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My Facebook friends aren’t too worried about Hillary’s health. Here’s a typical posting:

I would vote for Hillary Clinton for president if she was in a permanent coma that she could never wake up from. #ImWithHer

Aside from showing the death of the subjunctive, this posting presumably shows that the voter is presumably comfortable with the Democrat’s VP candidate actually doing the Presidential job. That led me to wonder if Americans in general wouldn’t be happier with both headline candidates withdrawing from the race. Would that automatically lead to the VP candidates facing off?

At that point both parties would have fairly generic and inoffensive candidates, no? The Democrats wouldn’t have the spouse of the former leader (go Argentina!) and a person who’d banked (some of it in a family-run foundation) $1 billion as a result of serving in politics . The Republicans wouldn’t have, well, Trump.

What do readers think? Could everyone relax a bit if the current Presidential candidates stepped down in favor of the VP candidates?

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“What Programming’s Past Reveals About Today’s Gender-Pay Gap” (Atlantic) is kind of interesting because a journalist without apparently any programming experience writes about what programmers do and why one candidate might be preferred by an employer over another.

Here are some excerpts:

During the 1940s and 50s, it was primarily women, not men, who were developing code for the nation’s first computers, and the accompanying pay and prestige were both relatively low. But as the century progressed and the field of computing became male-heavy, compensation and esteem both rose precipitously—despite the fact that the substance of the job remained similar.

How did programming transform from a feminine field into an occupation synonymous with young men wearing hoodies who collect generous salaries for hacking and disrupting things? The story behind the fluctuations in programmers’ salaries and cultural status—as well as those of other professions whose gender composition has shifted over the years—sheds light on how and why women’s work is, across the economy, considered to be less valuable than men’s work. It also provides a rebuttal to the common argument that the gender-pay gap exists because women tend to choose less demanding jobs that pay less.

Aptitude tests and personality profiles, which were the primary mechanisms used to screen and rank job candidates in programming in the 1950s and 60s, helped accelerate the profession’s shift from female to male. … The type of math questions on these multiple-choice exams—requiring little nuance or context-specific problem solving—were often testing skills that men were more likely than women to have learned in school at a time when girls were more likely to be steered away from STEM subjects.

Coders: What do you think of this article? Can it be the case that IBM’s hiring practices in the 1950s are determining the composition of the modern programming workforce?

[Readers would be disappointed if I didn’t point out that a woman in a lot of U.S. states (including here in Massachusetts) who wanted to have the spending power of a programmer could simply have sex with three programmers and then collect child support plus, if she did choose to work at a job more enjoyable (to her) than programming, park the children in daycare at the defendants’ expense (on top of the child support cashflow).]

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What was London like circa 1700? Peter the Great: His Life and World has the answers.

The London that Peter visited and explored on foot was rich, vital, dirty and dangerous. The narrow streets were piled with garbage and filth which could be dropped freely from any overhanging window. Even the main avenues were dark and airless because greedy builders, anxious to gain more space, had projected upper stories out over the street. Through these Stygian alleys, crowds of Londoners jostled and pushed one another. Traffic congestion was monumental. Lines of carriages and hackney cabs cut deep ruts into the streets, so that passengers inside were tossed about, arriving breathless, nauseated and sometimes bruised.

London was a violent city with coarse, cruel pleasures which quickly crushed the unprotected innocent. For women, the age of consent was twelve (it remained twelve in England until 1885).

For intelligent men, life in London centered on hundreds of coffee houses where the conversation could center on anything under the sun. Gradually, the different houses began to specialize in talk about politics, religion, literature, scientific ideas, business, shipping or agriculture. Choosing the house by the talk he wished to hear, a visitor could step in, sit by the fire, sip coffee and listen to every shade of opinion expressed in brilliant, learned and passionate terms. Good conversationalists could sharpen their wits, writers could share their dilemmas, politicians could arrange compromises, the lonely could find simple warmth. In Lloyd’s coffee house, marine insurance had its beginnings. At Will’s, Addison was to have his chair by the fire in winter and by the window in summer.

