Herr Bischoff

Reading List

Articles I have found at one time or another to be notable in any way, collected into one place. No one likes hunting for them around a website with blog posts. New additions are added to the top. There are also links to archival versions, in case the original disappears. Sometimes the original already did vanish.

The Tyranny of the Marginal User

How is it possible that software gets worse, not better, over time, despite billions of dollars of R&D and rapid progress in tooling and AI? What evil force, more powerful than Innovation and Progress, is at work here?

Elon Musk's Shadow Rule

The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk-taking, brinkmanship, and caprice. Current and former officials from NASA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk’s influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official.

A Discussion With William Friedkin: 'I See a Diminishing of All Art Forms These Days'

I see a diminishing of all the art forms. Are you gonna tell me that painting has moved upward since the times of Rembrandt and Vermeer, and the 17th century? Has painting advanced today in terms of craftsmanship and interest of the viewing public? I really don’t think so. I just don’t think so. And the same thing is with cinema, and the same thing is with music. Who writes music like Beethoven? Or Bartok? Who plays jazz like Miles Davis? Who is as good of a popular music singer as Frank Sinatra? And when I give you these honest answers about my feelings about art, I sound like somebody who’s stuck in the past. But I’m really not, I am looking to be inspired by the work of today. I don’t see it in a museum, I don’t hear it in a concert hall, and I certainly don’t see it in cinema.

The Machines We Have Now Are Not Conscious

So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics.

RIP Metaverse

The fact that Mark Zuckerberg has clearly stepped away from the Metaverse is a damning indictment of everyone who followed him, and anyone who still considers him a visionary tech leader. It should also be the cause for some serious reflection among the venture-capital community, which recklessly followed Zuckerberg into blowing billions of dollars on a hype cycle founded on the flimsiest possible press-release language. In a just world, Mark Zuckerberg should be fired as CEO of Meta (in the real world, this is actually impossible).

Tiktok's Enshittification

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

The Beggar Barons

In the late 1800s John D. Rockefeller devised an ingenious plan for Standard Oil. He had Standard Oil open gas stations in towns with competition, and Standard Oil would sell its products at a significant loss. This was fine for Rockefeller because he was worth billions of dollars, so Standard Oil could easily eat the losses. These lower prices would bankrupt the local competitors because they couldn’t lower their prices and survive. After all of the competition was wiped out Standard Oil would buy up the dead competitors, turn them into Standard Oil stations, and then raise the prices far beyond the real market price because Standard Oil now had a monopoly in that area.

The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-Computing

When you read histories of technology, whether of successes or failures, you sense the yearning of people who want to get back into those rooms for a minute, back to solving the old problems. How should a window open? How should the mouse look? What will people want to do, when we give them these machines? Who wouldn’t want to go back 20 years—to drive again into the office, to sit before the whiteboard in a beanbag chair, in a place of warmth and clarity, and give it another try?

You Are Not a Machine. You Are Not Alone.

We demand too much of ourselves as web professionals. We lie to one another, all living in a consensual delusion we build together. We talk about digital being our passion. We tell each other how great our jobs are. We work every hour in the day either in the hopes of getting bought by Google, or because we have convinced ourselves we enjoy it. Maybe we do and maybe we will be bought by Google, but is it healthy? I can tell you from experience it is not.

Valeria Lukyanova, the Human Barbie Doll

Valeria’s pointy talons have meanwhile been stripped into fuzzy half-transparency; I can see the outline of the real nail, shorter and darker, under the acrylic. She pulls her cashmere sweater’s sleeve farther up, baring an elbow. It is dry and flaky, a flaw that, for some reason, imbues me with joy. This is the first and last moment of our brief acquaintance when she looks genuinely beautiful. Then she smiles the studied Barbie smile, and it’s gone.

Give It Five Minutes

There’s also a difference between asking questions and pushing back. Pushing back means you already think you know. Asking questions means you want to know. Ask more questions.

Eternal Copyright: A Modest Proposal

Imagine you’re a new parent at 30 years old and you’ve just published a bestselling new novel. Under the current system, if you lived to 70 years old and your descendants all had children at the age of 30, the copyright in your book – and thus the proceeds – would provide for your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren.

