New Book Identifies 26 Lines of Code That Changed the World

As if the following from the first paragraphs wasn't enough of an indicator: "technologists, historians, journalists, academics, and sometimes the coders themselves,” explaining “how code works" but it only gets better:

- A guy gets to present his theory of the racist software infrastructure, as "a Professor" while one has to scan his Twitter timeline to see him as the political hack that he is. Bosch should have pointed out he worked for the DNC (On a general note: Hey America, you do realize there are people outside of your country without the slightest interest in having their own history bent over your domestic infighting?).

- Of course our databases are racist, mysoginistic and transphobic - just as we are (“The next frontier in gender rights is inside databases.”)!

- Book title's like Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech are just slipped in, like they aren't the giant red flag of bias that they are.

- "I’ve been really interested over the past several years to watch the power of the tech activists and tech labor movements" is giving me straight up maoist vibes of the 1970s when upper-class academics in Western Europe larped as "working-class" in and around auto-manufacturing sites, but the working class wasn't having it.

Let's see whether that failure also repeats itself and how the outfall of this will look (the snubbed academics then turned to "the environment" as a new ward allwing them to more openly spite the "Lumpenproletariat")

Agreed. This sentence from the marketing copy killed my interest instantly:

"Contributors discuss a host of topics, such as how university databases were programmed long ago to accept only two genders, "

There's chapters on the inventions of COBOL and Bitcoin and you're gonna write the whole book off because they included a chapter on today’s surveillance infrastructure and the shoddy crime-data algorithm that laid the cornerstone for said infrastructure?

Living life reacting so strongly to things you might not immediately agree with sounds exhausting. Good luck with

So not only Redditors copy every post from here, they somehow also have to join the discussions here and drag the whole site down to their level.

compstat - what i presume you are referring to - demonstrably exacerbates the performance metrics it was intended to improve. it impacts everyone, even today. because it - either by accident or by design - disproportionally targets latino/black men, it is somehow less valid as a critique? please.

anti-wokes are the only thing more tiresome than the wokes.

You read one excerpt about one piece of code and you were able to infer what the other 25 chapters were about?

Despite all the recent melodrama in the cryptocurrency markets and environs, I think Satoshi's implementation of a decentralized blockchain will be considered historically important.

They must have opened the libraries with Unix line endings in Windows.

It's the title of the book, too. *You Are Not Expected to Understand This: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World." I agree, it's a terrible title, it sounds like a technical book about a single 26-line snippet of code, but it's actually a series of 26 unrelated essays about people & their societal impact, and it's not a technical book at all.

TBH though, it sounds like an interesting book, and probably a pretty small time investment. I might buy it despite its dreadful title.

Yes, but the programs were written in APL.

I strongly miss such magazines. Yes, the web is a great resource for anything you want to know. But there is a curated completeness to such magazines, which I wish current websites had. Even popular magazines (I don't wish to name them) are often just glam. The only magazine/journal I know currently with introductory technical articles worth reading is IEEE Spectrum.