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💡Something I learned
Luddites were not an anti-technology faction
They were labor agitators. Smashing textile machinery was not a statement against the machine itself. It was an action against the social and economic shift that came as a result of those machines. All societies need to examine technology’s effect of new technology before it is wide spread. It rarely happens.
Look at the havoc social media has wreaked on the world right now.
📕Something to read
- Cory Doctorow, Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature: The patron saint of Cypherpunks, Cory Doctorow uses Luddite history to illustrate sci-fi’s role in examining the future.
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🗣Some Quotes and Notes
As I come clean
This essay was written by Neuroscientist Paul Kalanithi. He was suffering from late-stage cancer. He passed away shortly afterwards. It is a great reflection on death as whole, but this passage shows the effect a child has on their parents.
There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past.
That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.
— Paul Kalanithi, Before I go
Circular Debt
Technical debt is a rot that can destroy organization and grind them to a halt. This piece goes into how it happens and how to counter it.
Poorly managed knowledge leaves organizations with the memory of goldfish. I can’t tell you how many new product initiative meetings I’ve been in where no one remembers the meeting about the exact same thing from two quarters ago. It’s like Groundhog’s Day, but you’re having the same meetings over and over.
— Dave Rupert, Technical debt as a lack of understanding
You don’t know what you got, till its gone
The film Everything Everywhere All At Once was a beautiful surprise. Made by an independent team, at a low-budget, it deserves the praise just on the merit of its production value. However underneath the inventive visuals it was a treatise on life itself.
This review of the movie by Walter Chaw is even better.
Life is a series of terrible events punctuated by moments of transcendent, sublime grace. If you don’t savour them, you miss every reason to be alive.
— Walter Chaw, Review of the Film “Everything Everywhere All At Once”
Thank you for joining me this week. If you know some who might enjoy this, please forward this email to them. See you next week.
Mudassir Chapra