Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

Maybe you’ve heard: every font is free! Since fonts aren’t subject to copyright, you can legally ‘pirate’ them if you use a specific loophole!

...except that’s not really true. I’ve seen this claim repeated quite a lot recently, and it’s missing some pretty important nuance.

A thread 🧵

North Americans should romanticize our squirrels more. They're at least as cool as a kookaburra if you pay them enough attention. Why don't we use their calls in our media?

HOT AUTISTIC ADULTS IN YOUR AREA ARE UNSURE IF YOU WANT TO TALK TO THEM

CLICK HERE TO ESTABLISH CLEAR INTENT

How the billionaire hoarders prevent everyone else from having nice things.

Post World War II, a single income of a factory worker could support a family, own a house, drive two cars, and afforded vacations. Today most families with two parents working full time can barely make ends meet.

201 million Americans (almost 60%) live in poverty where a minimal quality of life is out of reach. Compare this to 5% in Italy and 11% in Japan.

https://newrepublic.com/article/195862/billionaire-hoarders-wealthy-biggest-threat

#oligarchs

yesterday I was talking about my brief stint at Google back in 2008 and how dystopic that was—basically a real-life version of the Alpha Complex from the dark comedy RPG "Paranoia", where being unhappy or being born a mutant or having a task that's impossible to fulfil are considered to be a criticism of the dictatorial Computer, and criticising the computer is a crime of treason. ("Happiness is mandatory. Are you happy, citizen?")

and I was talking of how Google was my first taste of the surveillance society that's the new normal now. see, all of us at Google Brazil dreamed of the job as a way of getting a ticket to the Global North—it didn't help that Google severely underpaid Latinoamerican employees, even for local standards (with the assurance that if you "excel" you'll be given "shares" eventually and partake of some crumbs of capitalism; even get a visa to the First World).

now I was always a weeb and back then I was already like, intermediate to advanced in Japanese. so of course my dream was to move to Japan. but when I talked to it with my boss about it—a disembodied face from Phoenix I would talk to on a giant monitor; this too felt very new, high-tech, and dystopic back then—he dismissed it out of hand, saying my Japanese wasn't fluent and that would make me a poor fit.

I talked to my colleagues about it and someone said wtf no, most international engineers brought to Shibuya cannot even say konnichiwa, if anything your level of Japanese and cultural experience in the diaspora makes you perfect for it. we had a Brazilian friend in Google Sweden and my mates said I should talk to her about contacting Shibuya directly regarding relocation.

readers from before notice that this was already *after* the "backstabbing" episode, when I became persona non grata to my boss because I voiced my concerns over recruiter promises not being real. I wrote that in the internal Blogspot system, and afterwards I got a number of emails from employees thanking me for talking about it, and praising me my bravery.

now my actions back then will feel very natural for people who only ever met me post-transition, as this badass nazi-punching anarchist with no filter, but you have to understand: back then I was a shy little nerd terrified of everything. I wasn't brave, I was incredibly, magnificently naïve. I was the only person in the world who believed the corporate kool-aid of Google, that it was some sort of new, dynamic academia where we didn't work in offices we worked in "campi", we were there to improve the world, at least I thought I was (interviewer: "what attracts you to Google?" me: "I agree with the Ten Principles of the company" interviewer: "the what now?" me: "the Ten Principles? Google's Principles? in the 'about us' page?" interviewer: "uuh, sure..."). It did not even *occur* to me that it was all a scam, that everyone else knew it was all a scam and the point was to get rich. in retrospect I should have read the undertones in early Paul Graham essays; I was a literary girl I'm good at undertones; but I read what I wanted to be true.

anyway so I got my scolding and marked myself as a troublemaker. and I was about to directly contradict my boss and look for a way into Japan behind his back. my colleagues *strongly* advised me to *never* mention any of this by email, and also not call from my desk. international calls were very expensive those days so I ended up calling Sweden from a phone in a little locker, between brooms and bottles of disinfectant, in the dark, after everyone was gone.

my friend from Sweden told me she had contacts in Tōkyō and she was sure they would want to relocate me there. a couple weeks after that, I was fired. (mid-economic crisis, in the 3rd world, with one 2-year-old kid and another about to be born.)

and it was *so* weird and surreal to be in that little locker room, afraid of every whisper, aware that every communication was being spied on. and when I tell this story to my now adult children, I struggle to convey how weird it was. I realise they never *experienced* existing with technology without it being the default that it's hostile to you and it's spying on you all the time. for them this has been the case *all of their lives*.

today, the concept of "spyware" has been obsoleted because every software is spyware. Google's "improving the world through search" was revealed to be about searching Gaza families to bomb, children and all; and "investing in progress" means bankrolling literal fascism. today, for us Latinx to even briefly step in the USA, not having spyware "social media" on always-on handheld devices is considered to be a mark of criminals. and my kids will never know a world that's not like this, but for me I saw this world being forged right there, deep in Mordor where the shadows lie.

