Links: Tech, privacy, diversity in hiring

[sonia]

Hi, I'm looking to buy a dumb appliance. Yes, a refrigerator with zero computers in it. Can I pay extra for there not to be an app via. I didn't write this, but I could have.

How to Respond Without Reacting by Svenja Schäfer. How to interrupt a cycle of interruptions at work.

1. Is the comment or question directly related to my work?
   
2. Can the author answer the question themself?
   
3. Is there someone around who can answer?

In the Shadow of Silicon Valley by Rebecca Solnit. A love letter to San Francisco, community, and connectedness, and how billionaires in tech are degrading it in San Francisco and the world. "You can’t really be in favour of both democracy and billionaires, because democracy requires equal opportunity in order to participate, and extreme wealth gives its holders unfathomable advantages with little accountability."

Practical Privacy Tips by The Author of the Control Alt Delete Blog via silveradept. I removed "Easy" and "For Everyone" from the title, since those things are relative. Tips to start with, I would call it.

Welcome to the Opt Out Project. A whole blog of tips for how to take your online life and privacy back from Big Tech.

The Power of Being New: A Proven Recipe for High Impact by Hazel Weakly.

the important part was to utilize my empathy, listen to others, understand their viewpoints, and solve their problems. That’s the magic, by the way.

My Diverse Hiring Playbook by Jacob Kaplan-Moss. More practical tips, this time to hire more underrepresented people in tech. Which links to Some Diversity Advice I Give by Sumana Harihareswara. "This playbook is only about hiring – how to attract a more diverse talent pipeline. [...] if your organization treats underrepresented people badly, no amount of “pipeline” work will improve things. Fix your inclusivity problem first."

Positive feedback is different from praise by Jacob Kaplan-Moss.

Praise looks towards the past: it’s recognition for a (past) job well done. Feedback, on the other hand, is about the future: the goal of positive feedback is to encourage similar behavior in the future. Praise is about saying “thanks”; feedback is about saying “keep doing that” or “more like this please”.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

I think the tech industry does okay in some corners with hiring; retention continues being an issue almost across the board, however.

[sonia]

I’ll have to find those corners some day. I still end up in groups where all the other developers are men. And yes, retention. *sigh*

[jesse_the_k]

Oh! Such chewy links — thanks. The opt out project is just what I needed to read today.

[sonia]

Yay!

I like the buttons, letter, sheet music icon!

[silveradept]

I appreciate how much the "I'd like to buy a dumb appliance" thread picks up with suggestions about how to get exactly that, especially in screens and televisions.

The Opt Out Project is lovely, and I hope that there's a fair amount of interoperability involved in that opting out, especially adversarial interop, so that people can avoid using the data-sucking parts but still maintain the communications part and the functionality parts. I'd like to see Sailfish ported to more devices, but I also know that at least one of the things I use regularly requires the Google frameworks, so I'm making the choice even though I'd really rather avoid that and just play the game, so LineageOS is probably the best I can do about limiting my data being sucked away. Still, we live in hope, right?

[sonia]

Yeah, it's good that people are helping each other opt out including building an alternative phone OS. I stubbornly turn location off on my phone and don't use iCloud, but I mostly feel like a solitary crank. Good to remember I'm not the only one.

[silveradept]

There are several Linux-based phone operating systems at this point, but the difficulty with them is that they often only work on specific hardware, or they still have a certain amount of "90% Just Works, 10% No, No, No" associated with them. It's getting better and those phones are becoming easier to find and purchase, but it's still on the phase where you have to be a tech nerd or willing to put up with some quirks to get out of Android or iOS, and that's assuming that you don't have an app that is only available for a specific platform that you need or you need accessibility assistance, which is still lagging pretty hard on several of the alternative operating systems.