How Tech Companies Can Solve Their Diversity Problem

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Pinterest is an app whose users are 85% women, and whose engineers are 88% men. Apparently this second part is a problem, so they want to hire more women and ethnic minorities.

Quite frankly, I’m amazed that an app for housewives and mommy bloggers could hire any men at all. If Pinterest has trouble hiring women, the other tech companies are hosed.

The solution isn’t to increase recruiting. Silicon Valley can barely house its residents as it is. Tech employees are living in stacked shipping containers stuffed into warehouses for lack of affordable housing, FFS.

I have a better idea. Tech companies should just fire half their white and Asian males to increase diversity. Gender ratio solved. Plus firing keeps the remaining staff on their toes. They’ll work harder knowing they might be next on the chopping block.

Look, we all know that engineers don’t work that hard*. Facebook is built like a small-scale model of Disneyland and Google is a large-scale replica of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. These aren’t productivity hacks, people. Pinterest can’t possibly need a team of 89 engineers to build an app for middle-aged women to save food pictures.

Facebook's campus arcade
Facebook’s campus arcade

And don’t worry about the fired employees. There are enough companies in the area looking to hire ANYONE, let alone women and ethnic minorities. Those ex-employees will end up at Slack or some YC-backed drone company. And everyone will live diversely ever after.

*Not at my company, of course. Everyone in my office works super duper hard. Nevermind the fact that this blog post materialized in the middle of the work day.

See Also:
Pinterest is the first Silicon Valley company to publicly set concrete goals for diversity –Fusion

Autonomous Weapons Don’t Kill People, People Kill People

The beer can contains a molotov cocktail
The beer can contains a molotov cocktail

The Future of Life Institute wrote an open letter pushing to ban autonomous weapons on the premise that autonomous weapons can be used for “assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations, and selectively killing a particular ethnic group.”

Major military powers already have ways of doing that. As they’ve demonstrated, over and over again.

Science people tend to exaggerate their impact on political situations to feel more important.

Look, military powers will find ways to destroy each other regardless of the technology at hand. Nuclear weapons didn’t magically enable us to kill 129,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I mean, just before that we killed 900,000 Japanese with old-fashioned fire bombs.

The letter points out that an autonomous-weapon arms race would make these weapons cheap and ubiquitous.

Do military powers conduct a cost-benefit analysis before committing genocide or targeted assassinations? I’ve never been in political power so I don’t know.

Yeah, we’d really like to exterminate the Pommies, but it’s a little expensive right now. If only those autonomous weapons were cheap and ubiquitous!

Unfortunately, autonomous technology is already cheap and ubiquitous. For $500, you can buy a drone that follows you around with a camera. The technology behind a drone that chases you with a GoPro is no different from the technology behind a drone that chases you with an AK-47.

People who want to kill each other will find ways to kill each other. I don’t think autonomous weapons are a good use of our defense budget, but then again few things are. As for the open letter… well, in the words of my senior thesis advisor Dr. Nyström: “It’s like cave men passing around a petition against fire, or the wheel.”

The fire and the wheel are both technologies that have been used to kill a lot of people.

This post inspired by conversations with Dr. Mika Nyström.

IBM Watson is Your New Psychologist

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The IBM Watson API is my new favorite toy. It’s a suite of natural language processing and analytics tools that make my chatbots look like retarded Teddy Ruxpins.

Using Watson, I made my own personality test. I fed it the contents of my blog, and it returned some data about my personality traits. Dr. Elaine interprets my blog personality as follows:

eiaine

Here I feed it Marc Andreessen’s blog:
pmarca

Here I gave Dr. Elaine the contents of George’s email correspondence. The analysis does not make a lot of sense, probably because Watson has not learned to detect sarcasm:

george

Dr. Elaine also analyzes Twitter feeds, so here’s @StartupLJackson.

slj

And Donald Trump @realDonaldTrump.

trump

Not bad.

Now go play with it.

The World’s Greatest Troll

I had been thinking that any day now, Donald Trump will check himself into rehab and everything will all make sense. Nate Silver provides a better explanation: Donald Trump is the World’s Greatest Troll.

Trolls will do anything for attention. Trump is getting more media coverage now than any other candidate. As people share his outrageous statements, news articles get more page views, and journalists are prompted to write more articles about him.

We all know the number one rule of the internet is Don’t Feed the Trolls. But Trump is an expert media whore and it’s hard to resist. Hell, even I’m writing a blog post about him. Bleah.

If any good has come from all this, it’s that Trump’s disparaging comments about Senator John McCain inspired me to read McCain’s war memoir. The book describes McCain’s 5+ years in a Hanoi prison camp, having his bones shattered and broken and rebroken in daily beatings. After reading this I feel like I can’t complain about any injustice in my life ever again.

John McCain being welcomed by President Richard Nixon in 1973. (Us Navy)
John McCain being welcomed by President Richard Nixon in 1973. (Us Navy)

And by the way, the imprisonment isn’t what makes McCain a war hero. What made him a war hero was his refusal to betray the military Code of Conduct or disclose information during those five years of torture.

Thanks Donald!

mccain

See Also:
What Donald Trump was up to while John McCain was a prisoner of war –Washington Post

To Conserve Water, Stop Eating

Restaurants aren’t allowed to offer water to patrons anymore. Not in California, anyway. Drought and stuff. This regulation was passed back in March, but I only learned about it today because I never go to restaurants.

My coworkers were at a restaurant celebrating the departure of an employee*. I asked why the state would enforce such a stupid rule. I mean, I waste way more washing my hair. A glass of water is nothing.

This is how much water it takes to make your food.

Screen Shot 2015-07-24 at 12.48.05 AM

That is sort of what I had for lunch. So I wasted 265 gallons of water while the restaurant saved 8 ounces.

My boss said that’s not the point. The point is to get the water conservation message out by setting an example.

Point taken. I’m not going to stop washing my hair, but I’ll stop flushing the toilet 🙂 Conserve water, kids!

This is a Cool Tool: How much water is used to produce your food? –LA Times

*Wait, that didn’t come out right. Is a farewell supposed to be a celebration? Or is it more like a mourning, because our engineering team just shrank by a quarter? Is it a farewell if the departing employee doesn’t bother to show up? Hm.
Anyway, for those who like Bitcoin stuff, we’re hiring!