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What the economy of the future looks like

2012-02-10T06:11:44Z

Matthew Yglesias makes the argument that Chipotle is the Apple of fast food. America may not be manufacturing consumer electronics, but it is manufacturing more burritos. It’s an interesting and provocative piece. For what it’s worth, I love Chipotle. Specifically, the carnitas burrito with rice, black beans, cheese, corn salsa, and hot salsa.

Matthew Yglesias makes the argument that Chipotle is the Apple of fast food. America may not be manufacturing consumer electronics, but it is manufacturing more burritos. It’s an interesting and provocative piece.

For what it’s worth, I love Chipotle. Specifically, the carnitas burrito with rice, black beans, cheese, corn salsa, and hot salsa.

Mark Zuckerberg will always be in charge of Facebook

2012-02-04T23:19:18Z

Matthew Yglesias explains how Facebook’s ownership structure insures that if he so chooses, Mark Zuckerberg will have complete control over Facebook for the rest of his life. I find that fascinating: To purchase a share in Facebook is to bet that at some future point some future person will want to take it off your [...]

Matthew Yglesias explains how Facebook’s ownership structure insures that if he so chooses, Mark Zuckerberg will have complete control over Facebook for the rest of his life. I find that fascinating:

To purchase a share in Facebook is to bet that at some future point some future person will want to take it off your hands for more money. You’re not getting even a notional slice of control in the company. There are no limits on the CEO’s ability to channel Facebook’s profits directly into his own pocket rather than yours. There’s not even a cheap-talk promise that he’s going to try to maximize the value of your investment. He created the company, he controls the company, he will always control the company, and he’s graciously allowing you to turn some of your working capital over to him.

How to make it as the new developer on a team

2012-02-02T05:50:25Z

I’ve recently had the opportunity to both be the new person on a team and to integrate new team members onto a team that I had been a part of for a long time. Having seen it from both sides, I have some thoughts on how to join a new team without driving everyone crazy. [...]I’ve recently had the opportunity to both be the new person on a team and to integrate new team members onto a team that I had been a part of for a long time. Having seen it from both sides, I have some thoughts on how to join a new team without driving everyone crazy. It doesn’t matter how you became a member of the new team, everybody starts in the same place, which is to say, not really knowing the code base or the culture of the team. Learning to mesh well with the culture of a new team is almost certainly more difficult than learning to work in a new code base. The first thing you have to do when you join a new team is check your ego at the door. It doesn’t matter how experienced you are or how many great ideas you have. At the beginning, your job is to be a sponge and learn as much as you possibly can. Just shut up and listen. Read anything you can get ahold of. Eavesdrop when other people are talking about the project. At the beginning, think of yourself as a spy — gathering as much information as you can without drawing too much attention to yourself. I even try to make it a point to try to figure out the answers to questions myself before I ask someone. The digging involved can be very educational, and showing some level of self-sufficiency will garner respect, at least until you make a big mistake that could have been avoided by asking a few simple questions. One question I try to avoid until I get to the point of saying “our code” rather than “your code” is “Why?” Figuring out why things are done a certain way is important, but “Why?” is a question that can very easily come across as critical, especially when it comes from someone who’s not really trusted. The truth is that the stuff that makes you want to ask why often really is worthy of criticism. Just let it go until fixing it is as much your responsibility as it is anyone else’s. The second important thing is to immerse yourself in the code style and coding habits of the team you’ve joined. Everybody who’s been programming for more than a month has their own opinion on whether to put spaces inside parentheses (doing so is crazy) or whether braces go at the end of the line or on the beginning of the next line. The team almost certainly has a policy on whether to use tabs or spaces when indenting. Beyond that, the team probably already has its own answers to more substantive questions about how their code is organized and how they deal with separation of concerns. At the beginning, do it all their way. If you have some ideas for improvement, propose them to the entire team once you’ve shown that you’re a team player. Coming in the door and writing code in your style rather than the team’s style is likely to infuriate at least one other member of the team. Furthermore, immersing yourself in the native culture is the best way to learn. People often have very good reasons for doing things the way that they do, and if you’re busy trying to impose your brilliant ideas on the team, you’ll never learn what those reasons are. The third thing is to focus on service. Look for opportunities to be helpful wherever possible. The biggest mistake I ever made at a job was listening when the director of the group led us to believe that stuff other groups wanted from us was not as important as the things we were building for him. In the end, we had an unpleasantly dysfunctional workplace, and I found myself looking for another job. The stakes are high. There are two ways things can play out, depending on the team dynamics. A new person who stomps all over the existing culture of the team will tend to be marginalized [...]

