2022 - To Read

determine why you're "terminally online" to accomplish the tasks detailed further in the list, you have to do some soul-searching. this starts with acknowle...

Inspired by “Git in 5 Minutes”, I decided to take things a step further, and create guide for git that takes even less time to get through. Of course, this is very minimalistic git! But it’s enough be useful for...

When I say that white supremacy makes for terrible readers, I mean that white supremacy is, among its myriad ills, a formative collection of fundamentally shitty reading techniques that impoverishe…

So you pick up a New Yorker short story, hoping to find something fresh. Here’s one that seems to have gotten a lot of attention, “The Ghost Birds,” by Karen Russell. In no time you find yourself s…

Depending on who you are, the word “essay” may make you squirm. After all, here in America at least, our introduction to the essay often comes complete with five paragraphs and “r…

On his blog, Bob Harper asks what, if anything, a declarative language is . He notes that "declarative" is often used to mean "logic or func...

New Blog Post: Crimes with Python Pattern Matching First technical blog post since 2021 and it’s all about how to break the Python type system over your...

June Huh wasn’t interested in mathematics until a chance encounter during his sixth year of college. Now his profound insights connecting combinatorics and geometry have led to math’s highest honor.

The key to building reliable services is proper preparation. See here how runbooks can help you do just that, by ensuring the right knowledge is readily available when you need it most.

Social media is neither social nor is it a good source of news.

In “Tech” we’ve spent a quarter of a century ‘changing the world’, and now it’s someone else's turn.

In this critical thinking barriers and how to overcome them post you'll see two things: Why your thinking is bad and how to improve it.

The Biden administration and many commentators are at pains to deny that the U.S. is in a recession, but history is not on their side.

Don't fall in love with your own intellect.

All I wanted was a custom domain but buying into G Suite locked me out of a wealth of Google apps and services.

The length of text lines substantially impacts their readability — yet this is often overlooked in e-commerce. See our latest test findings on line length readability.

Democracy and free speech are the long game

Richard Feynman has given us a wonderful technique to improve the way we learn. Discover the famous Feynman technique and start learning more effectively

And other lessons from a decade of making digital tools for teachers.

The long-time host of PBS NewsHour Jim Lehrer died this week at the age of 85. In this age of news as entertainment and opinion as news, Lehrer seems like one of the last of a breed of journalist who took seriously the i

The origins of the universe may be hidden in the voids of space.

Two Chinese psychologists talk about divorce, stockpiling and crying into your mask

The Spreadsheet That Launched A Million Companies

In the bestselling tradition of The Soul of a New Machine, Dealers of Lightning is a fascinating journey of intellectual creation. In the 1970s and '80s, Xerox Corporation brought together a brain-trust of engineering geniuses, a group of computer eccentrics dubbed PARC. This brilliant group created several monumental innovations that triggered a technological revolution, including the first personal computer, the laser printer, and the graphical interface (one of the main precursors of the Internet), only to see these breakthroughs rejected by the corporation. Yet, instead of giving up, these determined inventors turned their ideas into empires that radically altered contemporary life and changed the world.Based on extensive interviews with the scientists, engineers, administrators, and executives who lived the story, this riveting chronicle details PARC's humble beginnings through its triumph as a hothouse for ideas, and shows why Xerox was never able to grasp, and ultimately exploit, the cutting-edge innovations PARC delivered. Dealers of Lightning offers an unprecedented look at the ideas, the inventions, and the individuals that propelled Xerox PARC to the frontier of technohistoiy--and the corporate machinations that almost prevented it from achieving greatness.

From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives   Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence?   To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice…though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy.   Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible.   An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us—and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves.

This 2007 book considers how agencies are currently figured at the human-machine interface, and how they might be imaginatively and materially reconfigured. Contrary to the apparent enlivening of objects promised by the sciences of the artificial, the author proposes that the rhetorics and practices of those sciences work to obscure the performative nature of both persons and things. The question then shifts from debates over the status of human-like machines, to that of how humans and machines are enacted as similar or different in practice, and with what theoretical, practical and political consequences. Drawing on scholarship across the social sciences, humanities and computing, the author argues for research aimed at tracing the differences within specific sociomaterial arrangements without resorting to essentialist divides. This requires expanding our unit of analysis, while recognizing the inevitable cuts or boundaries through which technological systems are constituted.