Fabulousness from Rose Ann Prevec. ;)

"This breakthrough enables each pixel of an OLED display to simultaneously emit different sounds, essentially allowing the display to function as a multichannel speaker array"

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/05/250521125055.htm

uBlock Origin on Bluesky vs Mastodon

Why Bell Labs worked so well, and could innovate so much, while today’s innovation, in spite of the huge private funding, goes in hype-and-fizzle cycles that leave relatively little behind, is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot in the past years.

And I think that the author of this article has hit the nail on its head on most of the reasons - but he didn’t take the last step in identifying the root cause.

What Bell Labs achieved within a few decades is probably unprecedented in human history:

They employed folks like Nyquist and Shannon, who laid the foundations of modern information theory and electronic engineering while they were employees at Bell.
They discovered the first evidence of the black hole at the center of our galaxy in the 1930s while analyzing static noise on shortwave transmissions.
They developed in 1937 the first speech codec and the first speech synthesizer.
They developed the photovoltaic cell in the 1940, and the first solar cell in the 1950s.
They built the first transistor in 1947.
They built the first large-scale electronic computers (from Model I in 1939 to Model VI in 1949).
They employed Karnaugh in the 1950s, who worked on the Karnaugh maps that we still study in engineering while he was an employee at Bell.
They contributed in 1956 (together with AT&T and the British and Canadian telephone companies) to the first transatlantic communications cable.
They developed the first electronic musics program in 1957.
They employed Kernighan, Thompson and Ritchie, who created UNIX and the C programming language while they were Bell employees.

And then their rate of innovation suddenly fizzled out after the 1980s.

I often hear that Bell could do what they did because they had plenty of funding. But I don’t think that’s the main reason. The author rightly points out that Google, Microsoft and Apple have already made much more profit than Bell has ever seen in its entire history. Yet, despite being awash with money, none of them has been as impactful as Bell. Nowadays those companies don’t even innovate much besides providing you with a new version of Android, of Windows or the iPhone every now and then. And they jump on the next hype wagon (social media, AR/VR, Blockchain, AI…) just to deliver half-baked products that (especially in Google’s case) are abandoned as soon as the hype bubble bursts.

Let alone singlehandedly spear innovation that can revolutionize an entire industry, let alone make groundbreaking discoveries that engineers will still study a century later.

So what was Bell’s recipe that Google and Apple, despite having much more money and talented people, can’t replicate? And what killed that magic?

Well, first of all Bell and Kelly had an innate talent in spotting the “geekiest” among us. They would often recruit from pools of enthusiasts that had built their own home-made radio transmitters for fun, rather than recruiting from the top business schools, or among those who can solve some very abstract and very standardized HackerRank problems.

And they knew how to manage those people. According to Kelly’s golden rule:

How do you manage genius? You don’t

Bell specifically recruited people that had that strange urge of tinkering and solving big problems, they were given their lab and all the funding that they needed, and they could work in peace. Often it took years before Kelly asked them how their work was progressing.

Compare it to a Ph.D today who needs to struggle for funding, needs to produce papers that get accepted in conferences, regardless of their level of quality, and must spend much more time on paperwork than on actual research.

Or to an engineer in a big tech company that has to provide daily updates about their progress, has to survive the next round of layoffs, has to go through endless loops of compliance, permissions and corporate bureaucracy in order to get anything done, has his/her performance evaluated every 3 months, and doesn’t even have control on what gets shipped - that control has been taken away from engineers and given to PMs and MBA folks.

Compare that way of working with today’s backlogs, metrics, micromanaging and struggle for a dignified salary or a stable job.

We can’t have the new Nyquist, Shannon or Ritchie today simply because, in science and engineering, we’ve moved all the controls away from the passionate technical folks that care about the long-term impact of their work, and handed them to greedy business folks who only care about short-term returns for their investors.

So we ended up with a culture that feels like talent must be managed, even micromanaged, otherwise talented people will start slacking off and spending their days on TikTok.

But, as Kelly eloquently put it:

“What stops a gifted mind from just slacking off?” is the wrong question to ask. The right question is, “Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?”