Don’t like your tenants? It could be worse…

But it was not until the Russians had left at the end of their three-month stay and Evelyn came to see his once-beautiful home that the full extent of the damage became apparent. Appalled, Evelyn hurried off to the Royal Surveyor, Sir Christopher Wren, and the Royal Gardener, Mr. London, to ask them to estimate the cost of the repairs. They found floors and carpets so stained and smeared with ink and grease that new floors had to be installed. Tiles had been pulled from the Dutch stoves and brass door locks pried open. The paintwork was battered and filthy. Windows were broken, and more than fifty chairs—every one in the house—had simply disappeared, probably into the stoves. Featherbeds, sheets and canopies were ripped and torn as if by wild animals. Twenty pictures and portraits were torn, probably used for target practice. Outside, the garden was ruined. The lawn was trampled into mud and dust, “as if a regiment of soldiers in iron shoes had drilled on it.” The magnificent holly hedge, 400 feet long, 9 feet high and 5 feet thick, had been flattened by wheelbarrows rammed through it. The bowling green, the gravel paths, the bushes and trees, all were ravaged. Neighbors reported that the Russians had found three wheelbarrows, unknown in Russia, and had developed a game with one man, sometimes the Tsar, inside the wheelbarrow and another racing him into the hedges. Wren and his companions noted all this and made a recommendation which resulted in a recompense to Evelyn of 350 pounds and ninepence, an enormous sum for that day.

Peter loved his time there:

Although he never returned to England, Peter had enjoyed his taste of English life. He found there much that he liked: informality, a practical, efficient monarch and government, good drinking and good talk about ships, gunnery and fireworks. Although he was not intimate with William, the King had opened every door, he had given Peter access to his shipyards, mint and gun foundries, he had displayed his fleet, he had allowed the Russians to talk with everyone and make notes. Peter was grateful and carried away the highest respect not only for English ship design and workmanship, but for the island as a whole. In Russia, he once said to Perry that “if he had not come to England he had certainly been a bungler.” Further, continued Perry, “His Majesty has often declared to his lords, when he has been a little merry, that he thinks it a much happier life to be an admiral in England than a tsar in Russia.” “The English island,” Peter said, “is the best and most beautiful in the world.”

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Today is typically a day for Americans to reflect on stuff that was brought down. Recommended reading for today: “A Monument to Outlast Humanity: In the Nevada desert, the pioneering artist Michael Heizer completes his colossal life’s work.” (New Yorker)

[Separately, the location of this art installation might be a good destination for drone and/or helicopter pilots. Based on the description in the article, who can find it on Google Maps and post a link in the comments?]

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Sony knocks it out of the DxOMark park with their 85/1.4 lens, which has an only slightly crazy price of $1,800: review with a score of 49. Worth reading just to see what Sony can do with their own designers (presumably) and under their own brand name rather than in partnership with Zeiss. Only about 1% as exciting as the iPhone 7, presumably, despite the vastly superior image quality. I guess that is fair considering that you’re not going to get this lens into your pocket.

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Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez contains some reading list advice for engineers:

On the last hour of the last day, McEachen [superstar programmer], saint that he was, went to Murthy’s [Murthy Nukala, CEO of Adchemy, Martinez’s previous employer] office to say good-bye. He had invested over four years of his life in the company, watching it grow from a small shared space to the expansive floor of a high-end office tower. I waited impatiently by the emergency exit staircase, to avoid running into any other employees. After ten minutes or so, he emerged, looking astonished, or maybe shell-shocked. “He barely even looked up from the screen.” His voice cracked as he said it. He looked at me imploringly. For a moment I thought he might actually cry. “He didn’t say anything, and didn’t shake my hand.”

Matt McEachen, Adchemy’s best, most productive engineer, until the day he left the author of the biggest chunk of Adchemy’s codebase, was treated worse than a contract janitor on the way out. I marveled at a world in which well-meaning, industrious, but naive engineers are routinely manipulated by the glib entrepreneurs who seduce them into joining their startups, then relinquish them when they are no longer useful. Every Jobs has his Wozniak. I couldn’t exactly claim I wasn’t, to some degree, doing the same to him right then. He was merely trading Murthy for me.

