D&F 9/17/23
Sorry for the late missive, I got fully sucked in to watching Please Take Care of my Refrigerator and cooking Korean food. The food was good, but my weekend went by in a flash.
Links
- At least a few of you write code for a living, and some of you even write the delightfully strange CSS. It’s interesting to think of CSS as feminine-coded, but this tracks with who I know of as front-end developers. Front end work is not only important, it’s most of what people cheer for or complain about for modern apps, so folks who spend their time toiling away on the DOM should get paid well and get more kudos for their skills. My team at work are infrastructure, which is another thankless task, but definitely one that tech people think of as technically challenging. I’m lucky that I manage a few women on my teams, but as always the real high level folks in this discipline at most places are still men.
For technologists, the hardest work of all—the task that they most want to avoid—will be questioning the assumption that more technology is always better, and the belief that they can continue with business as usual and everything will simply work itself out.
- I sat on this link for a while, but on rereading it’s still amazing. Ted Chiang is a truly masterful sci-fi writer, and one of our time’s gifts to literature.
As it is currently deployed, A.I. often amounts to an effort to analyze a task that human beings perform and figure out a way to replace the human being. Coincidentally, this is exactly the type of problem that management wants solved. As a result, A.I. assists capital at the expense of labor.
- This bit about luddites is particularly important:
The Luddites were not anti-technology; what they wanted was economic justice. They destroyed machinery as a way to get factory owners’ attention. The fact that the word “Luddite” is now used as an insult, a way of calling someone irrational and ignorant, is a result of a smear campaign by the forces of capital.
Everyone today is born with a kind of existential debt. From the moment you emerge, you’re in a space that belongs to someone else, and from then on, money is spent each day to give you access to the space you require to exist. Land ownership, and the accompanying system of sales and rentals, merely allows some people to make money by gatekeeping a resource that no more belongs to one of us than any of us. Economists call this “rent seeking,” and most of us call it “immoral.”
Closing
That’s it for this week’s later and shorter than usual edition. I might need to space these out to bi-weekly for a while to get a better queue of links saved-up, but we’ll see. Until next time, cozy up to the coming fall, space cowgirls~