Weekend Reading
Writing worth reading - 11th/12th Jan 2025
Encryption backdoor debate 'done and dusted,' former White House tech advisor says by Jessica Lyons
“In December, CISA published formal guidance [PDF] on how to keep Chinese government spies off mobile devices, and "strongly urged" politicians and senior government officials — these are "highly targeted" individuals that are "likely to possess information of interest to these threat actors" — to ditch regular phone calls and messaging apps and instead use only end-to-end encrypted communications…”
I am rich and have no idea what to do with my life by Vinay Hiremath
“Then, as the company continued to skyrocket to new heights, I started to have growing expectations for myself, and others started to have growing expectations of me. When we went through our first round of layoffs, this company my ego was hitched to had suffered a massive blow, so I lost myself. This whole chapter of Loom has created a complex web of internalized insecurities I must now work hard to disentangle and free myself from.…”
Real peer review has never been tried by Saloni Dattani
“In the 1970s, Nature’s upcoming editor David Davies realized that – contrary to his expectations – the journal had a poor reputation outside Britain. American researchers he spoke to believed it had a British bias: that its reviewers lived in London or Cambridge and had ties to the scientists who sent in submissions. When he enforced peer review as a requirement and recruited new reviewers from other countries, it was to avoid conflicts of interest and establish Nature as a respectable journal worldwide…”
How I write by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“Now I have no problem with focus and precision: I do not want my vacuum cleaner user manual to be a stream of consciousness. I had written a specialized treatise in mathematical finance, and was embarking on a career writing scientific papers, which must be as narrow as possible. But literature should not have explicit boundaries: the confines of the subject are internal and may remain elusive and hard to express in words. Nor should literature have institutions formalizing and commoditizing things. And I wanted to do my own version of what is called literature. Literature must be idiosyncratic…”
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