the world.

She was a feminist, as we all should be. She defined her own identity, dressed as she wanted to dress, acted as she wanted to act, spoke how she wanted to speak. It wasn’t that she was irreverent towards more traditional expectations; they were utterly irrelevant. As they should be.

What do I want you to know about Ma?

I want you to know that she was herself - and that self was full of life and energy and humor and movement. And I’m not just talking about her amazing trousers.

The last time I was here at the Cape, which was three years ago, we were all hanging out in the pond behind Little Lane. For some reason, there was an inflatable bull out there with us. None of us could climb on top of it: Hannah, me, Anna, I think Rachel was there, Wiley, Elise.

Ma was weak, and the lung transplant drugs were taking their toll, and she was having trouble eating food. And when she started to climb onto that bull, I’ve got to admit, I was kind of worried.

But by god, climb she did, and she was the only one of us who made it to the top of that bull. And once she’d scrambled to the top of it, she lifted her arms up in victory.

That was Ma.

We realized later that she absolutely was not supposed to be in a closed body of water as an immunosuppressed person, but whatever. There were no ill effects. She climbed the bull.

She spent the last decade scrambling to the top of the biggest metaphorical inflatable bull you’ve ever heard of. And she spent most of that decade balancing precariously on top of it with her arms held high in victory.

When Pammy gifted us the Sunfish - the same boat that they had both sailed when they were younger - it was like a key to unlocking the bay. We spent days and days tacking around the bay, finding exactly the right breeze, and making our way back to Grandmother’s Beach at high speed in a single tack. She would yell: whooooooosh! And then we’d think about tacking back to Sagelots and doing it all again.

Life was always full of those small moments of joy. Taking Tessie, our little Jack Russell Terrier, out on Port Meadow and watching her bound through the tall grass. Going out to the wildlife sanctuary outside of Turlock and seeing the birds fly through the reeds. Sneaking out and stealing a dinghy late at night from Grandmother’s Beach and oohing at the phosphorescence shimmering around our oars. Getting out the sofabed and all sitting together under the covers to watch Doctor Who or a movie on a Friday night. Sitting around the table with people she loved, picking crabs.

When she got sick, life was still full of those moments of joy. Even just a five minute walk through the park had the same energy. Just a few months ago, she got out and walked the boardwalk at Monterey. “I still have life-force in me,” she told the doctors. She loved to live.

What do I want you to know about Ma?

One last thing for now. I actually have a message to impart. Not so long ago, while she was lying in a bed on the tenth floor at UCSF, surrounded by all the tubes and hospital paraphernalia, she gave me a simple instruction:

“Tell everyone I love them.”

And she did. She loved you so much. She loved all of us so much, in a way that was open, and forgiving, and kind, and all in her own way.

I’m really glad you’re all here. She would be glad too. She was hoping to be with you all one more time.

Thank you.

I failed to publish a Fairness Friday post today. In my defense, I've been preparing for my mother's memorial, which is tomorrow.

I'll likely post on Sunday. For now, I hope that you have a lovely weekend, full of good things, and urge you to tell your loved ones how you feel about them.

1. Proof-of-work is a disaster. There’s no way to couch it; arguments about it providing economic incentives for renewable energy are cognitive dissonance at best. Proof-of-work blockchains have the environmental footprint of a small country. Bitcoin could raise global temperatures by two degrees over the next decade all on its own. There is no valid argument for that being acceptable - or necessary.
   
   
2. Not all blockchains are terrible. Algorand could be considered to be carbon-negative if you accept that carbon offsets are effective (I don’t). Still, it’s got a very low footprint. Proof-of-stake chains have a much lower impact; Ethereum is a high profile example of one that’s making the change. But, of course, it should have happened faster.
   
   
3. The financialization of everything sucks. The instinct to put everything on-chain is a horrible idea that undermines social contracts in favor of free markets. In its worst embodiments, it’s a hardcore conservative libertarian’s wet dream. To have value, something doesn’t need to have financial value. Social contracts, representative democracy, social programs, and welfare all have immeasurable social value that should not be replaced with a Decentralized Autonomous Organization or anything else. Not to mention creating art for the sake of art, or community spaces for the sake of community. We don’t have to - and shouldn’t - make everything into a market.
   
   
4. But putting some resources on-chain isn’t bad. A rough rule of thumb for me: if the current gatekeeper for a resource is a wealth silo (giant corporation, wealthy individual) then it’s a prime candidate for replacement by a decentralized mechanism. Once again for the conservative libertarians: our democratically-elected government represents us and our interests, so government-run programs are not candidates for this.
   
   
5. Too many projects use an “if we built it they will come” mentality. I once saw a crypto investor tell an audience that he likes crypto projects to find an audience for their work in year two or three. That’s bonkers. As with every other software project - or every project - you need to validate the need and the users on day one. Otherwise you’re playing a very risky game, probably with other people’s money. It’s fun to pretend that you’re smarter than everyone else and can make something amazing without outside input, but it’s also highly unlikely.
   
   
6. And most of them are near-impossible to use. Using web3 projects is a horrible, archaic user experience. Centralized exchanges like Coinbase are far easier to use than decentralized exchanges for almost everyone, and unless someone comes up with the equivalent of Netscape Navigator (the first truly usable web browser), centralized services will always be the gateway to blockchain tech for most people.
   
   
7. Crypto may threaten to replace reserve currencies. The dollar has been used as a reserve currency for decades, but the ease of cross-border trade with cryptocurrencies may unseat it. Countries like China and El Salvador seem to be betting on this. It’s not obvious to me that a truly-decentralized currency replacing the dollar is a bad thing; but of course, not every cryptocurrency is truly decentralized. Even the likes of Bitcoin aren’t if a single entity controls enough of the miners.
   
   
8. Crypto is transforming global trade on a local level (which is great). I’m personally aware of freelancers in countries like Colombia being paid in crypto rather than USD or local currency. Vietnam, India, and Pakistan lead global adoption. I think this is a really positive change that could have a major impact on traditional global power hierarchies.
   
   
9. Some incumbents won’t go down without a fight. Both the empowerment of individuals in the global south and the upending of reserve currency structures will be major issues over the next decade or so. It’s the kind of change that has the potential to start wars. And at the very least, there are plenty of interests locked up in the traditional financial system that will do what they can to preserve their wealth.
   
   
10. Free markets tend not to protect the vulnerable - and we can’t afford to not. We need mechanisms to mitigate climate change, to empower people who live in poverty, to support social goods like education and public health, and to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to lead a prosperous, good life in health and safety. Those things need to be dealt with intentionally.
    
    
11. We need to be wary of crypto-libertarians. We need to beware of people who want to replace representative democracy with a financialized system, and who want to replace social safety nets with markets. Markets and society can happily live hand in hand; one does not need to replace the other. There are lots of opportunities that come with decentralization; conservative libertarians see opportunities to remove these social protections. We should continue to build for progress, and not tear down important protections that were hard-won over generations.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week, I’m donating to the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance. CIYJA is an organization run and developed by undocumented youth organizers. It describes its work as follows:

CIYJA is a statewide immigrant youth-led alliance that focuses on placing immigrant youth in advocacy and policy delegations in order to ensure pro-immigrant policies go beyond legalization, and shed light on how the criminalization of immigrants varies based on identity.

Its work includes pressure to divest from private prisons and to prevent deportations and family separations.

I donated. If you have the means, I encourage you to do the same.

Photo by Peg Hunter.

I’m hiring for a few engineers right now: five Ruby on Rails positions (most of them senior), two JS positions, and a quality engineer. More than a few people I’ve spoken to for these roles have apologized to me for coming from different backgrounds and not having been the product of a conventional CS track.

There’s no need to apologize for this. At all. In fact, I really like working with people who come from non-traditional backgrounds and/or small startups. Conversely, I’m not at all swayed by whether people went to top CS schools (or did CS at all) or are an an alumnus of a Fortune 500 tech company. Perhaps it’s worth exploring why; it seems obvious to me, but maybe isn’t to everyone.

The short answer is: it’s about priorities and values. Big companies and well-established CS tracks tend to (but don’t always!) lead to a certain kind of templated thinking that doesn’t necessarily translate to a smaller startup environment. People from more creative backgrounds or who have worked on smaller startups tend to be focused on making an outsized impact on a real, human problem using a broader set of skills, rather than developing a niche skill and working their way up the corporate ladder.

The skills required to climb the corporate ladder are intrinsically different to the ones required to solve problems quickly. One of the reasons I’ve avoided big tech companies for most of my career is that I’m allergic to office politics and the confrontation that inevitably arises: if a major concern for someone is building and maintaining power within an organization, becoming a gatekeeper to information, or not being willing to help build a supportive team culture, they’re going to be an obstacle to the team’s success.

If, on the other hand, a person’s focus is on solving the problems in front of the team and building the best product possible (including the best culture that leads to building the product), everyone is going to have a better time working together, and the product is exponentially more likely to be fit for purpose. All teams are communities of people pulling together to achieve a common goal. For any community to work well, the focus must be on the whole community’s success, while also ensuring that every member of the community is treated well and benefits from the group’s work.

In a smaller startup or organization, this is crucial. In these contexts, the focus needs to be on building. You have to go broad, because there just aren’t enough people to go around; you have to have a “no job too big / no job too small” mindset. Everyone needs to be a doer, not a manager. The CEO is doing everything from setting business strategy to unplugging the toilets. Engineers will sometimes need to make product decisions, think about design, or gather insights from customers. They need to find scrappy ways to get answers to questions themselves, sometimes by any means necessary. It’s not about hustling - hustle culture is not productive - but it is about pulling together to build the right product in the right way, using the full weight of your skills and insights.

I’ve been really impressed by engineers who have made their way to the discipline through meandering paths. Some of the best engineers I’ve ever worked with don’t have degrees; some studied music or art or literature. Perhaps this group has self-selected to be particularly passionate about solving the right sorts of problems; perhaps the wider breadth of disciplines helps to build stronger problem-solving skills; perhaps it’s something else entirely.

It’s not that you can’t have these skills if you’ve come from a traditional CS path. I studied computer science (with AI) in Edinburgh, and have met plenty of really strong team players with this background too. But they tend to be people who have been drawn to smaller, scrappier startups in the past. They’ve often built their own thing (although not everybody has the resources and freedom to do so, so perhaps they’ve been drawn to other people’s startups). They have a bias towards working on interesting projects rather than simply building up their own wealth and career.

It’s unfortunately also true that people from more “traditional” paths tend to be from a narrower demographic: CS degrees and Fortune 500 tech companies infamously have an inclusion problem. If you’re serious about solving problems for a breadth of people, you’d better have a team who represents those people. And, honestly, as well as being the right thing to do, it’s just more fun to work on a more diverse team.

