I’ll do one opinion per like on this topic. Why this topic, I don’t know, but I feel provoked, so well done @vgrhttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1205987218977775616 …
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But that ICBM cashed out and bought a lot of land in Colorado, so who exactly got the last laugh?
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The stereotype of engineers being terrible designers with no user empathy gets more complicated when those engineers are Asian immigrants / children of immigrants who could never mesh with American cultural norms like the natives
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“Good student” mentality is an obstacle to the creative leaps necessary for truly disruptive early-stage startup success
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Yep, being Asian in tech must be a privilege, because I feel like I haven’t thought about it much at all before this prompt
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7. Achievement/perfection-oriented parenting can prepare one well for the demand for absolute precision in writing code
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8. I’ve met people in “high-vibe” scenes and then surprised them by talking about how much I love the Internet. Because code-switching. Because I learned how to have eye contact, and healed a lot of my habits of disembodiment.
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This one time at Burning Man, at the Skinny Kitty Teahouse, this girl got in my face about not wanting any “code-switching bullshit” from me. In time I understood that just meant I wasn’t doing it well. Code-switching for third-culture kids is just a survival skill.
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9. Certain forms of high-functioning autism correlate with programming ability. Is there a higher incidence of this in Asians? Or just more of a cultural acceptance of “programming” kids in that direction? e.g. Kumon
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10. What gets sadly overlooked in the “Asians are good at math” stereotype is the opportunity to follow a different cultural archetype. Like the classical Chinese gentleman equally skilled at tai chi, Go, calligraphy. (“Then why would you choose engineering?”)
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11. It's not quite the same thing to be Alibaba founder Jack Ma and bankroll a martial arts film starring yourself. But I don't mean to hate on his success. And maybe it *is* the same thing, just with a late-stage capitalism filter applied.
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This "Asians in tech" prompt is clarifying my own niche on the fringes of that group. I'm the guy who used to joke about being so culturally American that I got interested in Eastern religions in college.
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12. But there are obvious connections between the foundations of computer science in binary logic and Taoism especially, its dialectical monism, the interplay of yin (0) & yang (1) creating the ten thousand (10011100010000) things.https://twitter.com/levity/status/1090328190021599232 …
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13. A spicy subset of this topic is “mainland Chinese in tech”. Am I going to say something that will put me on a CCP watchlist? You might argue I’m not important enough. But automation reduces the threshold of importance.
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14. We could draw a line from the Chinese “relaxed” attitude to intellectual property back to its communitarian cultural roots: no one is special enough to deserve a government-sanctioned profit moat.
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15. Occam’s razor suggests though it’s more a matter of driving economic growth at any cost than a principled philosophical position.
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16. With surveillance and the social credit score, China is running an experiment in putting its entire society “below the API”. The US is not far behind. It’s not just a question of whether your boss at work is an algorithm, but the sources of influence on your overall behavior.
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17. It’s very difficult to think at this scale without shutting off your empathy. The machines are chewing up so many at the margins, if you stop to mourn, you risk being drowned by sorrow.
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18. Documentaries to watch: Koyannisqatsi, Manufactured Landscapes, Samsara
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19. “Good student” mentality can be so deeply wired. There’s a voice in my head tsking me for going off-topic. Off-topic. On Twitter.
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20. Tech Asians and tech non-Asians are more like each other than either is like their non-tech ethnic counterparts. But tech Asians are less different from non-tech Asians than tech non-Asians are from non-tech non-Asians.
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In the clothing-optional hippie spa my wife and I go to in Santa Cruz, cell phones are banned. In the Korean spa we dropped by on the Peninsula last weekend, there’s a hangout area where some people bring laptops.
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21. A dimension alongside race in tech for a 2x2: class. As a programmer, are you a wizard permitted to lurk in your tower and rarely emerge with a magical gem, or a soldier expected to sacrifice yourself to meet hard deadlines?
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22. The question here is not only “what class are you” but “what class is your boss”? You can’t do your best work if you’re spending energy protecting your boundaries. So that’s their job. Do they know that? Or are they the one interrupting you?
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23. There’s Dunning-Kruger risk here ofc. Everyone wants to be a wizard but starts out as a child getting lost in the forest.
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24. Programming teacher as wilderness survival guide (ranger, to continue the class metaphor)
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25. In the archetype of the ranger we find a connection back to apprenticeship in nature. Just follow them around & watch everything they do. Don’t ask questions just yet. Programming has a folkway dimension as well.
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Though in programming the actions and observations are mostly verbal, so our “monkey see monkey do” routines aren’t as smooth. Not quite the same as being in a martial arts dojo, watching the master demonstrate a move, feeling it in your own body.
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There’s a hunger for more embodied understanding of programming. Visual—NoFlo et al. Real-time feedback—
@worrydream. Kinesthetic? I hope it’s not just “smart clothes” that vibrate your shoulder when you have new email.Show this thread -
Bilingual people have an advantage when it comes to grasping high-level system design, because they intuitively understand there’s an irreducible gap between what something is and what you call it. So they can be more intentional about choosing names that clarify function.
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A polarizing example of this is the meme language used by the early devs at
@makerdao. I lock my gems into a cup (CDP) to draw Dai, but if the spot (price) of the gems (Ether) drops below the mat, someone can bite my cup and take my gems.Show this thread - 5 more replies
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