David R. MacIver's Blog

Occasional Reading Post #8

(I’ve given up on calling these weekly reading posts because they’re clearly not weekly)

Random Reads

• Floating Utopias. Somehow these libertarian community projects never quite pan out.
• My condolences, you’re now the maintainer of a popular open source project
  . I relate to this a lot.
• The Really Big One. Your regular reminder that the planet earth has almost infinite means to destroy us at its disposal. Yet another reason not to relocate to San Francisco.
• The Other Side Is Not Dumb - good piece on the importance of understanding your political opponents
• Creativity: A Crime of Passion - “Be creative, but not TOO creative”. On the societal disincentives for creativity
• 3 reasons the American Revolution was a mistake. Yeah, um, I don’t agree with this piece at all. I mean I don’t think much of the USA, but I also don’t think much of the UK right now.
• How I Cracked a Keylogger and Ended Up in Someone’s Inbox
  - short piece on reverse engineering a key logger.
• The Principia Misanthropica - Ribbonfarm’s... rather idiosyncratic brief history of everything. Amusing read, tells you more about Ribbonfarm’s philosophical biases than actual history but that’s OK.
• The BBC problem - on the problems that the BBC’s “impartiality” requirement creates, and the resulting false balance. Specifically in the light of brexit but true more generally
• Alberta, Canada is the proud owner of the largest man-made pyramid on the planet - file this one under weird artifacts of industrial civilization
• AAVE is not SE with mistakes - a discussion of the grammatical features of AAVE (African American Vernacular English) and the fact that it’s a distinct dialect in its own right and not just speaking badly.
• Putin’s Puppet - on Putin’s funding of the campaigns of various western politicians, and Trump’s relationship with Russia
• Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful - a bunch of useful concepts. I’m not sure I would have labelled most of them mental models. I was familiar with most of them, but there were a few useful ones I hadn’t encountered (e.g. Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement

Selected Reads

Just one this time: Taming the stream roller: How to communicate compassionately with non native English speakers. I could have really used this advice before spending a week in Mexico then speaking at a Russian conference. I’ll try to remember it at Europython.

Books

No new wish list items recently.

I’ve been rereading What the best college teachers do as part of an attempt to improve my training courses more.