It is not uncommon, for example, to hear “teachers” make statements such as, “Oh, I taught them that, but they didn’t learn it.” There is no utterance made in the Teachers’ Room more extraordinary than this. From our point of view, it is on the same level as a salesman’s remarking, “I sold it to him, but he didn’t buy it”—which is to say, it makes no sense. It seems to mean that “teaching” is what a “teacher” does, which, in turn, may or may not bear any relationship to what those being “taught” do.

— Teaching As a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman

Writing code faster or working longer hours is not the fastest way to get a project done because you can only linearly scale up how fast one can program. On the flip side, there’s nonlinear savings that can be had by reducing the amount of work you need to do in the first place. Thus, you should write less code rather than trying to write code faster.

— Software Development is Nonlinear System by Dan Lew

We (Bloco) have done a major update of the Caderno Android app, 12 years after its release. It includes a new icon, a big redesign, and new features like search, backup and dark mode. Plus we’re finally testing revenue models for the app.

Hypnotic ambient jazz album. Recommendation from Jornal A Batalha.

In 2014 there was a transit strike when London’s mayor threatened to close perhaps a hundred London Underground ticket offices, leaving only machines. This sparked an online debate among certain local Marxists about whether the workers threatened with redundancy had “bullshit jobs” […] Asked to respond, I eventually referred my interlocutors to a circular put out by the strikers themselves, called “Advice to Passengers Using the Future London Underground.” It included lines like these:

Please ensure you are thoroughly familiar with London Underground’s 11 lines and 270 stations before traveling . . . Please ensure that there are no delays in your journey, or any accidents, emergencies, incidents, or evacuations. Please do not be disabled. Or poor. Or new to London. Please avoid being too young or too old. Please do not be harassed or assaulted while traveling. Please do not lose your property or your children. Please do not require assistance in any way.

[…] What tube workers actually do, then, is something much closer to what feminists have termed “caring labor.” It has more in common with a nurse’s work than a bricklayer’s. It’s just that, in the same way as women’s unpaid caring labor is made to disappear from our accounts of “the economy,” so are the caring aspects of other working-class jobs made to disappear as well.

— Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber