Monthly Archives: February 2018

Developer’s Remorse kicks in

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At last! The Center for Humane Technology has launched.

From the NYT report:

Its first project to reform the industry will be to introduce a Ledger of Harms — a website aimed at guiding rank-and-file engineers who are concerned about what they are being asked to build. The site will include data on the health effects of different technologies and ways to make products that are healthier.

Jim Steyer, chief executive and founder of Common Sense, said the Truth About Tech campaign was modeled on antismoking drives and focused on children because of their vulnerability. That may sway tech chief executives to change, he said. Already, Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, told The Guardian last month that he would not let his nephew on social media, while the Facebook investor Sean Parker also recently said of the social network that “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

Mr. Steyer said, “You see a degree of hypocrisy with all these guys in Silicon Valley.”

The new group also plans to begin lobbying for laws to curtail the power of big tech companies. It will initially focus on two pieces of legislation: a bill being introduced by Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, that would commission research on technology’s impact on children’s health, and a bill in California by State Senator Bob Hertzberg, a Democrat, which would prohibit the use of digital bots without identification.

Government by taxidermy

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Nice, perceptive column by Matthew d’Ancona:

Still, though, one continues to hear that [Theresa May] should stay where she is, as the only senior Tory who can realistically preside over the “constructive ambiguity” required by the Brexit talks – publicly demanding a clean break while quietly negotiating the complex, nuanced and unheroic deal that anyone remotely sensible knows is the only halfway palatable outcome.

The trouble is, she is doing no such thing. She is not the deft manager of meaning, soothing all sides and persuading each faction that its interests are being respected. She is the stuffed remnant of a once-optimistic prime minister, helpless in the midst of anarchic cacophony. This is government by taxidermy.

Yep. Amazing, perplexing — and alarming — to watch.

How to handle difficult customers

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This (from The Register) made my day:

One Boxing Day (December 26th for US readers who inexplicably don’t get it as a holiday) Ant met “an especially unpleasant and angry woman” who showed up with a computer in a shopping trolley.

“She stormed straight past the lengthy queue shouting ‘you’re all a bunch of stupid wankers’ and loudly proclaiming things like ‘how can you be so fck!ng stupid and sell fck!ng computers that don’t f*ck!ng work’.”

Ant and his crew decided it was better to let her jump the queue than let her stand in it shouting obscenities, so made her case a priority even as she continued to complain that her sound and CD drive were both “f*ck!ng faulty”.

This incident took place back when speakers slotted into the side of the monitor. The customer’s were still in their plastic wrapping with the cables tied up inside. Ant rated this fix “pretty easy”.

So did other customers still waiting behind the abusive woman in the queue. Ant told us those other shoppers “found it amusing when we pointed out – super and artificially nicely – that you had to plug the speakers in.”

The rude customer responded with “Well the CD’s f*ck!ng stuck”. She was right, Ant told us, because when he used the manual eject button to pop the tray open there was a a CD-ROM in the tray. Still in its plastic sleeve, which rather impaired the drive tray’s operation.

“It was lovely explaining to her, in front of the now openly laughing queue, that you had to take CDs out of their covers before putting them in anything.”

“That made the rest of the day fly by.”

Lovely!

Amazon’s move into healthcare

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This morning’s Observer column about the collaboration between Amazon, Warren Buffett and JP Morgan:

Launching the initiative with his customary folksy bluntness, Buffett said that “the ballooning costs of healthcare act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy. Our group does not come to this problem with answers. But we also do not accept it as inevitable.” If this – plus the fact that the new venture is to be a not-for-profit enterprise – was intended to be soothing, then it failed. The announcement immediately wiped billions off the valuations of the corporate tapeworms that have for decades fastened like leeches on the US healthcare system. And it’s not Buffett that scares them, but Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive and founder.

They’re right to to be scared…

Read on

Freeman Dyson: Rebel without a PhD

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You became a professor at Cornell without ever having received a Ph.D. You seem almost proud of that fact.

Oh, yes. I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all.

From a lovely interview with Dyson on his 90th birthday.

The real threat from Trump

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Summarised neatly by David Frum in his new book:

“The thing to fear from the Trump presidency is not the bold overthrow of the Constitution, but the stealthy paralysis of governance; not the open defiance of law, but an accumulating subversion of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters.”