When Society Asks the Wrong Questions

The Supreme Court appears inclined to uphold a series of local ordinances that allows a small Oregon city to ban homeless people from sleeping or camping in public spaces. We demand that those struggling with drug addiction seek treatment, yet we fail to provide the necessary inpatient care facilities that can genuinely enable their recovery. We expect individuals suffering from mental health issues to obtain therapy, all while facing a chronic shortage of accessible mental health services. These expectations reflect a broader societal failure to support our most vulnerable populations, trapping them in a relentless cycle of poverty and marginalization.

We impose unrealistic expectations on people experiencing homelessness or those living in unstable conditions, demanding that they find employment and reintegrate into society. Yet, the stigma attached to homelessness is so profound that many employers wouldn't consider hiring someone they perceive as 'unclean' or living in a tent. This impossible paradox not only perpetuates homelessness but also reinforces the societal view that the burden of poverty is solely on the individual.

The dialogue around poverty and homelessness has become skewed by misguided questions. We debate whether individuals deserve the basic human dignity of having a place to sleep instead of questioning how we can structurally support them. This disgustingly misplaced focus diverts attention from actionable solutions that could help alleviate these societal issues.

I was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder at the age of ten, yet I consider myself fortunate to have had a supportive family and the resources to access quality care. If any one of these factors had been different, my life could have followed a drastically different trajectory. I could have become merely another statistic rather than a successful professional leading a comfortable life.

The broader truth is, many of us are just one illness or personal crisis away from a precipitous fall through society's cracks. Our tendency to view ourselves as fundamentally different from those who are homeless or facing severe mental health challenges is a convenient illusion. It allows us to distance ourselves from confronting the uncomfortable reality that the line separating us from them is perilously thin. We are lying to ourselves.

Our approach to dealing with issues like addiction, mental illness, and homelessness needs a fundamental shift. Rather than ostracizing those who struggle, we must cultivate empathy, enact reform, and provide proactive support. Recognizing that these are not individual failures but societal issues is the first step toward building a more inclusive and supportive community. This is not merely about charity but redefining our societal values and ensuring dignity and support for all its members.

2023 - Nostalgia and the Future

A nostalgic moment forever gone. Downtown redevelopment has made this photograph no longer possible.

As each year comes to a close, I find myself swept away to a quiet place of introspection. Holidays are a joyous occasion, a tapestry of tradition and togetherness, but I have always found them to have a thread of melancholy woven into them. Nostalgia is a complex emotion. It transports us to an immutable and inaccessible past – a place we can never truly return to. These moments are slowly erased by fading memories, slipping through the fingers of time like grains of sand.

Holidays are a time when we hear the distant echoes of shared laughter from loved ones no longer with us, serving as a reminder of the transience and fragility of life. Holidays are a paradox of emotion, both a comforting escape to beautiful moments and a yearning for what once was – places we’ve left behind, friendships that have faded, and moments forever gone.

I’m learning to find the unique beauty that lies in the balance of embracing the past while savoring the present and planning to make the future shine brighter. It’s important to acknowledge that the holidays, with their unique blend of joy and nostalgia, offer us a chance to honor the traditions that ground us and create new memories that we will once again look back upon with a yearning sense of nostalgia.

Techno-Optimism

Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape and celebrity venture capitalist, recently published what he calls The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. The text advocates for Techno-Optimism, emphasizing the potential of technology and markets to bring about progress and abundance. Andreessen argues against pessimism and negative views of technology, challenging prevalent criticisms of the tech industry. He argues that it has been a driving force behind human progress and should be celebrated rather than feared.

This type of binary thinking is common among technologists, and the text is riddled with these false dilemmas — good or bad, growth or death. It reads like a privileged man attempting to coerce people into believing the very things that help increase his vast wealth. Reality is far more nuanced; technology should be celebrated and feared.

"We believe technology is a lever on the world – the way to make more with less."

"Technological innovation in a market system is inherently philanthropic."

While technology can be a great leveler, thus far, the vast majority of technological advancements and economic growth are disproportionately enjoyed by a small segment of the population, leading to increased inequality. This can exacerbate social divisions and leave many people behind. Andreessen touts the idea that most of the benefits go to society, ignoring the reality that we’ve witnessed the pugnacious startups of the last decade become some of the most powerful institutions in the world — often wielding more power than governments. While it is true that society as a whole often benefits from technological advances, that increase in power is not apportioned evenly.

