We could also rein in private equity? Culture Study had a great episode about PE [0] recently, with some explanation of what started it and, if I remember right, some gestures towards how it might be brought to heel — or at least made less bombastically awful for most people.
I'm a full-stack developer with over 10 years of experience across early- and late-stage startups, a Fortune 500 company, and academia.
Most recently, I've been working on a reading environment for networked commentaries on ancient texts. I built the first iteration with Elixir and Phoenix, and I'm currently working on a minimal computing setup that others can use for their own commentaries/collections of texts.
I've worked extensively with JavaScript throughout my career, and I also have production-grade experience with Ruby on Rails and Python.
I'm looking for a role in the Boston area or remote (hybrid works too) that has a meaningful impact and room to grow.
Thanks for reading, and please don't hesitate to reach out if you have questions or if you think I might be a good fit for your team.
> He can't go work in tech, who is going to pay a historian six figures or even a living wage?
I appreciate the thinking that went into the parent post, but I want to challenge this statement, which is emblematic of the kind of reasoning that paints training in the humanities as frivolous and out of touch with the demands of the market, as if the market is the sole arbiter of reality.
I recently earned a PhD in a humanities field, and I'm currently gainfully employed as a research software engineer at a major university. I'm making less than I did when I was in tech just out of college, but more than many of my humanities colleagues in various positions between the PhD and the tenure track.
My point is not to brag about being able to get into tech with a humanities background, but to say that I don't think I'm anything special. When I was first applying for tech jobs out of college, I drew on my training in literature and human languages to guide my learning and application of CS fundamentals. I admit that I caught a lucky break with companies willing to take a chance on someone with a non-traditional background, and I'm grateful to have these skills to draw on if a traditional academic career doesn't work out for me. But I think my story is repeatable.
But back to the original point: rather than denigrating the value of a history PhD, it's important to question the market forces that have created this kind of precariousness for people who possess not only important knowledge about the past but, more importantly, the training and skills to use that knowledge to interpret the present.
The assumption that jobs are available to people because of what they _know_ is based on faulty logic that comes from the MBA-ification of everything -- the obsession with "deliverables."
Really, what PhD training in any discipline brings is both a deep pool of knowledge and the training to synthesize and use those "facts" in novel ways.
> ChatGPT is destroying the freelance writing market
Relatedly, this statement only makes sense if one assumes that we have given up on teaching everyday people -- non-specialists -- the importance of the medium for a message's delivery, dissemination, and broader understanding. "ChatGPT is destroying the freelance writing market" because we have collectively failed to reinforce the value of human perspectives on an issue.
Allowing "The Market" to dictate reality has led to schisms in shared truth like climate change denialism. We need interpreters of history, literature, drama, etc. in order to get back to any hope of getting back to broad agreement about what the world is.
Will we ever get everyone to agree? Of course not, but market forces can't repair these divisions.
As the old Upton Sinclair quote goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
They're also a thing in Boston and a few other areas in the US. It's blatantly exploitative, to say nothing of the obvious corruption pointed out in other comments.
There was supposed to be a crackdown on the practice in NYC in 2020, but the brokers lobby was too powerful.[0]
One can only hope that such legislation eventually passes -- and has teeth.
Tbh, I’m put on more on alert by the spelling errors in the linked post than I am by the ostensible threat of a server timing my requests in order to serve malware.
It’s good practice to check anything that you’ll pipe to `sudo`, but this article’s level of paranoia is kind of self-defeating, no?
At some point, we all trust the things we run on our machines. We rely on communities — and our participation in them — to vet installations.
There is no perfect solution. Someone will always be misled.
> Humanities are a mess just for the reason that they take tuition and time from students and leave them hanging out to dray, after they graduate with no direct job prospects (i.e. a way to make a living).
It seems like this is a rumor that refuses to die. Humanities majors do just fine.
According to a 2018 ACS survey,[0] humanities majors are looking at 2.13% unemployment, which is comparable to other fields. The same survey shows that people who majored in the humanities earn comparable salaries to their peers in other disciplines.[1]
A 2014 study in Forbes found that humanities majors go on to earn even more than their peers in other disciplines as they all advance on their chosen career paths.[2]
I'm curious why the image of the deadbeat humanist persists, especially in an era where we need people who have been trained to look at potentially misleading information, identify why it is misleading, and point us towards better sources. Rampant misinformation in this social media age has shown us that "the facts" are much more slippery than anyone would like, and we need people who have been trained in the subjective arts of parsing contradictory information and -- even more importantly -- justifying their interpretation to others.
