Friday Links (Late Edition)

Monday, January 10, 2022

Like the week before Christmas, the week after Christmas was pretty quiet, too, so I decided to skip a week on the links post. And then I forgot to actually post at all. Whoops. Better late than never, right?

• Because cars are, like everything else, just computers now, the clocks in some Hondas are stuck in 2002 [sic].
• Bryan Lunduke has a couple of items, starting with one about laptops powered by AA batteries. But what I think is more interesting is his review of graphical user interfaces 1945–1980, i.e., the period before most of these sorts of reviews cover.

• Russ Allbery reviews Out of Office by Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Peterson. (I have not read the book.) The review is interesting enough, but it then led me to Allbery’s review of Cal Newport’s A World Without Email (which I also haven’t read) in which I found this summation interesting:

  Newport argues (with some evidence) that the drastic reduction in secretarial jobs, on the grounds that workers with computers can do the same work themselves, was a mistake. Even with new automation, this approach increased the range of tasks required in every other job. Not only was this a drain on the time of other workers, it caused more context switching, which made everyone less efficient and undermined work quality. He argues for reversing that trend: where the work cannot be automated, hire more support workers and more specialized workers in general, stop expecting everyone to be their own generalist admin, and empower support workers to create better systems rather than using the hyperactive hive mind model to answer requests.

  This is something I’ve low-key been advocating for quite a while, so naturally I’m in favor of anything that confirms it.