My company has always been all remote, and a number of other small tech companies that I've worked for have also been all remote. So watch that "everyone" you're swinging like a brickbat.

I've been working in tech remotely since 1989. Sure, it cut me out of a lot of gigs, but I've seldom had trouble finding interesting work to do.

Yup, except the "coffee" replaces a multi-step process and the "water" is a potentially highly infectious, deadly agent that you'd rather not let loose in your lab multiple times if you can keep it in isolation through the whole process.

These machines are designed to run in clinical and hospital settings without the need for highly trained personnel or intensive sanitation procedures. You don't want to risk sample cross-contamination or letting these genii out of their bottles to infect hospital staff.

I bought myself an iPad Pro with a keyboard and Apple pencil thinking that I'd use it for remote whiteboarding and sketching software designs.

Within a few weeks, I was doing almost all of my work as a lead engineer on the iPad while my laptop idled. Occasionally, it's more convenient to use my laptop, chiefly when I need docker or the screen real estate of my external monitor. Park the iPad Pro alongside, and I've got even more screen real estate.

iPadOS has started to address many of the limitations that made it difficult to do real work on the iPad, making multi-tasking and inter-app communication a lot easier. Most of what I need to work is on the web, easily accessible from the iPad. The laptop makes a decent docker server, which I can control from the iPad.

The haptic interface on the iPad plus the Apple pencil makes the iPad a lot easier to navigate than the touchpad on the laptop or the mouse on my iMac. You're right there, with access to all the power use gestures and the precision and responsiveness of the Apple pencil. Once I got the hang of it, it was faster and simpler to do almost everything on the iPad than on my laptop. When I traveled for work, the laptop stayed home.

The Apple pencil is an amazing piece of technology wrapped in a simple, intuitive package. It changed the way I interacted with my device immediately. There's almost no learning curve. The Apple pencil behaves like the real thing.

After a month or so of iPad Pro usage, I thought "this is the future of computing. No one is going to try this and want to go back to the clunkiness of a touchpad on a laptop."

We're currently in the valley between "humans are definitely better than autonomous vehicles in every use case" and "autonomous vehicles are definitely better than humans in every use case."

What gets us out of this valley is time and a whole lot of data. Absent data from autonomous vehicles for the whole gamut of road conditions and use cases, any assertion about accident records is mere speculation.

Before we have that data, we're gambling that promoters of autonomous vehicles can cash the checks they've written with their mouths.

I homeschooled four kids, but I only really taught one of them (who is severely dyslexic) how to read. The others learned to read because we read to them a lot, had interesting and engaging books around, and were available to answer their questions. They all figured it out and were reading at a junior high level by age 6 or 7. Those three didn't need formal reading training at all, let alone the slog through phonics. They learned to read in much the same way they learned to talk.

The severely dyslexic child needed a thorough grounding in phonics, for sure. She also needed ear training and practice sequencing sounds, so piano lessons and singing in a choir were also an important part of her reading training. She also benefitted from the study of Greek and Latin roots so she could decompose the complicated scientific words that she loved best. (She's a geneticist.) We tried a lot of different things (including different phonics programs), tossed the ones that didn't work, and kept on with the ones that were helpful.

The nightly family read-aloud was important for all of them, as was the ability to bring a stack of books to an already-reading family member and read them together.

He was a big proponent of the War on Drugs.

There was research way way back that showed that green-on-black and amber-on-black were easier on the eyes than white-on-black or black-on-white. I like green-on-black better because I'm partial to green, but I have to grudgingly admit that amber-on-black might be a little easier to read.

There's a continuum from human germ cells (sperm and ovum), to a baby who can survive outside the womb. A blastocyst is different from an embryo is different from a fetus. Where do you want to draw the line? Some people want to draw it back at the level of sperm, and say that male masturbation is essentially murder. Others draw it at birth itself.

If you want to criminalize the removal of a blastocyst or an embryo, then you might as well criminalize all non-reproductive uses of semen. Biologically, blastocysts and embryos are much closer to germ cells than they are to a living, breathing baby.

Having had children and miscarriages myself, the idea of abortion nauseates me, but I am also aware that pregnancy is too heavy a burden to be borne unconsenting.

I have supported friends who discovered that their much-wanted children had defects incompatible with life. People in such a terrible situation need all their medical options on the table, including late termination. If you discover your child has anencephaly or Potter's syndrome and that there's nothing ahead for them outside the womb except pain and death, you don't need anyone telling you what to do. You need compassion so that you can make the best decision for your family, including a late termination if that seems least awful for all involved.

The state should keep its snout out of our private lives, and there is no aspect of our lives more private than reproductive health care.

We should own our personal data, too. Using it without our consent violates our inherent intellectual property rights in ourselves.

Roe Vs Wade wasn't a 4th amendment case; it was a 9th amendment case. The right to privacy is fundamental, and one that stretches back to the common law the underlies the Constitution. Reproductive and medical decisions are fundamental to human beings, and the state has no business inserting itself in the process. The Roe vs Wade decision protects a lot more than a woman's right to make reproductive choices; it also protects our rights to make other family and medical decisions.