That article doesn’t argue for any sort of causal relationship between climate change and racism. Rather, it argues that a similar kind of denialism in the face of facts undermines the notion of shared truth by further entrenching people within their (a priori) belief systems.
Put another way, Kendi is pointing out different manifestations of the dangers of equating (dis)belief with knowledge.
This isn’t an entirely accurate picture. In Hanink’s first book, she demonstrates how the classical Athens that we think of today was largely an invention of Athens in the fourth century BCE.
To oversimplify a bit, although Athens lost its military hegemony at the end of the Peloponnesian War, Athens and Athenianness maintained a powerful cultural influence for centuries.
I think the lede, then, is clear from the first paragraph: classical Athens (synechdochically represented through Thucydides here) is a construct that can be used for diverse ends, and we need to pay careful to attention to who uses it and how.
The problem with this view is that foreign language education isn't about the language per se (although that's a bonus if you manage to get good), it's about providing a vehicle for understanding history and culture in context.
Latin is a favorite punching bag in this discussion, and I don't want to argue about the practical benefit of _speaking_ Latin right now. But learning to _read_ Latin is learning how to deal with long, difficult, and poorly defined problems---skills that translate (no pun intended) to almost any field.
> The problem with that article is not that it makes 0 valid points, it's that it makes some terrible correlations as an attempt to prove cryptos won't be huge.
Actually, the article doesn't set out "to prove cryptos won't be huge," and ends on a crypto-positive note:
> Bitcoin has shown us the promise of blockchain technologies despite its design shortcomings.
> The future of the technology will probably evolve towards a model that more resembles real world needs, rather than the needs of “cyberpunks”.
To diverge from the article a bit and respond to your final point, I don't know that the mantra of individual empowerment in the Bitcoin world amounts to anything other than solipsism. Bitcoin, as far as I can tell, ignores structural biases preventing people from accessing the cryptocurrency. We can see evidence of this in the "Bitcoin in Africa" startups, which on the surface seem benign and even benevolent, but are hiding an uninterrogated colonialism: their chief assumption, it seems to me, is that the developed world will always control more of Bitcoin's limited resources, and the value of spreading a small portion of those resources to the developing world comes from lock-in. It's a classic unfair trade agreement, and it doesn't take much thought to see how problematic this situation can become.
eBay can bend you over with fees because they control the market; Bitcoin's limited resources are susceptible to the same kind of market control. That's the discussion I wish more people were having.
There are a lot of problems with this article, but I want to focus on this paragraph:
> What’s more, there has never been a better time to try to found a genuinely subversive company than right now. Consider Y Combinator’s new openness to not-for-profit startups. Consider the remarkable recipient list of Reddit Donate. [http://www.redditblog.com/2015/02/announcing-winners-of-redd...] It seems to me that there is a hunger for real change out there. A huge audience. You might even call it a market.
I'm not sure that I trust Jon Evans' -- or any one person's -- assessment of subversion. The whole point of subversion is to overturn ("vertere") the status quo from below ("sub"), while this article seems content to maintain the current systems of marginalized nerd-dom (which has always been a suspect category) and capitalism (which is interesting and because as a system it preferences what's mainstream and marketable -- Evans has contradicted himself again).
When Evans writes, "Consider the remarkable recipient list of Reddit Donate," in support of his call for subversion, he glosses over the fact that the list includes some of the most mainstream nonprofits in the world (plus two well-known psychoactive research organizations). I'm not saying that these charities aren't doing good things -- I think it's fair to assume that they are -- I'm saying that supporting them can't be viewed as an act of subversion, and that assuming limited resources, support for them means lost support for other _actually subversive_ organizations that mean to do just as much good in the world.
"It seems to me that there is a hunger for real change out there." But change doesn't mean patching what exists; change -- subversive change -- means offering a replacement.
I think one thing that's misunderstood about Flux is the store <-> model distinction. Coming from MVC, it's a pretty easy mistake to make, but stores _are_ effectively global state objects: You can access a store's state from any component -- whether that's good practice is doubtful, but it can be done -- and even though you have to call that store's getter in particular, it's not really that different from requesting state from a global object. (As the article hints at, Om makes it even clearer that stores handle global state in the app-state atom.)
All of that is to say that I think Flux-y architectures can help with reasoning about GraphQL's and Relay's data handling, which I think is seconding your opinion, even if it's quibbling a bit with how annoying driving stick (or working in Flux) is. :)
[0]: https://culturestudypod.substack.com/p/how-private-equity-de...