Beware Corporate Psychopaths – They Are Still Occupying Positions of Power

He then makes an astonishing confession: “At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles.”

Don't Send That Email. Pick Up the Phone!

Email and social networking modes of communications have created a generation of casually convenient new connections, and even helped us deepen existing relationships, but they can rarely replace the real world. As digital communication accelerates the pace at which people form and broaden relationships, it is also decreasing the rate at which people are willing to resolve issues professionally and directly in-person.

Thirteen Observations Made by Lemony Snicket While Watching Occupy Wall Street From a Discreet Distance

99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree.

What Military Shooters Leave Out

Black Ops never once portrayed the Vietnamese as living, breathing people. In the storied history of the Call of Duty franchise, or in the Battlefield or Medal of Honor franchise for that matter, never once have we seen the opposition as people. We shoot them as people, they stumble and roll across pavement as people, yet their humanity is categorically absent from our encounters with them. The opposing forces in video games are always hyper-hostile, dark-skinned drones that shoot without question and answer to some ridiculous ideal that we, the heroes, must silence. War isn’t that way, though. And it shouldn’t be portrayed that way.

Why I'm Not on Facebook and Why You Shouldn't Be Either

I gave up on Facebook the day it kicked me off for using a fake name. I can’t remember now if it was 2006 or 2007, but I do remember a Facebook support staff member asking me via email to verify that I was actually named “Snuffles Caulfield.” I couldn’t, and after briefly considering some mock letterhead, I thought, Screw this stupid thing, and that was that.

Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama Bin Laden's Death

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

Master of Play

When Shigeru Miyamoto was a child, he didn’t really have any toys, so he made his own, out of wood and string. He put on performances with homemade puppets and made cartoon flip-books. He pretended that there were magical realms hidden behind the sliding shoji screens in his family’s little house. There was no television.

What Should a 4 Year Old Know?

It bothered me greatly to see these mothers responding to a worried mom by adding to her concern, with lists of all the things their children could do that hers couldn’t. We are such a competitive culture that even our preschoolers have become trophies and bragging rights. Childhood shouldn’t be a race.

Stephen Hawking: How to Build a Time Machine

Time travel was once considered scientific heresy. I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank. But these days I’m not so cautious. In fact, I’m more like the people who built Stonehenge. I’m obsessed by time. If I had a time machine I’d visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens. Perhaps I’d even travel to the end of the universe to find out how our whole cosmic story ends.

Why America Needs to Start Educating Its Workforce Again

That was until the ’70s. IBM still provides good training, but try getting a job there today: unless you have just the right skills, you won’t even score an interview. New recruits don’t receive the year or so of training that was common; they get a few days of orientation, after which they’re expected to be productive. It’s the same at Microsoft, Google, Apple, and almost every tech company. Unless you have the alphabet soup of technologies on your resume, you’ll get nothing more than an auto-response to your job application. If you do get hired, it’s up to you to stay current or get booted out with the first dip in sales. American corporations consider their workforce to be disposable — like ball-point pens and cigarette lighters. Gone are the days when a company would train a factory worker to become a computer programmer or offer lifelong employment. It’s all about quarterly revenue and profits now.

Creator James Cameron on Terminator’s Origins, Arnold as Robot, Machine Wars

Casting Arnold Schwarzenegger as our Terminator, on the other hand, shouldn’t have worked. The guy is supposed to be an infiltration unit, and there’s no way you wouldn’t spot a Terminator in a crowd instantly if they all looked like Arnold. It made no sense whatsoever. But the beauty of movies is that they don’t have to be logical. They just have to have plausibility. If there’s a visceral, cinematic thing happening that the audience likes, they don’t care if it goes against what’s likely.

CYA Security

If someone left a backpack full of explosives in a crowded movie theater, or detonated a truck bomb in the middle of a tunnel, no one would demand to know why the police hadn’t noticed it beforehand. But if a weird device with blinking lights and wires turned out to be a bomb – what every movie bomb looks like – there would be inquiries and demands for resignations. It took the police two weeks to notice the Mooninite blinkies, but once they did, they overreacted because their jobs were at stake.