Stack Overflow at 10

There’s a certain amount of irony in the proposition that one response in the comments on Jeff Atwood’s post commemorating the 10th anniversary of the launch of Stack Overflow was to suggest that the post be marked as a duplicate of https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/09/27/stack-overflow-is-10/.

I think Jeff Atwood puts it best himself:

Interesting, so we can close posts as duplicates across completely different websites now? Fascinating. I hope all websites on the internet get the memo on this exciting new policy!

For what it’s worth I’m the most amateurish of programmers, and over the years I’ve found Stack Overflow immensely useful. Read the answers carefully and there’s an astounding amount of useful information in there.

STET

STET is a breathtakingly good story by Sarah Gailey, told as much in the footnotes as the body text, about the implications of letting Artificial Intelligence loose on the public roads.

Which is more chilling?

10 – Read: ‘Murder’. It was murder, the car had a choice, you can’t choose to kill someone and call it manslaughter.

Or,

13 – Per Foote, the neural network training for cultural understanding of identity is collected via social media, keystroke analysis, and pupillary response to images. They’re watching to see what’s important to you. You are responsible.

Brrr…

[Via MetaFilter]

Social Surveillance

Australia’s ABC News on China’s plans to leave no dark corner when it comes to monitoring the populace’s lives online:

Dandan doesn’t object to the prospect of life under the state’s all-seeing surveillance network. […] The 36-year-old knows social credit is not a perfect system but believes it’s the best way to manage a complex country with the world’s biggest population. […]
Under an existing financial credit scheme called Sesame Credit, Dandan has a very high score of 770 out of 800 – she is very much the loyal Chinese citizen.
Just for the record, I hated the visual style of this piece – way too much scrolling over images to get to the next piece of the text – but the content is decent. The really worrying prospect of this stuff is how easy a sell a European edition of the Social Credit software is going to be to a certain type of centrist politician.[note]OK, not in the UK marketplace, maybe, not under that label. But a quick rebranding exercise should take care of that and we’ll be off to the races.[/note]

The term ‘social credit’ should be as despised as the term ‘meritocracy’, properly understood, deserves to be, but give it a decade or so and – barring a backlash against the level of surveillance and the consequences for ordinary citizens having brought down the Chinese government in the meantime – you’re going to see a huge bunfight as every careerist with half an eye on Number 10 decides that this is exactly what the UK needs to get the populace to shape up. We can but hope that they get the successors of the Government Digital Service to try to implement a UK version, so that with any luck it’ll show up years late and barely functional and the world will have moved on to the next big idea.

[Via Brettterpstra.com]

Weekend TV

Such a good weekend TV-wise.

Catching up with a new season of The Good Place was a delight. (Provided you could ignore Ted Danson/Michael’s attempt at an Australian accent when he was posing as a librarian to help nudge Chidi in the right direction at one crucial moment. It’s entirely possible that half a dozen episodes from now we’ll discover that there was a reason that accent was that bad.)

But of course the big TV event of the week came this evening when we got the debut of Jodie Whittaker in the Chris Chibnall-as-showrunner era of Doctor Who. I had my doubts, but they were more about Chibnall on the basis of how poor his past efforts at writing for the franchise had been than they were about his choice of an actor to play the lead role in his take on the show. [note]It probably doesn’t help that I’ve never watched a single minute of Broadchurch, and the main Who-adjacent story I associated Chibnall with was Cyberwoman from the first season of Torchwood.[/note]

On the basis of the first episode of the new era, I think it’s going to be fine. The first episode spent much of the time showing us what the new Companions are like, which is fair enough, but still left plenty of time for Jodie Whittaker to show us that she’s got the chops to give us a memorable Doctor once she’s reunited with the TARDIS and she gets a couple more stories under her belt. At this early stage, that’s as much as we can reasonably expect.

Libraries

Susan Orlean tells a tale that starts out much like that of many bookworms, of Growing Up in the Library, but her story ends with her reconnecting with libraries later in life, after a long spell when she had both the money and the inclination to buy most of her reading material and ends up taking her to a very different place than I’d expected.

I grew up in libraries, or at least it feels that way. My family lived in the suburbs of Cleveland, about a mile from the brick-faced Bertram Woods Branch of the Shaker Heights Public Library system. Throughout my childhood, starting when I was very young, my mother drove me there a couple of times a week. We walked in together, but, as soon as we passed through the door, we split up, each heading to our favorite section. The library might have been the first place that I was ever given independence. Even when I was maybe four or five years old, I was allowed to go off on my own. Then, after a while, my mother and I reunited at the checkout counter with our finds. Together, we waited as the librarian pulled out each date card and, with a loud chunk-chunk, stamped a crooked due date on it, below a score of previous crooked due dates that belonged to other people, other times. […] I deliberately didn’t quote from the end of her article because it needs to be read in situ to have the impact it does. Trust me (or, much more to the point, trust Susan Orlean), it’s worth the read. [note]The strange thing is that I feel that way despite my early personal experience of library visits having been a much more solitary affair and even though I’ve never really reconnected with libraries in later life. Neat thing, that whole writers-communicating-their-life-experiences-to-others-through-the-magic-of-words trick, isn’t it?[/note]

Of course, all this is nonsense because once we lose our attraction for all these strange notions about the usefulness of publicly-funded provision of access to reading materials then surely Amazon (or Facebook, or Apple) will have out best interests at heart and can be trusted to care of all our[note]Which is to say, all of us who have sufficient funds, plus access to the appropriate online payment systems, and to devices that have the appropriate up-to-date DRM software installed, and access to the internet.[/note] content needs. At worst, perhaps there may be some need for charitably-minded citizens to organise themselves to make access to content available to the indigent. The UK government thinks that the increasing role of Food Banks in feeding a small portion of the population is a good thing, so who could possibly object to extending that idea to the content market? Before we know it, we’ll have these things called “Book Banks.” Oh, hang on a minute…

Standard Notes

On my radar, for if (when) Evernote stumbles: Standard Notes

A writing experience unlike any other. Standard Notes is free to use on every platform, and comes standard with cross-platform sync and end-to-end privacy. For those wanting a little more power and flexibility, we created Extended, which unlocks powerful editors, themes, and automated backups.

There’s an argument to be made that Evernote has been stumbling from the moment it aspired to become a Unicorn, but I’m thinking more of the way the company recently started haemorrhaging senior executives and seems directionless. The only saving grace it has right now from where I’m sitting is that it isn’t OneNote, which I have use of at work and which plainly satisfies the needs of lots of people who are deeply tied into the Microsoft Office ecosystem but which definitely isn’t for me, especially not when I do my personal computing nowadays on iOS.

[Via 4 Short Links, via Things That Have Caught My Attention]