Jason Stirk

hint: it isn't the developers, so much as the situation.

the way Uber and startup culture has co-opted and bowdlerized the phrase into an anodyne signifier of entrepreneurialism is gallingly hollow. The side hustle is a survival mechanism, not an aspirational career track.

Some great practical advice here for more productive meetings.

The site, known as Warratyi, shows Aboriginal Australians settled the arid interior of the country around 49,000 years ago — some 10,000 years earlier than previously thought.

The shelter, about 550 kilometres north of Adelaide, also contains the first reliably dated evidence of human interaction with megafauna.

Homogenous teams create a vicious cycle of homogeneity. Is a candidate uncomfortable around people who are gay? Older than they are, younger than they are? People of color? You might never know until they get a chance to interact with a variety of people — is that time going to come before or after that candidate is on your staff?

Some really great tips and techniques here, for both novice and long time coders.

Regardless of who you are, how much passion or natural talent you have, you will eventually hit a hard ceiling. I’m going to share with you a few techniques that will dramatically improve your disciplined problem solving abilities.

Cool to see that teams are starting to look at what happens if quantum computing renders today's security algorithms obsolete and breakable.

Very quickly my Pokemon catching dreams were obliterated by the unfortunate reality that exist for a Black Man in America. I realized that if I keep playing this game, it could literally kill me.

Software development does not have economies of scale.

In all sorts of ways software development has diseconomies of scale.

There seems to be a belief in Silicon Valley that a failed algorithm is just a step on the way to success, and the fix will arrive in the next generation of software. But they seem oblivious to the fact that many regulations are there to deal with conflicts of interest, and algorithms do nothing to address that problem. So if something goes wrong on a Sharing Economy service, it’s in the interests of the platform to cover it up, and that’s a big problem.

Once it had taught itself to recognize the Blade Runner data, the encoder reduced each frame of the film to a 200-digit representation of itself and reconstructed those 200 digits into a new frame intended to match the original.

Interesting perspective on identifying and digging yourself (and others) out of shitty situations - times when it's too easy to make bad choices.

The Threshold of Misery is that point when things have become so bad, you simply cease to care when they get worse.

A hilarious reminder that you probably don't understand things as thoroughly as you think you do.

How many tech startups in the world are currently creating arbitrary incentives for systems that are ultimately unsustainable?

Unfortunately, in its desire to do good in a poor part of the world, the Body Shop created a situation which was worse than when they began: Massive resources went into shea butter production only to find that it was not needed, and the overproduction of nuts ended up being mostly worthless.

An irrational decision isn't always irrational given the context of the decision, and we should strive to understand the context before judging.

By extension, we should only call a choice irrational or suboptimal if we know what people are trying to optimise.

Interesting look into how a language's documentation and educational materials can dictate the community because of what. An important read for anyone who teaches or writes documentation.

The values of our educational materials create our community values. People whose assumptions mesh with theirs proceed onward to community participation; people whose assumptions and values don’t leak out of the pipeline.

This is fascinating, not just for the geostatistical analysis, but also for the political ramifications.

"We've had rape threats and death threats by people who were threatened by the existence of a bake sale that could potentially engage with an issue of inequality."

But if we explore where process might come from, you’ll understand three things: the circumstances that lead to the necessity of process, how it could be awesome, and most importantly, your role in maintaining the awesome.

Take Uber, for example. Uber’s great at solving how people with smartphones and disposable income can get around major cities — a small fraction of the global population. Uber is less good at helping the drivers, whose income is much lower than the riders, benefit from this new paradigm. Uber has hailed their impact as letting people work flexibly and use assets more productively, but strategically is investing hugely in driverless cars.

What we’ve found, over and over, is an industry willing to invest endless resources chasing “delight” — but when put up to the pressure of real life, the results are shallow at best, and horrifying at worst.

But what I’ve realized is that every question carries weight. Every bit we collect is part of a personal history—a story of a life lived. And those lives are always messier than the “frictionless interactive experiences” we—designers, writers, strategists, whathaveyous—intend to create.

Australia's former top statistician and a leading privacy group have slammed the Australian Bureau of Statistics for quietly reinstating a plan defeated a decade ago to retain names and addresses from the 2016 census, opening the door to future governments accessing sensitive personal information.

Even when we get past introductions, we make all sorts of arbitrary assumptions about someone’s personality, interests, and hobbies. How can someone be a developer and not like video games, or Star Wars, or staying up all night programming while eating junk food? We tease each other for not living up to those assumptions by saying, “but every developer likes this!” Yes, there’s usually an intended humor in these comments, but they still make people uncomfortable: they vocally point out one’s differences with the subtext that there’s something wrong with them

One morning last July, in the rain forest of northwestern Brazil, Dan Everett, an American linguistics professor, and I stepped from the pontoon of a Cessna floatplane onto the beach bordering the Maici River, a narrow, sharply meandering tributary of the Amazon.