The leap from furry, buzzing insects to abstract geometry is inconceivable unless you’re accustomed to looking at the world in that particular way.

But remote RC is working, and it includes most of the best parts of RC because it includes the most important part: kind, thoughtful, curious people who are committed to becoming better programmers together.

but then life happened as it tends to do but not quite in the way that any of us could expect–except bill gates? ​ now it’s a company that you can still enumerate with 2 hands but then have to reuse those same hands about 30 times.

This is "GORUCO 2014 - Samantha John, Jason Brennan - Designing a better Programmer Community" by Gotham Ruby Conference on Vimeo, the home for high quality…

I don’t want to suggest that we should resist change entirely. I do think we can be thoughtful about the rate of change that we introduce. I also think it’s a choice, rather than an inevitability, to drop bombs that throw an entire ecosystem off-balance. I tend to interpret this dismissiveness as a way of saying, “We don’t want to become a ‘thing’ because ‘things’ are destroyable by outsiders.” Avoiding labels is a way of keeping hidden cities away from the colonizers, like a nomadic tribe on the move.

Now, we can admit, at sufficiently high resolution we’re all effectively homeless a lot of the time. ​ Last week, I attended Ribbonfarm’s annual meetup in Los Angeles (which was fantastic). In Venkatesh Rao’s closing remarks, he observed that the audience wasn’t so much a community as an airport: a bunch of people on individual trajectories sharing the same physical space momentarily before dispersing again. ​ If we can instead learn to design parts of the world for airport-like assemblages and the fractal nature of physical existence — the world we currently inhabit — we might actually find that we get more of what we’re seeking from communities.

The problem is that if you’re not reflecting, you’re not learning. And if you’re not learning, it’s quite easy to get stuck or to find you’re working on the wrong thing. Reflection is like sleep—you need it but you tend to only appreciate it after you’ve had it. You could poll everyone, but honestly it’s easier to just pick a date and see what happens.

many people now rely on their employer to pay the premium for insurance against the erosion of their social life. ​ Hardly a cause for either company’s success, but certainly a tailwind. ​ Ironically this would mean that WeWork didn’t stand on the shoulders of Facebook as a user acquisition machine so much as it cleaned up what Facebook left in its wake as an alienation machine.

Every single time some stranger online says something dumb or rude or completely beside the point to me, I think of Paul Ford’s “Why wasn’t I consulted?”: “Why wasn't I consulted,” which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have

hot take it should be completely normal for people to come to forums and post a simple question, get directed to an existing thread, and everyone says "thanks / you're welcome" instead of the hostility i've seen towards this on forums for 20 years— Sega Protogenesis (@gravislizard) February 2, 2019

Jersey City-based artist/engineer Jenn Schiffer makes art with code, teaches code with art, and open-source tools for playing with both. Her hilariously deadpan writing satirizes tech culture and programming tutorials, roping in clueless mansplainers for literally years after publication. Follow Jenn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jennschiffer And on Medium: https://medium.com/@jennschiffer Her official site: http://jennmoney.biz/ Recorded in September 2016 at XOXO, an experimental festival celebrating independently produced art and technology in Portland, Oregon. For more, visit http://xoxofest.com. Introductory music: "Flaws Run Deep" by Jim Guthrie. Video production by brytCAST. Video thumbnail by Searle Video. Captions by White Coat Captioning.