👓 What are people using GitHub for besides coding? | InfoWorld

Read GitHub for the rest of us by Jon Udell (InfoWorld)
Git made it possible for programmers to coordinate distributed work across teams -- now GitHub makes it possible for everyone else
GitHub’s acquisition by Microsoft this week has many people writing about what GitHub is and how it could be used and leveraged by a larger institutional company. Jon Udell, who thinks a lot about annotation and and highlighting, has an excellent piece here (from 2015) that touches on some excellent forward-thinking pieces. Some of it is reminiscent to an article I wrote back in 2014: Git and Version Control for Novelists, Screenwriters, Academics, and the General Public. I’m hoping that in the coming years that the user interfaces for projects like these improve to make version control a more ubiquitous tool.

👓 Microsoft + GitHub = Empowering Developers | The Official Microsoft Blog

Read Microsoft + GitHub = Empowering Developers (The Official Microsoft Blog)
Today, we announced an agreement to acquire GitHub, the world’s leading software development platform. I want to share what this acquisition will mean for our industry and for developers. The era of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge is upon us. Computing is becoming embedded in the world,...
Not quite the pablum of the GitHub version of this announcement, but still in the same general ballpark. This one at least had some additional detail on things moving forward.

🔖 Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

Bookmarked Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber (Simon & Schuster)

From bestselling writer David Graeber, a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs, and their consequences.

Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It went viral. After a million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer.

There are millions of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs.

Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation.

Reply to Greg McVerry about Hypothesis

Replied to a post by Greg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)
@chrisaldrich Wouldn’t it be neat if @hypothesis was also a micropub client or used the API so I could PESOS each annotation to my blog as a quote post-kind? So cool @xolotl is coming coming to #indieweb summit. Know the markup doesn’t match but that ain’t a hard fix. Has to be somefun ways regardless of tech to make wordpress and open annotation talk.
There is the (abandoned?) Hypothesis Aggregator plugin  which Nate has worked on a bit that allows a relatively easy PESOS workflow from Hypothes.is to WordPress, but you’re right that it would be nice to have a micropub version that would work for all CMSs.

Personally, I’d also love them to support Webmention which I think would be generally useful as well. There are obvious use cases for it in addition to an anti-abuse one which I’ve written about before. Perhaps if it were supported and had better anti-troll or NIPSA (Not In Public Site Areas) features folks like Audrey Watters might not block it.

👓 Becoming More Interested in icos | Ben Werdmuller

Read Becoming more interested in ICOs by Ben WerdmüllerBen Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)
I started looking at blockchain from a position of extreme skepticism. Over time, mostly thanks to friends like Julien Genestoux and the amazing team over at DADA, I've come to a better understanding. I've always been interested in decentralization as a general topic, of course - the original visi...
Ben, like you I’m highly skeptical of the word blockchain when applied to any business. My background in cryptography and information theory indicates that the technical side of things is generally on the up and up, but the long term use with huge ledgers and massive transaction scale doesn’t seem to scale the way most seem to be hoping it will.

The one interesting business use case I’ve seen was on the fundraising front, but it also has a lot of the downside you mention for use in building a business. If it helps lay out a sketch of what the thing would look like from a startup perspective, I’m including the recorded talk I saw a few months ago. Still I say caveat emptor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ9yf9ahsPM

👓 Hiding Information in Plain Text | Spectrum IEEE

Read Hiding Information in Plain Text (IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News)
Subtle changes to letter shapes can embed messages
An interesting piece to be sure, but I’ve thought of doing this sort of steganography in the past. In particular, I recall having conversations with Sol Golomb about similar techniques in the past. I’m sure there’s got to be prior art for similar things as well.

👓 For now, our own | Music for Deck Chairs

Read For now, our own by Kate Bowles (Music for Deckchairs)

Over the last week I’ve been skirting a significant conversation begun by Maha Bali (“I don’t own my domain, I rent it“) and continued by Audrey Watters (“A domain of ones own in a post-ownership society“). Never far away is Andrew Rikard’s Edsurge post “Do I own my domain if you grade it?”

The question for me is how the idea of “own” works as a metaphor. It’s complicated enough as it is: my own, to own, owned, owned. We own our mistakes, we own our work, we own our politics, and none of this is quite like the way we own our homes—which for most of our working lives means some version of renting, in a funhouse world in which access to credit, like debt itself, has become an asset.

Conceptually, home ownership makes an ironic pass at all this, promising dominion over property that is actually quite a temporary thing in geohistorical time. Home ownership offers a misleading sense of permanence in relation to our provisional space in the world. A home that’s owned is always haunted by both its past and future. Far from sheltering us against the churn of things, it’s a daily reminder that we’re not here for long.

An interesting piece about ownership and the web.

I’ll try to say more about these ideas which have been swirling about the space for a bit, but I thought I’d outline a few bits before I forget them.

  • 9/10 of the law is about ownership
  • Commons is an interesting framework, but perhaps is an outmoded concept given that the majority of ownership is now either private, corporate, or governmental. Commons is now generally part of governmental ownership now rather than the older versions of what commons used to be. We need some oversight, management, and support for the governmental portion now. Perhaps Hacker’s book has something interesting to add here.
  • No one is taking the next step to say that either government or educational institutions should be footing the entirety of the bill for marginalized students. Why? Again Hacker et al may have something interesting to say here.
  • The analogy of ownership to things like houses is fine, but it’s still only that, an analogy to help people more easily think about an abstract idea about which they’ve not got direct knowledge. What about the lack of “ownership” we get from “free” services like Twitter and Facebook? Recall the example of an editorialist saying roughly that we (rich, privileged Americans) shouldn’t leave Facebook because it will potentially damage service to third world groups which then wouldn’t have anything. (include citation). What does all this look like 10 years hence when more people have direct knowledge and we no longer need the “house” ownership model?
  • What could be added to the discussion at the IndieWeb’s longevity page?
  • Considerations of evolving complexity and mashups found in examples like When Ideas Have Sex.
  • Considerations from Why Information Grows (C. Hidalgo) and the creation of value in links as well as the evolution towards larger knowledge entities.
  • The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. The same could also still be said about the Industrial Revolution which is still slowly coming to rural third world countries. Recall that it was only until the early 1900’s that the vast majority of people in the world were subsistence farmers.

👓 Does Donald Trump write his own tweets? Sometimes | The Boston Globe

Read Does Donald Trump write his own tweets? Sometimes (The Boston Globe)
It’s not always Trump tapping out a tweet, even when it sounds like his voice.
I wonder how complicated/in-depth the applied information theory is behind the Twitter bot described here?
Acquired The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon WinchesterSimon Winchester (Harper)

The revered New York Times bestselling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement—precision—in a superb history that is both an homage and a warning for our future.

The rise of manufacturing could not have happened without an attention to precision. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England, standards of measurement were established, giving way to the development of machine tools—machines that make machines. Eventually, the application of precision tools and methods resulted in the creation and mass production of items from guns and glass to mirrors, lenses, and cameras—and eventually gave way to further breakthroughs, including gene splicing, microchips, and the Hadron Collider.

Simon Winchester takes us back to origins of the Industrial Age, to England where he introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production: John Wilkinson, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden, and Joseph Whitworth. It was Thomas Jefferson who later exported their discoveries to the fledgling United States, setting the nation on its course to become a manufacturing titan. Winchester moves forward through time, to today’s cutting-edge developments occurring around the world, from America to Western Europe to Asia.

As he introduces the minds and methods that have changed the modern world, Winchester explores fundamental questions. Why is precision important? What are the different tools we use to measure it? Who has invented and perfected it? Has the pursuit of the ultra-precise in so many facets of human life blinded us to other things of equal value, such as an appreciation for the age-old traditions of craftsmanship, art, and high culture? Are we missing something that reflects the world as it is, rather than the world as we think we would wish it to be? And can the precise and the natural co-exist in society?

One of my favorite all-time writers and somehow I had missed any news about its pending release and hadn’t seen it despite having just been to the bookstore. What a fantastic surprise!

Received as the most perfect gift. Originally purchased at Vroman’s.

👓 Electric Scooter Charger Culture Is Out of Control | The Atlantic

Read Electric Scooter Charger Culture Is Out of Control (The Atlantic)
“Bird hunting” has become a pastime and a side hustle for teens and young professionals, but for some it’s a cutthroat business.

🔖 An Introduction to APIs | Zapier

Bookmarked An Introduction to APIs by Brian Cooksey (Zapier)
APIs (application programming interfaces) are a big part of the web. In 2013 there were over 10,000 APIs published by companies for open consumption 1. That is quadruple the number available in 2010 2. With so many companies investing in this new area of business, possessing a working understanding of APIs becomes increasingly relevant to careers in the software industry. Through this course, we hope to give you that knowledge by building up from the very basics. In this chapter, we start by looking at some fundamental concepts around APIs. We define what an API is, where it lives, and give a high level picture of how one is used.
I found this downloadable e-book a while back at Zapier’s resource page, which has some other interesting things, but this overview and layout of APIs seemed fairly simple but powerful for folks interested in the topic.

👓 Save Barnes & Noble! | New York Times

Read Opinion | Save Barnes & Noble! by David LeonhardtDavid Leonhardt (nytimes.com)
It’s in trouble. And Washington’s flawed antitrust policy is a big reason.
There are some squirrel-ly things that Amazon is managing to get away with, and they’re not all necessarily good.

👓 The Web We Need to Give Students | BRIGHT Magazine

Read The Web We Need to Give Students by Audrey Watters (BRIGHT Magazine)
“Giving students their own digital domain is a radical act. It gives them the ability to work on the Web and with the Web.”
Not sure how this surfaced into my feeds again today, but interesting to see it pop up. I’m also noticing that Audrey smartly posted a copy to her own site after it appeared in Bright.

In this article, she touches on some reasons why it’s important for students to have their own domain, but many of these ideas and arguments also work well for almost anyone. It’s interesting to see how similar the philosophy she describes here dovetails with that of the IndieWeb.

👓 Gmail’s biggest redesign is now live | The Verge

Read Gmail’s biggest redesign is now live by Vlad Savov (The Verge)
Snoozing, nudging, hover actions, and a new sidebar — it’s a mobile app on the web!
I’ve been using gmail for about 2 years now and am curious to see what this delivers though I do have to admit I’m itching to going back to my old methods of owning may own email and data.