What Caught My Eye - Week 7

Diversity in Tech

Two links this week in this category.

  • Linux Journal published this piece by Doc Searls in December. It makes a call for more female involvement in Linux.

  • Susan Sons wrote a response, 'Girls and Software', which I thought contained some interesting points. A trio of quotes I thought were thought provoking:

    Unfortunately, our society has set girls up to be anything but technologists. My son is in elementary school. Last year, his school offered a robotics class for girls only. When my son asked why he couldn't join, it was explained to him that girls need special help to become interested in technology, and that if there are boys around, the girls will be too scared to try.

    My son came home very confused. You see, he grew up with a mom who coded while she breastfed and brought him to his first LUG meeting at age seven weeks. The first time he saw a home-built robot, it was shown to him by a local hackerspace member, a woman who happens to administer one of the country's biggest supercomputers. Why was his school acting like girls were dumb?

    Thanks so much, modern-day "feminism", for putting very unfeminist ideas in my son's head.

    The new breed of open-source programmer isn't like the old. They've changed the rules in ways that have put a spotlight on my sex for the first time in my 18 years in this community.

    When we call a man a "technologist", we mean he's a programmer, system administrator, electrical engineer or something like that. The same used to be true when we called a woman a "technologist". However, according to the new breed, a female technologist might also be a graphic designer or someone who tweets for a living. Now, I'm glad that there are social media people out there—it means I can ignore that end of things—but putting them next to programmers makes being a "woman in tech" feel a lot like the Programmer Special Olympics.

    It used to be that I was comfortable standing side by side with men, and no one cared how I looked. Now I find myself having to waste time talking about my gender rather than my technology...otherwise, there are lectures:

    • The "you didn't have a woman on the panel" lecture. I'm on the panel, but I'm told I don't count because of the way I dress: t-shirt, jeans, boots, no make-up.

    • The "you desexualize yourself to fit in; you're oppressed!" lecture. I'm told that deep in my female heart I must really love make-up and fashion. It's not that I'm a geek who doesn't much care how she looks.

    • The "you aren't representing women; you'd be a better role model for girls if you looked the part" lecture. Funny, the rest of the world seems very busy telling girls to look fashionable (just pick up a magazine or walk down the girls' toy aisle). I don't think someone as bad at fashion as I am should worry about it.

    With one exception, I've heard these lectures only from women, and women who can't code at that. Sometimes I want to shout "you're not a programmer, what are you doing here?!"

    I've also come to realize that I have an advantage that female newcomers don't: I was here before the sexism moral panic started. When a dozen guys decide to drink and hack in someone's hotel room, I get invited. They've known me for years, so I'm safe. New women, regardless of competence, don't get invited unless I'm along. That's a sexual harassment accusation waiting to happen, and no one will risk having 12 men alone with a single woman and booze. So the new ladies get left out.

    I came to the Open Source world because I liked being part of a community where my ideas, my skills and my experience mattered, not my boobs. That's changed, and it's changed at the hands of the people who say they want a community where ideas, skills and experience matter more than boobs.

    There aren't very many girls who want to hack. I imagine this has a lot to do with the fact that girls are given fashion dolls and make-up and told to fantasize about dating and popularity, while boys are given LEGOs and tool sets and told to do something. I imagine it has a lot to do with the sort of women who used to coo "but she could be so pretty if only she didn't waste so much time with computers". I imagine it has a lot to do with how girls are sold on ephemera—popularity, beauty and fitting in—while boys are taught to revel in accomplishment.

    Give me a young person of any gender with a hacker mentality, and I'll make sure they get the support they need to become awesome. Meanwhile, buy your niece or daughter or neighbor girl some LEGOs and teach her to solder. I love seeing kids at LUG meetings and hackerspaces—bring them! There can never be too many hackers.

    Do not punish the men simply for being here. "Male privilege" is a way to say "you are guilty because you don't have boobs, feel ashamed, even if you did nothing wrong", and I've wasted too much of my time trying to defend good guys from it. Yes, some people are jerks. Call them out as jerks, and don't blame everyone with the same anatomy for their behavior. Lumping good guys in with bad doesn't help anyone, it just makes good guys afraid to interact with women because they feel like they can't win. I'm tired of expending time and energy to protect good men from this drama.

    Interesting piece. I've been sitting on this piece for about a week now. I can't decide what I think about it if I'm honest. I find myself unconvinced that we need to go back to days before gender was an issue, but I also can't articulate why this doesn't seem the right course of action.

Tech

  • Interesting slide from ISSCC showing a die shot of IBM's POWER8:

Culture

What Caught My Eye - Week 6

Arts

  • I really like Chance the Rapper and James Blake. So news that they're moving in together is terribly exciting to me. The first result of their collaboration has me excited.

    However, this cover of the collaboration is quite possibly even better. I want them to take my money so badly.

Tech

  • This little post by tptacek echos most of my thoughts on passion

    There might be nothing in the industry that gets under my skin quite as effectively as engineers making hiring decisions based on the perceived "passion" of candidates. "Passion" doesn't matter. What matters in a job is effectiveness and competence. Effectiveness gets things done. Competence ensures that what's getting done isn't going to backfire and create more work down the line.

    There's a little followup here.

The Beautiful Thing About An Idea

Listening to my favourite podcast (Roderick on The Line) this morning, I came across a small segment I had to take ten minutes and attempt to transcribe.

John Roderick was discussing the nature of modern identity politics, after a reader of an article he wrote pointed out that he'd used the phrase "guitarists and their girlfriends" in a way that the reader found exclusionary of the notion of female guitarists.