Or, as Peter Higgs (the Higgs boson guy) put it:

It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964… Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think I would be regarded as productive enough.

Or, as Shannon himself put it:

I’ve always pursued my interests without much regard for final value or value to the world. I’ve spent lots of time on totally useless things.

So basically the most brilliant minds of the 20th century would be considered lazy slackers today and be put on a PIP because they don’t deliver enough code or write enough papers.

So the article is spot on in identifying why Bell could invent, within a few years, all it did, while Apple, despite having much more money, hasn’t really done anything new in the past decade. MBAs, deadlines, pseudo-objective metrics and short-termism killed scientific inquiry and engineering ingenuity.

But the author doesn’t go one step further and identify the root cause.

It correctly spots the business and organizational issues that exist in managing talent today, but it doesn’t go deeper into their economic roots.

You see, MBA graduates and CEOs didn’t destroy the spirit of scientific and engineering ingenuity spurred by the Industrial Revolution just because they’re evil. I mean, there’s a higher chance for someone who has climbed the whole corporate ladder to be a sociopath than there is for someone you randomly picked from the street, but not to the point where they would willingly tame and screw the most talented minds of their generation, and squeeze them into a Jira board or a metric that looks at the number of commits, out of pure sadism.

They did so because the financial incentives have drastically changed from the times of Bells Labs.

The Bells Labs were basically publicly funded. AT&T operated the telephone lines in the US, paid by everyone who used telephones, and they reinvested a 1% tax into R&D (the Bells Labs). And nobody expected a single dime of profits to come out from the Bells Labs.

And btw, R&D was real R&D with no strings attached at the time. In theory also my employer does R&D today - but we just ended up treating whatever narrow iterative feature requested by whatever random PM as “research and development”. It’s not like scientists have much freedom in what to research or engineers have much freedom in what to develop. R&D programs have mostly just become a way for large businesses to squeeze more money out of taxpayers, put it in their pockets, and not feel any moral obligation of contributing to anything other than their shareholders’ accounts.

And at the time the idea of people paying taxes, so talented people in their country could focus on inventing the computer, the Internet or putting someone on the moon, without the pressure of VCs asking for their dividends, or PMs asking them to migrate everything to another cloud infrastructure by next week, or to a new shiny framework that they’ve just heard in a conference, wasn’t seen as a socialist dystopia. It was before the neoliberal sociopaths of the Chicago school screwed up everything.

The America that invested into the Bell Labs and into the Apollo project was very different from today’s America. It knew that it was the government’s job to foster innovation and to create an environment where genuinely smart people could do great things without external pressure. That America hadn’t yet been infected by the perverse idea that the government should always be small, that it’s not the government’s job to make people’s lives better, and that it was the job of privately funded ventures seeking short-term returns to fund moonshots.

And, since nobody was expecting a dime back from Bell, nobody would put deadlines on talented people, nobody hired unqualified and arrogant business specialists to micromanage them, nobody would put them on a performance improvement plan if they were often late at their daily standups or didn’t commit enough lines of code in the previous quarter. So they had time to focus on how to solve some of the most complex problems that humans ever faced.

So they could invent the transistor, the programming infrastructure still used to this day, and lay the foundations of what engineers study today.

The most brilliant minds of our age don’t have this luxury. So they can’t revolutionarize our world like those in the 20th century did.

Somebody else sets their priorities and their deadlines.

They can’t think of moonshots because they’re forced to work on the next mobile app riding the next wave of hype that their investors want to release to market so they can get even richer.

They have to worry about companies trying to replace them with AI bots and business managers wanting to release products themselves by “vibe coding”, just to ask those smart people to clean up the mess they’ve done, just like babies who are incapable of cleaning up the food they’ve spilled on the floor.

They are seen as a cost, not as a resource. Kelly used to call himself a “patron” rather than a “manager”, and he trusted his employees, while today’s managers and investors mostly see their engineering resources as squishy blobs of flesh standing between their ambitious ideas and their money, and they can’t wait to replace them with robots that just fullfill all of their wishes.

Tech has become all about monetization nowadays and nothing about ingenuity.

As a result, there are way more brilliant minds (and way more money) in our age going towards solving the “convince people to click on this link” problem rather than solving the climate problem, for example.

Then of course they can’t invent the next transistor, or bring the next breakthrough in information theory.

Then of course all you get, after one year of the most brilliant minds of our generation working at the richest company that has ever existed, is just a new iPhone.

https://links.fabiomanganiello.com/share/683ee70d0409e6.66273547