Everyone on a team should be compensated well, should enjoy good work-life integration, and should be able to work in an emotionally supportive (not just emotionally safe) environment. Ideally, everyone should bring a different perspective, their unique creativity, and a set of skills and personality traits that allows them to contribute uniquely to the community as a whole. They should have a bias towards action and be able to Sherlock Holmes their way through problems in collaboration with their colleagues. That requires a sort of scrappiness that isn’t taught in CS degrees, and isn’t required in resource-rich Fortune 500 companies.

There’s no need to apologize for being different. I’m grateful for it, and I’m excited to build a community of unique, talented, creative people who build software that matters together.

This is a personal post, but I'm hiring Ruby on Rails, Front End JS, and Lead Quality engineers. If this is you, I'd love to meet you!

Photo by Lagos Techie on Unsplash

I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week, I’m donating to the California Environmental Justice Alliance. Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Abolitionist Law Center describes its mission as follows:

The California Environmental Justice Alliance (CEJA) is a statewide, community-led alliance that works to achieve environmental justice by advancing policy solutions. We unite the powerful local organizing of our members in the communities most impacted by environmental hazards – low-income communities and communities of color  – to create comprehensive opportunities for change at a statewide level. CEJA builds the power of communities across California to create policies that will alleviate poverty and pollution.

Particularly in the wake of the UN climate change report, climate change and establishing environmental justice is the key issue of our time. Low-income communities, and disproportionately people of color, will be the worst hit by climate change. Organizations like CEJA are crucial to solve the underlying problems and advocate for the vulnerable.

CEJA's campaigns include climate justice, advancing energy equity in California, and establishing green zones.

I donated. If you have the means, I encourage you to do the same.

#justice

I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week, I’m donating to the Abolitionist Law Center. Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Abolitionist Law Center describes its mission as follows:

The Abolitionist Law Center is a public interest law firm inspired by the struggle of political and politicized prisoners, and organized for the purpose of abolishing class and race based mass incarceration in the United States.

I became aware of the ALC through its Director of Operations, Dustin McDaniel, who was also the lead investigator of the organization’s report into exposure to toxic waste at a Pennsylvania state correctional institution.

Its programs include ending solitary confinement, supporting the political rights of the incarcerated, healthcare rights, and perhaps most importantly, releasing people from prison.

I donated. If you have the means, I encourage you to do the same.

Photo by Joe Piette is of the release of Debbie Africa, which the ALC worked on.

#justice

On June 6, we lost my mother. The last really coherent thing she said to me was, “I love you guys”. The second-to-last thing was, “I need you”. The third-to-last thing was, “how will we get to the Cape?”

My great grandparents built a house in East Falmouth on Cape Cod around a hundred years ago. It was never supposed to last this long; it’s rickety and dusty, definitely falling apart, but it’s ours. In the meantime, developers have cut down much of the surrounding woods and replaced them with million dollar homes. They’re frustrated by our presence, and have described us as “arrogantly shabby”. Screw you, millionaires: we wear that description as a badge of pride.

The house was my mother’s favorite place in the world. It’s mine, too. Despite dialysis, feeding tubes, medicines, and a hundred other considerations, we’d spent a lot of time figuring out how to get her there one last time. I bought first class tickets so she could lie down comfortably on the flight; we figured out cars and dialysis logistics.

And then we lost her before we could get there.

When the three of us got back to my parents’ house, it was one of the first decisions we made. If Ma hadn’t had her medical issues, she would have loved to drive to Cape Cod from California. So we decided to do just that, with her ashes (and the proper permits) in tow.

We acquired a hybrid van (a 2021 Toyota Sienna), which runs about 600 miles on a tank of gas. There was talk of postponing the trip, but based on a desire to get to another family memorial, we set off in the evening two Fridays ago. We headed north to Seattle, via Portland, to avoid the worst of the summer heat. And then we headed east.

We saw a lot of America: around 4050 miles of cities, towns, countryside, and unadulterated wilderness. We learned never to eat Mexican food in Fargo, North Dakota, and that the Indian food in Philadelphia is spectacular. We were blown away by the beauty of Glacier National Park and the segregated poverty of much of the country. Throughout it all, we learned that beauty, humanity, and the progressive values of equality and shared lived experiences exist everywhere, albeit in pockets. There were Trump signs in deep Democrat country; there were radical coffee shops run by brave, non-binary progressives in the most staunchly conservative townships. As we went, I documented much of it on Instagram.

Images: Montana; a mural in Bismarck, ND; George Floyd Square in Minneapolis.

My sister planned much of the trip based around what she thought we’d all be most interested in; we made special efforts to visit Black-owned establishments and diverse neighborhoods. It’s what my mother would have been most interested in, too.

Our routine every night was the same: bring in our bags, and then bring in Ma. She stayed with us in our hotel rooms. We all spoke to her. In some way, she’s still with us. In another, there’s a hole in our lives, and a sadness that we all feel profoundly.

More than anything, it was a time for us to be together and heal. I shared a hotel room with my dad almost every night, and we would talk late into the night about what we’d seen and what we were feeling. It was necessary healing that will be long and ongoing.

We traveled across America once before, as the four of us, when I’d just graduated high school. Back then, we used paper AAA maps and picked up discount booklets for local motels from diners. Where we stayed was always hit and miss.

In contrast, this road trip was powered by technology in ways that were new for us. Our car is a hybrid, yes, but it also has traffic-aware cruise control that works a lot like a Tesla: the car slows down as the cars around it do, and follows the curves of the freeway. We used Apple CarPlay and Android Auto extensively to navigate, and made plans on a custom Google Map. I used Foursquare to find places to eat; Hannah used Yelp and Google Maps, often using gay-friendly and Black-owned filters. I booked our places to stay through apps, including the FairHotel app to look for socially responsible hotels with unionized workforces.

As I write this, we’re barreling down the freeway on the very last leg of the trip. Soon we’ll come to a stop, and the beginning of a new chapter. I don’t know what the future holds, what it looks like, or even what it’ll feel like. But I’m grateful to be a part of this family, and to have had this time. All of these things - these values, these experiences, these people - are an inexorable part of who I am. We’re an interconnected part of each other. And I’m glad we were all here.

This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for July, 2021. This is a lighter list than usual because I'm in the middle of driving across the US with my family.

Books

Mexican Gothic, by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia. An atmospheric horror story that was so slow burn that I was beginning to drift away, despite its intriguing subtexts about domination, colonization, and generational trauma - but then the story changed lanes at breakneck speed and I was hooked again. Smart, creepy, sensual, and unique in a way that defies all expectations.

Notable Articles

Business

Why the U.S. can’t have open banking. “As open banking sweeps the world, countries from the U.K. to Australia to Chile to Nigeria are adopting the concept, which generally includes mandates for API access to bank infrastructure and consumer rights to banking data. There’s global momentum behind it, but in the U.S. rule-making is still at an early stage. Reforms to Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act, the law that governs consumer access to financial data, are seemingly years away as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau weighs public comments.”

Spotify Exec Calls Artist 'Entitled' for Requesting One Penny Per Stream. “I think Taylor Swift doesn’t need .00001 more a stream. The problem is this: Spotify was created to solve a problem. The problem was this: piracy and music distribution. The problem was to get artists’ music out there. The problem was not to pay people money.”

The Church of American Startups and Capitalism. “Where startups claim to be so unique in their thinking and in what they do, they are absolutely a product of the protestant work ethic that frames America’s belief in what capitalism is. The church of business - modern American business - has become so absorbed by the cult of personality because it is easier to pray to the saints of startups than to recognize that a culture geared toward a conveyer belt of endless labor is beyond depressing.”

The World Is More Obvious Than We Want It To Be. “The adulation for the wealthy and successful is based on wanting what they have, but rarely accepts the common means through which they got it - luck, privilege, chaos and the ability and means to be persistent. Most people don’t have the time or energy to do a side hustle, and it’s an act of cruelty to guilt them into thinking that carving out a separate job on top of their other job is something they “have to” do.”

Funding To Black Startup Founders Quadrupled In Past Year, But Remains Elusive. “To be sure, much work remains to be done. Black startup entrepreneurs still received only a tiny fraction — 1.2 percent — of the record $147 billion in venture capital invested in U.S. startups through the first half of this year, Crunchbase numbers show. That compares with the more than 13 percent of the U.S. population that is Black or African American.”

Visualizing All the Vacant Office Space in San Francisco. “And employing the framework we introduced last year, there is now 12.7 Salesforce Towers, or 747 Salesforce Tower floors, worth of empty office space spread across San Francisco, which is roughly enough space to accommodate between 98,000 (based on an average, pre-Covid, density) and 131,000 (a la twitter) worker bees.”

Apple reportedly postpones in-person work until at least October. Likely the first of many.

Crypto

In bitcoin, Black entrepreneurs see a chance to rebuild generational wealth. “Building viable enterprises is possible “in a decentralized finance space,” said Evans, who teaches law at Penn State and began studying and speaking on blockchain and crypto four years ago. “No one’s standing in the way. There’s no bank. There’s no credit score. There’s no redlining. That’s transformative and very powerful.””

Culture

Self-publishing. “The corollary of this method is simple: unless you feel you can figure out how to market your book, unless you want to devote as much energy to that marketing plan as you did to its authorship and production, unless you are prepared to sustain your marketing effort through constant iteration and refinement, you probably shouldn’t self-publish.”

How the son of a homophobic politician in Nigeria became a queer OnlyFans star. “Bolu said he joined OnlyFans because he wanted to broaden the idea of what it means to be Black and gay, and show people that you can be both queer and masculine at the same time. In the first several weeks after he started using the site, he said he earned around $2,000 (he declined to share more information about his income). “I’m an exhibitionist by nature, so I feel good doing this. When I post pictures and videos of my Black, gay, muscular body, it does numbers. So, I’m going forward with that,” Bolu said.”

He Leaps for the Stars, He Leaps for the Stars by Grace Chan. I really enjoyed this short story in Clarkesworld about personas, fame, machine learning, and escape.

Media

Nikole Hannah-Jones Issues Statement on Decision to Decline Tenure Offer at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and to Accept Knight Chair Appointment at Howard University. “I cannot imagine working at and advancing a school named for a man who lobbied against me, who used his wealth to influence the hires and ideology of the journalism school, who ignored my 20 years of journalism experience, all of my credentials, all of my work, because he believed that a project that centered Black Americans equaled the denigration of white Americans.”

Politics

FACT SHEET: Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy. From limits on non-competes to anti-surveillance measures to better anti-trust scrutiny, this seems like a pretty great bundle of measures.

Adam Smith to Richard Spencer: Why Libertarians turn to the Alt-Right. ″[It’s] incredibly easy for the alt-right to reach out to libertarians; they’re both already literally speaking the same language. Socialists control the media? Swap ‘Socialists’ out for ‘Cultural Marxists’ and you’re halfway to becoming the new Richard Spencer. Hillary Clinton was clearly the social justice candidate in 2016, and Trump was against it. If you’re somebody who bases their entire ideology around opposing social justice, you’re going to be drawn towards the candidate who describes Neo-Nazis as ‘very fine people’.”