Engineers can be so smart about code, and yet so dense about human motivations. They’d be better served by reading less Neal Stephenson and more Shakespeare and Patricia Highsmith.

Following a moderately successful seed phase in a Y Combinator startup, Martinez has to choose between Facebook and Twitter for his next act:

In December 2010, Zynga launched a FarmVille clone called CityVille. That game, a moronic rip-off of the far cleverer game The Sims, had accumulated one hundred million users in a month. One hundred million users! If humanity had waited until 2010 to invent masturbation, it would not have caught on as fast as CityVille. That’s how fast Facebook could make something happen.

Here’s another data point for you: As part of our push to woo Facebook, I had been getting Google Alerts on the company for months. One in particular had caught my attention. In October 2010, a mother in Florida had shaken her baby to death, as the baby would interrupt her FarmVille games with crying. A mother destroyed with her own hands what she’d been programmed over aeons to love, just to keep on responding to Facebook notifications triggered by some idiot game. Products that cause mothers to murder their infants in order to use them more, assuming they’re legal, simply cannot fail in the world. Facebook was legalized crack, and at Internet scale. Such a company could certainly figure out a way to sell shoes. Twitter was cute and all, but it didn’t have a casualty rate yet, …

I recall very little from the interviews, except a comment from one of the DabbleDB engineers. After getting through the stress questions, I asked him, “So what do you like most about Twitter?” By this point, we’d built a decent rapport, so with a nod and a wink, he said, “Well, you know, in companies like Facebook and Google, they serve you breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Here at Twitter, they only serve you breakfast and lunch.” I cringed inwardly. So the big selling point was that nobody worked late into the night, so we could have that chimerical work-life balance?* I smiled to keep the warm vibe going. But that comment more than anything else sealed my decision. I was not going to blow the biggest career wad of my life on a company that hesitated to work past six p.m. daily.

I submit [Mark Zuckerberg] was an old-school genius, the fiery force of nature possessed by a tutelary spirit of seemingly supernatural provenance that fuels and guides him, intoxicates his circle, and compels his retinue to be great as well. The Jefferson, the Napoleon, the Alexander . . . the Jim Jones, the L. Ron Hubbard, the Joseph Smith. Keeper of a messianic vision that, though mercurial and stinting on specifics, presents an overwhelming and all-consuming picture of a new and different world. Have a mad vision, and you’re a kook. Get a crowd to believe in it as well, and you’re a leader. By imprinting this vision on his disciples, he founded the church of a new religion. … Then there was the culture he created. Many cool Valley companies have engineering-first cultures, but Facebook took it to a different level. … That was the uniquely piratical attitude: if you could get shit done and quickly, nobody cared much about credentials or traditional legalistic morality. The hacker ethos prevailed above all. This culture is what kept twenty-three-year-old kids who were making half a million a year, in a city where there was lots of fun on offer if you had the cash, tethered to a corporate campus for fourteen-hour days. They ate three meals a day there, sometimes slept there, and did nothing but write code, review code, or comment on new features in internal Facebook groups. On the day of the IPO—Facebook’s victory rally—the Ads area was full of busily working engineers at eight p.m. on a Friday. All were at that point worth real money—even fuck-you money for some—and all were writing code on the very day their paper turned to hard cash.

A concrete example of the zealotry?

In June 2011, Google launched an obvious Facebook copy called Google Plus. It hit Facebook like a bomb. Zuck took it as an existential threat comparable to the Soviets placing nukes on Cuba in 1961. This was the great enemy’s sally into our own hemisphere, and it gripped Zuck like nothing else. He declared “Lockdown,” the first and only one during my time there. As was duly explained to the more recent employees, Lockdown was a state of war that dated to Facebook’s earliest days, when no one could leave the building while the company confronted some threat, either competitive or technical. … the cafés would be open over the weekends, and the proposal was seriously floated to have the shuttles from Palo Alto and San Francisco run on the weekends too. This would make Facebook a fully seven-days-a-week company; by whatever means, employees were expected to be in and on duty. In what was perceived as a kindly concession to the few employees with families, it was also announced that families were welcome to visit on weekends and eat in the cafés, allowing the children to at least see daddy (and yes, it was mostly daddy) on weekend afternoons.

