BC CULTURE
Saved by @jacobhtml

One of the most Monkey's Paw things about my life is my relationship to books. When I was a teenager, I read all the way through the school and public libraries, spent everything I had on books, and still couldn't get enough and dreamt of more.

1/

 Today, as a reviewer, I have more books than I can possibly read, huge, teetering mountains of books that I'm desperate to read, far beyond my ability to ever get through them. Periodically, I declare "book bankruptcy," sweep away the backlog and start over.

2/
Even then, my eyes are bigger than my stomach: I keep back a few books that I can't bear to part with and promise myself I'll read them someday. Usually I don't, but I just did, and boy did I ever make the right call with @TheUniverse's BROAD BAND.

https://t.co/CpaE8nxixA

3/
I have read a LOT of histories of computing, and I had a front row seat for a lot of the events depicted in this book - people I worked with, people I worked against - and yet I was surprised over and over again with details and perspectives I'd never encountered.

4/
For example, for some reason, my ninth grade computer science course included lengthy readings on ENIAC, Univac, the Mark I and the Mark II, but none of those mentioned that they were all programmed exclusively or primarily by women.

5/
And Evans doesn't just explain this fact, but - because she is a brilliant and lyrical writer - she brings these women to life, turns them into fully formed characters, makes you see and feel their life stories, frustrations and triumphs.

6/
Even the most celebrated women of tech history - Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper - leap off the page as people, not merely historical personages or pioneers. Again, these are stories I thought I knew, and realized I didn't.

7/
Some of this can be chalked up to the haze of history - I don't know much about the lives of Lovelace's contemporaries regardless of gender or class - but the main culprit here is erasure, obviously.

8/
These women were written out of the record from the beginning, and the process only accelerated over time. The professionalization of programming - the coining of "software engineer" - coded a female trade as a male profession and precipitated a mass exodus of women.

9/
But despite this, women continued as tech pioneers, excelling in the marginalized, disfavored parts of the field: UX, community, "girl games," hypertext, multimedia and so on.

10/
The specialities that men turned up their noses at, until women proved out their significance (and/or profitability) whereupon men rushed in to dominate them, shouldering women aside.

11/
Reading this outstanding, important book, I found my views on erasure and exclusion evolving, first being brought into focus by Evans's skilful weaving of biographies, interviews and historical source documents, which made the abstract idea of erasure concrete.

12/
From there, Evans demonstrated how marginalized people move into marginalized subfields, defying odds and overcoming hurdles that their mainstream - white, male, affluent - contemporaries don't face, and then elevate these subfields to centrality.

13/
This dynamic is present in many fields of endeavor - think of how Black music (blues, jazz, rock, hiphop) went from the margins to the center when it was co-opted by white musicians who often did a worse job for more money and fame.

14/
It's another example of what @scalzi calls "living life on the lowest difficulty setting," and it's the basis for affirmative action.

https://t.co/my4bTbFCz8

15/
Consider two candidates: one who attains the top of their field after being trained and supported by the best of the best, and the other who trails them by a step or two - but never had their advantages. Which one has the most potential?

16/
Broad Band isn't just a tale of the women whose stories were erased - it's also the implied story of all the people (not just women) whose stories never got to happen.

17/
Telling the erased stories of people who excelled against all odds through luck and brilliance exposes a void: the people who didn't have that luck, that brilliant, who never got to make a contribution.

18/
After all, the women pioneers in computing trend whiter and wealthier than the median person in America. The notable exceptions - like the Black women who made the space program possible - demonstrate this disparity arises from exclusion, not a lack of aptitude or desire.

19/
Broad Band isn't merely a celebration of the hidden heroes of the computing revolution - it's also an epitaph for all the people whose talent, aptitude, dreams and contributions were squandered by a system based on mass exclusion.

20/
What's more, it's a tale that shows that the differences between fields are socially - not biologically -determined. The women who break through to male-dominated roles as CEOs and VCs are just as prone to selling out workers and users as their male counterparts.

21/
I'm so glad that I saved my copy of Broad Band from my repeated book bankruptcies since 2018, but I confess that I didn't read that print copy - rather, I listened to the audiobook, which Evans herself reads.

