#tech-policy

Posts tagged #tech-policy

1. Experience

   I said no to an AI symptom chatbot in our patient app. Here is the one-pager I used

   A short one, because three people asked me about it after a meetup. In August our CEO came back from a conference wanting a chatbot in our patient app that answers "should I see a doctor about this?" questions. A competitor had one in a demo. The board liked it. I wrote a one-pager recommending we do not build it this year, and we did not. Here is the structure, in case it is useful. 1. What problem would it solve,…

   Elin SjöbergOct 15, 202615likes7comments

2. Article

   the EU Cyber Resilience Act is going to land on unpaid maintainers. here is why I am still not fully against it.

   this is opinion, not reporting, and I am one of the people the EU Cyber Resilience Act is about, so take it with that bias in mind. the CRA's intent is good and overdue: products with digital parts sold in the EU should not be insecure by default, should get security updates, and someone should be accountable when they ship a backdoor in a car. after XZ and Log4Shell, "the manufacturer is responsible for the…

   Karl LindqvistSep 29, 202630likes5comments

3. Article

   We moved our nightly jobs to the greenest hours of the grid. Here's what it saved (spoiler: less than you'd think, and that's the point)

   I'm a data analyst at a community energy co-op in Bristol. We're small: about 400 member households, a few solar roofs, a share in a wind turbine, and one Linux box in a rack in a shared data centre that runs all our nightly jobs (meter data imports, billing calcs, the dashboards members look at). People in this topic keep asking about carbon-aware scheduling, so here's an honest write-up of doing it for real,…

   Freya CollinsSep 9, 202641likes17comments

4. Article

   Raising a daughter in Hsinchu while the news talks about blockades

   I am a process integration engineer at a foundry in Hsinchu. I will not say which one and I will not say anything about work, customers or yields, please do not ask. I want to write about something else: what it is like to live here, in the middle of a topic that people far away discuss like a strategy game. The ships on TV My daughter is 7. During the large drills, the news shows maps with red arrows around our…

   C.M. Huang 黃志明Aug 14, 202646likes15comments

5. Article

   Runway math for a 12 person Berlin startup: '27 months' is a lie we tell ourselves

   Every founder I know says "we have two years of runway". Honestly, most of them are counting wrong. We were. Here is our real math, slightly rounded, embarrassing parts included 😅 The naive version Bank: €2.1M (seed, closed last year) Monthly costs: about €115k Revenue: €38k MRR Net burn: €77k a month Runway: 2.1M / 77k = 27 months 🎉 Where the €115k actually goes Gross salaries, 12 people: €78k Employer social…

   Deniz YıldırımAug 13, 202610likes14comments

6. Article

   The African startup funding winter, explained without the doom (1/16)

   1/ Every week someone asks me if African tech is dead. It is not dead. It is cold. Here is why it got cold, who froze, and what the survivors are doing differently. 2/ 2021 and 2022 were the hot years. Money was cheap everywhere, interest rates were near zero, and every fund wanted an "Africa thesis". Fintech took the biggest share by far. 3/ Then rates went up worldwide. When a fund can earn a safe 5% on government…

   Achieng OwinoAug 11, 202631likes15comments

7. Article

   The H-1B 60-day clock: what I keep in a folder, just in case

   First: this is not legal advice. Immigration rules are detailed and every case is different. If you are affected, talk to an immigration attorney. This post is what I've learned from 7 years on H-1B and from helping two colleagues through layoffs. Every few months there's a new headline about fees or rules and our desi group chat explodes. Most of it is noise. What isn't noise is the 60-day grace period, because…

   Vikram IyerAug 9, 202610likes10comments

8. Question

   Engineers who have worked on UPI: why do failed transactions take days to reverse when the rule says T+1?

   Working on a data story about failed UPI transactions. Readers sent us about 1,800 complaints (voluntarily, everything anonymised) where money left their account but never reached the merchant or the person they were paying. The RBI's 2019 circular on turnaround times says, as I read it, that a failed UPI transaction should be auto-reversed by T+1, and after that the bank owes the customer ₹100 for every day of…

   Ira SaxenaAug 8, 202611likes12comments

9. Video

   Sharing this WSJ explainer for anyone who still thinks a shutdown is one big switch somebody flips. India has been at or near the top of Access Now's yearly shutdown count for years. I count things for a living, and this is one number I want to see go down.

   Ira SaxenaJul 30, 202629likes8comments

10. Article

    tech workers are workers, and yes that includes asking what our cloud sells to militaries

    ok so a few people asked after my comment in the sanctions thread what "organizing my workplace" actually means. here's the long version. opinion throughout, sources where i state facts. why i started not because of some big ideological moment. because of on-call. our rotation went from 8 people to 5 after a "restructuring", nobody's comp changed, and the pager didn't care. then the layoffs came by calendar invite…

    Jordan PikeJul 22, 202620likes14comments

11. Experience

    July 2024: five days without internet, from inside a Dhaka software house

    Marta asked me some weeks ago to write this. Today is the anniversary, so I am trying. Sorry if it is long, actually it is the short version. I work at a software house in Dhaka, around 40 developers, almost all our clients are in Denmark and Norway. In July 2024 the student movement started about the job quota, and it became much bigger than quota. I was on the streets some evenings after work. I will not write…

    Rafiul IslamJul 18, 202651likes15comments

12. Article

    Developer survival guide from Tehran: npm, Docker, Go, GitHub and the 403 lifestyle

    سلام. I write backend for a ride hailing and delivery app in Tehran, Go and Python, team of 14. Many people outside do not know what sanctions mean for a normal developer, and many developers in other sanctioned countries ask me the same questions. So this is the long version. Everything here is about using public open source and running things ourselves. Nothing exotic. The real problem is over-compliance US…

    Arash KarimiJul 12, 202648likes14comments

13. Experience

    Our software house lost five days of internet in July 2024. Here is everything we changed after

    Actually I wanted to write this for two years. I will not write about politics in this post. Only about what a shutdown costs a small outsourcing company, and what we changed. We are 34 people in Dhaka. Most clients are in Norway and Denmark. In July 2024 mobile internet went off first, then broadband. For about five days we had nothing. No Slack, no email, no GitHub, no way to tell clients why we disappeared. The…

    Rafiul IslamJun 24, 202617likes8comments

14. Article

    In early 2024, African internet broke three times in three months. A thread on undersea cables, for people who think the cloud is in the sky (1/18)

    1/ If you work remotely from Africa, your job is attached to a handful of cables lying on the sea floor. In 2024 we all learned exactly how few. 2/ February 2024: several cables in the Red Sea were damaged, including Seacom, AAE-1 and EIG. The damage was widely reported to have come from the dragging anchor of a cargo ship that had been attacked and abandoned. East African traffic to Europe and Asia had to be…

    Achieng OwinoJun 9, 202621likes11comments