You don’t have to read it, but you just might learn something.
Leading Thought
Prime
An Open Letter To Men Who Love Women Over 35 — This Is Why We Flinch When You Touch Us
Of all the articles this week, this is probably the one that needs reading, especially by men.
As a Gen-Xer, this is one of those posts that is an absolute gut-punch. When watching the series Mad Men, there were a lot of times when something happened that was absolutely cringe-worthy in the context of now, yet was perfectly normal for the times. I can remember thinking things like I can’t believe that anyone ever thought this behavior was OK.
Then you see the exact same perspective on the times you grew up in. Gut-punch.
The behaviors described here were absolutely normal when I was a kid, which means I’ve never really given them a second thought. I can remember Flag Day in elementary school being the day you were supposed to try and see up a girls dress. I remember girls getting groped walking down the hallways, or having their bra straps snapped in Junior High and High School. And while these weren’t things I did – not because I probably wouldn’t have, but more because I was a dork with low confidence – I knew the boys that did and admired them for their confidence and bravado, never thinking about the impact that this would have had on the girls victimized by the behavior.
While I can’t change the past, I can attempt to make amends by ensuring that I don’t raise my kids to carry this forward, continue to learn myself, and raise awareness and advocate wherever possible.
Husbands, have you noticed that your wife has phrases, even casually-uttered ones, that you use during your arguments that set her off in ways you never expect?
Have you considered that this might be from unresolved trauma? Trauma she may not even realize she has? You were likely among the same generation as your wife.
That means you probably use the same turns of phrase as those boys who made her feel unsafe.
The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk”
This is a really long read with a lot to unpack, but of all things to read from this week’s issue, this is probably the second most-important.
If you follow tech, especially Artificial Intelligence, you may run across Effective Altruism (EA), Longtermism, or other philosophies, and maybe even the acronym TESCREAL. What’s interesting to me – and a bit frightening, as well – is that there is so little talk about what the ideas are about, who subscribes to them, or the potential impact to vast swaths of the human population. There may be no better example of the need for a unified code of ethics for technology.
The very, very high-level view is that there are people who believe that the potential for humanity to become more in the far-far-distant future is far more important than helping people living now (or in the immediate future). The argument goes something like: if we assume that we could save a billion lives now by helping the poor, stopping climate change, or taking some other action, OR we can realize some exponential number of billions of future humans at the cost of the current billions dying or suffering, than the moral imperative is to let people suffer and die now because in the grand scheme of time, that number would be but a blip. Hell, the thought process of the Effective Altruist group is “it’s fine to work in industries like fossil fuels, tobacco, Wall Street, or anything else that does or may cause harm, as long as you make so much money you can afford to give more to charity.
Now wait a minute, you say, that seems like a pretty terrible take – that there is some moral equivalence of sacrificing an untold number now to maybe end up with more future-people – who would believe in such an idea? The unfortunate answer is: a whole lot of super-wealthy technology folks that are expecting to not be a part of the group that suffers and dies. In fact, one line of reasoning says that we should only be supporting the richest countries in the world because they can keep humanity evolving, never mind the fact that a lot of the places that are suffering, and will continue to suffer most are directly impacted by the technology and decision of the rich countries (e.g., Crypto-mining contributing to climate change, which in turn impacts countries least-likely to benefit from a decentralized monetary system).
The popularity of this religion among wealthy people in the West—especially the socioeconomic elite—makes sense because it tells them exactly what they want to hear: not only are you ethically excused from worrying too much about sub-existential threats like non-runaway climate change and global poverty, but you are actually a morally better person for focusing instead on more important things—risk that could permanently destroy “our potential” as a species of Earth-originating intelligent life.
Viable superconducting material created at low temperature and low pressure
When I was completing my first Bachelors Degree in Criminal Justice, I worked as a security guard with one of my posts at a Western Digital chip fab. In the headquarters they had framed drawings of the wiring for the chips that were a good 36” x 36” – maybe even larger – with colored lines so thin and packed together, they we’re truly art. In the years since I worked there, the tech has only gotten better so it’s hard to imagine what these might look like today. With the potential for a superconductor described in this article, it will be interesting to see how the engineering changes.
While I don’t have a full grasp of all the applications for superconductors, I do know that the potential is huge. One of the applications is in the creation of a fusion reactor that is contained by magnetic field, negating the need for lasers to ignite a fuel pellet. This source of unlimited power could be transmitted over lines without energy loss, saving up to 200 million megawatt hours (MWh) lost to resistance in current tech. Really an interesting read to see the process for creating superconductors described along with where the research team is looking for the next advance.
Scientists have been pursuing this breakthrough in condensed matter physics for more than a century. Superconducting materials have two key properties: electrical resistance vanishes, and the magnetic fields that are expelled pass around the superconducting material.
The scale of local news destruction in Gannett’s markets is astonishing
My parents got the newspaper delivered daily – two, in fact, the Los Angeles Times and the Long Beach Press Telegram – and when I moved out on my own, I continued to subscribe. Over time, The Times quality of reporting declined, but nowhere near as fast or badly as the Press. When I relocated to the Detroit area, I subscribed to the Detroit Free Press but, pre-pandemic, had already given it up. Why? Because the quality dropped, the price increased, and it was no longer worth investing in.
Unfortunately, this has been the story all across the country, with the consolidation of local newspapers occurring following mergers or outright takeovers by media mega corporations like Gannett or Alden Global Capital. Similar to what venture capitalists have done to grocery stores and other retail chains, papers are bought and stripped of value leading to a death spiral of decreasing subscribership following decreasing quality and local news reporting, and often an increasing slant to reporting. You may recognize a similar trend in local TV stations and news, and therein lies the problem: local newspapers and reporting are critical to fighting corruption in politics.