22/
Evans isn't just a superb writer, interviewer and researcher - she's also a brilliant voice actor, whose reading is gripping, exuberant, sorrowful and enraging by turns. I love hearing a book read by its author...when the author is a good reader. Evans is the whole package.

eof/
ETA: if you'd like to read or share this review as a blog post, here's a copy on my site https://t.co/iSBh8s9m7q, which has no trackers, ads or surveillance.

https://t.co/tUTRPUgNbx

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
I spend a lot of time looking in detail at abusive situations where tech plays a starring role: stalkerware, bossware, remote proctoring, etc. But nothing I'd read really prepared me for the tale of @arisevsinc, an abuser without parallel.

https://t.co/olExnSwEcW

1/


Arise sells itself as a "virtual call center" and boasts of blue-chip clients like Disney, Carnival Cruises, Comcast, Airbnb, Intuit etc. If you've ever called one of these companies, you may have spoken to an Arise worker.

2/

But that "worker" was not an employee. Arise is a pioneer in worker misclassification, and treats all the people who work for it as "independent contractors." So even though these workers are more tightly supervised and managed than any regular employee, they have no rights.

3/

You have to pay Arise for the privilege of working for them. Not just buying your own computer, but also paying to be trained in how to pretend to be an employee of Disney or Airbnb and Arise's other customers.

4/

Execs at these giant corps listen in on your calls while they are in progress or after the fact - and if they detect so much as a squeak from a child, or a noisy neighbor, they can terminate your contract and you lose the money and unpaid labor you spent on training.

5/
SOCIETY , SOCIETY
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
When they write the history of this era, one of the strangest chapters will be devoted to Uber, a company that was never, ever going to be profitable, which existed solely to launder billions for the Saudi royals.

1/


From the start, Uber's "blitzscaling" strategy involved breaking local taxi laws (incurring potentially unlimited civil liability) while losing (lots of) money on every ride. They flushed billions and billions and billions of dollars down the drain.

2/

But they had billions to burn. Mohammed bin Salman, the murdering Crown Prince of the Saudi royal family, funded Softbank - a Japanese pump-and-dump investment scheme behind Wework and other grifts - with $80B as part of his "Vision 2030"

Vision 2030 is a scheme to diversify Saudi wealth away from hydrocarbons by attempting to establish monopolies that will allow the family to control entire sectors of the global economy.

4/

These schemes are longshots, and the fallback position is to unload failed monopolies - with staggering debt-overhangs - on investors who've been suckered with the promise that really big piles of shit surely have a pony buried underneath them somewhere.

5/
UBER
Advertisement
Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow
@doctorow
It's been eight years since @aaronsw took his own life. Aaron had been charged with 13 felonies under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (#CFAA) for violating the terms of service on the @JSTOR database of scholarly articles.

1/


Prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz didn't dispute that Aaron was allowed to access the articles he retrieved. Rather, they said that the WAY he accessed them (using a script instead of clicking on links) was a terms-of-service violation and hence a crime.

2/

In other words: any business could conjure a felony out of thin air by making you click through an unreadable garbage-novella of legalese proscribing the use of a service they granted you access to. Violate any of those terms and you face a prison sentence.

3/

This isn't law as we know it, it's Felony Contempt of Business Model, and the most alarming thing was that this interpretation of the CFAA wasn't completely ridiculous, given how badly drafted that law is.

4/

Ronald Reagan signed CFAA into law. Fed prosecutors had been seeking broad authority to punish "hacking" and had drawn up an absurdly broad definition of cybercrime that would give them latitude to go after anyone they didn't like.

5/
ALL
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
The remix culture of the early 2000s left an indelible impression on me, an enduring delight in the power of whimsy, juxtaposition, virtuosity and ingenuity - and the ability of strangers all over the world to collaborate without any explicit coordination.

1/


The recent Bernie-mittens meme was a sterling example of this, tickling me right to my core, and I just happened on an especially delightful apex example of the form: @ToastedShoes's video of Sanders incorporated into eight AAA

Toasted Shoes got @JoeMashups to create a 3D model of Sanders, then tapped a bunch of different mashup artists to turn the Sanders sprite into playable characters in the games, showing them off in a narrated video.

3/

I'm not much of a fan of video-game streamers' narration, and I confess that I found the video more entertaining without the narration, but to each their own - Shoes was clearly enjoying himself, as were the commenters on the video.

4/

They had a lot to be pleased by.

Sanders as a Sith Lord in Star Wars Battlefront 2:

5/
FUN
Cory Doctorow RIGHT-CLICKING WORDCEL MENTALITY
Cory Doctorow RIGHT-CL...
@doctorow
I've just read one of the most lucid, wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary critiques of cryptocurrency and blockchain I've yet to encounter. 1/


It comes from David "DSHR" Rosenthal, a distinguished technologist whose past achievements including helping to develop X11 and the core technologies for Nvidia.

https://t.co/tkAMShno4k 2/

Rosenthal's critique is a transcript of a lecture he gave to Stanford's EE380 class, adapted from a December 2021 talk for an investor conference. 3/

It is a bang-up-to-date synthesis of many of the critical writings on the subject, glued together with Rosenthal's own deep technical expertise. He calls it "Can We Mitigate Cryptocurrencies' Externalities?"

