Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back by Rebecca Giblin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Rebecca Giblin and Corey Doctorow have written an incredibly important book for everyone to read, whether you’re a producer or consumer of cultural products (books, movies, music, etc). They do a great job of explaining how, over a bunch of industries, a handful of companies have made themselves into both monopolies and monopsonies. This allows them to screw over both the producers and the consumers by being the sole buyer and seller. Also shows how certain things like Spotify playlists are actually pretty insidious. (Spoiler: it’s because they train you not to care about the artist so that if the artist threatens to take their music off, no one will care)

Back when I first started getting into the internet and hadn’t started using Linux yet, I needed a way to get onto the chat protocol known as IRC. Back then I used mIRC. Later on I started using Linux and used all kinds of IRC programs including XChat, BitchX, and Konversation. But recently most open source projects (which is what I’d used it for recently) have moved to the Matrix protocol. So I was surprised to see that mIRC was still a thing when I saw this news post:

The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer by Janelle Monáe

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a very interesting collection of short stories. They are companion piece to the dystopia described in Janelle Monáe’s concept album Dirty Computer. That said, these stories are mostly full of hope. They also depict a world in which there is more room for LGBT+ members and with intersectionality. That is to say, yes, the LGBT+ individuals are hated within the dystopia of New Dawn, but within the various communities explored in the short stories, everyone who’s against New Dawn is OK with the LGBT+. This is a world where no one blinks at pronoun preferences or various types of couples. (Except in one story where the weakness of not accepting it is kind of the point of the story) Most of the morals and lessons of the stories are pretty obvious (at least to me), but I feel like Monáe and her collaborators do a good job of not distracting from the quality of the stories.

November was not a huge programming month for me. On the weekends I was a little more focused with family stuff and videogames. But I did manage work on a couple projects.

Ever since 2010, I’ve been been using Python to automatically post my top 3 artists to Twitter. In 2020, it even became my first package on Pypi. With activity picking up on Mastodon, I ported the code over to that site. I also used the opportunity to clean up the code bit to my more modern coding standards. I haven’t created a package yet, but may soon enough.
I also did some work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker. I’d pulled out the API so that others could build on it, but, as a result, I was creating a Team object from the API rather than the inheritance version. I did a workaround to make it work, but I’m going to have to work at the code a bit more to make it less clunky.

I was on Identi.ca back when it first launched and I joined Mastodon a few years ago. Identi.ca had a decent number of FLOSS devs at the time, but by the time of Mastodon, Twitter was ascendant. So “no one” was on Mastodon. Even a few of the FLOSS developers I followed on Mastodon never posted on there. Network effects - it’s the reason almost everyone who threatens to leave Facebook never does; social media is only useful if you can be social (ie your friends/acquaintances are on it).

One of Us Is Dead by Jeneva Rose

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The wife wanted something we could listen to while doing a bunch of driving last weekend. I don’t remember how we found this particular book, but she said it sounded fun. And she was right!

The book centers around a bunch of alcoholic women who are married to rich men. (Although some of them are also entrepreneurs in their own right as well as being married to rich men) They tend to often meet up at an exclusive hair salon and the proprietor of the salon is another protagonist. Each chapter is told from the POV of one of the women and is narrated by a different voice actor. This provides a bit of meta-fun as we get to hear how each voice actor narrates the others characters who are speaking in their chapters. I may have been imagining things, but I felt that they put different inflections into the other characters’ voices depending on their relationships to one another.

Jingo by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading this book. Rating dropped from 4/5 to 2/5 stars

For a City Watch novel, this one is a bit of a weak procedural. Pratchett somewhat goes back to meandering storytelling as we go back and forth between Vimes’ storyline and the storyline with Vetinari, Nobby, Colon, and Discworld’s version of Leonardo DaVinci. Vimes’ story isn’t presented as a straightforward mystery anyway. It’s mostly about how war makes people dumb as they get swept up in nationalism. There’s a slight mystery tugging at Vimes’ mind, but it’s not really central to anything. It just shows (near the end) that he was clever for not buying the simple explanations to things.

Stay Crazy by Erica L. Satifka

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book definitely sticks to its title. Our protagonist is suffering from a few mental ailments and they play into the story in all sorts of ways. Sometimes it leaves us with an unreliable narrator. Other times it appears to give the narrator the ability to have a greater understanding of the world around her compared to the “normal” folks around her.

Data Visualization with Python and JavaScript: Scrape, Clean, Explore & Transform Your Data by Kyran Dale

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While a book about web technologies is undoubtablely going to get out of date (especially when Javascript is involved), I would definitely recommend this book if you want to do some data visualization either as part of your job or for an undergrad, grad, or PhD project. While I would probably use FastAPI rather than Flask, I heard recently that the Javascript library the author uses, D3, is still one of the best in class libraries for this kind of work.

Flask Web Development: Developing Web Applications with Python by Miguel Grinberg

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read the second edition of the book

I’ve read lots of books covering web frameworks or GUI programming (both involve UI design and a different workflow where you’re often waiting for user input), but this one is one of the best I’ve ever read. While it’s traditional for a book to culminate in a blog or social media app (and this one does it too) there’s something about the way Grinberg writes that makes it so much more approachable. Also, something only more modern books can do, he has a github repo with all the code with commits that match different sections of the book.