Why I oppose recall of DA Chesa Boudin. “These reforms were desperately needed: disproportionate treatment of Black and Brown people in arrests, prosecutions, and lifetimes of incarceration isn’t just a trend of a few decades — it has taken place over centuries in America. Many in our LGBTQ+ community are in desperate need of criminal justice reform now.” I oppose his recall too.

Science

Study: 20% of vaccinated health workers who test positive suffer from long COVID. “Majority of 39 ‘breakthrough’ cases among 1,497 monitored were mild, but research author says persistence of symptoms among minority ‘raises concern’.”

First ‘Time Crystal’ Built Using Google’s Quantum Computer. “Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer.”

Society

Emergency Department Visits for Suspected Suicide Attempts Among Persons Aged 12–25 Years Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic. “In May 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, ED visits for suspected suicide attempts began to increase among adolescents aged 12–17 years, especially girls. During February 21–March 20, 2021, suspected suicide attempt ED visits were 50.6% higher among girls aged 12–17 years than during the same period in 2019; among boys aged 12–17 years, suspected suicide attempt ED visits increased 3.7%.”

How Twitter can ruin a life: Isabel Fall’s complicated story. “It’s incredibly hard to imagine “Attack Helicopter” receiving the degree of blowback it did in a world where Twitter didn’t exist. There were discussions of the story on forums and in comment threads all over the internet, but it is the nature of Twitter that all but ensured this particular argument would rage out of control. Isabel Fall’s story has been held up as an example of “cancel culture run amok,” but like almost all examples of cancel culture run amok, it’s mostly an example of Twitter run amok.”

Cop Plays Taylor Swift Song to Block BLM Protest Video From YouTube. “Burch, confused, says, “Are we having a dance party now?” The officer eventually admits, “You can record all you want. I just know it can’t be posted to YouTube.” Later, the officer, identified as Sgt. David Shelby, reiterates to Burch, “I’m playing my music so that you can’t post on YouTube.” The video [...] has been viewed more than 170,000 times since it was shared Thursday.”

Working from home might be worse for the environment than commuting. “In a white paper about the shift in energy consumption during the pandemic, Steve Cicala, an associate professor of economics at Tufts University who studies environmental and energy policy, wrote that in 2020, about a third of the U.S. workforce shifted to working from home due to the pandemic. Simultaneously, there was an almost 8% increase in residential consumption of electricity and about a 7% and 8% reduction in usage among commercial and industrial buildings, he wrote.”

MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule. ″“Changing our societal priorities hardly needs to be a capitulation to grim necessity,” she said. “Human activity can be regenerative and our productive capacities can be transformed. In fact, we are seeing examples of that happening right now. Expanding those efforts now creates a world full of opportunity that is also sustainable.”” Cool cool cool.

Are They Picking At Us? “Racism and xenophobia can hide under the very thin veneer of polite societal norms, like that shiny, sugary layer on a fruit tart that looks super-fake at the supermarket bakery table. I felt grateful for the refuge the community potluck table at our mosque offered. Ours was the only table in town where you could find grilled seekh kebabs, barbecue chicken, KFC hot wings, Palestinian chicken with vermicelli rice, potato salad, okra sabzi, Southern fried okra, Lahori-style fried fish, cornmeal-fried trout, fruit chaat, and, yes, even that fruit tart.”

I’m a Parkland Shooting Survivor. QAnon Convinced My Dad It Was All a Hoax. ““It started a couple months into the pandemic with the whole anti-lockdown protests,” Bill said. “His feelings were so strong it turned into facts for him. So if he didn’t like having to wear masks it wouldn’t matter what doctors or scientists said. Anything that contradicted his feelings was wrong. So he turned to the internet to find like-minded people which led him to QAnon.””

Technology

How Underground Fiber Optics Spy on Humans Moving Above. “By shining a laser through the fiber optics, the scientists could detect vibrations from above ground thanks to the way the cable ever so slightly deformed. As a car rolled across the subterranean cable or a person walked by, the ground would transmit their unique seismic signature. So without visually surveilling the surface, the scientists could paint a detailed portrait of how a once-bustling community ground to a halt, and slowly came back to life as the lockdown eased.”

Apple founder Steve Wozniak backs right-to-repair movement. ″“We wouldn’t have had an Apple had I not grown up in a very open technology world,” Mr Wozniak, its co-founder with Steve Jobs in the 1970s, said.” It shouldn’t even be a question.

The ugly, geeky war for web privacy is playing out in the W3C. “The W3C is under siege by an insurgency that’s thwarting browsers from developing new and important privacy protections for all web users. “They use cynical terms like: ‘We’re here to protect user choice’ or ‘We’re here to protect the open web’ or, frankly, horseshit like this,” said Pete Snyder, director of privacy at Brave, which makes an anti-tracking browser. “They’re there to slow down privacy protections that the browsers are creating.””

Police in Latin America are turning activists’ phones against them. “To break into devices more easily, a number of Latin American countries have contracted cybersecurity firms that make software allowing authorities to bypass encryption and other protections. The companies often argue that their tools help aid legitimate criminal investigations, but critics have said they’re often used by authoritarian regimes to infringe on civil rights.”

In-Vehicle Infotainment Systems Especially Distracting to Older Drivers. On car touchscreens and voice interfaces: “Researchers found that the technology created potentially unsafe distractions for all drivers, though this safety risk is more pronounced for older adults, who took longer (4.7-8.6 seconds) to complete tasks, experienced slower response times, and increased visual distractions.”

A Defunct Video Hosting Site Is Flooding Normal Websites With Hardcore Porn. “As pointed out by Twitter user @dox_gay, hardcore porn is now embedded on the pages of the Huffington Post, New York magazine, The Washington Post, and a host of other websites. This is because a porn site called 5 Star Porn HD bought the domain for Vidme, a brief YouTube competitor founded in 2014 and shuttered in 2017. Its Twitter account is still up, but the domain lapsed.” Cool URIs don’t change, etc etc.

She exposed how Facebook enabled global political manipulation. Now she's telling her story. “Her story reveals that it is really pure luck that we now know so much about how Facebook enables election interference globally. Zhang was not just the only person fighting an entire swath of political manipulation, it also wasn’t her job. She had discovered the problem because of a unique confluence of skills and passion, then taken it upon herself, driven by an extraordinary sense of moral responsibility. To regulators around the world considering how to rein in the company, this should be a wakeup call.”

I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week I'm donating to NDN Collective. Based in Rapid City, South Dakota, NDN Collective describes its mission as follows:

NDN Collective is an Indigenous-led organization dedicated to building Indigenous power. Through organizing, activism, philanthropy, grantmaking, capacity-building and narrative change, we are creating sustainable solutions on Indigenous terms.

As part of a journey to bring my mother's ashes to New England (which I'll write about soon in another post), I've been traveling through Montana and North Dakota. I've been profoundly struck by the level of poverty experienced by Native American communities there. Native Americans suffered a genocide at the hands of European colonizers, and have experienced generational injustices that continue to this day.

NDN Collective's restorative justice work includes climate justice and racial equity campaigning, as well as an important campaign to regain Indigenous land ownership. It has played a key part in campaigns against oil pipelines on Indigenous land. The Collective also makes grants and impact-orientated loans and investments.

I donated. If you have the means, I encourage you to do the same.

Photo by Joe Piette.

#justice

Inspired by Fred Wilson’s Funding Fridays, which highlight a new crowdfunding campaign that he’s contributed to every week, I decided to start a series of my own. This isn’t a knock on him: I genuinely enjoy those posts. But I also felt like there was room for something else.

Starting this week, I’m going to be posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I will donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week, I’m donating to Southerners on New Ground. Based in Atlanta, SONG describes its mission as follows:

We build membership (or our base) as a way to build the skills, connection and leadership of thousands of Southern rural LGBTQ people of color, immigrant people and working class people – united together in the struggle for dignity and justice for all people. In order to transform the South we must build our collective power, our people power, which comes from thousands and thousands of us uniting to make the South the home our communities need it to be.

Its work includes bail reform, Black queer, trans, and gender non-conforming leadership work, and electoral justice. It’s all good stuff.

I donated, became a member, and offered to use my tech skills for community members who need them. If you have the means, I encourage you to do the same.

Photo by Nathania Johnson

#justice

1. It will be decentralized. The way to compete with Facebook is not to compete with its model. Decentralization empowers users in a way that Facebook can’t, while also undermining its core business model.

2. It won’t be a decentralized version of something we already know. It’s not enough to build a “decentralized Facebook / Twitter / TikTok / whatever”. While there’s a core that’s attracted to the ethos of decentralization, it can’t be the core value prop for most users. It’s got to bring something new in itself.

3. It won’t be a monoculture. Lots of different clients written by lots of different teams with lots of different user experiences.

4. It doesn’t have to be web-based. As much as we love the web, we shouldn’t be constrained by having to build web-first. Apps like TikTok - and before it, Instagram - have shown that you can take advantage of native app platforms first, and use web for discovery second.

5. We can’t solve identity. There will never be a single identity that we use across the web. Instead, there may be open protocols that allow us to auth with different providers.

6. It won’t be built by an existing tech company. (Although it’s possible it could be built by a spinoff or protected internal team of one.) And it might not be built by a company at all: it’s likely to start as an open source collaboration, or even as a co-operative.

7. It won’t be built by an existing standards body. And any attempt to build standards-first will fail.

8. The ecosystem will be simpler than you imagine. The technologies that succeed will allow new developers to get up and running in an afternoon, armed with great documentation, easy-to-use libraries, and simple underlying protocols.

9. It won’t be based on blockchain. But there’s nothing to say that you won’t be able to bring your own ENS domain, etc, if you want.

10. It has to solve harassment and abuse. Any new network that doesn’t solve harassment and abuse will be co-opted by right wing groups and trolls, killing any nascent community before it has had a chance to get off the ground.

My mother used to regularly tell me that I needed to work less; that she didn’t understand why I went for the positions I did; that it sounded like hell to her.

At the time, I didn’t respond well, although I mostly kept my grumbling to myself. Did I have the only parents who didn’t want their child to succeed? I was working hard to try and build a good life for myself by doing work that hopefully was ethical - why wasn’t that enough?

It was only more recently that I realized how much she was looking out for me. From her perspective, I was on a treadmill, part of a kind of grind culture that promotes hard work as a good in itself. I had intense days, and was spending a lot of my time thinking about the work even when I wasn’t at my desk. It’s certainly a life choice, but it’s not necessarily the same as living.

From the outside, you could reasonably describe my parents as radicals. They met at Berkeley in the seventies, after all, with everything that suggests: they fought for renters’ rights, against the unjust war in Vietnam, and for affirmative action. They lived collectively with people who also wanted progressive change. But I think the radical label is in itself unjust: it’s a derogatory way of saying, “these people live outside the accepted template”.

The accepted templates for living - the social norms by which many of us govern our lives and set our goals - weren’t created collaboratively from the bottom up. They were engineered to help create a certain kind of worker; the protestant work ethic, in particular, was intentionally developed to help colonize the New World. They create a deep drive to become wealthy, and a corresponding deep unhappiness when this isn’t achieved. For most people, it’s an illusion: the carrot is a mirage, always just out of reach. You work hard because that’s what you think a good life is, and enrich someone else’s life in the process. You work hard in the hope that someone with more wealth and power than you will grant you worthiness: a promotion, a raise, investment. Meanwhile, the stick is the social pressure to conform to the model.

In tech, I’ve met a lot of people who are motivated by the idea that they’ll get rich. And some of them, to be clear, absolutely do get rich. There’s probably more of a chance of that than in many industries, although to be clear, the people who already have wealth and power will generate more than you in the process. But leaving inequitous power laws aside, when you get a big, fat check at the tail end of an acquisition or IPO, what happens then? Do you suddenly become happy? Is your life worthwhile? Or do you find yourself trapped on that treadmill, either in order to maintain that lifestyle or to quieten the internal voice you’ve developed that tells you to keep working? I’ve noticed that of all the millionaires and billionaires I’ve met - and I’ve met quite a few now - none has radically changed their life. Even the billionaires, who have more means than any of us will ever see, go back to the office day after day. Despite their unfathomable wealth, they’re as trapped as anyone else.

Almost nine out of ten young people say that they would love to be a social media influencer: someone who posts on social networks to a large audience in exchange for money. Once again, this isn’t a goal that appeared from nowhere: it was engineered. Influencers grind to build larger and larger audiences in the hope that someone with greater wealth and power - in this case the network owners, brand owners, and so on - will grant them special powers. It’s a well-designed hamster wheel to encourage people to add value to the centrally-owned network. However much the influencers make, however many followers they have, the network will always have more wealth and power.

How do we unlearn this? How do we break out of these templates, designed as they are to harness our power in order to enrich other people?

The Matrix is a flawed movie, but its central metaphor is radical (if unsubtle) by the definition I’ve established. In its universe, everyone has been harnessed to be a battery in service of a more powerful entity, while an illusion has been carefully crafted to keep them in place. The story breaks down when it starts to talk about a chosen one, Neo, who is uniquely suited to break the illusion and set everybody free: rather than needing to rely on some kind of superpowered vanguard of the revolution, we’re all capable of breaking through. The more of us that break free of the templates that have been set out for us, the more power we all have.

Decentralization is a powerful concept. It’s not about protocols or technologies (although some tools may be created using particular embodiments of these). It’s also not just about individual empowerment. It’s about community empowerment: flattening hierarchies and giving people the ability to exist on their own terms, negotiating through a democratic, collaborative process rather than in subjugation to centralized wealth. Rather than anti-capitalist, it allows for a more granular competitive marketplace. It doesn’t preclude representative democracy - and therefore, it can exist alongside single-payer healthcare, social security, government, and all the social infrastructure we collectively need to live well - but it does sit in opposition to oligarchy.

To reiterate: representative government is not centralization of power, and we should beware of anyone who would prefer to reduce representative democracy and replace it with deregulated markets that encourage oligarchy. We should also beware of anyone who does not want the most vulnerable in society to be protected. Finally, we should beware of people who believe freedom does not involve getting to define our own identities or love who we want to. Those are not people who have our best interests at heart. Removing oligarchies doesn’t mean removing social protections or perpetuating an oppressive status quo.

That’s the core ideal: to move away from an oligarchic system to one where there is little centralization of wealth and undemocratic power. A world that is more equal and more free. One where we all get to choose how we live our lives; how we define ourselves; how we set our goals and decide what a good life is. Those things are too important to be dictated to us by people who need us to maintain their wealth and power.

As this radical future becomes more possible, we should resist voices that want to water it down into the same old templates; the same old hierarchical forces and cultural norms that sap our energy and strip mine our communities. The movement can be one for equity and equality, but we have to keep our eye on the goal.

At the end of last week, I encouraged readers to ask me anything related to my work. I wasn’t sure if anyone actually would, but I was curious about what kinds of questions people had.

I got a surprising number of questions! So much so that I think I’m going to make it a series. Let’s open it up: you can ask me a question about anything, and I’ll do my best to answer in a future post.

Here are my answers to the questions I’ve received so far. Questions have been edited for spelling, punctuation, and grammar only.

Burnout is common in our industry. What is your approach to avoid or recover from burnout?

My take on burnout in tech is that it usually happens when we are disempowered to make decisions that relate to our workload. For example, if you’re a developer, it might be because you’re being asked to build something at speed with ill-defined specifications and an unrealistic deadline. (We’ve all been there.) Or you might have a dysfunctional work culture. Or just be completely swamped.

Those things go together: a company’s dysfunctional culture might encourage you to work over the weekend, or pressure you to make commitments to deliver something that hasn’t even been defined yet. It might feel utterly Sisyphean: you’re working hard at the best of your ability but the nature of the workplace or changing goalposts makes success impossible. This is incredibly common in dysfunctional tech workplaces where non-engineers are empowered to make decisions about engineering without deeply understanding the problem - often while declaring, “it should be easy!”

I’ve also found myself burned out because of external factors. Being a part-time carer for my mother, for example, was something I felt privileged to be able to do. But maintaining the energy to do that and a demanding job wasn’t always possible. (I always, for what it’s worth, prioritized my mother’s care.) For many people, just having to live in the society we do, with its biases and prejudices, can be a really legitimate source of burnout.

I always start by talking to my manager, if I can, about my concerns. But particularly in a dysfunctional workplace, it might be hard to achieve any change. My coping strategies have been threefold:

Immediate: Intentional breathing exercises really help. So does, well, exercise: either going for a run or a really long walk out in the world. I’ve also found that constantly having a book on the go has been really helpful; the act of reading is, in itself, meditative. There’s a reason I mostly don’t read books that are directly related to work.

Proximate: Take a damn vacation. Back when I lived in the UK, I would try to take three week vacations: typically I’d only start to really relax and decompress during the third week. In the US, which is a more psychotically workaholic culture, this tends to be frowned upon. So I always say to my team: know when your next vacation is. Not taking vacations isn’t a strength; it’s a character flaw.

Long-term: Get out.

I feel comfortable giving this answer in tech, which is the context the question gave, but I don’t take this privilege lightly. I know it’s not something everyone can do. But I’d rather have a sustainable position that doesn’t burn me out but pays less well than one that leaves me ragged and has a higher salary. I’ll do better work; chances are, I’ll do more mission-driven work, too. Like any dysfunctional relationship, sometimes it can’t be saved.

Check out Tricia Hersey’s Nap Ministry (and follow it on Instagram): it’s such a great collection of condensed wisdom, deployed to free us from the treadmill many of us have been conditioned to put ourselves on.

What do you look for in deciding whether a startup is worthy of investment?

I have to give two caveats here.

The first is that I’m not an active investor right now. I actually get quite a bit of dealflow, and I still have a small carry interest in Matter’s second fund. But I’m not making any new investments.

The second is that no startup is worthy of investment: it’s not a value judgment. There are plenty of startups, projects, and endeavors that are incredibly valuable, but don’t happen to fit a venture-scale investment thesis - or just one investor’s particular thesis. Because investment is an informed bet that a fund’s money will grow while invested in a startup’s equity - and not a grant, gift, or value judgment - everything comes down to how that investor thinks about becoming more informed.

I invested at a very early stage. At this point in a startup’s life, the thing that matters most is the team: who they are, what they’re capable of, and most of all, how they think.

I don’t care where someone went to school or what degree they earned, if any. (I feel the same way about hiring, for what it’s worth.) Their skills are important: I’m probably not going to invest in a tech company that can’t build software, for example, or doesn’t have domain knowledge relating to the problem they’re trying to solve. And their mindset is even more important than that. Can they identify their assumptions and de-risk them quickly, finding a well-defined core community to focus on first? Or are they quixotically ploughing ahead powered by blind belief, refusing to contemplate that they might fail, while declaring that “this is for everyone”? The latter mindset is really common and absolutely deadly.

I care deeply about societal effects and wouldn’t invest if I thought something was potentially harmful. I was also careful to source a pool of startups with diverse founders. Everyone was evaluated according to the same criteria. Nonetheless, a more diverse pool naturally led to a more diverse portfolio. Not only is supporting diverse founders the right thing to do, a wider set of perspectives can more effectively solve a broader range of problems.

And then there’s the big question: do I believe in the problem the team is trying to solve? Can they make me believe in it? Do I believe that other investors will also believe?

After that, there’s math, and there are logistics. Is the potential market size of the startup big enough to support the sort of financial growth the fund needs? Is the capitalization table (the list of who owns how many shares) clean enough to invest in? (Red flags here include people who are no longer involved in the company owning a potentially controlling interest.) Is it a legal entity that can be invested in easily - not just by me, but by future investors - and does it own all the IP? Are there debts? And so on.

This is a pretty narrow set of criteria. So it’s not that a startup is worthy of investment as such: it has to run such a tight gauntlet of restrictions that it just might not fit into the template.

Personally? I’m hoping to bootstrap my next startup. It’s genuinely nothing against VC: I’m just not sure I want to commit to a venture-scale market size, and I’m not sure I want to be beholden to investor commitments. Call me a control freak.

What’s next? (Big picture—technology trends)

There are a lot of trends I could be interested in. Here are some I actually am:

Ambient computing. Broad adoption of 5G is starting to mean broadband-quality internet in more and more places outside the home. These enable a new set of devices and experiences that go far beyond just the laptop / tablet / phone paradigms we’ve been tied to for decades. Moreover, as we move from one context to another, we’ll expect our services to seamlessly follow us. How do we build this future while maintaining personal privacy and freedom from advertising?

Human-centered data. The aforementioned future requires that all our data can be pooled together and kept under our control. We’re going to see an end to data that is locked up in silos belonging to individual services. A lot of investors call these customer data platforms because of the implications for commerce; I think the implications go far beyond.

Decentralization. Blockchain isn’t the trend: it’s a technology, in the same way that the web is a trend and CSS is a technology. Decentralization doesn’t need to depend on blockchains, although they’ve captured the zeitgeist right now because of the earnings potential. My interest continues to be in the potential to empower co-operatives, collectives, and other alternatives to centralized wealth and power structures. I’ve been a part of efforts to do this for as long as I’ve had a tech career; what’s super-cool is that mainstream interest it now enjoys.

The creator economy. There was a time, not so long ago, when I thought this was all about influencers, which I’m explicitly not interested in. But empowering individual creators - artists, writers, independent journalists - to make money on their own terms from their own sites and experiences? Sign me up.

And some trends I’m not:

Self-driving cars. Say it quietly, but I think this might be a red herring? I can easily imagine self-driving mass carriers though: think anything that has a set route along well-maintained roadways, like a bus, a sort of longer, rail-less tram, or a cargo truck transporting goods between distribution centers.