The presence of "externalities" in Rosenthal's title is key. 4/

Rosenthal identifies blockchainism's core ideology as emerging from "the libertarian culture of Silicon Valley and the cypherpunks," and states that "libertarianism's attraction is based on ignoring externalities."

This is an important critique of libertarianism. 5/
CRYPTO

More from Culture

Farnam Street
Farnam Street
@farnamstreet
The Blank Sheet Method that will 10x your reading comprehension.

Here is how it works.

Before you start reading a new book, take out a blank sheet of paper. Write down what you know about the book / subject you’re about to read — a mind map if you will.

After you finish a reading session, spend a few minutes adding to the map with a different color.

Before you start your next reading session, review the page.

When you’re done reading, put these ‘blank sheets’ into a binder that you periodically review.
CULTURE , ALL
Jeet Heer
Jeet Heer
@HeerJeet
1. Now that Stan Lee is being eulogized far and wide, it's important to remember how marginal Stan Lee and his collaborators (Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko) were in the 1950s and 1960s.

2. Marvel Comics (before that Atlas) was just a cog in the machine of a bottom pulp publisher run by Martin Goodman, the husband of one of Lee's cousins. It was the lowest of the low in the publishing world.

3. Now Mario Puzo (not yet the author of the Godfather) shared offices with Stan Lee in the 1950s and 1960s. Puzo wrote for garrish men's adventure magazines and, like Lee, dreamed of writing a novel & breaking out. But Puzo looked down on Lee.

4. Flo Steinberg, 1960s secretary at Marvel: "They were always making jokes about us. They'd come in and giggle. mario Puzo would look in and would see us all working on his way to the office and say, 'Work faster, little elves. Christmas is coming.'"

5. When JFK was killed, the whole office of Magazine Management was stunned and quiet. Except Lee. He continued working. "He was still working on the comic books," Puzo said. "Like that was the most important thing in the world."
CULTURE
Advertisement
Beth Moore
Beth Moore
@BethMooreLPM
Oh man, I loved my Bible reading this morning. It was Exodus 28 where God gave Moses the instructions for the priestly apparel Aaron & his sons were to wear. The attention to the minutest detail confirms what we can still count on today: everything God prescribed had purpose.

Whether or not they understood it, whether or not we understand it, God is not haphazard. Nothing is for nothing. For me, one of the most marvelous parts of Bible study is how often he does tie things together for us, connecting the dots, connecting the testaments, the covenants.

I’ll just offer 1 example from Ex 28. V.3 says “You are to instruct all the skilled artisans, whom I’ve filled with a spirit of wisdom (isn’t that fantastic?), to make Aaron’s garments for consecrating him to serve Me as priest.” The turban was an important piece of the apparel.

Something I find particularly fascinating is that the skilled artisans were to make a pure gold nameplate to fasten onto the very front of the priest’s turban. It was to have 4 words engraved on it -all caps in our Bibles- “HOLY TO THE LORD. “It is always to be on his forehead.”

Imagine how a conversation would change if we were talking to a person while staring at those four words on his or her forehead. Ok, fast forward to the New Testament where the Holy Spirit says through Peter that we who are in Christ are part of a “royal priesthood.” (2 Pet 2:9)
CULTURE
Wealthy Brains
Wealthy Brains
@Wealthy_Brains
Lessons I learned from "Rich Dad, Poor Dad"

~ Thread ~

1. Put your money to work

You cannot get rich with your money in savings account,

Invest it in appreciating assets.

2. Amount of money retained matters

It is not the amount of money you make,

It's the amount of money you keep that matters.

3. Acquire assets

Rich people acquire assets while poor accumulates liabilities,

Your choices will determine your fate.

4. You are not born to work for others for lifetime

Most people consider this slavery as their life,

Completely forgetting the life possible beyond that.
CULTURE
Zach W. Lambert
Zach W. Lambert
@ZachWLambert
I woke up this morning to hundreds of notifications from this tweet, which is literally just a quote from a book I am giving away tonight.

The level of vitriol in the replies is a new experience for me on here. I love Twitter, but this is the dark side of it.

Thread...


First, this quote is from a book which examines castes and slavery throughout history. Obviously Wilkerson isn’t claiming slavery was invented by America.

She says, “Slavery IN THIS LAND...” wasn’t happenstance. American chattel slavery was purposefully crafted and carried out.

