Mindblown: culture, urbanism, leadership, technology.
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The same boogieman
Privacy advocates and gun advocates fear the same boogieman but only privacy tech can stop it short of war and war is rarely an invited guest. The fear of authority gone awry and reaching towards authoritarianism is not irrational. The desire to have tools that protect you from authoritarianism is not irrational. The desire to…
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why VR?
The “high-tech, low-life” aesthetic that makes cyberpunk cool is the only setting where VR/AR doesn’t seem out of place as “consumer tech”. The problem for Apple is that they are a luxury goods brand that is out of place in the aesthetic. It’s like if the child soldier in Africa was using a Louis Vuitton…
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Conceptual Unpacking
Part I – Preconceived Notions First, there were the dinosaurs, but they got too big and died… Then apes, walking, fire, farming, religion, government, empire, enlightenment, capitalism, industrialization, computation, networking, porn, social media, cloud, and AI happened. None of which means very much at all in the eyes of the universe. But it does mean…
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Power is the means to coerce compliance
Power comes in four flavors:– Physical power, which coerces with threats of death– Financial power, which coerces with threats of poverty– Reputational power, which coerces with threats of shame– Cultural power, which coerces with threats of exile and of assimilation Threats can appear to be lessor — a beating or a lay-off, but the threats…
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Abundance obsoletes Efficiency
Efficiency often gets framed as inherently good by economists and engineers, but that obfuscates any consideration of Enough. Trying to find Efficiency on the abundant side of Enough is waste; all you are striving for is Excess.
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Failure
Every failed project I’ve been around can trace its failure back to a lack of agreement among the participants about what problem the project is trying to solve.
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Fear will keep them in line
Star Wars has a formula. When it gets followed, the stories are pretty solid and, with competent film making they lead to good films or shows, when it doesn’t, you don’t. One of the most important parts of the formula is that there has to be a totalitarian power that promotes evil for the heroes…
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Types of meetings
I have a lot of experience having my time wasted in meetings that don’t serve a purpose other than to “have a meeting”. They don’t make a decision, they don’t make the participants better or smarter or more valuable, and they don’t convey information very well. What they did do is show me how not…
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Thoughts on “what programming language should I learn?”
“What programming language should I learn?” is a perfectly reasonable question. You might have asked it yourself. Almost every answer to that question you’ll get is bunk. The one that isn’t, sounds something like, “It depends on what you want to do.”. Which is, while not complete bunk, still very bunk-ish because it isn’t really…
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Is there a relationship between market stability and market fragility?
There this argument in economics that big, interconnected markets are more stable than markets without inter-dependencies because can make it through economic shocks better when they can dissipate the impact of those shocks more widely. This makes sense on a macroeconomic level where you don’t actually look at the individuals and where the low level…