advocacy

Shop notebooks… with advice from Matt Kenney

I have no religion when it comes to shop notebooks. Not a type, nor paper or tech. But use “some thing” because not having anything at all will be a problem.

Your workflow will determine how the next step occurs. You may be prototyping something, and so there’s no notes to guide you. But at some point you will get to “nice” and you’ll want to build it “for real”. That would be the moment to take detailed notes. If you are working in CAD or a drawing app, it might be worthwhile to print out shop drawing and scribble some additional notes as you work. Etc. But these “sources of truth” are very helpful when questions and problems arise.

If I had one rule (snicker) it would be that your scribble paper, notebook, etc. assuming it is atoms not electrons should be graph paper. It was invented for just this sort of thing, take advantage.

Matt Kenny suggests the following…

  • Be as detailed as you possibly can. The more detail, the less work you’ll need to do to make sense of what’s written down.
  • Write in simple, clear statements and equations. A shop notebook is not a Faulkner novel or a Fields-Medal-worthy mathematical treatise.
  • Write down: dimensions, notes about materials, things you discovered that made construction easier, problems you encountered and how you solved them, and anything else that’s important to you.
  • Clearly identify which piece of furniture a note belongs to. A year from now you probably won’t remember.
  • Do not worry about how it reads or looks. If it makes sense to you and you can go back and make sense of it a month later, that’s all that matters. You will develop a style, organizing principles, etc. as you continue to work and fill up notebooks.

Google and HTTP

Google and HTTP:

The web is a miracle

Google has spent a lot of effort to convince you that HTTP is not good. Let me have the floor for a moment to tell you why HTTP is the best thing ever.

Its simplicity is what made the web work. It created an explosion of new applications. It may be hard to believe that there was a time when Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter etc didn’t exist. That was because the networking standards prior to the web were complicated and not well documented. The explosion happened because the web is simple. Where earlier protocols were hard to build on, the web is easy.

I don’t think the explosion is over. I want to make it easier and easier for people to run their own web servers. Google is doing what the programming priesthood always does, building the barrier to entry higher, making things more complicated, giving themselves an exclusive. This means only super nerds will be able to put up sites. And we will lose a lot of sites that were quickly posted on a whim, over the 25 years the web has existed, by people that didn’t fully understand what they were doing. That’s also the glory of the web. Fumbling around in the dark actually gets you somewhere. In worlds created by corporate programmers, it’s often impossible to find your way around, by design.

The web is a social agreement not to break things. It’s served us for 25 years. I don’t want to give it up because a bunch of nerds at Google think they know best.

The web is like the Grand Canyon. It’s a big natural thing, a resource, an inspiration, and like the canyon it deserves our protection. It’s a place of experimentation and learning. It’s also useful for big corporate websites like Google. All views of the web are important, especially ones that big companies don’t understand or respect. It’s how progress happens in technology.

Keeping the web running simple is as important as net neutrality.

[Anything open is inherently better than anything closed. I tell you 3X.]

Everything all the users know and more

Scripting News: Monday, April 3, 2023:

A sense that because I work for the company that made the product, I know everything all the users know and more. It’s the same fallacy that applies to Silicon Valley billionaires. You have to step into a new perspective to love the product, one that has nothing to do with who you work for or how validated you are by reporters and the public.

[I made a similar point recently. “Just because some process or thing works for you doesn’t make you an expert.” ]

The Vanishing

The Vanishing – Tablet Magazine:

The same pattern holds across America’s elite institutions: a slow-moving downward trend from the 1990s to the mid-2010s—likely due to all sorts of normal sociological factors—and then a purge so sweeping and dramatic you almost wonder who sent out the secret memo.

Museum boards now diversify by getting Jews to resign. A well-respected Jewish curator at the Guggenheim is purged after she puts on a Basquiat show. At the Art Institute of Chicago, even the nice Jewish lady volunteers are terminated for having the wrong ethnic background. There’s an entire cottage industry of summer programs and fellowships and postdocs that are now off-limits to Jews.

In 2014 there were 16-20 Jewish artists featured at the Whitney Biennial. After a very public campaign against a Jewish board member with ties to the Israeli defense establishment, the curators got the message. The 2022 biennial featured just 1-2 Jews.

Comb through the dozens of Jewish names for the 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship (I count 30-40). You’ll have a much harder time finding them 10 years later (14-16). There were 3-4 Jewish Marshall Scholars in 2014. I don’t see any in 2022.

From 2010 through 2019 there were at least three Jews in every MacArthur Fellowship class, sometimes as many as five or six. The Forward would write effusive columns celebrating the year’s Jewish geniuses. Since 2020, just 0-1 Jews a year have been awarded grants. The Forward hasn’t bothered to take note.

Today American Jews watch with Solomonic bemusement as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard is argued before the Supreme Court. On some level we sympathize with the Asian American plaintiffs, who are suing Harvard for using admissions criteria that discriminate against them on the basis of their race. Maybe they really are the new Jews, facing the same barriers—insidious racism, personality scores, rural geographic preferences—that we once did.

On the other hand, fancying ourselves to be high caste members of a beneficent elite, we pretend not to notice that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is a cudgel used to exclude certain groups of Americans, including Asians and Jews.

[I have no words.]

Source:

Reimagining Democracy – Schneier on Security

Reimagining Democracy – Schneier on Security:

What could democracy look like if it were reinvented today? Would it even be democracy —what comes after democracy?

Some questions to think about:

Representative democracies were built under the assumption that travel and communications were difficult. Does it still make sense to organize our representative units by geography? Or to send representatives far away to create laws in our name? Is there a better way for people to choose collective representatives?
Indeed, the very idea of representative government is due to technological limitations. If an AI system could find the optimal solution for balancing every voter’s preferences, would it still make sense to have representatives —or should we vote for ideas and goals instead?
With today’s technology, we can vote anywhere and any time. How should we organize the temporal pattern of voting— and of other forms of participation?
Starting from scratch, what is today’s ideal government structure? Does it make sense to have a singular leader “in charge” of everything? How should we constrain power —is there something better than the legislative/judicial/executive set of checks and balances?
The size of contemporary political units ranges from a few people in a room to vast nation-states and alliances. Within one country, what might the smaller units be —and how do they relate to one another?
Who has a voice in the government? What does “citizen” mean? What about children? Animals? Future people (and animals)? Corporations? The land?
And much more: What about the justice system? Is the twelfth-century jury form still relevant? How do we define fairness? Limit financial and military power? Keep our system robust to psychological manipulation?

[Hmmm…]

As many times as it takes

Mastery often means doing something as many times as it takes to get it right.

Whenever possible I give people the opportunity to revise their work as many times as they want. Only the final outcome or product matters. It was the learning and the hard work that I want to reward, not getting it right the first time. One of the most important lessons is that the only thing you can control is how you react. When challenges arise what do you do? When you don’t have an answer? When your skills aren’t up to the task?

When you allow people to make their own decisions, they start to feel more engaged, confident and empowered. And once that happens, there’s no limit to what they can achieve.

The Perks of a High-Documentation, Low-Meeting Work Culture

The Perks of a High-Documentation, Low-Meeting Work Culture:

This is a culturally influential decision considering that we’re a remote-first company. We don’t see each other in passing in the office, and we don’t have lunch together. 

It may seem counterintuitive to cut down on face time if you rarely see your colleagues as it is. But it’s working for us, and there’s a few reasons why. 

Practicing meeting mindfulness allows us to free up time for other stuff that matters more. This isn’t to say that all meetings are useless — it’s just that the meetings we do have at Tremendous are meetings for a reason.

[ If you’re feeling a theme, I’m getting this right.]

MTA to install 2 surveillance cameras on every subway car

MTA to install 2 surveillance cameras on every subway car:

The 13,000 cameras, which cost a total of $5.5 million, will be installed on 6,455 subway cars over the next three years.

Hochul said she hopes the surveillance will result in more people choosing to ride the subway, where ridership remains down 37% on weekdays – despite reaching a post-pandemic high just last week.

“You think Big Brother is watching you on the subways, you’re absolutely right. That is our intent,” Hochul said. “We are going to be having surveillance of activities on the subway trains and that is going to give people great peace of mind. If you’re concerned about this, best answer is don’t commit any crimes on the subways.”

The MTA already has 10,000 cameras in all 472 of its subway stations.

[I recently noted other privacy intrusions in the Subway system. Taking the Subway in NYC might be one of the most intrusive experiences ever soon enough.]

More Bosses Are Spying on Quiet Quitters. It Could Backfire.

More Bosses Are Spying on Quiet Quitters. It Could Backfire. – WSJ:

In some ways, what’s going on here is that companies are conducting a gigantic research experiment on their employees without necessarily being equipped to understand the data their worker-surveillance systems produce. Only about one in three medium-to-large companies has an analytics and data science team capable of parsing the kind of data these systems spit out, says Mr. Kropp of Gartner.

However employees feel about increased monitoring of how they do their work, they may not have much choice about it, as more companies make working from home contingent on employee acceptance of monitoring. One Prodoscore client that recently shifted to remote work specified that employees who wanted to work from home had to use Prodoscore, says Mr. Powell. In the first month, 80% of the company’s employees, or 3,200 of them, opted in, he adds.

[Sure, sure. Hold a gun to people’s head and surprise! They accept the monitoring. If you’re an employer and your staff is (supposedly) quiet quitting… maybe you should try and understand the lack of motivation by… wait for it… talking to them? C’mon. We can do better than surveil everyone.]