When the local paper stops reporting, there’s often no one else to take its place. Everyone gets a little less informed about the world around them. And Gannett has increased local ignorance at a scale no other company can match.
Humble Bundles
Linux MEGA Bundle Book Bundle
New offering from Humble Bundle benefitting Starlight Children’s Foundation. – and, if you don’t know it’s there, there is an Adjust Donation button that will let you give more of the take to charity! For a minimum donation of $18 you get 25 titles, including:
- Mastering Linux Administration
- Mastering Linux Security and Hardening - Third Edition 3rd Edition
- Linux Administration Best Practices
- Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2) Tips, Tricks, and Techniques
- Hands-On Enterprise Automation on Linux
- And more!
Game Design and AI featuring Steve Rabin Book Bundle
New offering from Humble Bundle benefitting Direct Relief – and, if you don’t know it’s there, there is an Adjust Donation button that will let you give more of the take to charity! For a minimum donation of $18 you get 18 titles, including:
- 20 Essential Games to Study
- Game Design Theory: A New Philosophy for Understanding Games
- The Craft and Science of Game Design
- Games As A Service: How Free to Play Design Can Make Better Games
- Game AI Pro 3
- And more!
AI
Microsoft lays off an ethical AI team as it doubles down on OpenAI
I have to thank Matt Davis for sharing this. It’s a short article, but has a lot of weight that goes along with it.
You may have read the paper On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? from Timnit Gebru (former co-lead of Google’s ethical AI team) et. al. which got her removed because it attacks the core business of Google. It now seems that the competition in the AI space has caused Microsoft to follow suit with its own team, responsible for understanding potential societal consequences and legal ramifications of products that are developed.
It seems lately that we have hit the point where those with TESCREAL (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism) ideologies are moving the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) forward at a breakneck pace, the good of society be damned, and are being helped along by those whose primary focus is revenue generation. There are so many frightening stories of artificial intelligence/machine learning systems gone awry already – from facial recognition, to fraud detection, to sentencing recommendations to name a few – that it’s hard to imagine a responsible company removing safeguard, yet here we are. Perhaps this is unsurprising in a country where the Office of Congressional Ethics has been under attack.
The EU’s efforts to allow companies to be held accountable for harm caused by AI systems holds some promise of accountability, but the question will quickly become ‘Is this too little, too late?’ Time will tell but before the worst can happen, it is becoming more and more apparent that we in the technology field must choose whether we can live with building these systems and continue without requiring all practitioners to subscribe to a formal code of ethics similar to other professionals.
Members of the team told Platformer they believed they were let go because Microsoft had become more focused on getting its AI products shipped before the competition, and was less concerned with long-term, socially responsible thinking.
DE&I
Boosting Woman Participation in Open Source Projects: A Beginner’s Guide to Contributing
Good post here that can help anyone get involved in open source software, but I appreciate the fact that the author is bringing particular attention for women. The risk of creating an open source project is that it is so useful that everyone uses it. Unless the project is exceptionally small – think something like leftPad – the chances are there will be bugs, maintenance, and feature requests. Because no good deed goes unpunished, maintainers can often find themselves the victim of abuse when things aren’t handled fast enough (pro-tip: don’t be that person who expects someone to jump when your request for a feature isn’t implemented; most maintainers have full-time jobs and do this work on the side because they are passionate about it).
If you are looking for a way to get experience, increase your skills, and be part of a community, open source may be for you. If you are a White male and find yourself in a community that is full of the stereotypical techbros, stand up for those people who are targeted; if you are a woman especially, stand your ground and don’t allow yourself to be chased off (though this is easy advice to give). We owe it to ourselves as a community to stand together and welcome everyone.
It’s important to know that contributing to open source is not just about coding. There are so many other ways you can get involved, like testing, documentation and design.
Engineering
Why POUT (aka TAD) Sucks
If you know me, then you know I absolutely rail at setting an arbitrary minimum test coverage percentage (like 90%) especially if you intend to use it as a gate for merging code. Is it because I think unit testing is a waste? Absolutely not. The reason is that very few teams practice TDD where the coverage is driven by the tests (hard to do TDD and not have 100% coverage) and instead try to bolt on tests after the fact. Why is this a problem?
- Once code has been written, it can be EXPENSIVE to test.
- You’ve likely lost the intent of the code under test and the edge cases.
- You may need to refactor code that is not already under test, increasing risk and the cost of changing code, all in the name of making it testable.
- You are almost assured to be testing at too low a level (test at the edges, not every function on every class!) which will result in brittle tests that need a lot of mocked dependencies (see To Kill a Mocking Test).
By far though, the biggest problem is Goodhart’s Law: you will get your coverage, but it won’t give you the results you expect. You will find a lot more ignore code coverage decorations. You’ll find tests of simple properties on objects. You’ll find tests that really don’t test anything or, worse, find that you are testing the wrong things like your mocks.
If you are going to write automated tests – whether unit, integration, or other, it is arguably better to have some testing over your most-important code but if you are going to set a coverage level, then go for 100% and have everyone practice TDD.
TDD Anti-Patterns
This is a pretty old post (November 2006!) about TDD that deserves revisiting every once in a while because, no matter how long TDD has been around, you’ll still find these everywhere. Interestingly, quite a few of these anti-patterns can be avoided simply by practicing testing correctly (I highly recommend watching Ian Cooper’s talk TDD: Where did it all go wrong?).
If you’ve been doing TDD (or even TAD), chances are you’ll recognize a lot of these patterns; if you are just starting out, it’s a good look at things to watch out for as you write your tests.