Ultimately, the manifesto fails to make the case that the tech industry doesn't deserve the scrutiny it is facing. Andreessen is angry about the tech backlash over the last several years yet completely fails to address the fact that most of the damage is self-inflicted. Andreessen Horowitz was an early investor in Facebook, a company with the idealistic goal of “connect[ing] every person in the world.” Years later, it would be revealed that Facebook allowed digital consultant Cambridge Analytica to misuse the data of millions of users. Unfortunately, this was not an isolated incident, and Facebook has been a nearly bottomless pit of scandal over the last decade. Experience should emphasize the need for a more balanced and nuanced approach, taking into account the potential drawbacks and unintended consequences of unchecked technological progress.

Progress is a tightrope act — a deft balance between opposing forces of innovation and accountability that gently bend the future upward for all.

A Lesson of Death and Beauty

I have a love/hate relationship with vintage wine, but the very traits I have come to hate are also the source of my passion. These opposite yet interconnected forces, this frustrating duality, came into focus when a Sommelier recently opened one of my bottles of 1981 vintage Chateau Leoville Las Cases Bordeaux.

This bottle had come to the end of a long journey. Forty-two years ago, the vineyard's grapes were carefully tended to over an entire growing season, hand-picked, sorted, and processed. Some of the hands that picked the grapes likely belong to people who have since passed. These grapes were survivors of the deluge of rain that consumed the first half of October that year. The bottle was cellared for decades in a temperature-controlled environment by multiple owners. There were thousands of opportunities for a mishap, but there it was forty-two years later, sitting on the bar of my favorite local restaurant. Cutting the foil wrapper revealed a white powdery substance overtaking the liquid-soaked cork, an ominous foreshadowing of what would come. The wine exhibited an initial hint of mustiness with a short, funk-laced whisper of cassis. It was the taste of oenological expiration. At an unknown time within the last four decades, the wine had died.

My reaction was not disappointment or irritation but a general sense of loss. This wine was painstakingly crafted by a team of passionate people for the purpose of bringing joy, and it never had the chance to realize this goal. Instead, it served as an austere reminder of time's relentless flow, a poignant lesson not to squander our singular opportunity to bring a measure of joy to those around us, and a warning of the precious immediacy to life. Time is slowly consuming us all, and like this bottle of wine, we have but one chance to leave our mark.

Perhaps this is the very source of my passion for wine. Even many of our happiest moments are laced with a sense of melancholy because we know it can't last forever. The emotional power is drawn from this very duality because it's the contrast of one that provides vibrance for the other – light and shadow, life and death.

Open-Source Has a Problem

Would you work for free? What about for "exposure?" Of course, your answer may vary greatly depending on context. I'll gladly volunteer my time to do architectural photography for a local nonprofit group trying to get a building on the National Historic Register, but I would feel less generous if my employer asked me to design a new customer management system in my spare time. The difference, of course, is intent—the nonprofit group is doing something to benefit all community members, present and future, while my employer is trying to maximize profits. What happens when this dynamic presents itself in the open-source software community?

The core-js library is the most widely used JavaScript library, providing hundreds of polyfill modules to extend the functionality of the standard JavaScript library significantly. While you may not have heard of it, many of the largest technology-forward companies, including LinkedIn, Netflix, Apple, eBay, Spotify, and many others, use the library. This website uses core-js. Neither I nor any of the companies mentioned above paid for core-js—it's an open-source library available for download on GitHub. You may not realize that this library is actively primarily maintained by a single developer. What if I told you that this developer only makes $57 per month on this library, despite its use by Fortune 500 companies collectively worth billions?

So, What's Next?

Last week, an intriguing commit appeared in the core-js GitHub repository containing a markdown file named 2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md. Looking at the title, I expected a development roadmap for the following year. Instead, I was greeted with an open letter to the community expressing feelings of frustration and despair. Maintenance requirements for this library are growing, along with entitled demands for additional features. It's tempting to write this off as a single cranky and overworked developer until you realize this scenario has played itself out dozens of times over the years. In 2013, Marak Squires, developer of the 'colors' and 'faker' libraries, purposefully corrupted the libraries in protest of "support[ing] Fortune 500s (and other smaller sized companies) with my free work." There are countless examples of similar scandals, pointing to a systemic problem in the open source community. Companies don't blink an eye at the cost of most enterprise software. Even moderately sized companies often spend over one million dollars yearly for a single piece of software, yet never consider a modest contribution to a free software stack crucial to their success.

