My dad was Tom West from Soul of a New Machine. Tracy Kidder lived at our house on weekends in the late 1970s while he was working on this book. He and my dad remained friends for the rest of his life, going out on boats, drinking a lot, talking about big ideas. Tom and Tracy and (Richard) Todd were the guys, when I was a girl. I wasn't as in touch with Tracy but I'd see him at events sometimes, I had a Tracy Kidder website up before he had his own website. He came to my father's memorial service in 2011, talked about the doors that book had opened up, how his life was changed by being able to tell that story as he's been able to tell so many people's stories since then. "I know the book was good for me," he said, "but I was never quite sure if it was good for Tom."
My favorite little bit of content about SOANM, and Tracy, is attached to this 2013 blog post.
It's a 1983 report from The Computer Museum (Inside "The Soul of a New Machine" Tracy Kidder and Tom West) which contains the partial transcript of an event that Tracy and Tom did together, that I don't think they did again. When Tracy was asked what he was up to and if he was sick of computers, he said
"I'm digging out from under. I'm writing some articles about atmospheric research. To be honest, I'm a little tired of my book. I put it on my shelf and
won't read it again for years. I think I know what's wrong with it. In some
sense, writing a book is like building a computer. There are rewards but one of
the main ones is that Sisyphean one that if you do one you get to do another. So, I have an opportunity now to write a better one." And he did, he wrote so many books that were, if not better, at least just as good.
In the United States local drug store Rite Aid got in some serious trouble for using AI facial recognition. Looking at some of the Federal Trade Commission's complaints against them can give you some creepy insight into how the technology supposedly works and how few checks for accuracy or oversight there are in place.
I believe part of the issue is that the other John Does may be people in other countries (according to the lawsuit) which may add to the issues with identifying and/or charging them.
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Right?! Hi I'm Tom West's daughter, librarian, owner of MetaFilter and someone who spends a LOT of time talking to people (mainly men) who take only some of the messages away from that book. The book was great. I'm in it in a single sentence. My sister isn't in it at all. My parents divorced shortly after the book came out. My father had never "let" my mother have a job (it was a different time) and so she was ill-prepared for the single life, but made it work.
I hammered out a decent relationship with my dad despite the fact that he was basically married to his work, was probably somewhere on the autism spectrum, and had a problematic relationship with alcohol. He was a good guy but he learned interpersonal interactions somewhat by rote and in a business role where the goal was "results" he just did what he had to do. It's weird growing up when your dad's nickname is The Price of Darkness.
He wound up having a decent retirement after being a company man most of his life, got to sail a lot more, had a second messy divorce, and died in 2011. At his memorial service Tracy Kidder spoke eloquently about working with my dad through the writing of that book (he basically lived with us on weekends for a while) and how he knew the book had been good for him--he won a Pulitzer, was catapulted to some level of renown, got to write more books--but he was never quite sure it had been good for my dad. I also wonder sometimes.
So, yeah, when I talk to people who are reading it again or for the first time, I often ask them to reflect on what the book says about work/life balance, about gender norms (there's one woman in the entire coding team), about how project management should run, and about the weird cult of personality that can grow up around people who don't quite get along with people, and how things could be different.
I honestly feel like part of it is just that the site sometimes feels like abandonware. That is, it's still running but older cruft is still there (like how you can add AOL Instant Messenger to your profile page) and there are many parts of the site that just don't seem vital and alive. Some of that has to do with a smaller userbase, but some of it also has to do with determining whose job it is to really stay on top of things like that, having the site under active development instead of just reactive "fix what breaks and do backups/updates" sort of things.
The last few years, maybe since 2016 really in some ways, have been really difficult on the site and people got used to more of a siege mentality in terms of managing megathreads, and very limited resources (human and otherwise) and that's a tough set of habits to turn around.
Hi! Yes I'm the owner which is mostly paperwork and legal and sort of "the vision thing." Loup is running day-to-day stuff and we have a 12-member Steering Committee who will hopefully be setting the priorities and keeping everyone on target. I can not stress enough that I am not making the daily decisions but I do know that yes being able to accept help (and money, but help especially) is really going to be a priority as we try to make the site more community run and much less of a "single point of failure" situation. The last few years have been hard for the world which also means hard for MeFi; MeFi had some MeFi-specific issues and problems which needed addressing and are getting looked at. For anyone who hangs out there, or who just has fond memories of the place but it's not your spot anymore, consider stopping by to say hi again, giving feedback (or money, but feedback especially) and helping MeFi stay MeFi. <3
I had a very long and angryish set of dealings with them about this. I finally got an engineer to let me download the archive but man... promises promises...
I feel like a lot of it is changing the discussion. Like not everyone has the money, time and effort to be able to do a small claims thing, but there are a lot of things you can do. Teaching people to pull their credit reports, teaching them about risk assessment (I talk briefly about threat models when I do an online privacy talk at public libraries and I think it's useful to help people figure out "where do I fit into all this?") and how to get more information that they can trust.
And, for this audience especially, try to be supportive and helpful getting people to figure out how to keep their information more private in a way that works for them. Most people aren't techie and that's OK and is going to stay that way. Help them be better at the things they need to do, with good, well-sourced information, don't just holler at them because they write passwords down or don't know the different between their Apple ID and their laptop login. Encourage them to look at the structures that underlie the systems that they use every day (frex: Google is the world's largest advertising agency and that should figure in to personal decisions about how much to interact with them).
Above all, don't just bitch on the internet! I mean, sure do some of that, but that should be the beginning of your work to try to help yourself and other people deal with the situations we're in, not the end.
I definitely tried to (last year was such a shitty year!) but there wasn't a lot of traction for that. Maybe if I had brought in therapist bills and said "Reimburse me"