Only when we arrive at a place where no voice has pride of priviledge, when no voice is heard more loudly than any other, can we fully know ourselves, or be close to achieving a human understandign or a collective wisdom. It's what I think is the undergirding idea of this quasi-marxist move on the part of the intellectual world -- the American Left's intellectual life --- to always be attacking priviledge, second guessing language, equaling voices. The only premise, an unspoken premise no one ever discusses it openly, is "Only when all voices are heard and once all voices are heard equally can we know what are project is".

Because, as you see, any time someone stands up, and says "I have an opinon", the first question is "What right do you have to speak, who are you. Are you just another middle-class white person, because we've heard what you have to say". It's a blanket dismissal -- and the reality is what any one person has to say is in a lot of ways irrespective of what their race or their class is. Right?

I mean, the world of ideas is-- the whole premise of it is that it can exist in one's mind. That, Yes, it's influenced by it's culture, Yes is influenced by it's culture, also that's the beautiful thing about an idea: You can have an idea that's in conflict with how you were raised, your culture. It's how ideas advertise themselves: I can think opposite me. To argue that all my thoughts are waterstamped with my race and culture is to be anti-intellectual (I guess) at it's core.

That's what's insane about this notion; ultimately it's anti-thinking and it becomes-- seeking to kill this idea that there's something being French, or an American, that's worth preserving, or that's an identity that has responsibility as well as rights attendent to it. That every right has a concomittant responsibility that goes along with it.

I dunno.

-- Roderick On The Line, Episode 96 “The Beautiful Thing About An Idea” (1h02m - 1h05m approximately)

All transcription errors are my fault.

It's a great discussion, start to finish, and yet another reason I listen to the podcast -- beyond the amazing and disturbing stories of eating meatball sub-sandwiches in a bathtub.

I think it blends well into recent discussions about the toxicity of progressive discussions. Language policing is something I've been guilty of [1], but Roderick makes the point that we can't be doctrinarian about this. Sometimes language is harmful and ought to be corrected, and sometimes it's just language we don't love.

[1] I feel a little better about my particular tiny foray into language policing. I was particularly concerned by a sexist turn of phrase in a technical oriented discussion, intended partially as a recruitment tool. My justification is centred largely on the petrie multiplier, which everyone in tech needs to read about.

What Caught My Eye - Week 5

Arts

  • A fantastically interesting hypothesis on the development of consciousness: The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. A taste:

    Julian Jaynes proposes a radical answer to these questions: until a few thousand years ago human beings did not ‘view themselves’. They did not have the ability: they had no introspection and no concept of ‘self’ that they could reflect upon. In other words: they had no subjective consciousness. Jaynes calls their mental world the bicameral mind. It is a mind with two chambers, the mind that is divided in a god part and a human part. The human part heard voices and experienced these as coming from gods. These gods were no judging, moral or transcendent gods, but were more like each person's personal problem solvers. They were hallucinated voices that provided the answers when a person entered a stressful situation which couldn't be solved by routine.

  • On a different note: Stormtroopers twerking. Could it get any better?

  • I've also been enjoying Big Boi's Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors. Goes a little sideways in places, but by and large, a pretty good album.

Tech

  • Eugene Wallingford on one reason we need computer programs, to bridge the gap between theory and data. Programming a solution forces a codification of how we handle edge cases, missing values, etc.

A quote

From a letter my grandfather wrote to me, after I questioned my reach a little bit:

Your reach was, and is greater than your grasp. That must always be your motto. If you reach for the stars, you will see and touch the moon.

It's a lovely sentiment, you see everwhere, but one I love-- even more so since it comes from my grandfather.

I also made this:

Reach.jpeg

What Caught My Eye - Week 4

Bit of a single topic this week. Still, some interesting things.

Technology

  • Caught Like Insects

    [...] for many, it was liberating to find that, on the web, you could explore your true nature and find fellow travelers without shame.

    But as paranoia grows about the NSA reading our emails and Google tapping into our home thermostats, it’s increasingly clear that — rather than providing an identity-free playground — the web can just as easily capture and preserve aspects of our identities we would have preferred to keep hidden. What started as a metaphor to describe the complexly interconnected network has come to suggest a spider’s sticky trap.

  • Code is not Literature: An interesting disucssion of the notion of 'reading code', and how 'reading' is really the wrong way to look at it.

    It was sometime after that presentation that I finally realized the obvious: code is not literature. We don’t read code, we decode it. We examine it. A piece of code is not literature; it is a specimen.

    I've always been very curious about the idea of sitting down and reading code, since it's a common exhortation to those trying to improve their skills. However, my brief forays have always been fruitless, largely because I did try to understand the challenge as reading, not examination.

    My most successful and rewarding instances of 'reading code' have been delving deep into systems I don't understand with a debugger and a notebook. Debugging problems in code I've never seen before is often a part of my day-to-day, and lately, part of my leisure time too!

  • On the Matter of Why Bitcoin Matters: An interesting and measured take on bitcoin from Glenn Fleishman.

    Bitcoin shows a path for massively more secure, reliable, and sensible ways to store value and move it around. As a currency, I have little faith that it will become a replacement for dollars, euros, or renminbi. As a model for a future payment and transaction system, I believe it’s already shown its value.

  • The CS Mindset: A discussion on why we teach CS, and what we hope students will learn from their CS courses.

    With this skill comes something else, something even more important: a discipline of thinking and a clarity of thought that are hard to attain when you learn "how to think more methodically and how to solve problems more effectively" in the abstract or while doing almost any other activity.