It's About Respect

Financial pressures aren't the only problem. Maintaining good open-source code is difficult. Maintainers must wade through mountains of pull requests (if they're lucky enough to have contributors) and review the code for quality. Rejected pull requests are often a source of friction among project contributors, but most pressure comes from users. Maintainers are placed under extraordinary pressure and routinely barraged with rude complaints from angry users and pointed questions from companies when bugs appear. As it turns out, providing software free of charge and without warranty doesn't prevent people from feeling entitled when something goes wrong.

Modern software is mindbogglingly complex. Every developer today stands atop the shoulders of developers that came before them; it's nearly impossible to develop a piece of software to modern expectations entirely from scratch. I might write several thousand lines of code for an application, but I may have imported dependencies and frameworks containing several tens of thousands of lines of code that I don't have the time (and may not even have the skill) to rewrite. Libraries like core-js are essential pieces of digital infrastructure, and finding solutions to these systemic issues is crucial to maintaining resilient software.

A Pilgrimage in Technology

There is a fleeting moment just before the sun sets and the light fades, where the gentle glow grants unusual clarity to familiar subjects, where shadows are long, offering contrast and refuge from continuous shape and form. I'm a profoundly introspective person in normal times, and at the conclusion of another year, I often find myself completely lost in contemplation. Perhaps it is because I am approaching 40 and having an early-onset midlife crisis, but my thoughts this year have revolved around how I ended up in a technology career. Why have I been so fascinated with technology from a very young age? Was it inevitable all along, despite the circuitous route I took to get there? Is my effort actually creating value?

A Spark of Curiosity

I was a profoundly curious child. In hindsight, I'm surprised my parents were able to cling to their sanity despite my relentless onslaught of questions. No mechanical or electronic device was safe from my insatiable curiosity as I carefully disassembled them (and often failed to reassemble them correctly) in attempt to determine how they worked. Naturally, I was drawn to the IBM Personal System/2 my parents brought home with equal force to a planet crossing a black hole's event horizon. I knew this device was unique after watching my father turn it on. Unlike modern electronic devices, the ritual was a fascinating delight for the senses—the buzz of the CRT as it warmed, the satisfying click of the oversized power switch, the whirr of the spinning hard drive, and the cacophony of mechanical nose emanating from the floppy drive captured my curiosity like nothing else did. Over time, I learned how to traverse the filesystem with the OS/2 command line and run programs. That PC helped me expand my vocabulary and showed me the joys of writing, but most importantly, it showed me that the gap between imagination and reality was so much smaller than I realized.

A Perfect World

The world is messy, and there are ambiguities around every corner—an infinite palette of gray shrouds every decision, which is a challenging realization for a perfectionist. Which permutation of decisions ultimately leads to the optimal result, and how is success measured? Viewing your choices through this excessively critical lens makes every undertaking feel like an accumulation of defeats, even if you could rationally judge the result as successful. To revere a perfect ideal is to indulge in fantasy, which inevitably leads to disappointment.

Technology sidesteps this problem by creating a universe of binary rules and infinitely precise methods of judging outcomes. It is a perfect world, a paradise of blind equality, where success is flawlessly equitable, and chance plays no role in the outcome. I will receive the same result from the same input whether I'm wealthy or poor, male or female, atheist or devout. It's a comforting place for a weary traveler seeking refuge from the unpredictability and perceived inequity of life.

A Gateway to Possibilities

I've recently been reminded of the transformative power of technology on a very personal level. It began years ago with a faint, muffled ring in my ears. It wouldn't go away but was so soft that it was easily consumed by even minor, omnipresent background noise. I didn't think much of it until recently when the ringing began overtaking normal conversation. As a lifelong lover of classical music, I could no longer appreciate the complex, undulating contrapuntal movement from which the immense power of each melody is drawn. Only in my memory did the music possess the beauty I knew it had.

Technology considered advanced only a few years ago has been miniaturized to the point that it can fit in a hearing aid small enough to tuck behind the ear. Microprocessors have become so powerful that the signal processing-induced latency is less than 0.5 milliseconds, facilitating the seamless mixing of enhanced sound from the hearing aid and the audible remnants of the natural sound. Fractal tones help obscure the constant, sanity-warping tinnitus associated with hearing loss, and machine learning algorithms constantly adjust output to detect and separate speech from ambient noise.

I've built programs ranging in complexity from a basic Java-based marine biology simulation in high school to implementing an end-to-end commercial loan origination process complete with automated, ML-based decisioning. Yet, three decades later, I still feel the same wonder of that small boy peering into a dim CRT monitor, realizing that technology is a gateway to actualizing the possibilities of the human mind.