Dogs of Amazon + other things

Dogs of Amazon

About Amazon – Working at Amazon – Dogs of Amazon – interesting page on the Dogs of Amazon. I worked at Yahoo! which tried to have the nanny dot com culture coupled with the work hard but laid back Silicon Valley vibe – it wasn’t pet friendly like Amazon proports to be. I can’t work out if Dogs of Amazon is a relic from when Amazon was a small dot com era startup.

Dogs of Amazon is that at odds with the narrative about Amazon being a hellish white collar employer. I know friends who described their Amazon middle management experience in very negative terms. I also couldn’t reconcile this dog friendly culture with their warehouse and logistics operating conditions for employees.

Origins of PowerPoint

The Improbable Origins of PowerPoint – IEEE Spectrum – built by a couple of former Apple employees and sold to Microsoft. Microsoft also bought MS-DOS (which was a hacked together clone of CP/L, which in turn tried to copy the experience of the PDP-11 mini-computer)

Carhartt

There was a great talk at Google from Carhartt about their brand and approach to products

The Soviet internet that never happened

InterNyet: why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network – (PDF) – it is interesting how the discourse on the networked country moved from being extremely positive for communism in the early 1960s due to its ability for economic control. The rise of ‘economic cybernetics’ sprang out of the end of the Stalin era as there were shortages and production distortions as central planning was failing to control the economy. Decentralising solutions built a massive bureaucratic infrastructure which affected things further. The Soviet Academy of Sciences suggested advocated for the use of computers for statistics and planning. You can see some of the influence of this now in the uptake of networking, machine learning and technology by the Chinese government over the past few decades.

What I’ve been listening to this week

I loved this edit of Earth, Wind and Fire.