I decided to do some reconnaissance. En route to work one Sunday morning, I skipped the Palo Alto exit on the 101, and got off in Mountain View instead. Down Shoreline I went, and into the sprawling Google campus. The multicolored Google logo was everywhere, and clunky Google-colored bikes littered the courtyards. I had visited friends here before, and knew where to find the engineering buildings. I made my way there, and contemplated the parking lot. It was empty. Completely empty. Interesting. I got back on the 101 North and drove to Facebook. At the California Avenue building, I had to hunt for a parking spot. The lot was full. It was clear which company was fighting to the death.

More: read Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

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Friends on Facebook, when they aren’t comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, may complain that Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border is un-American and/or immoral. Yet Wikipedia indicates that we have already built 580 miles of such a wall. It seems obvious that Trump is proposing a longer wall, but how is that qualitatively or morally different than what we’ve already done? With a quick Google search I found “History of Border Walls in the U.S. and Around the World,” which says that the Mexico-U.S. wall dates back at least to 1990:

In 1990, the United States constructed a 66-mile (106-kilometer) fence along the California coast from San Diego to the Pacific Ocean to deter illegal immigration. Arrests of illegal immigrants in the San Diego region declined sharply as a result of the fence, but increased nearly 600 percent in Arizona, where the number of accidental deaths also climbed as Mexicans attempted to traverse the harsh desert environment.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The act increased fines for illegal aliens, provided additional funding for border patrol and surveillance, and also approved the installation of an additional 14-mile (22-kilometer) fence near San Diego.

With respect to his advocacy of a border wall/fence, what is different about Donald Trump than our 1990s political leaders?

Related:

• Bill Clinton 1995 speech regarding immigration.

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Folks:

Although Picasa continues to run on my Windows 10 desktop computer, one of the things that I liked best about it has stopped working. Adding a photo to an album that is specified to sync to the web no longer results in an automatic update. Telling Picasa to sync a new folder to the web first results in an annoying prompt for a username and password (these credentials used to be saved for months if not years). Then there is a spinning uploading icon. Then there is apparently a silent failure because the album doesn’t show up in Google Photos (but if you retry 10 times it might).

Back in February I posted about Google killing off Picasa and it seemed that there was no obvious replacement in terms of a seamless desktop/web application or a web-only application that actually does what Picasa used to do.

What about now? Has anyone found a good solution? What can the Adobe tools do? I pay for them every month but I haven’t comprehended even 1 percent of the features!

[Separately, a superstar programmer friend who recently quit Google says that the Alphabet reorganization will result in big changes: “Here is their trick: cut out big pieces of google, e.g., fiber, verity life sciences, x labs, etc. At first all of the org charts point to larry, the people are comfortable. then a few months ago, the org charts no longer reported to larry. Eventually they will put in firewalls and then start layoffs and squeezing, unit by unit. So google fiber will probably get a huge layoff. They’ll probably spin off the car company from x labs and squeeze that with ‘make money or die.'” He estimated that more than half of the Google staff could be fired without an impact on revenue or product development. But so far my personal experience is that Google is killing great products that shouldn’t cost a lot to maintain.]

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“How Was Burning Man” is this week’s must-view (4 minutes).

Separately, I sat down with a friend for lunch this week to find out what happened during his Burn. We compared text messages on our phones. My exchange with a woman included “Costco list?,” “Pears but no organic bananas,” and “Glad to hear that you skipped the fruit snacks.” (I made the trip to Costco with an almost-3-year-old in the middle seat of the Honda Odyssey.) His exchanges with women at Burning Man cannot be reprinted in a family weblog…

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People can debate the quality of the tech education offered at ITT Technical Institute, but the stock price chart is a great lesson for investors. It seemed to be a recession-proof stock, reaching over $120 per share in early 2009. Now that the shower of federal money has been shut off the stock is worth pennies.

Separately, what will these folks do with the corporate shell? Presumably they aren’t solvent due to real estate obligations, such as leases for campus buildings.

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