Fifteen years ago I read a lot of what danah boyd wrote. I enjoy her research themes, and still find them important in understanding the world of teens and tech. But I lost track of her work some time ago.

So I was pleased to come across her new home, and to read Protect Elders! Ban Television!!

The piece is a piercing reminder that:

• Our evidence generally shows that social media use is, at best, correlated with — rather than the cause of — problems children might have.
• Banning kids from social media is dumb and misguided, but looks good to voters because one is Taking Action on an Issue Of The Day.

There was something reassuring about the piece, that technology isn’t destroying the young, but also not-reassuring, because the problems have deeper causes that have everything to do with the wider state of the world. I’m not sure that I agree with one of the ideas presented, that the laws are based on removing children from political discourse, but I’m also not sure that I disagree either given the state of politics in the US right now. There’s a lot in the piece to unpack, and to think about, over weeks and months.

And, everyone notices the example they are set:

When I was spending lots of time with teenagers, one of the things that they always told me was that parents were the real addicts. They couldn’t let go of their phone (or Twitter or … ). I looked around and realized how true this is. Go to a kids’ sports game or playground and you’ll see a bunch of parents staring into their devices.

Red neon signs with skulls are not typically charming. At the Brewdog bar in Edinburgh airport, however, I found this example. It is, I think, charmingly customised to its location. Further, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the only airport bar in the world with a decent alcohol-free beer on tap.

This is something I keep trying and failing to explain, so I am writing it down to hopefully create something that makes sense. Then I can refer people to it, rather than rambling away at them for a time and leaving them slightly bewildered.

A CPU stall is created when a process uses up all of its allocated CPU, and is put to sleep by the kernel, often for 10s of milliseconds.

Sometimes this isn’t noticeable, other times it is catastrophic. It depends on how latency critical the workload is. A few 10s of milliseconds on something that takes a few minutes, like a background batch job, doesn’t matter much, but if it’s a database operation on a critical user-facing request path, perhaps it’ll be an issue. It’s one reason monitoring tail latencies is important — this kind of thing doesn’t show up in averages, only in tails.

Anyway, now we know what the problems are: what causes it? And how can we prevent it?

My daughter will be growing up as AI imbues itself into society at a deep level. The first place she will feel this is at school. The Homework Apocalypse talks about some of the issues that we are going to start to see over the next couple of years, as students and teachers adapt to the availability of tools like ChatGPT.

Students will cheat with AI. But they also will begin to integrate AI into everything they do, raising new questions for educators. Students will want to understand why they are doing assignments that seem obsolete thanks to AI. They will want to use AI as a learning companion, a co-author, or a teammate. They will want to accomplish more than they did before, and also want answers about what AI means for their future learning paths. Schools will need to decide how to respond to this flood of questions.

I’m a bit of a Luddite with respect to AI tools that are designed to help with my work, like GitHub Copilot. I’m starting to think that I should use them, to enable me to better understand the challenges and opportunities she is going to have to deal with in the coming years.

Several years ago, I wrote that I was not a fan of technical debt as a metaphor. I’m still not convinced. But recently, someone I respect wrote about tech debt in Tech debt metaphor maximalism:

I really like the “tech debt” metaphor. A lot of people don’t, but I think that’s because they either don’t extend the metaphor far enough, or because they don’t properly understand financial debt.

So let’s talk about debt!

There’s a lot more detail than I ever thought about, and certainly far more than I wrote down. After one read through, all I know is that I am not sure I was right.

I’m going to add a reminder to read the piece again in a few months, to see what I think after my hindbrain has stewed on it for a while.