links for 2008-03-25
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On the internet, everybody can see you scheme….
Archive for March, 2008
links for 2008-03-23
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via: Making Light
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“The Internet has been around since the 1960s, but it was the development of the Mosaic browser in 1933 at the University of Illinois that made it possible to simply point and click your way to information that not only contained text, but also graphics.”
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“Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.”
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“I work with young startup founders in their twenties. They’re geniuses, and play by their own rules. Oh… you haven’t founded a company? You suck.”
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“But you, sir, are no painter. And while you hack away at your terminal, or ride your homemade Segway, we painters and musicians are going to be right over here with all the wine, hash, and hot chicks.”
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(tags: via:arthegall to-read)
On the use of the numeral 1 to signal parodic intent
Linguists!!! U need to TOTALLY!!!1! check this out!!!1!
links for 2008-03-22
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Various potentially useful resources for texture synthesis and image analysis applications of genetic programming.
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Please may I have a Mac virus now?
links for 2008-03-21
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We were talking about the Uncanny Valley a few days ago, and I was reminded of Hod’s dreaming spider robots, twitching in their sleep.
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“Most of your massed-produced honey is made by just mashing bees up indiscriminately, and later forcing the bee-y goo through successively finer filters.”
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indirectly via:nelson
Assumptions are not your friends
Crossposted to the Not An Employee blog
A gentleman of my passing acquaintance, who is a prominent local businessman, mentioned today that he was “happy to see another talent collective” in our town.
I went to substantial lengths to correct him. Which leads me to jot a few notes, and to share them with you.
Sure, yes, there’s Not An Employee, LLC, a company we formed to sell stickers. But that’s a piece of legal chaff for PayPal accounts and to give us a shared ontological framework to use as an interface with banks and Chambers of Commerce and suchlike.
No. Whatever it is, maybe an institution or collective or organization or movement—whatever we finally call it—this thing “Not An Employee” is not a consultancy, headhunting agency, subcontracting network, social club, networking infrastructure.
Not a “talent collective” or a union. Not a cooperative.
Not a coworking facility, and not coworking itself.
Not boosterism, not economic development, not merely a scam to sell stickers or present hack poetry or invoke the ancient Titans of yore. Not a cult, not a jape, not a sorry-ass quixotic windmill-tilters association.
Not even a way to change the world.
It’s a tag. That’s all it is. A tag. A complex adjective. A thing used to describe. A nonexclusive classifier.
So you are asked, What are you? And you say: I’m Not An Employee.
Tell that to me, and having thought long and hard about it I promise that I won’t assume I understand the details of what you mean. But I will suspect some of what it implies.
What are you? Not an employee. What do you do? This.
I think I’m starting to understand.
When we founded Not An Employee, we decided that we would build a new Founders’ Myth with every telling; that every face-to-face version would be measurably different. That still applies; ask any of the others around here what this thing is, what it’s for, and you’ll get a variation. Some overlaps, some differences. Some realistic but stereotyped details thrown in to make it more feasible, make it sound like it’s a general-purpose answer other folks would give as well.
They’re all different, but every one of them is the truth.
So when you tell me you’re Not An Employee, I hear you. After several months, and years before that, I think I’m starting finally to get it. A lot of people I meet every day, people with Prometheus stickers on their computers and “Better Without Bosses” badges on their lapels, I bet they’re starting to understand too.
Tell that to any of us, and we’ll suspect that you have a truly marvelous life which this margin is too narrow to contain. That you’re there, you’re in there behind your eyes, somebody watching back. Rare bird. You’re saying something important about your work, life, that it’s all complex and contingent and varies from time to time in unexpected ways.
We’ll know, more than anything, that you’ve spent a little time thinking, and have decided that the standard glib explanations just don’t work.
What do you do? What do you want? Where do you work?
Does being not an employee prohibit you from being anything else? Does it keep you from having any other tags? From being a programmer or a maid or an inventor or a mom, a gardener or a golfer or a Spaniard or a soprano?
Don’t be stupid. You are also everything else you are. It’s just a tag. A phrase that describes you. One of many.
Being a thing does not keep you from being other things. Being Not An Employee, having that tag, presenting yourself with that label, it doesn’t even keep you from being an actual employee.
If you ask me, it’s risky to assume the world is as simple as you’ve been told. Even the simple white lies you tell yourself? They’re still lies.
Every time you accept a simple explanation, you open yourself up as a tool to be used to others’ advantage. You become of use.
Now you may want to be of use. That’s a life of service, and it is admirable and honest work of its own. Many of the most blessed among us, they’ve served.
By choice. Remember that the blessed ones, they lead their lives with their eyes open. They lead regarded lives. They pay attention, and I would wager that their assumption-to-consideration ratio is really kinda low.
Not all of us choose lives of service. I haven’t, not really. And so like me you may find yourself telling somebody it’s more complicated than that; it’s not what you assume.
The more you do that, the more likely it is you’re Not An Employee.
Among other things.
links for 2008-03-20
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The key: “…it needn’t be bureaucratically untenable.”
links for 2008-03-18
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“If Web 2.0 is the answer then we are clearly asking the wrong question.”
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Can’t even spell “Lorem ipsum” right…
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One of the reasons I’ve been kind of quiet lately.
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The world wants to be uncanny and disturbing. I want it to be, and being of the world… I get to say. More of these. Now! With seven legs! And undulating cilia! But it needs more eyes.
Sprawlette visualization; nearly breeding; busily Not Employed
First more-or-less complete shell images of the new house have appeared. First post on project blog for our Nudge genetic programming thing has appeared. And many thanks for all the supportive voices we’ve heard in comments online and met at SXSWi regarding our (still intentionally) vague effort at Not An Employee.
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