This project is aimed at creating a living syllabus, a community, and a framework for these ideas, one informed by a deep “historical sense” that ensures computing does not remain a “pop culture.” We must make computers work for people, guided by history and the humanities.

“A lot of the online things we’ve built are, like roads and bridges, now necessary — and figure out how we can publicly fund enough of them that important things without an obvious and direct profit motive can get done.”

The lack of hook size standardization is maddening.

I’ve started to think of this as backseat software: the slow shift from software as a tool you operate to software as a channel that operates on you. Once a product learns it can talk back, it’s remarkably hard to keep it quiet.

Treating Mondays as a design problem.

Software development, as it has been done for decades, is over.

Molly rightfully calls out the so-called anti-authoritarian crypto community for being silent on ICE:

For years, crypto executives have touted cryptocurrency’s supposed anti-authoritarian and humanitarian credentials — whether to fend off regulators or convince the public that crypto has viable use cases beyond speculation. The technology is necessary and good, they claim, because it could support dissidents living under authoritarian regimes, help persecuted groups escape their oppressors, shield people from surveillance, or somehow inherently protect citizens from government overreach. Many of them spent years posting piously about the importance of due process and protection from abuses of power, or shared quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass about freedom. …

And yet now these voices are silent on the authoritarianism unfolding before us. Where are their defenses of the Constitution when the president claims Pretti’s lawful gun ownership justified his killing,6 or when ICE leaders tell subordinates to enter homes without warrants?7 Where are their warnings about surveillance states now that ICE is photographing protesters for their “domestic terrorist” lists and Palantir is contracted by the government to build databases of people living in the US they can target for raids?8 In 2022, they were incensed when Canadian authorities froze bank accounts belonging to truckers protesting vaccine mandates (and delighted for the opportunity to promote crypto as an alternative funding mechanism) — but now, when ICE agents murder bystanders and invent pretexts that footage shows are false, where is the righteous outcry against state violence towards those exercising their right to protest?

The answer, of course, is that they never actually cared about these principles at all.

TIL about Wiarton Willie, the Canadian equivalent of Punxsutawney Phil, and the wiki is full of scandal and intrigue.

You need infoguards to protect your mind.

A Javascript-based app for formatting PDFs for bookbinding