Machine learning. Again: call it a technique or a technology, but not necessarily a trend in itself. It’s too often described in magical terms that downplay the inherent problems both in its use and prerequisite data collection.

Audio rooms. See: Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, whatever the Facebook thing is called. Someone took panels, which are the worst part of every conference, and turned them into a 24/7 product? Great.

VR. Maybe I need to be more of a gamer, but I don’t see this becoming more than niche.

What’s scary and what should we be doing about it? (Are we?)

Two growing trends genuinely scare me:

Global warming. We’re not doing nearly enough about this. Like many people, I’m worried about the focus on individual responsibility vs widespread industrial change. To be clear, both are necessary - particularly as we live in a representative democracy - but the onus of change can’t be placed on individuals over the industrial forces that are ultimately responsible for so much of the underlying pollution.

We’ve got to change the way society works, and we’ve got to make and enforce far stronger rules. A lot of global climate policy amounts to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. And I think ideas like carbon trading just perpetuate the problems we need to solve. We need massive, government-led change, and we need it decades ago.

Rent-seeking. Just about everything is available on a subscription basis these days, with true ownership diminishing. The effect in housing is well-documented: generations of people are being more or less locked out of home ownership. But it’s also true in everything from software to cars. The effect is to create a stratum of wealthy property owners, whose property continues to expand and grow in value, and a much bigger one of less wealthy people who are forced to pay rent on an increasing number of things. The property owners get to set the terms by which their property is rented; the renters must abide by them.

We’ve always had a disparity in rule-making, where the wealthy held more of the cards, but it grows the more the gulf between property owners and renters widens. A lot of this situation has been enabled by the tech industry, VC-enabled business models, and the desire to maximize recurring revenue at all costs. I don’t see this trend slowing down, let alone reversing, but it only leads to widespread poverty and, with it, unrest.

What’s exciting and promising and what should we doing about it? (Are we?)

Decentralization! Renewable energy! Better mass transit! A move away from selfish individualism to a better collective future! Better societal infrastructure!

I’m also really excited about remote working. Being able to work in your own home empowers people who couldn’t necessarily make it to an office before; it also spreads wealth across the country and potentially across the world. Everyone’s comfortable with it after a year of doing it; in my opinion all of the reasons to go back into an office come down to personal preference rather than it being inherently better.

Consequently, when we look back a decade or so from now, I think we’ll find that tech companies which have embraced remote working after the pandemic will do far better than those that don’t. They’ll be more attractive, they’ll attract a broader set of candidates, and they’ll have solved communication problems that allow them to work more efficiently.

Do I want to go back to an office? I do not. And there are a lot of people who feel the same.

You once wrote a blog post suggesting that a 4th 'bubble’, sustainability, be added to the traditional design thinking bubbles of 'desirability, feasibility, viability’. I found this while researching Design Thinking for Social Innovation for a presentation I was doing. I explored it with the audience, themselves all heavily vested and involved in Social Innovation, but the resulting debate led us to the conclusion that if the existing 3 bubbles are used appropriately, then the 4th is not needed, and that between 'Desirability' and 'Viability', Sustainability is covered. My question is, have you explored this further in your work, have you since changed your perspective, and have you encountered further widespread support (for or against) your thoughts on this?

I agree that if the existing three principles are used appropriately, the fourth is not needed. That’s a big “if”. I think, in most cases, that it’s important to have a model to explicitly consider these issues. It’s possible to have a desirable, viable product that you can feasibly build - if you only evaluate first-order effects - that also has negative societal effects. Some teams understand that sustainability is baked right into desirability, viability, and feasibility once you evaluate how the product sits in its context over time; for others, calling it out directly as part of the model may be helpful. And it may not be possible for a product team to properly evaluate in which group they sit: some may think they don’t need it, while in reality they could still benefit.

In teaching our Designing for Equity session in the Google News Initiative / Newmark School / News Catalyst Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms course, Roxann Stafford and I talk about reframing from building a Minimum Viable Product to Maximum Distributed Equity. While this isn’t a direct continuation of the Sustainability idea, it lives on the same spectrum. It’s not that maximum distributed equity is the only lens you should use; it does, however, force conversations and design thinking that would not occur if you didn’t evaluate it intentionally. Some teams might think (and often say so, vocally) that they don’t need to explicitly consider equity; generally, they’re wrong. It’s something we all need to work on, and naming it helps us remember to consider it carefully.

Can you share your thoughts on where you see crypto going in the future and projects / possibilities to keep an eye on?

I see a few things as inevitable:

Moving away from proof of work. Possibly legislatively. These algorithms, and their environmental effects, are absurd. Great proof of concept, well done, now let’s move on. I think proof of stake is a great v2, and I’m sure there will be something better in the future.

Stronger smart contracts. Again, Ethereum was a pretty fantastic proof of concept here. But let’s keep an eye on Algorand, Polkadot, and others that are pushing the envelope of what can be built.

Privacy. I don’t see a network that is completely public as being desirable. Privacy is a prerequisite for democratic freedom.

Blockchain as part of a delicious, decentralized breakfast. Right now, as described above, blockchain is often considered to be the trend in itself. It’s just one decentralized technology; it wasn’t the first and won’t be the last. It also has enduring limitations. We’ll do more off-chain than we do on-chain, and making that more seamless will be part of building the decentralized future.

Should I code indieweb or fediverse protocols?

Yes.

Longer answer: it depends on what you’re trying to build! The indieweb and the fediverse are two complementary ideas. Both are sets of protocols that allow people to communicate with each other from their independent websites and platforms. Neither is a monoculture. So I don’t see it as a debate: start with the experience you want to build for the user, work backwards to figure out the best way to build it, and go from there.

"Specialists know everything about nothing, generalists know nothing about everything". Should person attempt/claim to be a full-stack developer+ops+dba+tester, or welcome specialists within a broad team/community/church? In my opinion we should foster mutual co-ed training to raise cultural awareness without claiming expertise in every field. What ever happened to brown bag lunch sessions as bite-sized learning?

Speaking as an unashamed technical generalist:

My answer to most questions about engineering approaches like this is that it comes down to the human context. There’s the perfect situation, and then there’s the one you’re actually in.

So the answer to this question depends on the organization you’re a part of, and what you’re trying to do. In a larger company, you’re more able to have people who occupy specialities and can go deep on those. In a smaller one - let’s say a three-person startup - you’re forced to be a generalist, whether you like it or not. It’s not so much about what you claim to be as what you have to do in order to get the job done.

Given this reality, should there be cross-team collaboration and learning? Absolutely. We should do better at that as an industry. As an engineering leader, I should also be better at doing this within my own team; in all honesty, I haven’t found a way to effectively replicate brown bag lunches / continuous group education in a remote context, and it’s something we all need.

I am guilty of debugger-based development to muddle towards an eventual solution. Is there any hope for this repentant sinner?

You’d be surprised which engineers write code by using console.log all over the place. Just do what works for you. We all code differently, and coding sucks for everyone. Wear it proudly.

That said: I can’t overstate the utility of automated testing. It’s not a fun habit to get into, but it’s so much better than having to go back and add them later on. You don’t need to engage in test driven development (where writing the tests comes first), but you really should write those tests. Every language you write in has a test framework; use it.

Patterns and interfaces = good, over-engineering (ability to change DB etc but seldom required) = bad. Newbies always overwork the latest read/fad instead of pragmatism. Do cyclomatics etc help dictate the tipping point?

Pragmatism is learned, and the opposite comes from nervousness. The solution is not to apply more metrics to force the issue, in my opinion. It’s about laying out good team / project principles.

Engineers often overlook the “soft stuff”: team principles, coding culture, communication, and conveying why we do things. They’re crucial. The non-deterministic aspects of engineering are at least as important as the algorithms and data structures. This is one of those questions: how much abstraction is too much abstraction? The answer will vary depending on the needs of the project you’re working on.

If there is a hard and fast rule, I think it’s around readability and flexibility of architecture, and speed of execution. Abstractions shouldn’t interfere with ease of comprehension: too abstract and you may have to learn to play four dimensional chess just to figure out how it all fits together. Not abstract enough, and you may find your architecture is largely defined by the structure of external services or libraries. There’s a sweet spot in the middle.

Finally, of course, spending your time on building abstracted interfaces that you don’t have an obvious use case for is just yak shaving. Ship that code.

Should you be a polyglot language speaker [coder] or accept that your favorite language/framework/OS/protocol/Db is good enough to meet your requirements?

Again, this is a fuzzier, less-deterministic question than it appears. It depends!

You should use the best language for fulfilling your requirements. Probably, that’s the language you already know rather than one you need to learn. At the same time, not everything is interchangeable: Ruby on Rails is not like-for-like with Node, for example. They work in different ways (one’s a framework, for one thing), and therefore some tasks can be done better with Node than Rails. They have different ecosystems of libraries and supporting documentation, and so on. Whether it’s worth switching to a technology you’re not an expert in yet depends on how much better it’s likely to be.

Nobody can be an expert in every language and framework, so there’s always going to be some level of shoehorning requirements into what you already know, and there’s always going to be some level of learning something new.

An unsatisfying answer if you’re looking for something deterministic, perhaps, but it’s an insight into why programming is both super-fun and terrible.

There are many open source software packages but the huge time it takes to assess whether they’re good/bad/ugly is largely wasted. How do you find the right package before you build? Then how do you best keep it updated [or replace it] without finding yourself in dependency hell?

First assess: do you need an external library to begin with? Every addition does create a dependency. The story behind left-pad is a great example of why care is needed.

Then it’s about social proof. Who wrote it? How many people are using it? When was the source code repository last updated? Is it active or abandoned? Is the maintainer a jerk? Are there reviews or tutorials on the web?

Don’t forget to assess if the license it’s distributed under is compatible with your project. Are you legally allowed to incorporate it?

This kind of due diligence takes a little time, but it’s worth it. And a little friction means you don’t end up adding libraries to your code without thinking about it, which is probably a good thing.

As for dependency hell: there are plenty of useful tools that can keep your projects up to date. As a GitHub user, I like Dependabot, alongside its dependency graph tools. I’m not even remotely interested in keeping my dependencies current manually. Who has the time? But this is another reason to maintain robust automated tests: because an automated update could break your code, it’s important to have a test suite that Dependabot (etc) can test its updates against.

...

Those questions were fun to answer. I’d love to do this again in a future post; ask me anything at this link and I’ll do my best to answer in the future.

Let’s try something a little bit different.

I’m the Head of Engineering at a Series B startup based in San Francisco. I’ve previously been a startup founder in both San Francisco and Edinburgh, Scotland. I’ve started two major open source projects and worked in the early stages of a third. I was the geek in residence at the world’s largest arts festival. And as Director of Investments at a mission-driven accelerator, I invested in 24 startups and supported a portfolio of 75, as well as teaching a design thinking based curriculum.

