Kickoff for September 30, 2024
A few people have asked me if I use a generative AI tool to help me process and summarize the articles that I read for The Monday Kickoff. I don't. Everything that you read in these letters is created by a human, not by AI. And it always will be.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
Truth Follows Function — Wherein Martin Gurri meditates on the nature and interconnectedness of information, truth, and fact and how our trust in the purveyors of that information has eroded.
From the article:
Information doesn’t occur spontaneously in nature, to be picked like a wildflower for our delectation. It is always generated by human beings, to fit some human purpose. This subjective element in information is usually treated with suspicion, for good reason: We tend to distort reality in our favor.
The Story of the 414s: The Milwaukee Teenagers Who Became Hacking Pioneers — Wherein we learn about the exploits of a group of young computer enthusiasts who, in the early 1980s, embraced the true hacker ethos of learning by intrusion, how they were shut down, and about their legacy.
From the article:
Ultimately, the group would help introduce the nation to the possibilities — and problems, like sloppy security protections — that come with computer connectivity.
The Eternal Truth of Markdown — Wherein Scott Gilbertson rhapsodizes about the simple language used to format plain text documents, why it became fairly ubiquitous, and looks at some of the weaknesses and drawbacks of the language.
From the article:
This, I believe, is the cornerstone of Markdown’s success (and why related projects from that era, like reStructuredText and Setext, remain largely unknown): It looked at the world as it actually was and built on the informal conventions people were using.
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Are Bookstores Just a Waste of Space? — Wherein Louis Menand ponders the place of the brick and mortar bookshop in our digital age, how surviving ones have been trying to reinvent themselves, and
From the article:
You will probably soon be able to chat online about your book interests with a bot, but a bot is not a person with green hair, a tattoo, and a sense of humor who might have some offbeat suggestions for you. Salespeople today tend to be book lovers themselves (historically not always the case), and they can recommend a new book or help you find a book whose title you have forgotten.
Origins of the Lab Mouse — Wherein we dive into the story of how the little rodents went from being a curiosity in scientific and medical laboratories to being one of the main living organisms that researchers use in their experiments.
From the article:
The early supply of mice for research depended on a late-19th century community of hobbyists—fanciers—who collected, bred, and sold unusual mice varieties. These “fancy” varieties were then standardized in the 1920s by a small group of researchers at the Jackson Laboratory in Maine who intended to use them to investigate the genetics of cancer but were instead forced to sell their mice to support the lab when funding dried up during the Great Depression. From there, we witnessed an analog of the network effect, wherein the widespread sale and use of Jackson Lab mouse strains ensured their continued future use.
The Tinkerer’s Box of Dreams — Wherein we learn about Yadhu Gopalan, a software engineer who worked on Microsoft's mobile device project from its early days, about his collection of handheld hardware from those years, and learn a bit about how the smartphone as we know it came to be.
From the article:
There are still devices out there running CE; some of them are in the wild, working past retirement, wherever they are; some are in boxes like the one in Gopalan’s garage. To hobbyists, the old devices are beloved artifacts of a bygone age. But to people like Gopalan, they’re dreams from their younger selves.