Menu
"equality" entries
Classic Programmer Paintings, Equality at Work, Bitcoin as Politics, and Raising Robotic Natives
-
Classic Programmer Paintings — hilarity has ensued. The captions are brilliant.
-
Equality Takes Work — Women do not prefer saying less: They anticipate the treatment they will receive when they say more.
-
Bitcoin as Politics: Distributed Right-Wing Extremism — The lack of any thorough, non-conspiratorial analysis of existing financial systems means that bitcoin fails to embody any true alternative to them. The reasons for this have little to do with technology and everything to do with the existing systems in which bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies are embedded, systems that instantiate the forms of social power that cannot be eliminated through either wishful thinking or technical or even political evasion: the rich and powerful will not become poor and powerless simply because other people decide to operate alternate economies of exchange. […] Because it operates without such an account, bitcoin’s real utility and purpose (and that of the cryptocurrency movement in general) can be better understood as a “program” for recruiting uninformed citizens into a neoliberal anti-government politics, understanding the nature and effects of which requires just the attention to political theory and history that bitcoin enthusiasts rail against. So … not a fan, then?
-
Raising Robotic Natives — design/art artefacts for generations growing up with robots.
(more…)
Feudal Employment, Untrusted Computing, Nerd Entitlement, and Paxos Explained
-
Governance for the New Class of Worker (Matt Webb) — there is a new class of worker. They’re not inside the company – not benefiting from job security or healthcare – but their livelihoods in large part dependent on it, the transaction cost of moving to a competitor deliberately kept high. Or the worker is, without seeing any of the upside of success, taking on the risk or bearing the cost of the company’s expansion and operation.
-
Hidden Code in Your Chipset (Slideshare) — there’s a processor that supervises your processor, and it’s astonishingly fully-featured (to the point of having privileged access to the network and being able to run Java code).
-
On Nerd Entitlement — Privilege doesn’t mean you don’t suffer. The best part of 2014 was the tech/net feminist consciousness-raising/uprising. That’s probably the wrong label for it, but bullshit is being called that was ignored years ago. I think we’ve collectively found the next thing we fix that future generations will look back on us and wonder why it went unremarked-upon for so long.
-
Understanding Paxos — a simple introduction, with animations, to one of the key algorithms in distributed systems.
Evolving Malware, Male Advocates, Every BU is an Internal Startup, and Amazonian Warehouses
-
Slow Release Malware — Prof. Vigna outlined scenarios in which an increasingly sophisticated and opaque breed of malicious executable will evolve to ‘mimic’ the behaviour patterns of benign software, in an attempt to avoid wasting its payload behaviour on a sandbox or virtualised environment. (via Slashdot)
-
Top 10 Ways to be a Male Advocate — pass to any men in tech that you know.
-
All Businesses are Now Digital Businesses (Vikram Kumar) — given that your business units are buying their own IT and thus reinventing their own business, How many CEOs and CIOs think of business units acting as tech start-ups?
-
Amazon Opens First Physical Store (WSJ, paywall) — in NYC, for pickups, returns, exchanges, and same-day delivery of some items from the accompanying warehouse. I’m curious to see what of Amazon’s infrastructure, analytics, and other thin-margin tricks they can bring to substantial physical presence.