You parked your car in my garage, where posted signs clearly say that all car parts become the property of the garage owner and can be disposed of as I see fit. By parking here, you agreed to my business practices and to foot the bill for any hauling services required to get the bits I don't want off my property.

Clear as day, right there in 2-point font in a poorly lit supply closet behind the ducts. You owe me $1249.73 for hauling away the unusable portions of your Tesla.

Facebook presented themselves as an advertising company, not a personal data vendor. It was supposed to be tv -- you get content and engagement in return for viewing ads. Still not a great deal, but a far better one than what they actually rolled out.

Yeah, despite our fancy college degrees, we don't know enough actual technical words to describe what we're doing logically. Our only possible option is to resort to name-calling and put-downs.

Like 5-year-olds.

In a professional workplace, people focus on technical issues and try to solve technical problems using reason, logic, and common sense. They look at how the code functions and address issues with details that allow other human beings to see what the issues are and choose good solutions. They address disagreements with logic, diagnostics, and test suites. They don't engage in verbal pissing contests. They don't threaten or belittle co-workers; they keep their comments about the code rather than personalities.

But fuck all this shit. It's a whole fucking lot more fun to just let the fuck flag fly than it is to fucking talk about what's fucking things up and why to other fucking engineers.

Did your CS degree cover locating, interviewing, documenting, and protecting sources? Did it teach you how to get into and out of a war zone safely and do effective coverage while you're there? Did it teach you how to investigate a situation that smells funny? Did it teach you how to cover your tracks and avoid government and corporate censorship?

Let's turn that around and see what that disrespect feels like pointed at us:

"Why team with programmers? Programmers don't know anything, can't do anything, and don't bring anything useful to the table. In fact, if anything, they taint your work and your message with their biases and ideologies. Programmers used to be a necessary evil as gatekeepers to a costly, limited bandwidth distribution medium (computers), but that function has been made obsolete. And programmers work for for-profit corporations that turn your knowledge into their profits. They get something out of teaming with you, you don't get anything out of teaming with them."

Oh, okay, that' s pretty much how social media companies operate.

There are all kinds of journalists out there, and they have their own areas of expertise of which programmers know nothing. Many of them put themselves out there in war zones, disaster areas, and other dangerous situations. They poke under rocks with their sticks and tell us what they find.

Journalists have always been hated by people who don't want us to see what's under those rocks. And sure, there is a lot of sloppy journalism, and editors have always shaped their reports to fit the narrative they want to tell.

If you hate and revile the press indiscriminately, though, you run the danger of destroying one of the pillars of liberty.

The First Amendment to the US Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech." It says nothing about private companies like Facebook, Twitter, or Google making policies about the type of speech they want to allow on their platforms. "Free speech" does belong in quotes when what people mean is that a private concern declines to provide a platform for a particular type of speech. It's like crying censorship because a bookstore declines to carry a particular magazine. You might not like the policies of the bookstore or the social media company, but they're not abridging anyone's rights by refusing to spread certain content.

Prior to starting Slack, Stewart Butterfield worked on a social-engineering-project-masquerading-as-a-game called Glitch. He was trying to figure out how to encourage pro-social behavior among players, and he did a pretty good job of it. Ellen Pao thinks that social networking companies should do something similar -- figure out how to promote community-building behavior on their platforms. Mailing list and forum moderators have often tried to encourage practices that build good online communities. Why shouldn't they? If you're going to devote your time and energy into an online community, you want it to be one you're going to enjoy.

Online platforms are never going to be value neutral. Like it or not, social media platforms encourage some forms of behavior and discourage others. Social engineering is very much part of the puzzle.

Most of the web runs on layers of open source software. If Linus' Law was more than an open source marketing point, the web would be a poster child for secure computing.

Even back in the 90s, open source software wasn't more robust or secure than proprietary software, and that continues to be the case despite numerous assertions to the contrary. Sure, there are more eyeballs on the code, but few delve deeply into it, and fewer still delve deeply into it looking for flaws or vulnerabilities. A lot of open source software is built on a shoestring. There aren't the resources to get the features the code needs, let alone the programmer hours to make it bulletproof.

Moreover, open source software is as vulnerable to players with evil intent as any other kind of software. If a programmer wants to introduce a backdoor, all they need to do is make themselves an expert on some ugly low-level area that no one else wants to get into. The vulnerabilities are hidden by the complexity of the code and the time cost of digging through the ugly code. Bonus points if the programmer is backed by government or industry.

What would you do if you were the NSA? What would you do if you were a private entity that wanted access to all the data everywhere? Do you think they're not actively doing all that and more?

Now add the fact that different layers and components are built by different groups who likely don't coordinate with one another. If one layer or component is well-built, well-audited, and secure, bad players can just move their mischief elsewhere.

The commentator's rant is perfectly self-referential: an apt example of everything he's complaining about. I can't decide if he's a complete genius or utterly clueless, but in either event, his rant is a work of art.

Also, can we just stop patting tech people on the back for being brilliant? There's little evidence of that these days. A lot of tech people now are highly trained performers who are skilled at the one thing they actually do, but maybe not overall the brightest crayons in the box. Tech hiring practices emphasize jumping through hoops to the exclusion of creativity or the ability to think about problems from multiple angles.