yzl

Tech and ethics reading collection

A list of books, essays, papers, blog posts, tweets, etc. on tech and ethics that I have either read and found useful or plan to read because I think they might be useful. I’m not especially interested in ethics that doesn’t take power or structure into account, so most of the standard texts one would read in a course on ethics aren’t represented on my list.

(My) starting point

Not strictly about either ethics or tech, but Claire Dederer’s What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men? verbalizes something that is wound up in how I think about ethics, and what I hear when people talk about ethics:

This, I think, is what happens to so many of us when we consider the work of the monster geniuses—we tell ourselves we’re having ethical thoughts when really what we’re having is moral feelings.

Ideal theory

Dr. Robin James recommends Charles Mills’ [Ideal Theory as I

textarcana

I remember very clear I cry when I finish volume 3 of Knuth.
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I am work on CSS SQL.
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First sign of depression in devops is denial: you start of ignore Nagios alert.
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In devops language is not success unless is another language++.
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In devops you are addict to graph if first thought after orgasm is send duration and intensity to Graphite.
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ztellman

This relates to work I'm doing on a system for distributed outlier detection, as described here.

In this system, the count-min sketch is used as a distributed filter. Over some interval, the CMS is populated on all the edge nodes, sent to a server for merging, and the merged CMS is broadcast back out to the edges. On the following interval, each new key is run through the "global" CMS, and if it's over some threshold, it is added to the set of potential outliers, which are precisely counted.

This is, as described so far, an adaptation of this 2003 paper from single-node to multi-node. However, that paper assumes that the threshold is known ahead of time.

In most cases, though, what constitutes an "outlier" is a moving target. We'd like to adapt as the distribution changes. Previously, I was using a consistent uniform sample of the keys to identify the threshold, but we'd have to take a very

somebox

#!/bin/bash

# A script to set up a new mac. Uses bash, homebrew, etc.

# Focused for ruby/rails development. Includes many utilities and apps:
# - homebrew, rvm, node
# - quicklook plugins, terminal fonts
# - browsers: chrome, firefox
# - dev: iterm2, sublime text, postgres, chrome devtools, etc.
# - team: slack, dropbox, google drive, skype, etc