Four short links: 23 August 2016
Real-Time Dystopia, Inside the Hololens, Future Excitement, and Useful Ebook Lending
- The Age of the Never-Ending Performance Review (Bloomberg) — In theory, frequent substantive feedback ought to be less fraught and more helpful than annual reviews and ratings. But coupled with other tools that enable employers to keep an ever-closer watch on how workers spend every second of their days, it’s easy to see how some workplaces could turn pretty dystopian pretty quickly.
- Inside the Hololens (The Register) — The secretive HPU is a custom-designed TSMC-fabricated 28nm coprocessor that has 24 Tensilica DSP cores. It has about 65 million logic gates, 8MB of SRAM, and a layer of 1GB of low-power DDR3 RAM on top, all in a 12mm-by-12mm BGA package. We understand it can perform a trillion calculations a second. So…not an Arduino, then?
- Eleven Reasons to be Excited about the Future of Technology (Chris Dixon) — an investor’s take. I’m excited about the future of technology because there’s been a multi-country explosion in awareness of, and action around, the unjust treatment of women and minorities. And a lot of that that explosion of awareness happened via tech designed to let white boys in San Francisco chitchat (while, admittedly, enabling a tsunami of trolling assholes). Who knows, maybe VR/AR will accidentally end sex-trafficking.
- How NYPL Got Useful Ebook Lending — presentation about the tech and strategy required to actually make a useful ebook lending service. (via Cory Doctorow)
