Year: 2018

Completely unsurprising, and yet utterly terrifying.

Amy Zegart and Kevin Childs:

In the past year, Google executives, citing ethical concerns, have canceled an artificial-intelligence project with the Pentagon and refused to even bid on the Defense Department’s Project JEDI, a desperately needed $10 billion IT-improvement program. While stiff-arming Washington, Google has been embracing Beijing, helping the Chinese government develop a more effective censored search engine despite outcries from human-rights groups, American politicians, and, more recently, its own employees.

That is an absolutely damning paragraph.

Jack Nicas and Karen Weise reporting:

“Every day as a C.E.O., you have employees coming to you saying, ‘I don’t make enough to buy a house for my family,’ and you already feel like you are paying through the nose,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, the real estate site based in Seattle. “Almost everyone is looking at other affordable places where you can open an office.”

I seriously can’t believe it has taken this long for the most obvious things to occur to these companies, like expanding beyond one singular location for an entire industry. On the Seattle front, I used to contend it was the best city in the US, but Amazon has soured me on that opinion.

This was a lot of fun/work putting together. It’s quite interesting to imagine you have no clothes and you are rebuilding from scratch. We actually wrote these independently, but they came out very similar in areas.

My post on this comes Monday. In the mean time, check out how Steve would rebuild his wardrobe.

Jon Evans:

Let me reiterate: to write elegant software, you must keep both the macro and the micro vision in your mind simultaneously while working. JIRA is good at managing micro pieces. But you need something else for the macro. (And no, a clickable prototype isn’t enough; those are important, but they too require descriptive context.)

He goes on to talk about writing a ten pager about what you are trying to create. I like the idea of writing out some prose, but hate the idea of a ten page document. That’s absurd.

If you can’t describe what your software needs to do in one sentence, you don’t yet understand what you are building. Once you get that once sentence figured out, then write a page or two about how you are going to accomplish that.

Either way, JIRA has by in large has become JIRA for JIRA’s sake. And more worryingly, I’ve often seen it become a place to point fingers to blame for errors or delays, or features not coming out right. And the frustrating part is that this finger pointing is done completely unintentionally and ends up frustrating and confusing everyone, so the end result is usually doubling down on JIRA for the next week or so.

Solid read. It is pretty clear that most ‘health’ apps are far more concerned with engagement than with help. Though I suspect most genuinely start off by wanting to help. There’s long been a trend with Nicholas Felton at the top of that, about logging your life to analyze the data. I call bullshit.

Most people log for trivial and idiotic rewards and rarely do they bother with any type of analysis. It’s logging to log for the sake of a log that you can hold up at some point.

If the health app you use, doesn’t actually provide actionable data, then you are logging to log. Acting on data to make a change is great. Logging data so that you have it is pointless.

The DuckDuckGo blog:

Private browsing mode and being logged out of Google offered very little filter bubble protection. These tactics simply do not provide the anonymity most people expect. In fact, it’s simply not possible to use Google search and avoid its filter bubble.

Ultimately:

We often hear of confusion that private browsing mode enables anonymity on the web, but this finding demonstrates that Google tailors search results regardless of browsing mode. People should not be lulled into a false sense of security that so-called “incognito” mode makes them anonymous.

If the average person knew this, and accepted it, they’d shit a brick. The. Switch to DuckDuckGo which is far superior.

Gabe Weatherhead:

I’ve spent my entire career working with PDFs as reference material. I have thousands of documents and many, many notes. I feel like I spent my life doing it all wrong. LiquidText is an indispensable tool for any researcher or student.

Such a killer app. If I still worked in real estate it would have been a game changer.

Out today, I had it in pre-order myself on Apple Books. Really enjoyed the first novel in the series and have been looking forward to reading this one too.

Speaking of lifestyle changes, this post at Working Mother, has this tidbit that bothers me:

Instead of work and life outside of the office being two totally separate parts of our lives, Bezos envisions a more harmonic relationship between the two. In his world, work and life outside of work are reciprocal rather than competing, compartmentalized parts.

First, this coming from Bezos is fucking rich. Secondly, I think this is still not the right way to think about it. Work and ‘life’ should not be things that happen at set points during the day. I often told people when bringing them on in my last job, that I didn’t care when they work or for how long, just get the job done and do it well.

I told them that if that meant leaving for an hour mid-morning to grocery shop, and then working later, that’s great. Life shouldn’t be hard, as a “boss” I always felt it was asinine to make life harder by making someone be chained to set hours when they “have” to work.