I’ve also written and self-published a novel, as well as a published non-fiction tech book; been a W3C invited expert; worked on multiple open culture projects; and taught equity in product design to local newsrooms from all over the world. Long ago, when the universe was young, I built some of the first viral web content.

What can I answer for you? For example, is there anything you’re wondering about pitches; open source software; building mission-driven projects; building a team; ethics in software development; etc?

Nothing’s off-limits (except for confidential customer information). Here’s how it’ll work: ask a question anonymously on this form, and as long as it’s related to one of the topics above, I’ll answer every question as honestly as I can in my next post.

That's assuming I get any questions, anyway. Ask me a question!

This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for June, 2021.

This month, I started posting notable links to my site as I saved them. You can follow my bookmarks here (and subscribe via RSS).

Books

A Queer History of the United States, by Michael Bronski. Flawed but fascinating. Given that he encompassed such a wide range, I sometimes wished the author had slowed down and gone into more detail. Episodes that demand nuance were often not given enough, and bisexuality was barely mentioned. Still, it was an eye-opening, mind-expanding read.

Notes on Grief, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. “How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?” A pertinent read for me right now. Every word, heavy with loss and love and the rage of disbelief, resonates.

How to Love, by Thich Nhat Hanh. “In a deep relationship, there’s no longer a boundary between you and the other person. You are her and she is you. Your suffering is her suffering. Your understanding of your own suffering helps your loved one to suffer less. Suffering and happiness are no longer individual matters. What happens to your loved one happens to you. What happens to you happens to your loved one.” Simple, affirming, and inspirational from beginning to end.

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro. A sort of melancholy science fiction fairy tale about loss, love, loneliness, religious belief, and what it means to be human. I wasn’t sure what to make of it at first; by the end I felt acceptance. An example of what I hope for from speculative fiction.

Streaming

Collective. I wish I’d gotten around to seeing this remarkable documentary sooner. Gripping and frustrating in equal measure, the true-life story of how a team of hero journalists uncovered massive governmental corruption in Romania demands close attention. Easily the best movie I’ve seen this year.

Bo Burnham: Inside. It wants to be something as impactful as Hannah Gadsby’s incredible Nanette, but never quite gets there. Still, I found this effective as a piece of theater more than a comedy special: a portrait of a comedian’s self-questioning and increasingly unraveling mental state during the pandemic. Burnham’s critiques and parodies of internet culture in this context are particularly spot on (perhaps excluding a piece about white women’s Instagram feeds). And honestly, the songs are great.

Harvard Justice. In 2009, Harvard televised one of its most popular courses, on political philosophy and ethics. I’ve been watching it this month on YouTube and loving it. Accessible but thought-provoking; the lecturer, Michael Sandel, is brilliant.

Notable Articles

Business

Y Combinator Entrepreneurs Say Accelerator Expelled Them Over Critiques. “Two entrepreneurs claimed Friday the startup accelerator Y Combinator kicked them out of its program for speaking publicly about misogyny and members’ efforts to circumvent COVID-19 vaccine eligibility requirements.”

The Work-From-Home Future Is Destroying Bosses' Brains. “The reason that remote work is so threatening to a lot of corporate thinkers is that it largely devalues the middle management layer that corporate society is built on. When you’re in person, a middle manager can walk the floors, “keep an eye on people” and, in meetings, “speak for the group.” While this can happen over Zoom and Slack, it becomes significantly more apparent who actually did the work, because you can digitally evaluate where the work is coming from.”

Forget Going Back to the Office—People Are Just Quitting Instead. “As the pandemic clouds lift, the percentage of Americans leaving employers for new opportunities is at its highest level in more than two decades.”

The document culture of Amazon. “Reading documents is so ingrained in our culture and process that our scheduling tools have check boxes to automatically create a document. If I’m catching up on a new service or feature launch, I will find the document rather than emailing or calling the product manager.” I really love this.

Do Chance Meetings at the Office Boost Innovation? There’s No Evidence of It. “Remote work, though, can enable ideas to bubble up from people with different backgrounds. Online, people who are not comfortable speaking up in an in-person meeting may feel more able to weigh in. Brainstorming sessions using apps like Slack can surface many more perspectives by including people who wouldn’t have been invited to a meeting, like interns or employees in other departments.”

Office and Company Culture Are Bullshit. “The big push back to the office - and the many, many, many people I’ve had contact me saying they don’t want to go back - is only about control. Company culture is industrial guilt - it’s “just what we do here” - and without an office, it becomes significantly harder to wield, because there isn’t an easy way to wield power over a distributed group of people. It’s hard to feel like you’re a fancy King that people fear the wrath of when you don’t have an office to trot around, with middle-management Lords that also get off on the authority of power and draw little satisfaction from actual work that rewards you with money.”

Lord of the Roths: How Tech Mogul Peter Thiel Turned a Retirement Account for the Middle Class Into a $5 Billion Tax-Free Piggy Bank. “Over the last 20 years, Thiel has quietly turned his Roth IRA — a humdrum retirement vehicle intended to spur Americans to save for their golden years — into a gargantuan tax-exempt piggy bank, confidential Internal Revenue Service data shows. Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall.”

What Salaries Did Startup CEOs Earn in 2020? “Interestingly, Female CEOs were more likely to take a pay cut during the pandemic. When comparing male and female CEOs, female leaders took a 30% reduction in salary at the peak of the pandemic ($101,000 compared to $138,000 in 2019) while their male counterparts saw an increase ($146,000 compared to $143,000 in 2019).”

Crypto

Beyond Resale Royalties. So Why Is DADA Ditching Royalties? “Fast forward three years since we tried to devise a royalty standard, and now it is art and not collectibles that is bringing hundreds of millions of dollars into the NFT ecosystem. Yet OpenSea is now too busy to put resources into guaranteeing resale royalties on their platform. Today, if an artwork is sold on a crypto art marketplace and resold on OpenSea, the artist does not get royalties.”

Sir Tim Berners-Lee Is Selling The Original Source Code For The World Wide Web as an NFT. “The work includes the original archive of dated and time-stamped files from 1990 and 1991, containing 9,555 lines of source code and original HTML documents that taught the earliest web users how to use the application. The auction item also includes an animated 30-minute video of the code being written and a digital signature from Berners-Lee himself, as well as a letter written by him over 30 years later in which he reflects on the process of creating the code and the impact it has made.”

Culture

Roxane Gay Starts Publishing Imprint With Grove Atlantic. “Roxane Gay Books will focus on underrepresented fiction, nonfiction and memoir writers, with or without agents.”

How Memes Become Money. “It’s appropriate to give credit to people for their creativity and compensate them for their labor. It’s empowering to siphon value from the social-media companies that have been making billions off our personal lives. But it’s also a kind of giving up.”

In Argentina, cheap government-issued netbooks sparked a musical renaissance. “More than four million students received a computer between 2011 and 2015. These were exactly the years that saw the rise of a budding generation of rappers, trappers, and freestylers. The overlap is no coincidence to Sebastián Benítez Larghi, director of the sociology department at the La Plata National University. “The working classes have always had a tradition of cultural creation — urban rhythms are just more proof of that.””

Media

Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Mega-Donor, and the Future of Journalism. “Emails obtained by The Assembly show that UNC-Chapel Hill’s largest journalism-school donor warned against Nikole Hannah-Jones’ hiring. Their divergent views represent a new front in the debate over objectivity and the future of the field.”

An open letter on U.S. media coverage of Palestine. “Yet for decades, our news industry has abandoned those values in coverage of Israel and Palestine. We have failed our audiences with a narrative that obscures the most fundamental aspects of the story: Israel’s military occupation and its system of apartheid.”

Pulitzer Prizes 2021: Darnella Frazier wins special citation from Pulitzer Prize board. “The board said Frazier was honored “for courageously recording the murder of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality around the world, highlighting the crucial role of citizens in journalists’ quest for truth and justice.””

‘We’re Going to Publish’: An Oral History of the Pentagon Papers. “So Ellsberg and I made this agreement: If I could get The Times to agree to publish the whole thing, they’d do their best to protect him. He’d give us the whole thing. He wouldn’t be publicly announced as a source.” One of the most important acts of whistleblowing and journalism of the 20th century.

Andreessen Horowitz’s ‘Future’ is a media machine. ″“We have a business to run, and we’re in the business of investing in the future and providing returns for LPs,” Wennmachers said. “So as much as I can help advance the future and the narrative of the pro case for the future … that’s what I’m trying to do. That is the goal.”″ So in other words, it’s the VC equivalent of an inflight magazine.

Newsrooms Need To Treat Coordinated Online Attacks On Reporters Like Propaganda - And Act Like They're At War. “And yes, this is a war, and it is a war being fought by the New York Post, by Fox News, and by many solo writers that have found a successful career in joining these campaigns, because outrage breeds clicks.”

Why the AP is no longer naming suspects in minor crime stories. “These minor stories, which only cover an arrest, have long lives on the internet. AP’s broad distribution network can make it difficult for the suspects named in such items to later gain employment or just move on in their lives.”

Lifting the mask. Edward Snowden launches his Substack: “Though my relationship to time fluctuates, the gravamen of my disclosures remains constant. In the past eight years, the depredations of surveillance have merely become more entrenched, with the capabilities that used to be the province of governments now in the hands of private companies, too, which employ them to track and tether us and attenuate our freedoms. This enduring danger, this compounding danger, is one of the reasons I’ve decided to lift my voice again — adding a new page to my “permanent record”...one to which I hope you subscribe.”

Linda Amster gets due recognition for work on Pentagon Papers. ″“I asked him why my name wasn’t included, and he said, ‘Well, we knew that we all might have to go to prison, and you are a woman, and we don’t want you to have to go to prison,’” Amster recalled.”

Fears for future of American journalism as hedge funds flex power. “According to a recent analysis, hedge funds or private equity firms now control half of US daily newspapers, including some of the largest newspaper groups in the country: Tribune, McClatchy and MediaNews Group.”

I am Palestinian. Here’s how Israel silences us on social media. “In 2015, Israel arrested 27-year-old Nader Halahleh and imprisoned him for seven months over seven posts on Facebook. That same year, 17-year-old Kathem Sbeih was also arrested over a Facebook post and placed in administrative detention — a policy from the British Mandate in which Israel imprisons Palestinians without charge or trial — for three months, despite being a child. By 2017, more than 300 Palestinians were detained under the pretext of incitement. For some Palestinians, just being able to post on social media under their real names is a risk too dangerous to take.”

Politics

Statement of Concern. “We [the undersigned] urge members of Congress to do whatever is necessary—including suspending the filibuster—in order to pass national voting and election administration standards that both guarantee the vote to all Americans equally, and prevent state legislatures from manipulating the rules in order to manufacture the result they want. Our democracy is fundamentally at stake. History will judge what we do at this moment.”

