Four short links: 18 March 2019
Information Abundance, Meritocracy Considered Harmful, Tracking, and Blockchain Basics
- What the Hell is Going On? — I’ll show how the shift from information scarcity to information abundance is transforming commerce, education, and politics. The structure of each industry was shaped by the information-scarce, mass media environment. First, we’ll focus on commerce. Education will be second. Then, we’ll zoom out for a short history of America since World War II. We’ll see how information scarcity creates authority and observe the effects of the internet on knowledge. Finally, we’ll return to politics and tie these threads together.
- Meritocracy (Fast Company) — in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations. This preference disappeared where meritocracy was not explicitly adopted as a value.
- Client-Side Instrumentation for Under $1/Month — open source JavaScript tracker, AWS Lambda collecting it, Cloudflare logs into S3, AWS Athena integrating. (via Simon Willison)
- Crypto Canon — A16Z recommended reading list to come up to speed in cryptocurrency/blockchain. Contains an awful lot of Medium posts.
