Over at TechCrunch, Basel Farag doesn’t want you to learn to code:

There’s an idea that’s been gaining ground in the tech community lately: Everyone should learn to code. But here’s the problem with that idea: Coding is not the new literacy.

If you regularly pay attention to the cultural shenanigans of Silicon Valley, you’ve no doubt heard of the “Learn to Code” movement. Politicians, nonprofit organizations like Code.org and even former Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City have evangelized what they view as a necessary skill for tomorrow’s workforce.

There may be some truth to that, especially since the United States’ need for engineers shows no sign of slowing down.

But the picture is more complicated.

Farag’s basic premise is people should learn to problem solve before they learn to code. I agree with this. Even though I’m a designer I started teaching myself how to code over 15 years ago because I have a technical side to me that thinks coding can be fun. Other times I’ve learned certain aspects of coding because of a project requirement.

As the years have gone by I touch code less and less, but my basic understanding of code and development helps me as a designer when I collaborate with front-end and back-end developers.

The question, “Should I learn to code?” is similar to, “Should I start a blog?” and “Should I start a podcast?” The answer to all these is the same: do you have a problem that coding, a blog, or a podcast will help solve?

For me, learning to code in the early 2000s made me employable in the early days of the Internet and web design. I started this blog in 2006 because I needed a place to capture my thoughts and react to news. I started my podcast in 2014 as an extension of this site.

The other very important puzzle piece to this is persistence:

It took me more than a year of self-taught study before I got a freelance gig. Even then, the pay was poor. There were countless times I was refused even an interview because I didn’t have a computer science degree.

There were times when I could not afford a place to stay and had to rely on the kindness of friends to keep me going. There were many nights when I wanted to give up. But I found the strength to keep going.

It was — and is — persistence that allows me to stay in this field.

In varying degrees, I’ve stuck with my endeavors. Some scratch an itch (podcast), while others have more impact on my career (coding, blog).

The numbers don’t lie.

via Reddit

I few days ago I explained why I’m not a fan of movie reboots.

It seems I’m not alone. News broke this past week that the character Sulu is revealed to be gay in the upcoming Star Trek Beyond and the actor who originally played Sulu, and who has been openly gay since 2005 — George Takei — is not on board with the idea:

The idea came from Simon Pegg, who plays Scotty in the new films and penned the Beyond screenplay, and director Justin Lin, both of whom wanted to pay homage to Takei’s legacy as both a sci-fi icon and beloved LGBT activist.

And so a scene was written into the new film, very matter-of-fact, in which Sulu is pictured with a male spouse raising their infant child. Pegg and Lin assumed, reasonably, that Takei would be overjoyed at the development — a manifestation of that conversation with Roddenberry in his swimming pool so many years ago.

Except Takei wasn’t overjoyed. He had never asked for Sulu to be gay. In fact, he’d much prefer that he stay straight. “I’m delighted that there’s a gay character,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Unfortunately, it’s a twisting of Gene’s creation, to which he put in so much thought. I think it’s really unfortunate.”

Takei explains that Roddenberry was exhaustive in conceiving his Star Trek characters. (The name Sulu, for example, was based on the Sulu Sea off the coast of the Philippines, so as to render his Asian nationality indeterminate.) And Roddenberry had always envisioned Sulu as heterosexual.

As nice an homage to Takei it is, I can understand Takei’s rejection of the idea. George Takei, the person, is gay, not Sulu. Being gay is Takei’s story to tell and champion.

Pegg responded, “respectfully disagreeing“:

Pegg expressed sympathy with Takei’s sentiment that mainstream gay heroes were belatedly coming to the big screen, but rejected the idea that this meant a new character needed creating.

“He’s right, it is unfortunate, it’s unfortunate that the screen version of the most inclusive, tolerant universe in science fiction hasn’t featured an LGBT character until now. We could have introduced a new gay character, but he or she would have been primarily defined by their sexuality, seen as the ‘gay character’, rather than simply for who they are, and isn’t that tokenism?”

Pegg continued: “Justin Lin, Doug Jung and I loved the idea of it being someone we already knew because the audience have a pre-existing opinion of that character as a human being, unaffected by any prejudice. Their sexual orientation is just one of many personal aspects, not the defining characteristic. Also, the audience would infer that there has been an LGBT presence in the Trek Universe from the beginning (at least in the Kelvin timeline), that a gay hero isn’t something new or strange. It’s also important to note that at no point do we suggest that our Sulu was ever closeted, why would he need to be? It’s just hasn’t come up before.”

At the end of the day, the most important question will be, is the movie any good?

From a The New York Times story on the deadly shooting in Dallas yesterday where 5 police officers were killed by a sniper:

“The negotiations broke down, and we had an exchange of gunfire with the suspect,” the chief said. “We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was.”

Robots and artificial intelligence are doing more and more of what we humans used to do, including kill other humans.

Over at The New York Times, Moshe Bar on the benefits of a clear mind:

Recently, I discovered how much we overlook, not just about the world, but also about the full potential of our inner life, when our mind is cluttered. In a study published in this month’s Psychological Science, the graduate student Shira Baror and I demonstrate that the capacity for original and creative thinking is markedly stymied by stray thoughts, obsessive ruminations and other forms of “mental load.” Many psychologists assume that the mind, left to its own devices, is inclined to follow a well-worn path of familiar associations. But our findings suggest that innovative thinking, not routine ideation, is our default cognitive mode when our minds are clear.

I always love the stories about how Steve Jobs would go on walks a lot, either to negotiate deals with other people or just by himself.

