A Funkaoshi Production

Fascinating look at the lives of Internet moderators.

I love obsessive stationary shops.

My path to a career in software engineering should have been simple. I grew up in Silicon Valley, the child of two software engineers with computer science PhDs. I went to high school in Mountain View—the land of Google. Later, I went to college at Stanford University, where our university president was a computer scientist who had made a fortune in microprocessors. During the summers, I interned at Facebook and Google.

But even though I was completely immersed in tech culture, I had trouble envisioning a career in software engineering for myself. The issue wasn’t a lack of interest or ability. It was that the sexism I encountered, both in school and in the workplace, had me convinced that I wasn’t just good enough to make it in tech.

The Globe’s headline is polite: the studies are about Indian immigrants.

None of the results are shocking.

A pretty funny and harsh look at start up life from Fake Steve Jobs.

“I could have told the taxi driver to speed up, because I was worried I was having a miscarriage, but to use the actual words at the time felt too final.”

Somehow a tweet I wrote out of anger months before our protest began has become a bigger media story than our protest’s many and profound accomplishments. The noise surrounding this tweet has also drowned out the discussion we sought to spark about the black lives of those who have died at the guns of police in this country. Journalists have incessantly harassed me, desperate to get a comment on the tweet. Where were they during the entire two weeks of #BLMTOtentcity? The media is part and parcel of how anti-black racism works. Too often black people are ignored or vilified when we speak the truth about our condition.

Yusra Khogali writes about how people hate being called racist more than they hate actual racism.

The only thing we truly have in common is that we write and speak candidly about race. Desmond is a progressive activist who spent years doing anti-poverty work. I’m a financial professional who made a living advising the wealthy. In a just world, the two of us should be ideological enemies. But we arrived at our leftist credentials by way of our blackness. For the most part, that’s all the space we’re allotted to write and speak on.

“Which hardware will Google choose to intentionally brick next?”

Over a year ago, an anonymous source contacted the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and submitted encrypted internal documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that sells anonymous offshore companies around the world. These shell companies enable their owners to cover up their business dealings, no matter how shady.

In the months that followed, the number of documents continued to grow far beyond the original leak. Ultimately, SZ acquired about 2.6 terabytes of data, making the leak the biggest that journalists had ever worked with. The source wanted neither financial compensation nor anything else in return, apart from a few security measures.

The data provides rare insights into a world that can only exist in the shadows. It proves how a global industry led by major banks, legal firms, and asset management companies secretly manages the estates of the world’s rich and famous: from politicians, Fifa officials, fraudsters and drug smugglers, to celebrities and professional athletes.

This is a huge story.

My favourite plaintext to-do application. (Perhaps the only plaintext to-do application.)

Holy shit this film looks amazing.

If you’ve never worked in a kitchen, you may not know that immigrants from Sri Lanka are the backbone of Toronto restaurants. Twelve years ago, when I worked at Fresh, the lion’s share of prep was done by two guys, Mogan and Prapa. They worked a midnight shift, producing all of the vegetarian restaurant’s soups and sauces. As long-term employees, they were the only ones trusted with maintaining the flavour and consistency of key dishes, while the line cooks, Canadian kids in their early 20s who would only stay with the company a couple years, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers.

Tamils keeping Toronto fed.

To quote my friend Phil, “it must be tough, being so good you jam out the definitive version of one of your songs during a makeup session.”

Capsule’s Pride (Bikes) is a new mixtape of Akira-themed remixes. From Toronto, no less. Awesome.

At the Jian Ghomeshi trial, everything unfolded as it “should.” Prodigiously talented legal commandos for the defence reduced the prosecution’s case to a smouldering ruin.

Then, the judge – by current convention a mere observer of the carnage – stated what legal observers had been describing as obvious in his final ruling: The evidence did not meet the standard for criminal conviction. This meant the accused walked away, wearing the legally indisputable (but, for some, ill-fitting) cloak of innocence, and his accusers were left to somehow make sense of things on their own.

Is that the best approximation of justice we can aspire to?

A great article from Tim O’Reilly on the (poor, short sighted) choices businesses make to maximize share holder returns.