Wait, people are getting paid for file sharing?

2012-01-29T02:51:22Z

It turns out I had no idea how file sharing actually works these days. I mean, I know how BitTorrent works, but I didn’t know how sites like the recently terminated MegaUpload worked. TorrentFreak has a good post explaining how they work — specifically how people get paid for sharing copyrighted material — and the [...]

It turns out I had no idea how file sharing actually works these days. I mean, I know how BitTorrent works, but I didn’t know how sites like the recently terminated MegaUpload worked. TorrentFreak has a good post explaining how they work — specifically how people get paid for sharing copyrighted material — and the effect that the MegaUpload shutdown has had on other sites in the same business. In short, a lot of content has been taken down as a result because people don’t want to go to jail. Interesting stuff.

Optimize for simplicity, not performance

2012-01-27T20:07:28Z

I liked this, from DHH: The progress of technology is throwing an ever greater number of optimizations into the “premature evil” bucket never to be seen again. That can be a tough lesson for those of us who have been developing software for awhile to internalize. It becomes ever more sensible to optimize for simplicity [...]

I liked this, from DHH:

The progress of technology is throwing an ever greater number of optimizations into the “premature evil” bucket never to be seen again.

That can be a tough lesson for those of us who have been developing software for awhile to internalize. It becomes ever more sensible to optimize for simplicity rather than performance.

The movie industry accelerates its push toward irrelevance

2012-01-26T22:31:20Z

Here’s a new one — in order to drive people away from watching movies on Netflix, Warner Bros has struck a deal that prevents users from adding them to their queue for 28 days until the DVDs have been on sale for four weeks. Users have to wait another four weeks after that to actually [...]

Here’s a new one — in order to drive people away from watching movies on Netflix, Warner Bros has struck a deal that prevents users from adding them to their queue for 28 days until the DVDs have been on sale for four weeks. Users have to wait another four weeks after that to actually get the movies from Netflix. Anybody think this is going to wind up being a money maker for the film industry? It surely does not ingratiate Warner Bros or Netflix with me. (Via Matt Drance.)

Why does Chris Dodd work for the MPAA?

2012-01-20T20:10:00Z

Today I noticed that the New York Times had set up one of their room for debate features on the topic What’s the Best Way to Protect Against Online Piracy? The most pro-SOPA piece is written by the Democratic former Senator from Connecticut, Chris Dodd. What’s his current job? Here’s the byline: Chris Dodd, a [...]

Today I noticed that the New York Times had set up one of their room for debate features on the topic What’s the Best Way to Protect Against Online Piracy? The most pro-SOPA piece is written by the Democratic former Senator from Connecticut, Chris Dodd. What’s his current job? Here’s the byline:

Chris Dodd, a former U.S. senator who represented Connecticut from 1981 to 2011, is the C.E.O. and chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America.

You don’t have to think too long to figure out why the MPAA hired Chris Dodd. It’s not because of his experience in the film industry, he’s a lifelong politician. It’s not because of his legislative experience, he was not a member of the relevant committees. He’s got the job because he spent 30 years in the Senate, and the movie industry wants someone with clout to represent their interests on Capitol Hill.

Monied interests, whether they’re companies, trade groups, unions, or issues-based organizations, have many, many ways to influence the political process. Obviously they can attempt to influence the political process directly with money, see Stephen Colbert’s SuperPAC for details. They can also hire lobbyists, who, in addition to wining and dining legislators, also influence the process by offering to take some of the workload off of Congressional staffs. They’ll even write the bills for Congress! And of course they can spend money to try to influence public opinion, through advertising, or organizing “grassroots” opposition or support. They can pay academics to do research that supports their interests. They can pay experts to write opinion pieces in their favor. Or, as in the case of Chris Dodd, they can hire a long-time Senator to run their trade group.

My point is that if you have interests to promote, and you have money you can use to promote those interests, there will always be inroads into the political system available. That’s not an argument against campaign finance reform — the fact that being a politician is more about fundraising than anything else is a big problem that public financing of elections could fix — but it is an argument that in every case where it’s not money versus money, it’s going to be people power versus money, and no reform will change that. The work never ends.

What kind of precedent does iBooks Author set?

2012-01-20T07:01:29Z

There’s been a lot of talk about the licensing terms of iBook Author today. Apple’s new application for creating e-books is cheap, but books created with it can only be distributed through the App Store unless they are free. Gus Mueller wonders about the precedent this sets for Apple’s other tools: I really hope Xcode [...]

There’s been a lot of talk about the licensing terms of iBook Author today. Apple’s new application for creating e-books is cheap, but books created with it can only be distributed through the App Store unless they are free. Gus Mueller wonders about the precedent this sets for Apple’s other tools:

I really hope Xcode doesn’t ship with the same restrictions some day. “Binaries created through Xcode can only be sold through the App Store, and you can’t charge more than $15.99″.

Apple is free to distribute its tools under any terms that it likes, what I am pondering is what authors should do.

As an author, I can say that this doesn’t seem fundamentally different from signing a contract with a publisher. If Publisher A agrees to publish my book, that usually means I can’t also let Publisher B publish it as well. When you use iBooks Author, Apple is your publisher. If you want to give it away for free, that’s fine, but you’re not going to be able to sell a Kindle version published using Apple’s tools.

That doesn’t strike me as horribly unreasonable. The big difference, though, is that if Publisher A publishes my book, it can be sold in any bookstore, online or offline. In the new electronic world, choosing a certain publisher means that you are also choosing only one channel of distribution. If you choose iBooks, you’re also constrained in terms of devices. There are Kindle apps for most platforms, but iBooks is iOS only. It’ll be interesting to see if going with iBooks turns out to be a better economic proposition for authors, or more precisely, to see which authors benefit from going with iBooks rather than Kindle.

It’s a lot to think about, in any case.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on ignorance

2012-01-19T19:36:27Z

Ta-Nehisi Coates on ignorance: If your chief goal, as a thinking person, is to find a path to making yourself right, you may never amount to much of a thinking person, but you can never be disappointed.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on ignorance:

If your chief goal, as a thinking person, is to find a path to making yourself right, you may never amount to much of a thinking person, but you can never be disappointed.

The anti-SOPA protests worked

2012-01-19T06:26:26Z

The big news of the day is that on the day of the blackout protests, 18 Senators announced their opposition to PIPA, the Senate version of the SOPA bill. Most of the newly opposed Senators are Republicans. Sadly, Democrats get a lot of campaign contributions from the entertainment industry, and the entertainment industry desperately wants [...]

The big news of the day is that on the day of the blackout protests, 18 Senators announced their opposition to PIPA, the Senate version of the SOPA bill. Most of the newly opposed Senators are Republicans. Sadly, Democrats get a lot of campaign contributions from the entertainment industry, and the entertainment industry desperately wants to be granted even more authority to bully suspected copyright violators.

Killing this terrible bill is great, but there are two broader discussions that really need to take place. The first is about whether attempts to prevent piracy through new laws is worthwhile at all. (I would argue that it is not.) And the second is about how laws like SOPA come about in the first place. For more on that, read about Larry Lessig’s recent work.

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