I do it a lot myself here in San Francisco, but I think the habit got formed in my 10+ years living in Manhattan because in New York, you have to walk everywhere (why wouldn’t you want to?).

It’s amazing the ideas that pop in my head when I’m walking. If you don’t do it, you should give it a try.

Regular readers of Daily Exhaust know I’m not a fan of Microsoft. I feel this way for a lot of reasons. I think they’re always a day late and a dollar short with new products (see Windows Phone, Nokia, Microsoft Stores, etc), they historically have not valued design, and every attempt at being cool ends up being very, very, very uncool.

The latest example is a recruitment email aimed at interns (via Twitter):

You’re not cool, Microsoft, you’re fuckin’ chilly, and chilly ain’t never been cool.

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard
Humanity i love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you’re flush pride keeps
you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down
on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you

—e.e. cummings

via Brain Pickings

Seth Godin: The computer, the network and the economy:

When a pre-employed person says, “I don’t know how to code and I’m not interested in selling,” we need to pause for a moment and think about what we built school for. When he continues, “I don’t really have anything interesting to say, and I’m not committed to making a particular change in the world, but I’m pretty good at following instructions,” we’re on the edge of a seismic shift in our culture. And not a positive one.

No, the good jobs aren’t coming back. But yes, there’s a whole host of a new kind of good job, one that feels fundamentally different from the old days. It doesn’t look like a job used to look, but it’s the chance of lifetime if we can shift gears fast enough.

You don’t have to like this shift, but ignoring it, yelling about it, cutting ourselves off from it is a recipe for a downward spiral. It’s an opportunity if we let it be one.

The mutants will survive.

This is amazing.

If you don’t get it, I can’t help you.

And shame on you too.

Mike discusses the Juno Space Mission, Apple removing the headphone jack from the iPhone, Tony Hawk’s 900, Spotify bitching about Apple, and letting go of a balloon, among other things.

Subscribe on iTunes (or listen online)

The Subreddit ‘LifeProTips’ has a great thread on ways to remove “um,” and words like it from your conversational vocabulary:

Replace your “ums” with spaces. You begin your thought with something as simple as “I’m…” space space space… then just finish your thought as it comes to you: “not really in the mood for spaghetti tonight.”

Eventually, the spaces will get shorter. “Um” and “uh” and “er” are crutches. Keep using them, and you’ll always need them.

I like mrwizard420’s response to this:

This is… absolutely correct. If you were to look at… certain famous people like… President Obama, you… would see this technique… used quite often.

(Bonus points if you read this in… the Obamavoice.)

Adding spacings and pauses in your speech is the most common piece of advice in this threaad.

As someone who’s continually trying to get better at talking on his podcast, this thread handy.

Uber data reveals drivers earn less than $13.25 an hour:

Uber is always droning on about how drivers are able to make money by driving their own vehicle, while having the freedom to choose their own schedules. A few years ago, Uber told The Wall Street Journal that a typical driver earns more than $100,000 a year in gross fares. However, new data and calculations based off a million trips reveals a different picture. In three major US markets – Denver, CO, Detroit, MI, and Houston, TX – Uber drivers earned less than $13.25 an hour.

It’s important to note Uber drivers are paid per ride, not by the hour, but $13.25 hourly average is still not much income for a company “valued” at over $60 billion (as of December 2015) and one that classifies its drivers as contractors, not employees.

It would paint a more complete picture if we also knew how many hours a week Uber drivers work.

This is a good follow up to my post from earlier today on the movie reboots.

Ars Technica: New study could explain why we remake certain movies over and over again:

It’s the question that every movie fan asks in summer: why are there so many remakes and sequels and reboots? It turns out that science may have an answer. Unfortunately, if you’re hoping for more original stories, the prognosis is not good.

Two network theorists in the Netherlands, Folgert Karsdorp and Antal van den Bosch, just published a study on story networks in Royal Society Open Science. Story networks, they write, are “streams of retellings in which retellers modify and adapt retellings in a gradual and accumulative way.” There is also a basic structure that seems to underly how these networks function. To explore retellings, the researchers looked at more than 200 versions of the Little Red Riding Hood story, which had been retold over the past two centuries. They measured the stories’ similarity to one another with the amusingly named “bag-of-words” technique, which reveals how many words two texts have in common. Then they created a network diagram showing relatedness between stories over time. Earlier stories became what the researchers called “pre-texts” that inspired later retellings.

Once again, everything is a remix.

‘Ghostbusters’ backlash is about more than sexism, says producer Ivan Reitman:

The Ghostbusters reboot has received criticism questioning the need for a reboot, as well as the decision to cast four women as the ghostbusting stars. For his part, Reitman thinks the backlash has more to do with nostalgia than anger over a perception that political correctness influenced creative choices.

“I think there’s way too much talk about gender [when it comes to this film],” he said. “I think that many of the people who were complaining were actually lovers of the [original] movie, not haters of women.”

I’m one of the people who is not a fan of the reboot.

It really comes down to the fact that this is a money grab, not a move by an up-and-coming director who wants to honor the legacy of a classic film. Bullshit. This is Columbia Pictures wanting a cash cow for the summer.

It’s no secret Hollywood is out of ideas.

I also don’t believe in changing the ethnicity and sexual orientation of existing superheroes to make them more relevant in today’s world. I’d rather see people get creative and come up with new backstories and new superpowers younger generations can relate to.

The hero has a thousand faces, so give her/him a new one. I’d pay money to see it.