Donald Trump Belief That “Reinstatement” to Office Coming: Delusional. “I can attest, from speaking to an array of different sources, that Donald Trump does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former senators David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be “reinstated” to office this summer after “audits” of the 2020 elections in Arizona, Georgia, and a handful of other states have been completed. I can attest, too, that Trump is trying hard to recruit journalists, politicians, and other influential figures to promulgate this belief — not as a fundraising tool or an infantile bit of trolling or a trial balloon, but as a fact.”

Revealed: rightwing firm posed as leftist group on Facebook to divide Democrats. “In an apparent attempt to split the Democratic vote in a number of close races, the ads purported to come from an organization called America Progress Now (APN) and used socialist memes and rhetoric to urge leftwing voters to support Green party candidates.”

Former NSA contractor Reality Winner, jailed for leaking secrets about Russian hacking, released early from prison. “Winner, 29, was sentenced to more than five years in prison in 2018 after she leaked classified information to The Intercept news outlet about Russia’s attempts to hack the 2016 presidential election. She pleaded guilty to leaking a classified report that detailed the Russian government’s efforts to penetrate a Florida-based voting software supplier. At the time, the sentence was the longest ever for a federal crime involving leaks to the media.” Thank you for your service.

’Nightmare Scenario’ fresh details on chaos, conflicts inside Trump’s pandemic response. “In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, as White House officials debated whether to bring infected Americans home for care, President Donald Trump suggested his own plan for where to send them, eager to suppress the numbers on U.S. soil. “Don’t we have an island that we own?” the president reportedly asked those assembled in the Situation Room in February 2020, before the U.S. outbreak would explode. “What about Guantánamo?””

Records Show Nearly 900 Secret Service Employees Got COVID. “The records show that of the 881 positive test results recorded between March 1, 2021 and March 9, 2021, the majority, 477, came from employees working as special agents, and 249 were from members of the uniformed division.”

Science

Telomerase Regulation. If we’d figured this out, my mother would have lived a normal, healthy life. It’s also an issue associated with 90% of human cancers. I strongly suspect we’ll crack it in my lifetime.

Scientists shocked as particle transforms between matter and antimatter for the first time. “The charm meson has a light and heavy version that helps distinguish between its matter and antimatter states.”

Coronavirus infections dropping where people are vaccinated, rising where they are not. In other news: Popes Catholic, bears defecating in woodland.

Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong. “Which brings us to one of the largest gaps between science and practice in our own time. Years from now, we will look back in horror at the counterproductive ways we addressed the obesity epidemic and the barbaric ways we treated fat people—long after we knew there was a better path.”

Are advertisers coming for your dreams? “Now, brands from Xbox to Coors to Burger King are teaming up with some scientists to attempt something similar: “Engineer” advertisements into willing consumers’ dreams, via video and audio clips. This week, a group of 40 dream researchers has pushed back in an online letter, calling for the regulation of commercial dream manipulation.”

What Happened to the Lyme Disease Vaccine? “No human vaccines for Lyme exist. But that wasn’t always the case. Before Lyme disease shots went to the dogs, people had a safe and effective vaccine, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1998. But anti-vaccine forces claimed it was dangerous, tanked its popularity and sued it out of existence after just a few years on the market.” Meanwhile, the Lyme epidemic continues to grow.

When an Eel Climbs a Ramp to Eat Squid From a Clamp, That’s a Moray. “Moray eels can hunt on land, and footage from a recent study highlights how they accomplish this feat with a sneaky second set of jaws.” Also: perfect headline, well done.

What’s the Difference Between a ‘Borb’ and a ‘Floof’? “Let us now apply this logic. Borbs as a category heavily intersect with birbs, defined as both are by roundness. But just as every bird is not a birb, every birb is not a borb. Some birds naturally have deep chests and short necks, easily securing their borbness: chickadees, European Robins, and Bearded Tits, the last of which seems to be the poster child for the type. Other clear borbs include pigeons, thrushes, warblers, game birds, small parrots, most owls, and penguins.”

Why Is the Intellectual Dark Web Suddenly Hyping an Unproven COVID Treatment? ”While Big Tech continues to issue a confused, belated, and at times contradictory response to the problem of people using its platforms to promote health quackery, Weinstein, Heying, Taibbi, and Weiss have positioned themselves as the vanguards of intellectual freedom by, in their ways, buttressing these claims. In fact, and without, perhaps, even realizing it, they’ve acted as foot soldiers for something entirely commonplace: a politicized and pseudoscientific response to a deadly disease.”

Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out. “A simple blood test that can detect more than 50 types of cancer before any clinical signs or symptoms of the disease emerge in a person is accurate enough to be rolled out as a screening test, according to scientists.”

Society

Why We Are Publishing the Tax Secrets of the .001%. “Today, ProPublica is launching the first in a series of stories based on the private tax data of some of our nation’s richest citizens. We obtained the information from an anonymous source who provided us with large amounts of information on the ultrawealthy, everything from the taxes they paid to the income they reported to the profits from their stock trades.”

‘A career change saved my life’: the people who built better lives after burnout. “Among her clients, burnout is common. “We’re at a tipping point, I think, where the old world is not fit for purpose any more,” she says. “There’s this narrative in society which is that in order to be successful, you’ve got to sacrifice your health or your relationships, or things that are important to you. You’ve got to hustle. And I really don’t agree with that.””

I said I couldn’t stand Indian food. Then a Twitter friend took me to dinner. ““This is the guy,” Preet said to the owner and some friends, meaning “the guy who slagged the cuisine of our ancestors whose mind we just might change.” I smiled gamely and said I was willing to make amends. There was laughter and a lot of smiles and knowing looks. It turns out they’d been expecting me. I was not going to get away with my usual only-child behavior of a quick taste here and there. This was going to be a marathon.”

What Do Conservatives Fear About Critical Race Theory? “Increasingly, conservatism after Donald Trump has been defined by a fear that American society is on the verge of being displaced by a progressive reimagining, with woke politics and aggressive redistribution. Progressivism is defined by an equally urgent hope that it can, in fact, displace old patterns of ecological destruction and discrimination. It is interesting—and slightly ironic—that critical race theory, with its invocations of structural racism, should be so central to the policy debate right now: part of its teaching is that the patterns of American society can’t be easily dislodged by a change in manners, and that if you are snapping your fingers to make the past disappear you are only doing so in tandem with the rhythms of the past.”

She got hurt working for Amazon. Here's why she doesn't want to quit. “Amazon’s high injury rates were reported last week in a study by the Strategic Organizing Center, a labor advocacy group that used data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to analyze the rates of serious injury in fulfillment and delivery roles. The SOC is using the data to push for changes to Amazon’s notoriously long hours, strict and limited break schedules, and repetitive-motion work that can cause chronic pain. The group found that Amazon’s serious injury rate was more than double Walmart (its closest competitor) last year, and that Amazon employees take an average of one to two weeks longer to recover from these injuries than the average injured warehouse employee.”

Why We Shouldn't Be Surprised People Don't Read. “It’s more than sucking the joy out of learning - we have changed on a societal level what it means to be educated. Education has become so pragmatism-focused that it’s unsurprising that we have people that learn basically everything outside of school through a web browser - we have educated generations of kids to consciously or otherwise view knowledge as something one acquires as quickly as possible, and usually for a task.”

What the Rich Don’t Want to Admit About the Poor. “For the most part, America finds the money to pay for the things it values. In recent decades, and despite deep gridlock in Washington, we have spent trillions of dollars on wars in the Middle East and tax cuts for the wealthy. We have also spent trillions of dollars on health insurance subsidies and coronavirus relief. It is in our power to wipe out poverty. It simply isn’t among our priorities.”

Grenfell FC: "This club is bigger than any one individual". ″“You felt the loss everywhere in those weeks,” says Rupert. “Then one day, there was a young man who came in who I felt was struggling with his mental health. He’d lost both his parents a few years prior, three months apart. I can’t imagine what that must have been like. And he’d lived in the tower. It felt like history was repeating itself. I asked him what had helped him get through the death of his parents. He said football. So we formed a football team. Right there, like that.””

The Electrification of Everything: What You Need to Know. Short answer: we’d better upgrade the grid.

How You Start is How You Finish? The Slave Patrol and Jim Crow Origins of Policing. “Policing in southern slave-holding states followed a different trajectory—one that has roots in slave patrols of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and police enforcement of Jim Crow laws in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. As per Professor Michael Robinson (2017) of the University of Georgia, the first deaths in America of Black men at the hands of law enforcement “can be traced back as early as 1619 when the first slave ship, a Dutch Man-of-War vessel landed in Point Comfort, Virginia.””

Kids Need Freedom, Too. “The problem with a society devoted to zero risk is that kids grow up overprotected and under-socialized. They miss out on the thrilling experience of fending for themselves, crucial in forging confidence. They miss out on learning to assess risk and dealing with minimal danger without constantly deferring to an authority.” I’m excited that free-range parenting will be back in style by the time I’m a parent. I can’t imagine doing it any other way.

Conservatives now use the label ‘critical race theory’ to describe any conversation about race that makes them uncomfortable. “On its face, the opprobrium misunderstands the point: CRT is less about blaming white people than interrogating systems of power and privilege. But that’s the very thing that frightens conservatives: If children recognize the culpability of systems, as opposed to individuals, they’ll also recognize societal problems require collective solutions. The myth of rugged individualism will vanish.”

'I was completely inside': Lobster diver swallowed by humpback whale off Provincetown. ″“All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black,” Packard recalled Friday afternoon following his release from Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis.” Call me shaken.

Oregon Has Legalized Human Composting. I really wish California did this.

Abigail Disney: Why the Rich Protect Dynastic Wealth. “If your comfort requires that society be structured so that a decent percentage of your fellow citizens live in a constant state of terror about whether they’ll get health care in an emergency, or whether they can keep a roof over their family’s heads, or whether they will simply have enough to eat, perhaps the problem does not rest with those people, but with you and what you think of as necessary, proper, and acceptable.”

Fighting the pressure for pandemic personal growth. “But there’s a larger norm at work behind questions like this, and behind the greater expectation that people could use lockdown to boost their coronapreneurial profiles. An obsessive focus on productivity is “part of late-stage American capitalism,” Blustein said. “This productivity ethos has gotten transported into our hobbies, it’s gotten transported into our relationships, into our physical and mental health.””

5 pads for 2 cellmates: Menstrual products still scarce in prison. “Unable to get more than an allotted number of pads, Bozelko began reusing them. The prison’s pads were thin, she said, thinner than the pads typically sold outside, and the adhesive barely stuck to her clothes. She once saw another woman’s pad fall to the ground because the glue was so weak, so Bozelko stepped on it, hiding the pad beneath her boot to save her from humiliation. She and her cellmate received five of these pads to share among themselves every week, and asking a guard for another pad often led to a rejected request and ridicule.” Why are we so cruel?

Technology

Mass scale manipulation of Twitter Trends discovered. “We found that 47% of local trends in Turkey and 20% of global trends are fake, created from scratch by bots. Between June 2015 and September 2019, we uncovered 108,000 bot accounts involved, the biggest bot dataset reported in a single paper. Our research is the first to uncover the manipulation of Twitter Trends at this scale.”

