The title had me interested, but skimming through this post and the excerpt tells me that the book is actually just the usual low quality social justice commentary about racism/police brutality/etc. not-so-cleverly disguised as a tech-related book.
As if the following from the first paragraphs wasn't enough of an indicator: "technologists, historians, journalists, academics, and sometimes the coders themselves,” explaining “how code works" but it only gets better:
- A guy gets to present his theory of the racist software infrastructure, as "a Professor" while one has to scan his Twitter timeline to see him as the political hack that he is. Bosch should have pointed out he worked for the DNC (On a general note: Hey America, you do realize there are people outside of your country without the slightest interest in having their own history bent over your domestic infighting?).
- Of course our databases are racist, mysoginistic and transphobic - just as we are (“The next frontier in gender rights is inside databases.”)!
- Book title's like Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech are just slipped in, like they aren't the giant red flag of bias that they are.
- "I’ve been really interested over the past several years to watch the power of the tech activists and tech labor movements" is giving me straight up maoist vibes of the 1970s when upper-class academics in Western Europe larped as "working-class" in and around auto-manufacturing sites, but the working class wasn't having it.
Let's see whether that failure also repeats itself and how the outfall of this will look (the snubbed academics then turned to "the environment" as a new ward allwing them to more openly spite the "Lumpenproletariat")
There's chapters on the inventions of COBOL and Bitcoin and you're gonna write the whole book off because they included a chapter on today’s surveillance infrastructure and the shoddy crime-data algorithm that laid the cornerstone for said infrastructure?
Living life reacting so strongly to things you might not immediately agree with sounds exhausting. Good luck with
You can also tell by all the talks about how "human" it is, which is a way tech writers praise each other for writing books about technology that require no knowledge of nor interest in technology to understand.
There's also the bit about hoping developers say no to cheating emissions standards. Picking that example and not, say - not assisting the Chinese government in surveilling their citizens shows exactly where the author wants to take these ideas.
These themes would be fun to discuss in some environment, but it's pretty clear that the goal is to create a page turner first, push a message second, produce insight last.
The author is funded by New America. An organization founded by a lady famous for helping Sandinistas sue the US government to for foreign intervention, then signing off on one of the worst interventions in the Global War on Terror in Libya.
It is possible that this is just ad copy for an otherwise good book, but forgive us for assuming that the person passing out christian literature at the party is probably mostly interested in converting new christians.
compstat - what i presume you are referring to - demonstrably exacerbates the performance metrics it was intended to improve. it impacts everyone, even today. because it - either by accident or by design - disproportionally targets latino/black men, it is somehow less valid as a critique? please.
It is perfectly valid, just less interesting as a critique. This is well-trod ground, journalistically. If writing about it were actually going to change anything, it would have already. As it stands, writing about it now is just a shrewd way to sell copy to people who like think that reading about something is the same as “taking action” against it.
I have not read the book or even looked at it. As far as I know the only code bases I think as important are:
PGP: The code could be printed on a t-shirt and allowed communication that was hard to break.
Lossy-Compression: In the 1970s and early 1980s a lot of the work was on lossless compression, but the move to lossy compression made Sound and Video files small enough to move around.
Chaos Theory: Applied to weather forecasting and other complex systems.
Deep Learning: I do not understand it but it lets data that could not be processed before.
Despite all the recent melodrama in the cryptocurrency markets and environs, I think Satoshi's implementation of a decentralized blockchain will be considered historically important.
Whatever you might think about Bitcoin/Blockchains, Satoshi did solve a very hard CS problem that didn't have a solution before. I'm relatively skeptical of blockchain technologies and don't think they have any real use cases (except cryptocurrencies,) but I think in the long term, there must be some interesting things to do with the decentralization ideas created by Satoshi.
It's the title of the book, too. *You Are Not Expected to Understand This: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World." I agree, it's a terrible title, it sounds like a technical book about a single 26-line snippet of code, but it's actually a series of 26 unrelated essays about people & their societal impact, and it's not a technical book at all.
TBH though, it sounds like an interesting book, and probably a pretty small time investment. I might buy it despite its dreadful title.
I strongly miss such magazines. Yes, the web is a great resource for anything you want to know. But there is a curated completeness to such magazines, which I wish current websites had. Even popular magazines (I don't wish to name them) are often just glam. The only magazine/journal I know currently with introductory technical articles worth reading is IEEE Spectrum.