That’s not a “hot take” or a fringe opinion. It’s a fact with which any reputable historian or scholar agrees.

Second, this is a perfect example of how nefarious folks operate here on Twitter...

J*mes Linds*y, P*ter Bogh*ssian and others like them purposefully misrepresent something (or just outright ignore what it actually says as they do in this case) and then feed it to their large, angry following so they will attack.


The attacks are rarely about ideas or beliefs, because purposefully misrepresenting someone’s argument prevents that from happening. Instead, the attacks are directed at the person.
CULTURE

You May Also Like

Caleb Porzio
Caleb Porzio
@calebporzio
🎉🎉 PHP 7.3 is here!

Here are the things I'm excited about.

🚂 Trailing commas in function/method calls!

This will certainly be a required styling choice for me. Same delightful benefits of trailing comma in multi-line PHP arrays, and JavaScript objects.


🧵 Less disgusting heredoc syntax!

Inlining heredoc strings in any way right now is grrrosssss. Now we get sensible capabilities. Everything that was wrong with it is now fixed!

(Ignore the bad syntax highlighting)


☠️ Finally, not-so-silent json_decode error detection!

This really sucked before, now it just sucks a bit less (who wants to pass a 4th param and pass 2 default params first? (helper function anybody?)


📜 Not horrible functions for getting the first and last item (or key) from an array!

Before you either strung a bunch of functions together or messed with internal array pointers. This is a much-needed improvement.
TECH
Homestays & Villas
Homestays & Villas
@thehomestays
Best resort on the Ganga at Rishikesh
TRAVEL , TRAVELINDIA , PLACES 2TRAVEL
Advertisement
Andrew Chen
Andrew Chen
@andrewchen
👇Thread.

Published a new essay: The red flags and magic numbers that investors look for in your startup’s metrics – 80 slide deck included!


This was a deck that I created on my (longish) interview process with @a16z. It was a long path, starting with meeting folks at the firm 10 years ago. But the purpose of the deck was to explain how I would use my superpower in an investing context

Here's what I explain in the deck. As investors (whether angel or VC) we're often confronted with an up-and-to-the-right graph. Is it going to go up? Or down?


One solution to forecast these growth curves is the Growth Accounting Framework, where you add up New+Reactivated and subtract churned users. In each time period that gives you the difference in monthly actives.


The problem with this is that it's a lagging metric, not a leading one. We need to go one level deeper and look at the underlying loops that drive these numbers, to understand the quality.
STARTUPS
Shalini Singh Sengar
Shalini Singh Sengar
@Maverickmusafir
Post Independence, Army wanted to select the most experienced Indian commander as Army chief. But Nehru without consulting anyone appointed Gen Rob Lockhart, a senior British Army officer as the Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) of the Indian Army.


Most people were shocked to know that Nehru selected a British Man after fighting for independence for over 200 years! Major Gen A A ‘Jick’ Rudra of the Indian Army was completely upset with the decision.


One day Lockhart met Nehru with a strategic plan and proposed many government directive defence policies for the country. He placed it on the table and explained the point to PM Nehru. After a while Lockhart walked out of the room and met AA Jick Rudra,+

Lockhart looked shell shocked and stunned. When asked what happened he said “The PM took one look at my paper and blew his top. Rubbish! Total rubbish! We don’t need a defence plan. Our policy is ahimsa (non-violence). We foresee no military threats. Scrap the army!”

One year after the incident the Kashmir crisis had increased and Gen Lockhart used to exchange ideas with the Gen Douglas Gracey who was commander in chief of Pakistan Army.There were many infiltrations along the border which Lockhart knew and took no action. But Lt Gen Cariappa+
HISTORY
George Mack
George Mack
@george__mack
THREAD: 15 of the most useful razors and rules I've found.

Rules of thumb that simplify decisions.

Bezos' Razors:

• If unsure what action to take, let your 80-year-old self make it.

• If unsure who to work with, pick the person that has the best chances of breaking you out of a 3rd world prison.

Skinner's Law:

• If procrastinating on an item, you only have 2 options:

1. Make the pain of not doing it greater than the pain of doing it.

2. Make the pleasure of doing it greater than the pleasure of not doing it.

Luck Razor:

• If stuck with 2 equal options, pick the one that feels like it will produce the most luck later down the line.

I used this razor to go for drinks with a stranger rather than watch Netflix.

In hindsight, it was the highest ROI decision I've ever made.

Bragging Razor:

• If someone brags about their success or happiness, assume it’s half what they claim.

• If someone downplays their success or happiness, assume it’s double what they claim.

The map is not the terrain.
ALL , BUSINESS , PRINCIPLES