Passport. A neat solution for independent subscription media businesses. I kind of want to use it.

1997: The Year of DHTML. A nice history of DHTML and the DOM, for people (like me) who are interested in that sort of thing.

I saw millions compromise their Facebook accounts to fuel fake engagement. “During my time at Facebook, I saw compromised accounts functioning in droves in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. Most of these accounts were commandeered through autolikers: online programs which promise users automatic likes and other engagement for their posts. Signing up for the autoliker, however, requires the user to hand over account access. Then, these accounts join a bot farm, where their likes and comments are delivered to other autoliker users, or sold en masse, even while the original user maintains ownership of the account. Although motivated by money rather than politics — and far less sophisticated than government-run human troll farms — the sheer quantity of these autoliker programs can be dangerous.”

Introducing Astro: Ship Less JavaScript. Neat!

Colorado is now the 3rd US state with modern privacy legislation, with a twist. “In other words, Do Not Track – or something very much like it – is back in Colorado, and ignoring the setting, like companies did widely when Do Not Track was created, is not an option any more. The technical details will need to be figured out between now and when this provision goes into effect, which two and a half years away. So plenty of time to get this right.”

Day One at Automattic. “Day One not only nails the experience of a local blog (or journal as they call it) in an app, but also has (built) a great technical infrastructure — it works fantastic (when) offline and has a fully encrypted sync mechanism, so the data that’s in the cloud is secured in a way that even someone with access to their database couldn’t decode your entries, it’s only decrypted on your local device. Combining encryption and sync in a truly secure way is tricky, but they’ve done it.”

Apple’s emoji keyboard is reinforcing Western stereotypes. “The feature associates “Africa” with the hut emoji and “China” with the dog emoji.”

China’s tech workers pushed to their limits by surveillance software. “A Chinese subsidiary of Japanese camera maker Canon, Canon Information Technology, last year unveiled a new workspace management system that only allows smiling employees to enter the office and book conference rooms. Using so-called “smile recognition” technology, Canon said the system was intended to bring more cheerfulness to the office in the post-pandemic era.”

My plan for my mother’s Christmas present this year was to write her a novel. Despite her failing eyesight, she devoured books: I bought her a Kindle, which allowed her to increase the font size to an almost comical level, and an iPad, which she used to listen to audiobooks. The one year I finished NaNoWriMo, she followed along every day. It wasn’t a particularly great piece of writing, but she read it with a mother’s pride. So I wanted to do that again.

Yesterday marked three weeks since her passing. Processing this new reality is going to be a long journey. I’m not okay, but I’m okay-presenting: I can emulate a fully-functional human when I need to. I don’t want to perform that emulation for loved ones, but nobody else needs to know that I pull over to the side of the road to ugly cry or can barely manage to sleep through the night. I miss her terribly, and I will always miss her terribly.

I’m still planning on writing that novel.

Writing has always been the thing I love to do most. It’s not that I’m necessarily good at it, although I also don’t think I’m bad; it’s more that it puts me into a kind of meditative state that gives me the tools to process the world. Some people are really great social thinkers. I need to put my ideas down in words.

My grandfather, Sidney Monas, translated Crime and Punishment into English. My cousin, Sarah Dessen, is a famous and talented young adult author whose novel Along for the Ride is being adapted by Netflix. Another cousin, Jonathan Neale, has written beautiful novels and progressive non-fiction histories. I’m not looking for the literary impact or success of any of them; I just want to have the mental stillness to sit down and tell a story, and to develop the skills to do that well.

Still, the startup side of me is interested in how people get to do this full-time. The indie author DC Kalbach makes a solid salary from self-publishing on Kindle Unlimited. Elle Griffin is going to serialize her novel behind a Substack subscription. My friend Yoko Oji Kikuchi makes her living through supporters of her art on Patreon. These seem like idyllic existences to me, but also difficult: each requires a rhythm of sustained creativity to maintain.

For now, I’m lucky to be able to think about making stuff without having to worry about its financial sustainability - or even if it’s good. (To be clear, I hope that it’s good.) I’ve got my draft going in Ulysses, and I’m making solid progress. Who knows what will happen next - and in lots of ways, it doesn’t matter, as long as I keep working on it. This will be the last you hear about it until you read it.

The one thing that does matter, if I’m truly honest with myself, is this: I just wish its intended audience was here to read it.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

I’m convinced that one reason Americans embrace the cryptocurrency ideal of “programmable money” is that the domestic banking system is such an unmitigated disaster. Some of the features crypto enables - near-instant cross-institutional transfers with low fees, for example, or comprehensive API access to banking features like balances and transactions - are enjoyed by traditional banking customers elsewhere in the world.

When I first moved to California and needed to pay rent for the first time, I did what I’d always done: set up an automatic scheduled transfer with my bank. When the bank printed out a check and mailed it to my landlady, a week late no less, I couldn’t believe it. Surely checks were obsolete? Why wouldn’t they just transfer the money?

This year, a full decade later, I moved a balance from one retirement account to another: perhaps not a huge amount by Peter Thiel standards, but still, a non-trivial sum. And yes, the same thing happened: the original institution printed out a check and mailed it to me. Then I needed to mail that check, with a cover letter with written instructions, to the receiving institution. It’s a broken, stupid process that doesn’t appear to have meaningfully changed since the seventies.

America’s federated approach creates lots of these kinds of inefficiencies. My assumption is that there are now so many companies and business models that have grown up to take advantage of the gaps and inconsistencies that it’s now grievously hard to smooth them over. This same underlying business pattern has been repeated over and over here: for example, while citizens of other countries can often file taxes without having to submit a return or paying for a processor, the US tax system is famously kept complicated and expensive through lobbying by Intuit, the owner of TurboTax.

Similarly, while open banking has been a fantastic innovation elsewhere - regulations now force banks to share data and interoperate across the UK and Europe, for example - it hasn’t yet gained a foothold in the US. As The Financial Brand reports, the way financial applications are forced to work in the United States is genuinely jaw-dropping:

Screen scraping technology has been around since the early days of the internet (and of online banking) and remains in active use, but comes with a number of problems. Most important of these, from financial institutions’ perspective, is giving login credentials to a third party without setting strict limits on that access, which is neither elegant nor ideal. But even companies known for their use of APIs, such as Plaid, have resorted to screen scraping when API connections were not possible.

Programmable money can be seen as a great way to force the issue. Suddenly banks are no longer competing just with each other, but with an internet-native, cross-border set of currencies that allow a new generation of connected applications to be built without asking for anyone’s permission. DeFi platforms have lower fees because they can operate on the protocol level; more importantly, anyone can build and launch one. There’s no need to ask for permission. There’s also no incentive to keep the workings of their platforms private, so they’re typically fully open source and auditable by any third party who cares to check.

That’s going to create serious competitive pressure for traditional banks. As DeFi adoption continues to grow, they’ll need to do more and more to compete: on the fee and flexibility level for end-user customers, but also on the platform level for partners. Banks have real competitive advantages too, like FDIC insurance and real humans who sit in regional branches or answer the phones, but this will need to be combined with a newfound openness. Because cryptocurrencies can be thought of as protocols that you can build on top of, the traditional banking system needs to move in that direction too; because crypto is permissionless and transparent, banks will need to find ways to lower barriers to partnering with them. Today’s situation, where APIs are hard to find or restricted to high-paying partners, will become a thing of the past. Alternatively, the banks will.

If I was working for a bank (which I’m not), I’d be finding ways to build open banking protocols with others in my industry, using open source principles. I’d be creating a non-profit technology custodian to create a neutral territory for the various institutions to collaborate: a W3C for banking. I’d be hiring fantastic technologists, technology advocates, and communicators to develop protocols, build libraries, and drive adoption. And I’d be doing it yesterday.

None of this is to say that crypto is going away. Even if the banks innovate appropriately in the face of this new-found competition (best case) or crypto becomes subject to Intuit-style regulatory lobbying to hinder the competition (realistic case), the horse has bolted from the stable. Trillions of dollars are invested in cryptocurrencies. A new generation of financial applications is absolutely inevitable: it’s already here. And crucially, I think consumers - real people with average incomes, who have long been underserved by the rigidity and biases of the traditional banking system - will benefit.

Disclosure: I work for ForUsAll, a retirement provider that allows participants to invest in crypto in participating plans, but this post was written independently and does not represent my employer.

Photo by Tim Evans on Unsplash

While I’ve been away from work, we’ve made some big announcements about something I’ve been helping to work on for a while as Head of Engineering.

Over in Fortune:

The platform, called Alt 401(k), will allow workers in participating companies to transfer up to 5% of their [401(k)] account balances into a Coinbase-traded cryptocurrency window. They will have over 50 cryptocurrencies to choose from as investment vehicles. ForUsAll says it also plans to monitor allocations, alerting employees when their overall cryptocurrency allocation exceeds 5% of their portfolio.

In the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Ramirez said participants who invest in cryptocurrency must acknowledge having read disclosures explaining it is a volatile asset. “Our guidance is not to be day trading anything, whether a stock or crypto,” he added.

‌[...] ForUsAll said it plans to eventually add small allocations to other alternative investments, including private equity, venture capital, and real estate.

In Barron’s:

Crypto may provide an incentive for people to put more money into their retirement plans, says Paul Selker, president of Spark Street Digital, a webcast production company.

“If the opportunity to put this tiny little slice of crypto into the portfolio makes them increase their contribution overall, they win. It almost doesn’t matter what happens to crypto,” said Selker. ForUsAll is the 401(k) plan provider for Spark Street’s 14 employees.

In The Motley Fool:

Now it is worth reiterating that ForUsAll only plans to let plan participants put up to 5% of their money into cryptocurrency. And that alone speaks to its speculative nature. It's also a responsible way to introduce cryptocurrency investing to people who may be excited to dabble in it, but don't really know much about it other than it's in the news a lot.

In USA Today:

Crypto investing is virtually nowhere to be found in 401(k) plans and individual retirement accounts at the moment. But while financial advisers remain cautious about cryptocurrencies, they may be ready to embrace them due to client demand, according to the 2021 Trends in Investing Survey, conducted by the Journal of Financial Planning and the Financial Planning Association.

In the delightfully-named Benzinga:

“For too long, too many Americans haven’t had the same access to alternative investments that wealthy and professional investors have had. Our mission is to provide every American with the tools necessary to build a brighter financial future, and making these alternatives more readily available is a key step towards that,” said Jeff Schulte, CEO of ForUsAll.

Brett Tejpaul, Head of Institutional Coverage at Coinbase, added to this, “When we created our institutional platform, our initial focus was making cryptocurrency accessible to institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals.”

“The next evolution is to broaden our reach and we are thrilled to be working with ForUsAll, the leading 401k technology platform, to expand access to cryptocurrency through 401ks,” Tejpaul added.

To learn more, head over to the ForUsAll site.

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash