Against Platform Determinism

There is no doubt that platform corporations are among the most significant economic, political, and cultural actors in contemporary life. Platforms are powerful because they position themselves both beneath and in-between users — that is, they are both the place in which and the means by which users interact online. This not only gives platform owners privileged access to data about users, but it also enables them to dictate the rules about how the many people who depend on platforms interact with one another. As a result, current discussions on platforms—both in popular media and in academia — tend to focus on how central platforms are to the textures of daily life, taking on an “infrastructural” quality as they synchronize and standardize actors across industries in ways that often pit collective values — such as democracy — against private gain. In our upcoming workshop Against Platform Determinism, we are inviting scholars, technologists, and activists to flip the script on platformization to ask how institutions, individuals, and infrastructures mediate and shape platform power.

Learn To Hire Well And You’ll Never Lose

Three Tips For Leaders Who Want To Up Their Recruiting Game

Hunter Walk

Just now·4 min read

Show me the first 20 employees of a startup and I’ll tell you whether it’s going to be successful or not. In my mind there’s no greater indicator of success than the quality and characteristics of the individuals you’re able to bring on board. Success is a signal of two meaningful truths: you have the talent you need to execute your roadmap and A+ people have decided that you are worth working for. When I encounter founders who know how to hire, or founders who are self-aware enough to know it’s an area they want to get better at, it’s a huge plus in our investment decision.

Tweet from Corey Quinn

And now, a thread of Ancient Sysadmin Wisdom: an incomplete list of things we have learned from decades of outages.

“It’s always DNS.” Yup. Everything relies upon DNS, those relationships are non-obvious, and some things like to cache well beyond your TTL.

“If an outage lasts more than ten minutes, it’s likely to last for hours.” Yup. Usually related to electric power, but this is a good rule of thumb for “do we activate our DR plan” decisions.

Metaverse! Metaverse? Metaverse!! — Benedict Evans

Over and over again, the tech industry asks ‘what’s the next cycle?’ Smartphones were the locomotive that drove the industry and all the innovation for 15 years, but now 4.5-5bn people have a smartphones and the market is mature, so what’s the next fundamental trend? Crypto people don’t ask – they know it’s crypto – but everyone else in tech thinks that crypto is almost certainly a thing but not necessarily the thing, and wonders what else might come together.

Eating the Cloud from Outside In

Cloudflare launched on September 27, 2010, and every year since, it has made it a point to celebrate “Birthday Week” with a raft of launches. By far, the show-stopper this year was the announcement of R2 Storage, an S3-compatible Object Storage service that directly takes aim at AWS’ “Hotel California” business model. This has been extremely well received, going by the response on HN and Twitter. In its past 5 birthdays, Cloudflare has gone from world-class CDN to offering:

Reid Hoffman’s Two Rules for Strategy Decisions

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Reid Hoffman — the co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn and partner at the venture capital firm Greylock — is a preeminent Silicon Valley strategist. I recently ended my tour of duty as Reid’s chief of staff and wrote a long essay about that experience — “10,000 Hours with Reid Hoffman: Lessons Learned on Business and Life.” These are the two major strategic decision-making lessons that I learned from working so closely with him.

The Mysterious Case of the COVID-19 Lab-Leak Theory

Since the coronavirus first appeared, at the end of 2019, four and a half million people have died, countless more have suffered, whole economies have been upended, schools have been shuttered. Why? Did the virus jump from an animal to its first human host, its patient zero? Or, as some suspect, was the catastrophe the result of a laboratory accident in Wuhan, a city of eleven million people in central China?

Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change?

Let’s say that you’ve devoted your entire adult life to developing a carbon-free way to power a household for a year on the fuel of a single glass of water, and that you’ve had moments, even years, when you were pretty sure you would succeed. Let’s say also that you’re not crazy. This is a reasonable description of many of the physicists working in the field of nuclear fusion. In order to reach this goal, they had to find a way to heat matter to temperatures hotter than the center of the sun, so hot that atoms essentially melt into a cloud of charged particles known as plasma; they did that. They had to conceive of and build containers that could hold those plasmas; they did that, too, by making “bottles” out of strong magnetic fields. When those magnetic bottles leaked—because, as one scientist explained, trying to contain plasma in a magnetic bottle is like trying to wrap a jelly in twine—they had to devise further ingenious solutions, and, again and again, they did. Over decades, in the pursuit of nuclear fusion, scientists and engineers built giant metal doughnuts and Gehryesque twisted coils, they “pinched” plasmas with lasers, and they constructed fusion devices in garages. For thirty-six years, they have been planning and building an experimental fusion device in Provence. And yet commercially viable nuclear-fusion energy has always remained just a bit farther on. As the White Queen, in “Through the Looking Glass,” said to Alice, it is never jam today, it is always jam tomorrow.

The Curse of Xanadu

It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form.

It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form. Instead, it sucked Nelson and his intrepid band of true believers into what became the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing – a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair. The amazing epic tragedy.

20 Years After the Anthrax Attacks, We’re Still Unprepared

The first fatal bioterror attack in the US killed five people and caused a national panic—and we’re still short of funding and tech to handle health emergencies.

It was still early when Larry Bush reached the gurney in the emergency room of JFK Medical Center in Atlantis, Florida, part of a strip of towns that stretches from Miami to West Palm Beach. Bush was the hospital’s chief of staff and an infectious diseases physician, on his way to a regular morning meeting, but some ER physicians had asked that he drop by. A 63-year-old man named Bob Stevens had been brought in about 2:30 am with a roaring fever. Now he was comatose and plugged into a ventilator, with his frightened wife by his side.

America Is Choking Under an ‘Everything Shortage’

Is it just me, or does it feel like America is running out of everything?

I visited CVS last week to pick up some at-home COVID-19 tests. They’d been sold out for a week, an employee told me. So I asked about paper towels. “We’re out of those too,” he said. “Try Walgreens.” I drove to a Walgreens that had paper towels. But when I asked a pharmacist to fill some very common prescriptions, he told me the store had run out. “Try the Target up the road,” he suggested. Target’s pharmacy had the meds, but its front area was alarmingly barren, like the canned-food section of a grocery store one hour before a hurricane makes landfall.

Engineering Teams Are Just Networks

Marianne Bellotti

Sep 30·7 min read

To be a great hiring manager don’t be distracted by rockstar engineers, study up on network theory.

As a manager I like to build teams out of spare parts. I hire candidates who are rejected from other pipelines, I pick up people with middling performance in other teams, sometimes I even hire people whose skills are weak or out of date. My proudest accomplishments all involve teams constructed in such a manner completely out performing best-of-the-best rockstar teams assembled elsewhere. I’ve often struggled to explain how I tell the difference between a diamond in the…

A P O P H E N I A

The easier it becomes to produce information, the harder that information becomes to consume — and the harder we have to work to separate the spurious from the significant.

Humans are meaning-making machines, seeking order in the chaos. Our pattern recognition capabilities are a key determinant in defining intelligence. But we now live in a dystopian digital landscape purpose-built to undermine these capabilities, training us to mistake planned patterns for convenient and even meaningful coincidences.

What I’ve Learned From the 16 Engineers Who Turned Down Job Offers at Our Startup

I’m the cofounder and CEO of Kapwing, a 30-person company based in San Francisco. In our three years of trying to recruit top engineering talent, we’ve made 36 job offers to engineering candidates, and 16 of them turned us down.

Like a sales or fundraising rejection, every startup founder and recruiter knows the disappointment of rejection from an engineer who you’ve pitched and gone through the interview process with. In this article, I’ll share my experience with closing engineering candidates, my own insight into how engineering candidates make decisions on job offers from startups, and advice for other entrepreneurs trying to grow their teams quickly.

Creatures of the dawn: How radioactivity unlocked deep time

When scientists discovered the energy embedded within atoms, it transformed how we think about the long-term future of humanity, writes the historian Thomas Moynihan. J

Just over 100 years ago, an ocean liner – twin to the Titanic – returned to Normandy from the US with a very special item. It was a summer’s day in 1921, and travelling on board was the scientist Marie Sklodowska-Curie, accompanied by her daughters, Irène and Ève. In their possession was a single gram (0.04oz) of radium, locked away in a lead box within the ship’s safe. In today’s money, it would be worth $1,500,000.

Why we need to be repressed

Is Going to the Office a Broken Way of Working?

Earlier this month, a technology entrepreneur named Chris Herd posted a thread on Twitter. “I spoke to 10 x Billion $ companies who canceled return to the office due to the delta variant,” he began. “A few predictions on what else is going to happen.” His first salvo was titled “Office Death,” and claimed that “by the time people can return to the office a lot of companies will no longer have space to return to.” His next prediction was about “City Flight.” He stated that workers would continue to flee cities and would quit if their employers forced them back into urban offices. The thread continued with sixteen more tweets.

This Is What Impactful Engineering Leadership Looks Like

Jessica McKellar is now the founder and CTO of Pilot**.

In 2012, Jessica McKellar and a group of friends from MIT started stealthy chat startup Zulip. Less than two years later, it was acquired by Dropbox. And this wasn’t an anomaly. They’d done it once before, selling Ksplice to Oracle just as fast. This wild ride has given McKellar a more diverse set of management opportunities than the average engineer ever sees — she’s been a team lead, a founder, a technical leader at a massive corporation, and today, is the manager of dozens at a rapidly growing global startup. (Oh, and on the side, she’s a major figure in the Python community.)

Speed! Nuance, and Learning.

Speed, Nuance and Learning | Flight Levels Academy

How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum

Project management is a topic most people have strong opinions on, and I’m no exception. To answer the question of how different companies run engineering projects, I pulled in help from across the industry. In this issue we’ll cover:

• Project management approaches across the industry. An overview of a survey with over 100 companies represented, plus key takeaways.
• Project management at Big Tech. How are these done? How does the organizational setup of Big Tech influence how projects are executed?
• The lack of Scrum at Big Tech. Why is the popular framework missing from most of Big Tech, and are there takeaways for companies operating outside this model?
• How should you run projects in your team? I’ll share my personal take.

Before we jump in, here’s a personal story about why it’s sometimes hard to put a finger on how important project management approaches are.

Inside the Trillion-Dollar E-Commerce Trend Boston Tech Is Building

Image: Shutterstock

There’s a trillion-dollar, modern-day gold rush taking shape. It’s not happening in the foothills and creeks of the American West, but rather the vast landscape of Amazon.com. And the much sought-after “gold” isn’t gold at all, but it is valuable: a successful Amazon third-party seller.

Acquiring Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) businesses has become an increasingly popular trend, with dozens of “roll-up” companies cropping up throughout the world. In a nutshell, they purchase third-party sellers for thousands and even millions of dollars, and then take over the ins and outs of the business. These private aggregators have scooped up hundreds of third-party sellers and attracted billions of dollars in venture funding over the last few years, and two of the top dogs are located right here in Boston: Perch and Thrasio.

Biological Deterrence for the Shadow War – War on the Rocks

The inadequate initial U.S. response to COVID-19, coupled with new advances in biotechnology, could make biological weapons more appealing for U.S. adversaries. The biological weapons capability achieved by the United States in the 1960s and by the Soviet Union in the 1980s suggests that it is very likely that near-peer adversaries have the capabilities to launch a biological attack with the same destructive capacity as a nuclear strike. However, in future decades, less lethal biological attacks may become more appealing. The risk is a new biological component to the low-boil actions by China and Russia that have been dubbed the “Shadow War.”

Students who grew up with search engines might change STEM education forever

Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files.

Jade Rubick – No-bullshit tenets for faster decision-making

Tenets are mental shortcuts that help an organization make decisions faster. They are a way to bias the decision-making of an organization in a particular direction.

An example tenet might be, “we build our software to scale by ten times our current baseline traffic”. This tenet helps reduce the number of decisions people have to make in the future, and aligns the organization around HOW we do things.

Coordination Models – Tools for Getting Groups to Work Well Together

As an organizational leader, you’ll be faced with many situations where the solution will be to improve the way people work together.

Today, I’ll list some coordination models you can use to address these situations. These models are very much like tools in a toolbox. You want to have a lot of familiarity with the tools you can use, and which tools make sense in what situation.

Jade Rubick – Implementing Amazon’s single threaded owner model a retrospective

I’d like to share the results of one of the most interesting management experiments I’ve been a part of. At a company I worked at recently, we implemented the Single Threaded Owner (STO) model from Amazon, where you have everyone on the team report to a single leader, including product, design, and engineering. You can think of the STO model as a more extreme form of cross-functional teams, where the team has everything it needs to deliver on its mission.

The Third Revolution in Warfare

On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, against the backdrop of the rushed U.S.-allied Afghanistan withdrawal, the grisly reality of armed combat and the challenge posed by asymmetric suicide terror attacks grow harder to ignore.

But weapons technology has changed substantially over the past two decades. And thinking ahead to the not-so-distant future, we must ask: What if these assailants were able to remove human suicide bombers or attackers from the equation altogether? As someone who has studied and worked in artificial intelligence for the better part of four decades, I worry about such a technology threat, born from artificial intelligence and robotics.

The Builder’s High

When I am in a foul mood, I have a surefire way to improve my outlook – I build something. A foul mood is a stubborn beast and it does not give ground easily. It is an effort to simply get past the foulness in order to start building, but once the building has begun, the foul beast loses ground.

I don’t know what cascading chemical awesomeness is going down in my brain when it detects and rewards me for the act of building, but I’m certain that the hormonal cocktail is the end result of millions of years of evolution. Part of the reason we’re at the top of the food chain is that we are chemically rewarded when we are industrious – it is evolutionarily advantageous to be productive.

Imaginable Tech vs Unimaginable Tech | by Nick Hilton | Aug, 2021 | OneZero

Voice commands wouldn’t shock someone from the 1960s — so what technologies are we failing to imagine in 2021?

Nick Hilton

Aug 31·5 min read

Pete Campbell, inventing Alexa

Earlier this week, I asked Alexa — the Amazon-designed voice-activated assistant, which is accessible via a worrying number of Echo devices in my house — to turn the radio on. I do this several times a day, but I’ve…

Revolt of the NYC Delivery Workers – The Verge

This article is a collaboration between New York Magazine and The Verge.
Lea el reportaje en español aquí.

The Willis Avenue Bridge, a 3,000-foot stretch of asphalt and beige-painted steel connecting Manhattan and the Bronx, is the perfect place for an ambush. The narrow bike path along its west side is poorly lit; darkened trash-strewn alcoves on either end are useful for lying in wait. All summer, food-delivery workers returning home after their shifts have been violently attacked there for their bikes: by gunmen pulling up on motorcycles, by knife-wielding thieves leaping from the recesses, by muggers blocking the path with Citi Bikes and brandishing broken bottles.

The Road to Self-Reproducing Machines

Illustration:

Tomasz Walenta

By

Frank Wilczek

Sept. 2, 2021 1:58 pm ET

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek explores the secrets of the cosmos. Read previous columns here..

Throughout history, creative human engineers have taken inspiration from artifacts of the biological world. Leonardo da Vinci designed flying machines, submarines and tanks with birds, fish and tortoises in mind. Today, artificial neural nets, a computer architecture directly inspired by animal nervous systems, are the cutting edge of machine learning. But none of those applications get to the deep structure of biology—likely a beacon of future creativity.

A Second Major Seasonal Virus Won’t Leave Us Any Choice

This pandemic will eventually be over, and the Delta surge—in which most of those not yet vaccinated against the coronavirus could become infected—may well be America’s last destructive wave. But just because we’re eager to move past the virus doesn’t mean it’s finished with us.

In our large, open, and globally connected society, getting to zero COVID, the goal that Australia and New Zealand have pursued, is as politically unrealistic as it is biologically implausible. Americans are mostly done with the onerous shutdowns that such a goal would require. The virus has now spread so widely in the world that even tight, long-lasting limits on Americans’ movement—restrictions far beyond what we would tolerate—could not stamp it out entirely. Instead, SARS-CoV-2 will become an endemic virus, settling alongside the other four strains of coronaviruses that circulate widely among us.

TBM 16/52: Goal Clarity (and Embracing Different Perspectives)

Huge favor to ask. Have you learned a new analytics product in the last year or so? If so, and you have 5 minutes to spare, It would be a big help for my team.

Twelve people look at a proposed quarterly goal. They respond. Note the differences (you will inevitably encounter all of these in your career).

Person A looks at the goal and says “looks good to me!”

4 Lessons From the Improbable Rise of QR Codes

Top highlight

Tech that seems totally useless can suddenly become crucial — like during a pandemic

Clive Thompson

Jul 28·7 min read

The first time I saw a QR code, I scoffed.

It was 2010 and the code was in the bottom corner of a movie poster. To scan it, I had to download a special app on my Iphone. The software was still buggy and fiddly — I was hunched over for 15 seconds, scanning and rescanning, until finally it worked. Lo and behold: A crappy browser opened up, showing me the website for the movie.

Serving cell-grown meat to high-end restaurants

A food tech startup is partnering with an avant-garde San Francisco chef to serve the company’s cultivated, cell-grown chicken at her restaurant.

Why it matters: Cultivated meat — animal products grown from cells, rather than processed from slaughtered animals — faces technical and economic challenges, but it also has to gain consumer acceptance.

• Placing the products in high-end restaurants could help speed that process.

What’s happening: Cultivated chicken from the Oakland-based startup Upside Foods will be served in San Francisco chef Dominique Crenn’s Atelier Crenn restaurant, Upside announced on Thursday — the first such partnership between a cultivated meat maker and a three-star Michelin chef.

Lawyer Is Shot Months After Unsolved Killing of His Wife and Son

Alex Murdaugh, the descendant of a prominent family of lawyers in rural South Carolina, was shot on Saturday, nearly three months after his wife and son were killed at their home.

An entrance to the rural estate of Alex and Maggie Murdaugh in Colleton County, S.C., in June.Credit…Michael M. DeWitt, via Imagn Content Services

By

Published Sept. 4, 2021Updated Sept. 6, 2021

Opinion | The Simplest Tool for Improving Cities Is Also Free

Guest Essay

The Simplest Tool for Improving Cities Is Also Free

July 16, 2021

Credit…Son Eunkyoung

By

Ms. Hendren is an artist and design researcher, a professor at Olin College of Engineering and the author of “What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World.”

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — For decades, a stretch of Memorial Drive here that runs along the Charles River has been closed to automobiles on Sundays for the warmer half of the year. In the absence of cars on a four-lane thoroughfare beside the water, all kinds of other street uses blossom: skateboards, bicycles, hoverboards, strollers, wheelchairs and walkers, people on feet and on wheels now moving slowly enough to witness the late spring goslings, the ever-present sea gulls or the rarer magic and grace of a heron feeding along the water’s edge. A towering line of stately, centenarian sycamores forms an unbroken canopy over several blocks.

When **it Gets Real

The heat has come.

In Portland, Oregon, it was hotter (108ºF) Saturday than it’s ever been there. . Yesterday, it was hotter still (114ºF). Records are dropping in Seattle and Vancouver and scores of smaller Pacific Northwest cities. That green and rainy corner of the world is baking in greenhouse sun and drought.

All this is, the National Weather Service informs us, “unprecedented.” No one has ever experienced what it’s like to live in these places at these temperatures. We’re in the unknown, now; Terra incognita. And here be dragons.

How Many People Can Someone Lead?

Contents

The Short Answer

A common question I hear in my technical leadership workshops is, “How many people can someone (e.g. a Tech Lead or Engineering Manager) lead?”

What’s the magic number?

My answer is generally 5-7 people for an experienced leader, but many factors affect the final number. Some of these factors include their leadership scope, other leadership roles, the experience level of the leader, the experience level of the team, and the level of organisational bureaucracy.

Why does it cost so much to build things in America?

As Congress argues over the size of the infrastructure bill and how to pay for it, very little attention is being devoted to one of the most perplexing problems: Why does it cost so much more to build transportation networks in the US than in the rest of the world?

In an interview in early June, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg acknowledged the problem, but he offered no solutions except the need to study it further.

Google’s New AI Photo Upscaling Tech is Jaw-Dropping

Photo enhancing in movies and TV shows is often ridiculed for being unbelievable, but research in real photo enhancing is actually creeping more and more into the realm of science fiction. Just take a look at Google’s latest AI photo upscaling tech.

In a post titled “High Fidelity Image Generation Using Diffusion Models” published on the Google AI Blog (and spotted by DPR), Google researchers in the company’s Brain Team share about new breakthroughs they’ve made in image super-resolution.

Structure Eats Strategy

Again and again, I run into situations in which change agents in organizations that I work with run into organizational boundaries that stop them from moving forward in a way that makes perfect sense from a business and innovation perspective. For various reasons, within the current organization, agreements have been reached where some functions have responsibilities that others can not intrude upon without causing major hassle and disturbance in the company. The result is a situation where the current organization dictates what the company looks like going forward, no matter if this is the right setup or not.

The Art of Not Taking Things Personally

Psychology

Why other people’s emotions might not be about you — and your emotions might not be about them

Dave Bailey Follow

Aug 18 · 6 min read

Photo by Norbu Gyachung on Unsplash

‘That’s irrational.’

‘That’s stupid.’

‘They’re making things difficult for the sake of it.’

When we encounter emotions and behaviours that don’t make sense to us, it’s often because we don’t have all the information. And in the absence of information, we tend to assume the worst.

How to take a vacation – Jo VanEvery

Just because your work doesn’t always look like work, doesn’t mean you don’t get to take a real vacation.

You already deserve this vacation; it’s not a reward for achieving summer goals. In fact, not only do you deserve a vacation, you need a vacation.

Why you need a holiday.

You work hard. Fatigue impairs cognitive function. Being tired at the end of the academic year is a feature, not a bug. Rest of all kinds helps you recharge so that you are able to do the work you do. Taking a vacation is an important part of that.

Better Coordination, or Better Software?

TL;DR: When different parts of an organization need to coordinate, it seems like a good idea to help them coordinate smoothly and frequently. Don’t. Help them coordinate less — more explicitly, less often.

Software systems get big, and they have lots of parts, and those parts need to talk to each other. Maybe we’re building a new customer portal, and the new web services need to talk with existing CRM, and with warehouse systems for returns, and with invoicing. The software crosses organizational boundaries.