February 23rd, 2019
In Philosophy
No Comments
If you live near New York City, then I would like to get to know you better. Once a month I host a gathering. This used to be exclusively a tech event, but lately I have opened it up to the artists that I know. This is very informal. You might have seen my earlier post about one of the dinner parties I threw last summer?
Contact me if you are interested.
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February 22nd, 2019
In Philosophy
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A long sad goodbye to one thread on Reddit:
But instead it was always that the the thread was “dominated by” or “only had” or “was an echo chamber for” homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that the subreddit was dominated by homophobic etc neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that the SSC community was dominated by homophobic etc neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that I personally was a homophobic etc neo-Nazi of them ...
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February 22nd, 2019
In Philosophy
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When I was younger the Conservatives in the USA had a rhetoric of “small government” and they were nominally anti-subsidy. In reality, the government grew under Republican governments, and no government questioned the many billions of subsidies given to the farm sector. Still, there was a rhetoric that suggested subsides are bad. I don’t see any trace of that rhetoric anymore. It is worth noting how much it has vanished, given that it was important to Republicans for several decades. ...
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February 21st, 2019
In Philosophy
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First of all, it looks like Tumblr creates a copy of a post when a blogger decides to reblog it, but how can this be allowed under the GDPR? Here is a case where it looks like the original blogger deleted a post, but the post still exists where it was reblogged. Does anyone know the legal implications? How does the original blogger say “I want all of my material erased from this website.”?
The original post was reblogged here, ...
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February 21st, 2019
In Philosophy
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I wrote this as a comment on Hacker News.
It’s also worth examining if our typical ways of measuring inflation (in the USA, the Consumer Price Index, or CPI) is an accurate guide to the real costs of raising children. The CPI currently takes into account a very diverse range of goods, including canoes and guns and lamps and kitchen wares and music and coffee grinders. The CPI tries to avoid the assumption that some purchases are more important than ...
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February 20th, 2019
In Technology
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This is the kind of emotional impulse that for thousands of years would cause men to challenge one another to a duel:
And finally, I became the exact thing I hated: a toxic asshat throwing his skills around like fists. I don’t do code review for the business, I just like showing the rookies their place. My skills have finally started to pay off.
If a guy brings me his code, and it has mistakes, it brings insane pleasure from how smart ...
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February 19th, 2019
In Philosophy
1 Comment
The energy that goes into writing tweets is also energy that could instead go into works of lasting value. I’ve noticed that with all of my favorite writers, the moment when they turn to Twitter seems to be a moment when their production of high quality books/essays seems to go into decline. One of my favorite economists had a 10 year streak when he was absolutely on fire, then he started tweeting on Twitter, and his production of books and ...
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February 10th, 2019
In Business
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My great-grandmother Nanny came over from Europe and invested in real estate. She taught my grandparents, and my father, to invest in real estate. Avoid the stock market. Apparently economists now have evidence that this is a very good idea:
In general, economists would expect that assets with more risk–that is, more likely to rise or fall over time–will tend to have higher returns on average. From the standpoint of investors, the higher returns are needed to make up for the ...
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February 2nd, 2019
In Technology
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I’ve made every mistake that they mention in this lecture. Most of the lecture is devoted to diagnostics for ML, how you should act when your ML is not performing the way you expected:
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January 24th, 2019
In Philosophy
No Comments
The New York Times shows this graph, which shows a dramatic decline in the number of students interested in computer science, followed by a dramatic uptick. I find it frustrating that the article focuses on the uptick, without making any comment on the decline. The article says that enrollment in CS majors has doubled since 2013, but it doesn’t mention that it was only in 2014 that enrollment got back to the level of 2002. That’s a 12 year lull, ...
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January 20th, 2019
In Philosophy
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It’s an interesting idea, how much autonomy the actor should have, in relation to the showrunner:
it makes me think back to bering and wells. the femslash ship that was captained by the two actresses themselves. and how the showrunner dug his heels in, not wanting them to be in a relationship, but the actresses played all their scenes romantically despite it. and to this day it holds semi-canon ship status. because the actors made sure to show (and say ...
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January 19th, 2019
In Philosophy
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This is actually an important post, with a message that the rest of the tech community would be wise to listen to:
What the experiment demonstrates is that I will put up with all of that just to use a site that shows me posts that I asked for in chronological order.
and this:
the key function of this site is not asking me for my real name/phone number and not using my contact list/other apps to find people/let people find me.
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January 18th, 2019
In Technology
No Comments
I missed this at the time. Interesting:
The main counterargument is that the moratorium would stifle web innovation. Since web innovation is currently defined as “emulating native even more,” I think a bit of stifling would actually be a good idea. Once web innovation is redefined as something that’s actually about the web we can proceed as usual.
Another counterargument is “But we need feature X!” Everybody will have a favourite upcoming feature that would be hit by the moratorium — mine ...
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January 18th, 2019
In Philosophy
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Alexandra Rowland has more to say about her word “hopepunk”. This definition is nearly identical to Camus’s “Myth Of Sisyphus”:
The work is never finished. The work will never be finished. There will never be a nice, comfortable utopia where we can rest on our laurels and sip strawberry daiquiris by the pool and trust that now things are Fine and we can all relax. Utopia is not a stable system. It doesn’t last. The best we can hope for is ...
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January 17th, 2019
In Philosophy
1 Comment
People complaining about is the first sign of something ending.
Interesting:
This was science fiction perfectly tuned for the Reagan-Thatcher era. Its connection with punk music and subcultures is, of course, contingent. (Who knows what might have happened if Bethke decided to call his story Techno-Hipster.) Yet the clichéd punk imperative to “Do It Yourself” is in fact perfect for a kind of fiction whose ethos is that you have to survive in a world where unstoppable megacorporations control every aspect ...
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January 13th, 2019
In Philosophy
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Apparently child abuse spikes when report cards are sent home, but the effect is especially strong if the report cards go home on Friday:
While talking to a pediatrician and fellow early-childhood researcher, Dr. Melissa Bright heard something that stopped her in her tracks: Child abuse spikes after report cards come out.
Bright, a research scientist in the University of Florida’s Anita Zucker Center for Excellence in Early Childhood Studies, couldn’t find any studies to back up what doctors have long observed. ...
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January 11th, 2019
In Philosophy
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English is a flexible language. Perhaps it is too flexible?
Carlson is hardly the first right-leaning figure to make a pitch for populism, even tangentially, in the third year of Donald Trump, whose populist-lite presidential candidacy and presidency Carlson told me he views as “the smoke alarm … telling you the building is on fire, and unless you figure out how to put the flames out, it will consume it.”
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January 8th, 2019
In Business
No Comments
My mom was recently in the hospital. I gave the hospital my cell phone number, as the official point of contact between the hospital and the family. Suddenly I’m getting spam robots calling my cell phone, with messages about how I can get low cost health insurance. Someone sold my number. Maybe it was the hospital or maybe it was a related 3rd party, but someone sold my number. I am very irritated about this.
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January 4th, 2019
In Philosophy
No Comments
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has an excellent essay about why science works to advance the human race, and how to structure a research program for maximum benefit. However, it is also the strongest argument I’ve ever seen for ending 4 year school degrees. Consider this bit:
1) Convexity is easier to attain than knowledge (in the technical jargon, the “long-gamma” property): As we saw in Figure 2, under some level of uncertainty, we benefit more from improving the payoff function than from ...
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January 3rd, 2019
In Philosophy
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I’ve been watching the HBO production of My Brilliant Friend. I love it. I think the acting is great, the direction is great, the recreation of the past is great, the tension is constant. Everything about this is great. But I saw this Lesbian review on Jezebel, and I laughed because it seems so true. The two women are often in these situations, staring at one another, close together, bonded by some deed or secret, and its possible to imagine ...
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January 2nd, 2019
In Philosophy
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A good article at Vox, of obvious interest to me:
“The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk,” declared Alexandra Rowland, a Massachusetts writer, in a two-sentence Tumblr post in July 2017. “Pass it on.”
…When pressed by other Tumblr users to expand on her two-sentence Tumblr post that coined the term, Rowland elaborated on what she meant by “hopepunk,” touching on themes present in both her own psyche and in the spirit of resistance and political agitation all around her:
Hopepunk says that genuinely ...
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December 28th, 2018
In Philosophy
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An interesting comment over at Jezebel:
When I was single, I remember talking politics with some guy I’d met at a party. He tried to call me out for something, and I sternly nailed him back with facts and data. I sincerely thought he was a jerk because of the way he smugly raised his objections to my argument and rolled his eyes. I walked away.
For the remainder of the night, this guy would not leave me alone. He had to ...
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December 28th, 2018
In Philosophy
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I’m not sure this is correctly stated, but it is interesting:
Some of this may reflect personal values: Putin, bin Salman and other strongmen are just Trump’s kind of people. But it’s hard to escape the suspicion that Moola — financial payoffs to Trump personally via the Trump Organization — plays an important role. After all, unlike leaders of democracies, dictators and absolute monarchs can direct lots of cash to Trump properties and offer the Trump family investment opportunities without having ...
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December 28th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
Interesting:
// ==================================================================
// PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO SIMPLIFY THIS CODE.
// KEEP THE SPACE SHUTTLE FLYING.
// ==================================================================
//
// This controller is intentionally written in a very verbose style. You will
// notice:
//
// 1. Every 'if' statement has a matching 'else' (exception: simple error
// checks for a client API call)
// 2. Things that may seem obvious are commented explicitly
//
// We call this style 'space shuttle style'. Space shuttle style is meant to
// ensure that every branch ...
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December 27th, 2018
In Philosophy
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Two points which I think are obvious:
1.) The USA should have never gotten into the ridiculous situation where its President is being blackmailed by a foreign power.
2.) However, once we ended up in this sad scenario, it seems to me important that the political system offer the President a full pardon, both so the blackmailers lose their power, and also the President can safely resign.
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December 24th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Web 2.0 lasted from 2002 to 2008 and it will be remembered as the peak of the fun times on the Web. It was killed when Twitter and Facebook became popular in 2008. But it wasn’t till 2016 that we began to see how awful things could get. This is part of our learning process:
And maybe the things you don’t even need to whisper should be whispered. I’ve been slowly trying, as much as one can who works on ...
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December 18th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Interesting story.
So this object is a bit more than 11 billion miles from the sun?
And Alpha Centauri is 4.2 light years away, which is 24,635,923,200,000 miles?
So this object is roughly 0.046% of the way to the next star?
Assuming that the Alpha Centauri system reaches out to us as much as our system reaches out to Alpha Centauri, I am surprised that the two systems reach out to each other as much as they do.
Almost 10% of the distance between the ...
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December 17th, 2018
In Business
No Comments
This says a lot about the ways the culture has changed. Apparently, the original Macintosh manual of 1984 only had photos of white males. These are some of the photos:
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December 16th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
The community around the Rust language is increasingly in conflict with itself. Why allow a team to grow out of control like this?
That’s a total of 770 comments on the design of the API for the Pin type, which has not yet been stabilized; I expect it will pass 800 comments before this is done. This is just one significant but ultimately fairly small std API addition, and it doesn’t isn’t including the discussion that’s gone on around the ...
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December 13th, 2018
In Philosophy
2 Comments
I don’t follow politics in Israel, but my mom does. I did not realize how bad things had gotten, till she pointed me to this article, about the arrest of a rabbi who committed the crime of marrying a couple in a Conservative way, rather than in an Orthodox way.
Haiyun said he was shocked by his detention and said Israel was becoming an Orthodox theocracy.
“Iran is here already. I am not an offender, not a murderer, not a criminal,” ...
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December 13th, 2018
In Business
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It’s been sad to watch the rise (and partial fall) of cryptocurrency mania on Hacker News. Even now, I’m still seeing stuff like this:
“Beanie Babies are collectibles, cryptocurrencies are money.”
It’s been established over and over again that cryptocurrencies are not money. They are a collectible like Beanie Babies. Cryptocurrencies vary too much in value to be used as money. Would you go into a Starbucks and spend $4 USD dollars to buy a coffee, if there was a chance ...
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December 12th, 2018
In Business
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Someone on Hacker News asked why there were less and less articles about technology.
There are 2 obvious answers:
In the first place, as Ycombinator became famous, more and more entrepreneurs began to hang out at Hacker News. The percentage of non-technical people reading the site is probably a lot higher now than in the past.
Also, there is the changing technology.
Once upon a time there were huge differences in major web frameworks. Compare Zope 2.0 to Ruby On ...
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December 10th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
People do a lot of important things in beds, but one of the most important is have sex.
(Please note, nothing I say in this essay is meant to be a criticism of other locations for sex. If you’re into forest groves, mountain tops, office desks, bar bathrooms, or the kitchen floor, please know that you are valid and I support you.)
First of all, beds are too small for sex, even if you limit yourself to just two people. These ...
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December 3rd, 2018
In Philosophy
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Tumblr has decided to delete all porn. They are going after images that are clearly not porn:
I’m curious if Tumblr is using AI, or if they are using humans to delete these images? If AI, why is the AI always so terrible? Why does the tech industry talk about breakthroughs in AI, yet actual use of AI tends to be absurd? This story would be a bit more familiar if the deleting is being done by humans, especially if the ...
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December 3rd, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
Clojure continues to innovate.
Navigation is generic and extensible
As explained before, the core of Specter is the defnav operator upon which Specter’s entire collection of navigators is built. Specter’s extensibility is one of its most important features, as you may use data structures other than the ones Clojure provides. As I mentioned, I do a lot of work with graphs, and I just wouldn’t be able to work with them in any reasonable way without my internal collection of graph navigators ...
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December 1st, 2018
In Business
No Comments
For a few years, Netflix has been showing me this message, which says they can not reach my email:
I don’t know why they show me this message. They have a valid email. I receive their email. It’s an alias but it works. I can’t imagine what problem they are having. I wish I could talk to Netflix about this. But Netflix has no place I can send an email. In theory they offer live chat, but for the last two ...
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November 29th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
A woman writes to an advice columnist. The woman says she has wasted her life. The response is very good:
Shame is the opposite of art. When you live inside of your shame, everything you see is inadequate and embarrassing. A lifetime of traveling and having adventures and not being tethered to long-term commitments looks empty and pathetic and foolish, through the lens of shame. You haven’t found a partner. Your face is aging. Your body will only grow weaker. ...
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November 29th, 2018
In Business
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I actually read this book, back in the 1990s. It was published in 1958. Reading about it again I’m reminded that it really set the tone for the modern era. These last 60 years of Democrat politics have largely followed the agenda he set, at least on economic matters.
Whether the problem be that of a burgeoning population and of space in which to live with peace and grace, or whether it be the depletion of the materials which nature ...
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November 28th, 2018
In Business
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To my mind, the problem with the article is the nostalgia, and the desire to turn ordinary business people into community heroes. If you engage in this particular vice, you should expect to be disappointed.
The criticism of the article is worth reading:
But Alexander does not talk to Stanich’s wife, who—as the Willamette Week reported on Wednesday—had managed the restaurant for 19 years before being diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. He does not mention that she and Stanich divorced ...
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November 25th, 2018
In Business
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President Trump has argued that the economy is doing well under his leadership. And Brad Delong, who has positioned himself as a mildly left-of-center economist, seems willing to agree:
Nick Bunker has a very nice piece from late last month on wage growth and employment, as it bears on the question of whether the United States is at “full employment.” My take is that the U.S. economy probably is because at current unemployment and employment rates, if no additional shocks were ...
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November 22nd, 2018
In Philosophy
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Specifically “L”, though I suspect every category of LGBQ suffers its own special kind of isolation. Interesting:
I hate how the queerio community acts like being a lesbian means “UwU I love girls and every gorl is soft n precious and we wear matching flannels and both SLAY together!!! Wow being a lesbian is so cute and fun OwO.” When in reality, being an actual lesbian means growing up hating a part of yourself you cannot change, worrying that you come ...
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November 22nd, 2018
In Philosophy
1 Comment
This woman is a mess. For 30 years she’s been pushing the idea that we should accept what the right-wing says, at face value, and try to give into their demands, in the hopes that if we give the right-wing what they want, then they won’t be so angry anymore. It’s difficult to understand how she can continue to make the same mistake, over and over and over again.
Except immigration is not stirring up right-wing populist fury, rather, right-wing populist ...
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November 21st, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
I recently read “The World Turned Upside Down” and I was surprised by the parallels:
https://www.amazon.com/World-Turned-Upside-Down-Revolution/dp/0140137327/
During the English revolt, the censorship of the press was suspended, and people could publish anything. And they did. And the number of inaccuracies spread rapidly.
It became common to argue that England had once enjoyed a rough democracy during the Anglo Saxon days, even though there is no evidence of that.
It became common to argue that studying the Bible was unimportant, compared to the importance of ...
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November 21st, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
I see a comment on this page that starts with “It’s crazy how far people will go to protect the status quo.” I agree with the sentiment. It is true when we talk about personal relationships, or personal friends, or defending professional colleagues. It’s also true in politics. And sometimes those overlap:
As has been widely reported this week, Marcia Fudge, currently the Democratic representative of Ohio’s 11th district, was one of the letter writers. “Lance Mason is a good man ...
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November 19th, 2018
In Technology
1 Comment
Tim Bray has an interesting article about the future of REST. However, I fail to understand this sentence:
“To start with, transient query surges are no longer a problem”
Why? The external world can still send unexpected surges of traffic, yes?
Anyway, this is worth reading:
Post-REST: Messaging and Eventing · This approach is all over, and I mean all over, the cloud infrastructure that I work on. The idea is you get a request, you validate it, maybe you do some computation on ...
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November 19th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
Interesting. I’ll look at this later. I wonder if this will become important, or if it will go the way of RSS/Atom, something with huge potential, that somehow never clicks?
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November 19th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
I’ve already linked to this article, where Movio talked about moving away from Scala and towards Go. But I just re-read and had more to say about this:
First, we made the mistake of making the `persist` function synchronized. This guaranteed that buffer-full-based invocations would not run concurrently with timeout-based invocations. However, because the stream digest and the `persist` functions did run concurrently and manipulated the buffer, we had to further synchronize those functions to each other!
In the end, we ...
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November 19th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
There is a part of me that wonders if Scala will last. For awhile it was seen as Java 2.0. It generated some good ideas. People were excited about it for awhile. But it suffered its own chaos. It was too experimental to become the new standard Enterprise language. If it fails, I wonder what will take its place?
First, we made the mistake of making the `persist` function synchronized. This guaranteed that buffer-full-based invocations would not run concurrently with ...
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November 18th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
My last several clients have needed high write throughput systems. Most of these clients were doing something with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and they were often sucking in gigabytes of data, which had to be put somewhere until it could be processed. I found that entrepreneurs were surprised at how much time and money had to go into the support systems. So finally I created this all-in-one OWPORPOL graphic, which tries to show how all the different parts of the ...
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November 17th, 2018
In Business
No Comments
Back in the 1930s and 1940s the USA lead the way regarding women working. Although absolute numbers peaked in the 1980s, at the second derivative (the rate of the rate of the change) the biggest uptick were the years 1933 to 1944. But since the end of the 1980s there has been nothing but decline in the USA.
To get some sense of the changing tone with which the USA talks about this, it is worth comparing some comedies from ...
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November 16th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
I have a rule that when I write books the books should be 60,000 words or less, because I want people to be able to read my books in a single day. Because of this, I sometimes move fast and skip over things. I rely on the intelligence of my reader to guess at the gaps. I suppose some people hate this? I’m intrigued by the preferences suggested here:
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November 16th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
I donated $400 to the campaign of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That is the most that I have ever donated to any political campaign. What can we expect from her, while she is in Congress? During the next 2 years, I suspect the answer is “nothing.” The Democrats don’t have much power. And she faces at least two great difficulties:
1.) governing is a complex skill which takes 10 years to learn and she is a complete novice
2.) soon she will have to ...
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November 14th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
Is this the best way to store events? In a relational database? Wouldn’t a log be better for this kind of data? Are the events actually relational? When not switch to a historic paradigm? Clearly, the Ruby On Rails model can be made to do almost anything, but is it ideal?
The root cause was that our database hit the ceiling of 2,147,483,647 on our very busy events table. Almost every single activity in Basecamp is tracked in this table. ...
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November 14th, 2018
In Business
No Comments
I’d like some actual information about Volvo fleet sales, and how the process works. Leaving the marketing team in charge of the website means that I mostly get pages full of sexy photos, with only a few dozen words of actual information.
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November 14th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
I just saw Fired Up! the movie. Some of the dialogue is very much an inspiration for the kind of comedy writing I want to do. In particular, repeating this 3 times:
Angela: What?
Nick: What?
3 times? That seems excessive, but it works in the movie.
Shawn: What to the panthers have that you don’t have?
Sylvia: Skills.
Bianca: Athletics-isms?
Caryl: Kick-ass cheers.
Sylvia: Laser hair removals?
Angela: Big ass titties!
Bianca: Hm?
Sylvia: What?
Angela: Well, I’m just sayin’.
Shawn: CONFIDENCE! They’re cocky-ass holes! Like Nick, he’s the cockiest ass ...
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November 12th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
I liked this movie and I liked this review:
Returning to the movie, I feared that this relationship, too, might be diminished by time: both the length of time that has passed since the movie’s release and the moment of time in which I watch, weighted with a hyper-vigilant attention to all that can go wrong between older, more powerful men and younger, less powerful women. But Bob’s interest in a woman 20 years his junior strikes me as even ...
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November 10th, 2018
In Philosophy
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It is interesting, if a bit sad, to realize how common it is for some intellectuals to speak out against the injustices of the age, while having no power to stop those injustices. The injustices continue for another several centuries. This was written in 1516:
The first discussions with Raphael allow him to discuss some of the modern ills affecting Europe such as the tendency of kings to start wars and the subsequent loss of money on fruitless endeavours. He also ...
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November 6th, 2018
In Business
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As an aside, the German courts seem to produce less false imprisonment than Anglo-Saxon courts, in part thanks to the Schöffen, the lay jurists. I suspect that the medical profession would be greatly improved by a combination of Schöffen and doulas, who could work out a great many patient issues without needing to escalate issues to the attention of a doctor.
Interesting and a sad commentary of the failure of both the tech world and corporate management:
Burnout seemed to vary ...
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November 5th, 2018
In Business
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An interesting story from Jakub Holý about the day he was fired:
When I came to the office one late autumn morning in 2005, I have been shocked to find out that – without any warning signs whatsoever – I hd been fired. That day I have learned the importance of communication. Their criticism was justified but the thing is, nobody bothered to tell me anything during my 11 months in the company. I received exactly 0 feedback about my ...
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November 5th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
danah boyd is always good and this is one of her best:
Accusations of anti-conservative bias are not evaluated through evidence because reality doesn’t matter to them. This is what makes this stunt so effective. News organizations and tech companies have no way to “prove” their innocence. What makes conspiratorial messages work is how they pervert evidence. The simplest technique is to conflate correlation and causation. Conspiracy makers point to the data that suggests that both journalists and Silicon Valley engineers ...
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November 4th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
This starts out well, and then goes down hill. Larry Summers and his wife did a drive across rural America, and Larry Summers feels he learned something important by visiting these rural backwaters. Likewise, when I was younger I spent 2 years of my life hitchhiking all over the USA, so visiting these rural backwaters was a formative experience for me.
Larry Summers starts out sounding like he learned something new, but in the end he concludes that the Democrats ...
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November 4th, 2018
In Business
No Comments
I’m torn between thinking Yahoo is just fundamentally stupid, and Marissa Mayer especially, and thinking that Flickr, at its best, is simply a small business that can not support the kind of giant returns that venture capital, and then later public investors wanted. So perhaps Yahoo could only destroy Flickr, by demanding it support more than it could. But that simply goes back to Yahoo being stupid.
SmugMug is a successful mostly family owned business, looking for normal business returns, ...
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November 4th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
The real question is, why was it easier to use the informal channel? What about the formal methods of communication were difficult?
The CIA does appear to have lucked out when it comes to Russia. The Intelligence Agency ring fences its Russian activities and the report states that intel chiefs were quick to harden up its Russian communications channel at the first sign of trouble.
But the rest of the agency had become too reliant on the system, which was originally ...
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November 3rd, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Parts of this are outright illegal, and then other parts should be illegal but are frustratingly legal. Sad to think about these sisters (off-topic, but on the same theme, check out the Turkish film Mustang):
In 8th grade, our class took a field trip to tour the high school. No one wore uniforms, like we did in middle school! I could even wear my skinny jeans there. Yep, as strict as my mom was, she did buy me skinny jeans that ...
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November 3rd, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Posting some Tumblr links so I can remember where I saw this stuff:
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November 3rd, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
LGBTQ language has been changing, in interesting ways. Much of the debate, and the problems arising, come from the difficulties of including transexuals into conversations about gay and lesbian issues. Especially problematic are when people born as men declare themselves to be women and want to have sex with women, declaring themselves to be male lesbians — this seems to raise a serious challenge to LGBQT alliances. The issues seem to get the most discussion on Tumblr.
So for instance:
I ...
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November 3rd, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
A sad/funny story about dealing with a brother who is alt-right, written by a sister who is not alt-right:
the cool thing about having an idiot alt right supporting brother is when he gets mad over dumb shit my sister and i go “It’s concerning how such a small thing triggers such a strong reaction from you.” in the family groupchat and he’ll see the word “trigger” in relation to him and go fucking nuclear
the downside about having such a dipshit ...
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November 1st, 2018
In Technology
7 Comments
In the tech world, a headline such as “Zed Shaw is angry” is the ultimate evergreen headline, since he is always angry, and it is easy to get tired of his ranting. But I think he has a good point here:
I hate using badly designed APIs. I hate it even more when someone beats me over the head with words they were handed in some rhetoric class masquerading as a computer science course. Words like “abstract”, “pattern”, and “object ...
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November 1st, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Interesting to me because I’ve been writing fiction about Unicode:
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October 27th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
After my dad died, in 2007, I was a zombie for a year. Taking Paxil helped. I identify with stories such as this. A beautiful story that everyone should read:
I lost my grandaddy to throat cancer. Lost my grandma to heart disease. Lost my best friend Geracy to the streets. He got stabbed to death in 2004, when we came back home for the summer.
I’m not saying that for sympathy. Everybody goes through darkness. I’m just saying that I kept ...
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October 19th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Worrisome and alarming. Under this President social norms that help with the functioning of a healthy society are being violated on a constant basis:
Trump’s comments “mark the first time the president has openly and directly praised a violent act against a journalist on American soil,” added the New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg.
Trump fondly reminisced about the physical assault that occurred on 24 May last year when Jacobs, the Guardian’s political correspondent, asked Gianforte a question about healthcare policy ...
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October 19th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
So sad!
Imagine an 8 year old comes home from school crying and says “Mom, there is a bully at school, he called me fat!”
What happens next? Does the mom then say “No, honey, you are within statistically normal ranges. We can print out some charts from the World Healthy Organization. You know what you should do to get back at that bully? Next time he teases you, take your charts and attempt to demonstrate that your body weight is ...
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October 13th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Hazel Cills, making a point I’ve thought about often, the work that does not exist because of the oppression of women:
For every woman who comes forward, I imagine a second version of her, one who could freely pursue the art she wanted, claim the space she desired, without worrying that a man would come along and render her disposable. I’d much rather read stories on these women, who made news for the lives they lived than the ways in which ...
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October 13th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
From Paul Krugman, very interesting:
About that conspiracy theorizing: It began in the first moments of Kavanaugh’s testimony, when he attributed his problems to “a calculated and orchestrated political hit” motivated by people seeking “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.” This was a completely false, hysterical accusation, and making it should in itself have disqualified Kavanaugh for the court.
But Donald Trump quickly made it much worse, attributing protests against Kavanaugh to George Soros and declaring, falsely (and with no evidence), ...
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October 7th, 2018
In Philosophy
1 Comment
Some inspiration for a story I’m writing:
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October 4th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Some girls says her boyfriend wants to sleep with Anna Kendrick. I think I’m a bit surprised that Trevor Noah doesn’t know how to handle this moment. I’m also impressed with Anna Kendrick for being so ready to roll with it. I think I assumed that a professional comedian like Trevor Noah would handle awkward moments like this at least as well as Anna Kendrick.
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October 4th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Tumblr or Blogger are fine if you are 19 and posting cat pictures. But if you are building a professional audience? A reminder that it can be terrible to rely on a free blogging service for professional use:
But earlier this month, when I published a new article, Blogger prompted me to post it on Google+, and I did. A few hours later I discovered that my Google+ account had been suspended for violating terms of service, but I got ...
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October 4th, 2018
In Business
No Comments
The math here is a bit tricky:
Moreover, the Bank of Japan owns government bonds worth 90% of GDP, and ultimately returns to the government as dividends all the money it receives from the government as interest on the bonds it holds. Deducting both public financial assets and all the debts the Japanese government and people effectively owe to themselves, the debt level is only about 60% percent of GDP and not rising. This level of debt could be sustainable even ...
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October 3rd, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
It is worrisome, that globalization has produced so much anger. Clearly, one can not build a global ecconomy, without first building global institutions.
A very good article on right-wing rage in Germany:
The success of the right-wing populists has a lot to do with changes that have occurred in Western societies, where a new class of disadvantaged has developed out of the erstwhile economic and political center – a new class which unabashedly took to the streets next to neo-Nazis in ...
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October 3rd, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
It’s a bit depressing to see Germany struggling with a neo-fascist movement, and the police unclear about what their role is:
Let’s first look at the police, who, just as they did in Lichtenhagen in 1992, stood by helplessly – and hopefully not in quiet acceptance – unable to prevent the worst excesses. Twice in just a few days, the Saxony police showed that they have no clear idea as to what, exactly, their job entails in a democracy. The first ...
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October 3rd, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
One of the many difficult issues that immigrants face in Germany, is that native Germans grow up with excellent sex education, whereas the immigrants often come from countries where there is no sex education:
This article is from Die Zeit:
My experience thus far shows that the sooner young men attend a sex education course, the better are the chances to prevent the kind of group dynamic where sexual posturing combined with alcohol results in sexual assault. Sitting on colorful chairs ...
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October 3rd, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
An interesting metaphor for the limits that women face:
Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, ...
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September 30th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
A woman doesn’t cure anorexia by losing weight, and an incel does not cure being an incel by having sex. Both are a kind of mental illness. With anorexia, the rage is directed inward, and among the incel, the rage is directed outward, as this disgusting story make clear:
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September 19th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
My friend Kathryn sent me this in an email, and I thought it made a good point, so with her permission I post it here:
I watched the Women’s final on TV and have been reading and listening to the commentaries. I feel a little of both sides on this – I think Serena behaved badly and ultimately she needed to keep her cool and she didn’t. I also think the official overused his power unnecessarily and inserted himself ...
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August 28th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
I’ve run into this before, an app seems to work but if I run it under Supervisord it doesn’t work, so does that mean there is a problem with Supervisord or with the app itself? This is a useful bit of debugging advice:
Does the command supervisorctl status work when the process is in this state? If that hangs or doesn’t connect, it might indicate a problem in supervisord. If supervisorctl commands work normally, that almost always indicates something is ...
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August 26th, 2018
In Philosophy
2 Comments
I often post comments on Hacker News. Over the years I’ve become increasingly frustrated with how the community works. I’ve been thinking about why, and I think it comes down to this:
1.) I want to read the comments by highly experienced people, reflecting the wisdom gained over the years. I’ve been doing tech work for 20 years now, and I’m especially interested in comments from peers.
2.) the audience at Hacker News skews young, and the comments are given prominence ...
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August 25th, 2018
In Business
No Comments
This bit of melodrama reveals a lot about how to keep an online audience even after one is caught up in a scandal, as well as how to do this badly. The discussion in the comments is also interesting, regarding other people affected by the scandal, and how quickly they were able to regain their audience.
Still, the consequences hit hard and fast. Zamora and Dragun have bled subscribers since the incident; Dragun, alone, has lost at least 1,500, SocialBlade ...
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August 23rd, 2018
In Business
No Comments
Anyone who thinks the USA economy has fully recovered from the Great Recession should keep this in mind:
CR Note: Currently the target range for the federal funds rate is 1.75% to 2%. With inflation running close to 2% by most measures, the real Fed Funds rate is still negative.
Source
August 21st, 2018
In Philosophy
2 Comments
I first read Hadrian’s Memoirs when I was 14 and I loved it. I was a serious intellectual back then. I re-read it in my 20s and I still loved it. But I recently re-read and I was disappointed at how slow it is.
I don’t blame the Internet, I just think I’m older and I tend to skim more often than before.
So this is an interesting alternative view
Wolf resolved to allot a set period every day to reread ...
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August 17th, 2018
In Business
1 Comment
Monday, November 2nd, 2015
I woke up and got ready for work. Still at my apartment, I checked our team communications. I saw that Milburn (a member of the Board Of Directors, and possibly the secret founder of the company) had sent me a short email:
“Why did you send those emails over the weekend? Please call me as soon as you get to the office.”
I was surprised. Did he really want to start the week with another argument? And why did ...
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August 10th, 2018
In Technology
3 Comments
Summary: Python 1.x and 2.x brought some interesting ideas to the tech world, but the upgrade to 3.x has brought an astonishing number of problems in terms of version conflicts and dependency management. Python no longer offers ease of setup, as any non-trivial system will run into version problems. If you are a CTO, you should consider using a technology stack that has a long history of being stable, such as any of the languages that run on the JVM ...
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July 31st, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
A good comment by jacobwilliamroy:
“My impression as to your cheap labour was soon disillusioned when I saw your people at work. No doubt they are lowly paid, but the return is equally so; to see your men at work made me feel that you are a very satisfied and easy-going race who reckon time is no object. When I spoke to some managers they informed me that it was impossible to change the habits of a national heritage.”
This excerpt appears ...
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July 28th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Back when the USA was a middle-class country, lots of people chose to go to college and get a degree that would allow them to teach in the public schools. Huge numbers of women did this. For a long stretch, the only requirement to teach in K-12 schools was a college degree, and the specialty did not matter much. Since 2008, for the first time in history, some states cut back on the number of K-12 teachers they were employing, ...
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July 28th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
For the last 2 years I had Ghostery installed on Google Chrome (on a Mac) and I was using Chrome as my main web browser. I love the way it protected me from spam advertising. I’d open my favorite magazine and a purple box would open in the bottom right part of the browser window, where Ghostery would list all the advertising widgets it had blocked. The list was eye opening for me. On some magazine sites there were as ...
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July 28th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
I’m doing research for a bit of fiction I’m writing. The main character has uneven eyebrows. So I’m reading this advice:
Gel isn’t just for people with already-thick brows. Martin suggests starting with it as a baseline: “You want to see how big your brows can get naturally,” he explains. This will give you a better idea of how much you need to fake it till you make it. Brush in the direction your hair grows. Usually, that means you’ll ...
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July 28th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
I’m with the radicals here. I suspect that government intervention doesn’t seem to help economic growth, because the various Western governments have not attempted political and social revolutions since 1945. If a nation has a particular growth rate, and you’d like to double that growth rate, you need to make very radical changes. Among the more obvious things Western nations could do would look at the various constraints that keep women from fulfilling their potential. We have half the ...
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July 28th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
This is exactly the kind of mindset that used to get women burned at the stake:
But in September 2015, she was suddenly plunged into an American nightmare. She got a call at 6 a.m. one morning from a colleague at Re/Max telling her something terrible had been posted about her on the Re/Max Facebook page. Glennon thought at first she meant that a client had left her a bad review, but it turned out to be much worse than ...
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July 25th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
The first 70 years of the 20th Century saw big wage gains for almost all groups. But since then, things have gone downhill, and the era of the Internet has been an especial disaster. Writers have never been well paid, but their activity is a social and political necessity. At some point the government will have to subsidize this. This is the wrong way to handle an essential service:
My second internship was a much better experience, and I think ...
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July 23rd, 2018
In Business
No Comments
This has been going on for 30 years, but once again, computer programming is seeing a relative decline in wages, compared to most other professions:
Legal occupations are the only occupations that come close to potentially hinting at a shortage, with wage growth of 3.7 percent over the last year and an unemployment rate of less than 2 percent. Computer and mathematical science occupations, which require skills that are often mentioned in conversations about skills shortages, do have a relatively ...
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July 19th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
I read this article but I didn’t understand what was gained, compared to good monitoring pushing stuff into good graphs, thus giving people a real-time view of the system.
Architecture & Deployment diagram:
The first thing is to have the deployment & architecture diagrams. Where architecture depicts the logical flow of request/ response inside the system, deployment diagram is focussed on the actual infrastructure. But if the system is not too complex, it makes sense to have them in a single ...
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July 18th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
It’s odd that I spend all day reading tech news, and there are still so many project that I know nothing about:
This project is a very young one, only about one year old (first commit in github was on aug 2015). It is, however, backed by the world’s most popular TimeSeries database: InfluxDB. When diving in, you can see this is a very energetic group, which has covered a lot of ground in a very short time and is presenting ...
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July 18th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
I was a bit curious about this::
When you ask Emacs to start a new REPL using cider-jack-in it actually sends this request to Leiningen, the Clojure build automation tool. Once Leiningen has started the REPL, then a connection is made to that REPL from Emacs using the nREPL protocol.
This feature is from the CIDER package for Emacs, a Leiningen plugin called cider-nrepl and the Clojure tools.nrepl library are required.
Cider configuration (version 0.10 and earlier)
In earlier versions of CIDER (
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July 18th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Kerning! For god’s sake, kerning!
From Qz.com “American cheese is no longer the most popular cheese in America”. There is no space between “90″ and “%” so it reads like they belong together.
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July 18th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
A note to myself. I’m doing this with Terraform, but of course, one has to know how it will all actually work. Connecting a private subnet to the public world:
Resolution
1. List the Availability Zones that have the instances you want to attach to the load balancer.
2. Create an equal number of public subnets in the same Availability Zones where your private instances exist. To ensure that the load balancer can scale properly, verify that each subnet for the load balancer ...
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July 15th, 2018
In Business
No Comments
If you need to know how marketing works, consider these two essays, which are entirely opposite in how they talk about Emily Weiss, yet both agree she is able to tell a powerful story about her own experience with cosmetics.
This essay is a positive sounding puff piece:
Before Emily Weiss became the powerful business and marketing mogul we know today, she was a writer. She was a beauty columnist for Teen Vogue, actually. So yeah, she was a big deal ...
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July 15th, 2018
In Business
No Comments
Increasing specialization has been a theme of content sites on the Web, for much of the last 20 years. It’s interesting to realize that both readers and writers have an interest in cosmetics diaries. The comments on that post, by Sophie Kleeman, are interesting, and reviewing cosmetics is exactly how Emily Weiss launched her empire. I’d write something like “I’m surprised Jezebel doesn’t spin this off as its own blog” but Jezebel is now owned by Univision, which is run ...
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July 15th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
This is a great article: Building ZFS Root Ubuntu AMIs with Packer. You can do the same thing with Docker but I would not want my software engineers taking on those devops tasks. Indeed, one reason I’m so hostile to Docker is because it disrupts the specialization of tasks that I want to see on my teams. I expect to work with great devops people, and I’ll leave devops decisions to them.
From the article:
For all applications of importance or ...
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July 15th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that there are 2 failsafes that make it easier for an early stage technology startup to recover from making bad hires on the tech team.
1.) Hire a great project manager. A great project manager is able to get good work out of mediocre programmers. Also, great project managers have a good intuitive feel for how long tasks should take, so if some task misses its deadline, the project manager will know why. ...
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July 15th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Yeats
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Source
July 14th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
Because Terraform will delete all of your databases when you rebuild your infrastructure, and that is a nasty shock. So you should manually back up ElasticSearch:
In Aws you have many options to allow [users|servers] access AWS resources. The idea we have is to setup a snapshot repository on Amazon Aws S3 and doing a restore from that specific location. In order to do that, the servers that have to access S3 must be authorised. Thankfully to Amazon we have many ...
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July 12th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
Two bad incidents, in PHP and Python.
Escalate? Oh how I wish I had someone to escalate to. Painful to read. Here is someone filing a bug report and attacking Ramus Lerdorf, the guy who created PHP.
[2010-01-08 21:51 UTC] endosquid at endosquid dot com
This is going to cause us MONTHS or fixing code for no real benefit since this behavior change is arbitrary and seemingly, was made for no reason. We are all engineers and developershere, and ...
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July 11th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Brett Kavanaugh sounds like a really bad dude. If he made it onto the Supreme Court, he would take the USA in a terrible direction. How should the Democrats stop his nomination? Since they lack power right now, they need to make use of power they will have in the future. They need to credibly threaten to end the independence of the Supreme Court, the next time they hold the majority in Congress, and hold the Presidency.
This is known ...
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July 11th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Those on the offense are complaining that the other side is trying to defend itself. This is like the abusive husband who hits his wife and then asks “Why’d you make me hit you? I can’t take any more of this!”
The one thing protesters and customers seemed to share was a fervent want to express their beliefs – as well as a frustration with the political moment that sparked the Red Hen incident in the first place.
“What happened ...
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July 6th, 2018
In Business
No Comments
My friend Susan Wentworth, who lives in Madison, Wisconsin, sent me this in an email:
I do think entrepreneurs are a special kind of crazy for sure. I guess you need a little crazy to do something no one has suceeded at doing before. The risk of failure is so big, you’d have to be a little crazy.
I am often surprised at another aspect of entrepreneurs and also salespeople that I have have noticed a few times. They ...
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June 30th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Absolutely amazing if true:
It all started about 45,000 years ago. At that point, people began burning down vegetation to make room for plant resources and homes. Over millennia, the simple practice of burning back forest evolved. People mixed specialized soils for growing plants; they drained swamps for agriculture; they domesticated animals like chickens; and they farmed yam, taro, sweet potato, chili pepper, black pepper, mango, and bananas.
École française d’Extrême-Orient archaeologist Damian Evans, a co-author on the Nature paper, said that ...
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June 30th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Given their intensity online, an interesting fact about right-wing web trolls is how little they have so far managed to do on their own. Without help from state actors such as Russia, it would seem they are incapable of getting anything done in the real world. If they are able to take over Ukip, that would be a first sign that they are able to accomplish something in the real world. So far, web trolls with hundreds of thousands of ...
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June 30th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Imagine a world where it seems normal for a world leader to go on maternity leave:
She nearly doubled the Labour vote, wrangled herself into office with a complex multiparty coalition, and just passed a social democratic budget. Polls have held. The most recent gives her party and one coalition partner, the Greens, enough votes to govern between them. Her personal approval rating is a thumping 76%.
To understand why is to look beyond policy and into her representation of it. What ...
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June 30th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
In normal times, it is normal for a President to be popular when the economy is good. President Bush 2001-2009 was very popular while the economy was good. So was President Clinton and President Reagan. At the top of every business cycle, there will be a few years when the public is happy, and credit often goes to the President, even if the President did very little to create the current prosperity.
So if Trump was a normal President, it ...
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June 30th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Heartbreaking stories of mass murder:
Yesterday, Jarrod Ramos allegedly murdered five journalists at the offices of the Capital Gazette in Maryland. Ramos had sent countless threats to the paper, after one journalist reported on his harassment of a former classmate. The woman went through what she called a “year-long nightmare” of intimidation and threats before Ramos was convicted of misdemeanour harassment. Ramos was apparently furious that the Capital Gazette wrote about him as if he’d done something wrong.
Of 95 mass shootings ...
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June 25th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Shakespeare’s view of tyrants. Interesting:
The tyrant’s triumph is based on lies and fraudulent promises braided around the violent elimination of rivals. The cunning strategy that brings him to the throne hardly constitutes a vision for the realm; nor has he assembled counselors who can help him formulate one. He can count—for the moment, at least—on the acquiescence of such suggestible officials as the London mayor and frightened clerks like the scribe. But the new ruler possesses neither administrative ability nor ...
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June 23rd, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
I also posted this in my post about the dinner party last night, but I thought I would also make it a standalone post, in case anyone wants to ask specifically about this dish.
Some people asked me for the recipe for the pasta and seafood dish that I made. I post the recipe here:
For the dinner I made last night I used 2 pounds of scallops and 1 pound of shrimp.
In a frying pan, melt butter with some salt and ...
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June 23rd, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
A big thanks to all of the lovely and amazing people who came to my dinner party last night. Some people left early and some arrived late, but I think this photo captured most of us:
Some people asked me for the recipe for the pasta and seafood dish that I made. I post the recipe here:
For the dinner I made last night I used 2 pounds of scallops and 1 pound of shrimp.
In a frying pan, melt butter with ...
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Source
June 19th, 2018
In Business
No Comments
General Electric is getting kicked off the Dow because of its financial struggles. But how meaningful is the Dow if it keeps getting rid of companies when they run into trouble. Some people point out that the Dow has mostly gone up over the last 120 years, and they see this as evidence of an expanding economy. But if they hide all the bad news, and only keep the good news, is the index really meaningful? If you only ...
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June 16th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
This is sort of like the high-brow, well educated version of incel rants:
In virtually all states it is more profitable to have children with multiple partners than to have multiple children with the same co-parent. Residents of most states can enjoy a higher spending power by collecting child support after a one-night sexual encounter than by working at the median wage for a college graduate.
I have never met a woman who would prefer to raise children alone. Every woman ...
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June 16th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
It’s the personal marriage stories that interest me. For instance, this:
I’m annoyed at how much of an Issue this is becoming for me. As a lady, I’m not sure whether to take my partner’s last name or not when we finally do the official knot-tying thing. Do I keep mine because I know I won’t have kids, and I kind of want to keep my dad’s last name alive as long as I am? Do I take his because Tradition ...
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June 13th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
A bit hidden, and important for anyone using Jenkins, This fact should be better known:
Serialization and the “node” Block
Jenkins pipelines must be built so they can run across multiple executors, even if you only run Jenkins with one executor. This is done using the node block. With it, a job can be split into smaller pieces that can be scheduled to run on any executor on any agent in the cluster. Once a node block completes, Jenkins serializes the ...
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June 3rd, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Interesting story. I recall Little Green Footballs as a blog of right-wing extremists, but apparently the owner of the site evolved. Conversion stories are so rare, I consider them automatically interesting:
JH: They’re not even controversial, Charles. Along the way, and correct me if I’m wrong because I was an outsider looking in, it seems the tipping point came in 2007 when you had this epic flame war with Pamela Geller, who remains one of the country’s biggest bigots to this ...
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June 3rd, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Linkrot has been a major part of the Joy Reid story, though not many people have commented on that aspect. Shelley Powers brings up this aspect of the story:
Weblogs were less like the Washington Post and more like Facebook or Twitter of the time: a stream of conciousness, separated into timestamped chunks. Every once in a while we’d carefully research and write longer pieces (still called “long reads”, even today), but for the most part, we tossed up whatever ...
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June 3rd, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Depression can end your career, end your marriage, and end your life. But long before most people find themselves facing a serious depression, they typically pass through an earlier stage, more mild and more subtle. What if we could all catch ourselves at that earlier stage?
I’m talking about burnout. Perhaps we can think of it as the mildest form of depression, or a mid-point between true mental health and outright depression. How do we identify something so subtle? Specific ...
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June 2nd, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
So sad that this continues to happen. Seriously, what is wrong with these guys? Why are they so negative? Do they realize that they have to option to demonstrate some leadership and raise everyone up to a positive place?
After Annemunition posted the video, one of the players who’d given her gallons of shit tried to apologize. In a sense. “I am extremely sorry for the way you feel, ” he wrote in a tweet from an account that’s since ...
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May 31st, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Interesting:
If our particles have no identity, how can we?
If the elements are all identical with each other, then it seems like the only measurable identity you could attach to sets of elements is cardinality, right?
Reviving the a notion of “monad” from Leibniz from the 1600s, as a thought experiment:
Imagine beings that exist outside of time and space, in a space that is without dimension. These creatures initially lack cardinality or identity. They are “lazy” in the computing sense, they ...
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May 28th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Shelley Powers site has been online since 1996. As such, she knows a bit about having a voice that changes over the years. As such, she is very much worth reading, regarding the changing voice of Joy Reid:
I’ll have more to say in a later piece on what it means to be a writer putting yourself online, especially over the years. For now, I think that the Daily Beast has an accurate read on what’s happened.
I’ve had considerable pushback on ...
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May 28th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Since 2008, I’ve been sad about the death of the blogosphere, and the way things moved to Twitter and died there. Paul Krugman posts this reminder about the importance of blogs:
An aside: the way this discussion is taking place marks a kind of new frontier in the mechanics of scientific communication – and, I think, an unfortunate one. Once upon a time economic debate took place in the pages of refereed journals, but that stopped being true at least 30 ...
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May 27th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
I like this review, posted to Amazon:
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A well written, highly amusing, and cathartic read for anyone who has survived or is facing similar ridiculous/toxic workplace situations or relationships.
The author, Lawrence, brings you right into the trenches along with him as he slogs through challenge after challenge determined to do his best to prevent impending fiasco. Fortunately, its not his first rodeo, so he keeps a life-line on his sanity through the co-author, Natalie; and so the book is ...
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May 27th, 2018
In Philosophy
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Regarding the rise of current populist movements and their craving for charismatic leaders Übermensch is the wrong word for what we are seeing, because Übermensch is basically a secular term, and so it misses the primitive religious feelings and primal mysticism that animates current populist movements. ÜberSeele is a better term: over-soul, the soul beyond. It’s important to have a term with some mystical connotation.
I apologize that most of my examples come from the Western tradition. I’ve studied ...
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May 27th, 2018
In Business
No Comments
According to this, the only real economic boom was the boom of the 1500s:
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May 17th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
I’m still struggling to learn when to use the various different Machine Learning approaches:
To solve a problem like this, you can use MODEL-BASED approaches if you know how likely it is that the robot will move from one state to another (that is, the transition probabilities for each action) or MODEL-FREE approaches (you don’t know how likely it is that the robot will move from state to state, but you can figure out a reward structure).
Markov Decision Process (MDP) – ...
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May 17th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
This is very much worth reading if you are using or considering Terraform:
It takes a bit of getting used to, but This terraform how to, should get you moving. You need an EC2 host to run your containers on, you need a task that defines your container image & resources, and lastly a service which tells ECS which cluster to run on and registers with ALB if you have one.
If you don’t know, the ALB is the Application Load Balancer. ...
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May 17th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
I am impressed with the way that Terraform allows us to specify a setup of servers and load balancers and firewalls and whitelists and set it up, and use it for development, and then the day we decide to go public, we only have to run one command to re-create everything in production. That is a high level of automation.
Good people have insisted that this is only possible while using Docker containers, but I don’t see that at all. ...
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May 16th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
This is interesting. I mostly just use the “curl” command to test APIs over the Internet, but this could be useful when I need a lot of mock services:
mountebank employs a legion of imposters to act as on-demand test doubles. Your test communicates to mountebank over http using the api to set up stubs, record and replay proxies, and verify mock expectations. In the typical use case, each test will start an imposter during test setup and stop an imposter ...
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May 13th, 2018
In Technology
39 Comments
Summary: don’t use Docker, or any other container technology. Use Terraform and Packer instead. It’s one less level of virtualization, and therefore one less level of complexity.
There is perhaps one good argument for using Docker. It is hidden by the many bad arguments for using Docker. I’m going to try to explain why so much Docker rhetoric is stupid, and then look at what reason might be good.
Every time I criticize Docker I get angry responses. When I ...
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May 13th, 2018
In Technology
2 Comments
Do you know about giraffes? In particular, their recurrent laryngeal nerve? Here is the deal: the nerve used to go straight from the brain to larynx, and in fish this is a short, direct connection, with the nerve passing behind the gills, but as fish evolved into creatures that lived on land, the gills got pulled into the body of the creature, and became what we call lungs. As that evolution happened, the nerve got pulled further and further into ...
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May 13th, 2018
In Technology
3 Comments
The Acme Legal Firm needed a small office, and there was little available for rent in their city, so they decided they would build their own place. They hired a builder and asked her what they should do.
“Well, I think we should build this office with wood. I’m a big believer in wood. It is beautiful and fairly strong, and it is easy to hire workers who know how to work with wood. The failure modes of wood are ...
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May 11th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
I get that Linux Cgroups might be acceptable, in the sense that “perfect is the enemy of the good” and Cgroups are maybe good enough for now. I’d prefer it if the industry could rethink what a multi-user computer is, get rid of Unix, take the best ideas forward into a new system, and build something where something as clunky as Cgroups and Docker are not needed — it should be possible to have a “fat process” which does what ...
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May 11th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
This is not the way I would have gone, but whatever. Here we are now:
cgroups (abbreviated from control groups) is a Linux kernel feature that limits, accounts for, and isolates the resource usage (CPU, memory, disk I/O, network, etc.) of a collection of processes.
Engineers at Google (primarily Paul Menage and Rohit Seth) started the work on this feature in 2006 under the name “process containers”.[1] In late 2007, the nomenclature changed to “control groups” to avoid confusion caused by multiple ...
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May 10th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
I had no idea the history was so opposite:
In this new context, the salaries of executives and engineers rose structurally faster than the low and medium-range salaries in the 1950s-1960s and at first, nobody seemed to be worried. A minimum wage had been created in 1950, but it was almost never re-valued thereafter, with the result that there was a wide gap in comparison with the evolution of the average wage. Society had never been so patriarchal; in the 1980s, ...
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May 10th, 2018
In Business
No Comments
One of many example’s of how broken LinkedIn is, I can not figure out who “walter” is, nor can I click on “walter” to go see that profile:
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May 10th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
My friend Lark points me to this, and I am surprised to realize that the theory of epigenetics was around for a long time before it gained acceptance:
McClintock and the Theory of Epigenetics
Beyond her discovery of TEs and her revolutionary cytogenetic research techniques, Barbara McClintock was also the first scientist to correctly speculate on the basic concept of epigenetics-or heritable changes in gene expression that are not caused by changes to DNA sequences. Mainly, she recognized that genes can be ...
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May 8th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
Sean Hull always has interesting things to say, and so it is worth reading what tripped him up with a recent project where he had to Dockerize everything:
When a service is run, ECS wants to have *all* of the containers running together. Just like when you use docker-compose. If one container fails, ecs-agent may decide to kill the entire service, and restart. So you may see weird things happening in “docker logs” for one container, simply because another failed. What ...
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May 7th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
As I’ve suggested before, unless you a full time specialist tracking AWS, you won’t be able to keep track of all the services coming out of AWS. The one I just learned about is ALB:
Amazon Web Services (AWS) just announced a new Application Load Balancer (ALB) service.
I spent some time playing with the new service to understand what it offers and to see how it fits into our cloud architecture.
In summary, ALB is a massive improvement over ELB in almost ...
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April 30th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
This is a solider who fought in combat and who is extremely critical that children at a school failed to act the way he behaved on a battlefield. One can never underestimate the complete insanity of the gun debate in the USA. There should not be a need to say this, but a 14 year old in biology class should not be expected to behave the way a solider, after years of training, might behave.
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April 30th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
I had endless errors with Confluence. Each time I started over, I set up a new EC2 instance. I eventually learned that it was possible to restart the setup process by deleting the file confluence.cfg.xml so I did this:
/etc/init.d/confluence stop
rm /var/atlassian/application-data/confluence/confluence.cfg.xml
/etc/init.d/confluence start
but now I’m trying to finish the setup, and all I get is a blank page:
Does anyone know how to fix this?
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April 29th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
I suspect this will last. It’s a phenomena that needed a name, and this is actually a good name. A hundred years from now, this might be the only thing that is remembered from this particular event.
Wolf continued: “I actually really like Sarah. I think she’s very resourceful. But she burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye. Like maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.”
Sanders looked stony faced ...
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April 26th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
[[ My thanks to Natalie Sidner for editing this essay. All names in this essay have been changed. ]]
While it might be admirable to aspire to be as rational as possible, what I’ve noticed, over and over again, is that people overestimate how rational they are. Or they imagine themselves to be objective and unemotional, when in fact their behavior is driven by strong emotions. The accusation “You’re emotional, I’m objective” tends to be a manipulative power play. I ...
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April 21st, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
The Onion has a reputation for humor that cuts close to the bone, and this really hits me hard:
“‘Your Father Died Peacefully In His Sleep,’ Assures Hospice Nurse Who Spent Past 6 Months Watching Man Wither Away In Agony”
In an attempt to console the family of the deceased, Mountain View Hospice nurse Sam Bakshi—who watched his patient wither away for half a year in unrelenting torment—told relatives of the late Dennis Ridges on Tuesday that the man had died peacefully ...
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April 21st, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Unlike the so-called “sexual revolution” of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the change of the last 10 years has been dramatic but less talked about.
“I just have one thing to say about promise rings,” said Jordin Sparks, then a newly-minted American Idol winner, as she took the stage in 2008 to present at the MTV VMAs. She was gearing up a response to host Russell Brand, who earlier in the night had made a dig at the band the ...
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April 21st, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
There is always some lie at the heart of depression, some fiction. A large body of research suggests a link between creativity and depression. I think the link must be the ability to go over the same story a thousand times, and slowly refine it. I assume Bach did that with his cello suites, and Victor Hugo must have rehearsed Les Miserable a thousand times to get the structure of the narrative down. Over and over we go, repeating ...
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April 20th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
An interesting example of an artist whose star burned brightly for many years, then faded completely. I’ve never heard of her before this.
Walsh died of tuberculosis in October 1926 at the age of 31, leaving Boyle pregnant with his child, born in March 1927. Her husband, Richard, invited her and her daughter, Sharon, to return to live with him in Stoke-on-Trent, England, where he had found a job with the Michelin Tire Company. Out of options, Kay accepted. She ...
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April 16th, 2018
In Philosophy
9 Comments
I feel like my teachers lied to me. The version of Western history that I was taught in school mostly focused on Spain and Portugal during the 1400s and 1500s, France and Germany in the 1700s and 1800s, Russia and Germany in the 1900s, and Britain during the whole era from the Dark Ages onwards. But I never learned anything about Poland, except for the weird fact that Copernicus showed up, out of nowhere, and suddenly invented modern science. Except ...
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April 15th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
I have trouble imagining this working for an American audience. There is a level of cuteness and irony that is popular in some USA sub-cultures, but never seems mainstream enough to be addressed in an ad.
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April 12th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
I’m working with Laravel now, a PHP framework. I see this on StackOverflow:
With Laravel, everything is more complex than it needs to be. Yesterday I was dealing with the issue of logging and errors. How to get Laravel to output errors somewhere that I could see them? Well, that involves overriding some logging classes. The tone of the documentation is always “See, it’s very simple, and flexible, just override the default classes, inherit from the parent, override the method, choose ...
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April 10th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
As soon as the Denisovan were discovered, it should have become necessary to update our ideas about where homo sapiens first arose. It’s simply too much of a coincidence. Neanderthals and Denisovans and Sapiens seem more similar to each other than to homo erectus, therefore they must have had a somewhat recent common ancestor, and if Neanderthal and Denisovans first evolved in Asia, that means Sapiens must have evolved there too. Roughly, the most likely theory at the moment is:
1.) ...
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April 9th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
Apparently so, this is interesting.
Someone named Jinni writes:
Our Muqaddimah of Code 45* is still banned, alas. A bright point in my own days feels notably dimmed. For those of you who didn’t read (or quite ‘get’) Code 45*; it was a hallucinatory tour into the subconscious of Donald Trump as evidenced by the odd and illogical punctuation of his disordered tweets. Code 45*, like a creative, and slightly mad psychotherapist, attempted to wrest vestiges of meaning from the morass of ...
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April 9th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
I’m not clear how they got around attorney-client privilege, but I assume the exception here was similar to the one used against lawyers who work for the Mafia: if you know you are protecting criminal behavior, then your privilege is revoked. Clearly, the FBI raid against Trump’s lawyer represents a huge escalation of the investigation against Trump.
Trump sounds just barely coherent in his response:
The president also complained about Session’s decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, a longtime sticking ...
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April 8th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
In 1855 Jules Michelet claimed he had invented “Universal history,” a history that included everything, and Marx increasingly thought of history as involving more than just kings and battles, but true social and economic histories didn’t becomes widespread till the 1890s, and perhaps saw their best expression with Fernand Braudel, in the mid 20th century.
My point is, it is extraordinary that anyone in 1832 would raise the possibility of writing a history of slaves. This was really ahead of its ...
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April 8th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
I just lost a week of my life trying to send a message from my server to the APNS servers. A previous team had given us some bad PHP code which I could not get working. I finally tore it out and replaced it with the example I found on StackOverflow:
/* We are using the sandbox version of the APNS for development. For production
environments, ...
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April 8th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
Having lost the last week of my life trying get a pem file that will let me talk to APNS, I will link to this, because it seems to be a solution for the future:
Automatically generate and renew your push notification profiles
Tired of manually creating and maintaining your push notification profiles for your iOS apps? Tired of generating a pem file for your server?
pem does all that for you, just by simply running pem.
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April 7th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
I wonder why some species have such lopsided ratios of male/female?
Male cuttlefish challenge one another for dominance and the best den during mating season. During this challenge, no direct contact is usually made. The animals will threaten each other until one of them backs down and swims away. Eventually, the larger male cuttlefish mate with the females by grabbing them with their tentacles, turning the female so that the two animals are face-to-face, then using a specialized tentacle to insert ...
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April 6th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
Apparently there are a lot of ways to do this? I am suspicious, because I lost days trying to get this to work.
This article says:
Now we need to encode these two files in Base64:
openssl base64 -in cert.pem -out cert.txt
openssl base64 -in key.pem -out key.txt
But this gist says:
Step 1: Create Certificate .pem from Certificate .p12
Command: openssl pkcs12 -clcerts -nokeys -out apns-dev-cert.pem -in apns-dev-cert.p12
Step 2: Create Key .pem from Key .p12
Command : openssl pkcs12 -nocerts -out apns-dev-key.pem -in apns-dev-key.p12
None ...
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April 6th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
Homo sapiens have an unusual reproductive system. Whereas apes rarely have more than 5 children, humans typically had 20 to 25 children. What lead to the huge increase in the number of children? One possibility is fire, which lead to cooked food. One can reason from the opposite of this paragraph:
This hypothesis stems from a few modern observations. When you eat cooked food, you have access to many more calories than if you eat the same food raw. There ...
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April 5th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
None of the commands listed on this page worked for me, and yet that is the topped ranked page in Google. What did work for me:
openssl pkcs12 -in apns_certificates.p12 -out apns_certificates.pem -nodes
openssl pkcs12 -in apns_key.p12 -out apns_key.pem -nodes
chmod 0400 apns_key.pem
chmod 0400 apns_certificates.pem
openssl s_client -connect gateway.sandbox.push.apple.com:2195 -cert apns_certificates.pem -key apns_key.pem
cat apns_certificates.pem apns_key.pem > Peeroapp.pem
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April 3rd, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
This is a good summary of some issues with starting a career in tech. This one jumps out at me, though I realize the issue of portfolios is controversial in some quarters.
More than a couple of times have I met developers looking for web development gigs without a proper portfolio to show off.
Having a portfolio helps to demonstrate what you are capable of doing.
You’ve probably been told that having a personal domain puts you a mile ahead in your ...
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March 29th, 2018
In Business
No Comments
It’s probably good that teens today are producing stuff for YouTube, rather than just passively consuming whatever is on television.
Interesting:
The magazine Teen Boss, styled as Teen Bo$$!, débuted in September of last year. It publishes quarterly, like an earnings report. The title is aimed at girls aged eight to fifteen, and it has a bright, pink-heavy, clamorously cheerful aesthetic to match. September cover lines included “how to make money online right now!” and “turn your piggy bank into ...
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March 27th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
Over the last week I had two marathon days where I worked more than 12 hours, and I had 4 normal days where I worked 6 to 8 hours, and all of it was wasted on one bug.
I’ve a friend who wanted an app built that would work for both iOS and Android. He contracted with a team in India to build it. They used Cordova and Ionic.
When they were done with the project they sent it to ...
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March 25th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
I am amazed by this. On Friday I tried to log into:
https://developer.apple.com
None of my regular passwords worked. Only later did I realize I’d probably set up a separate account for this, using some unusual password. Anyway, I figured this would not be a big deal. I clicked “I forgot password”. I put in my email and then my phone number.
Apple then sent a text message to my phone, with a code that I was to type into the website. ...
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March 22nd, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
I’ve decided I should learn how to build native iOS apps. So I am following a basic tutorial for Xcode and iOS.
As soon as I’ve created the project, I try to run it. It does compile and run, but the log is full of hundreds of errors. I’m putting a small sampling below.
Does Apple realize how confusing this is for someone who is just beginning?
I learned how to program back in 1999, writing PHP scripts. One great ...
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March 20th, 2018
In Business
No Comments
Although rapid hiring suggests that something good is happening (money is coming in) when a tech team expands 100% in a year, it is likely that the short-term growth will undermine the long term growth. Every since Fredrick Brooks published “The Mythical Man Month” we’ve understood that rapid hiring in a tech team leads to very difficult communication issues.
And yet somehow, these problems are still normal in the game industry:
The culture of the company changed dramatically as a result. ...
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March 19th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
CSS is broken because the style sheets are global. Once upon a time, this didn’t seem terrible because it was thought that CSS would operate as CONSTANTS. But they are not constants. On any modern website or app, the styles are always changing. So the styles are really a global variable, and they have all the problems that 60 years of computer science has taught us to expect from global variables.
There are other problems with CSS. Perhaps the biggest ...
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March 17th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
The events in my book “How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps” happens at the NYU Varick Street startup incubator, in 2015.
Of the incubator where these events occur, my co-author, Natalie Sidner, produced a 4 minute for her family, back in June of 2015:
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March 15th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
The right-wing has become a tribe. This has been true at least since Newt Gingrich won the congressional elections in 1994, but it has only recently become fashionable to say this out loud. And the New York Times is both unwilling and unable to represent that tribe on its opinion pages:
Here is the scary truth that NYT editors and readers alike resist: US politics today is not a contest of ideas or governing philosophies. We are witnessing a massive revanchist ...
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March 11th, 2018
In Business
No Comments
The book I wrote is about events which occurred at one of the NYU startup incubators.
I was interested by this article about the economic impact of these incubators:
“In the last year, the Future Labs and our companies reached significant milestones. We started with news of Uber acquiring Geometric Intelligence, and throughout the year, significant rounds of investment closed by current and graduate companies. In this single year, the Future Labs economic output totaled $1.2 billion,” said Steve Kuyan, NYU ...
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March 10th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
I wish this felt more intuitive to me:
This is a starting point for intuition:
To provide some intuition consider the situation in two dimensions, as shown in Figure 10. For a point on the circle to be close to the equator, its
y-coordinate must be small.
So, this is sort of an expression of the Curse Of Dimensionality?
But perhaps the most amazing thing is that we can not figure out how many spheres might surround a central sphere, in such a ...
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March 9th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
An interesting glimpse of a sub-culture and a meme (a somewhat extreme take on the “useless lesbian” meme):
My wife and I literally would make out, sleep together, moved in together, adopted a dog together, go to family and work functions together, and built a life together for about three years before she proposed. Only to catch me by surprise, because I didn’t realize we were dating, thinking this was just normal friend stuff. She still likes to remind me that ...
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March 8th, 2018
In Technology
No Comments
With Apache I have always done something like this:
ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:8080/
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:8080/
But I just saw this interesting bit on StackOverflow:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(/.*)$ http://app-server:8181/jellyfish$1 [P]
ProxyPassReverse / http://app-server:8181/jellyfish/
Which does the same thing. The RewriteRule says “grab everything after the ...
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March 8th, 2018
In Business
No Comments
I likely this because it is an example of how innovation sometimes comes from unlikely people. The wife, in particular, does not initially seem like the type to revolutionize part of the computer industry.
The story concept was certainly innovative, but it wasn’t the sort of innovation that would immediately appeal to a guy like Ken, with little interest in game design in the abstract. He was rather interested in products he could sell, operating intuitively by a rule he would ...
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March 5th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
I would have found this very frustrating:
I started to ask about Mad Men’s discussion of the issue of harassment in the workplace, citing a Boston Globe piece from earlier this year titled, “Before #MeToo, there was Mad Men.” Before I could ask about whether it struck Hendricks that Joan’s final storyline was in many ways prescient in terms of how this conversation would come to play out just a few years later, the publicist interrupted:
“I’m so sorry, but we ...
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March 5th, 2018
In Business
2 Comments
Just to get this out of the way, entrepreneurs engage in all of the self-destructive habits that non-entrepreneurs sometimes engage in: drug addiction, denial, blame shifting, perfectionism, depression, mania, laziness, etc. I’m not going to write about that, because all of that is too obvious, and great essays have already been written about those subjects. Instead I’m going to write about the self-destructive habits that are unique to entrepreneurs. There are 3 patterns that I have seen a lot ...
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March 3rd, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
I’ll write this down, just so I can remember it later. Below I post an example of incoherent writing. It is possible the person who wrote is struggling with some mental health issues. But those are interesting in themselves. I’ve read that before 1960, people suffering from schizophrenia, in the USA, mostly commonly said they were being persecuted by Satan, but during the 1960s and 1970s, they most commonly claimed they were being persecuted by the CIA. Even those with ...
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February 26th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
It is worrisome to think that politicians now feel comfortable using racist language, in a way they have not felt comfortable these last 50 years. I recall when I was young people said “The older generation is racist but the younger generation will change things.” But nowadays, some of the leading racists are younger than I am. And the trend seems to be getting worse instead of better.
Here is a rather overt example from the heartland of the USA:
According to ...
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February 25th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
At the end of the English revolutionary period, during the 1660s, a conservative reaction set in, and even some peasants were infected with the conservative spirit. Some wanted England to become a monarchy again, and they openly called for the return of the King. They had a saying: “All will be well when the King enjoys his own again.”
In the 1970s, conservatives began to promote “supply side economics” which is the modern, pseudo-scientific way of saying “All will be well ...
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February 22nd, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
No one wants to die. The police don’t want to die. Faced with death, the police panic. Fantasy deludes some gun advocates, in particular, the fantasy that every cop will act like Bruce Willis did in the movie Die Hard. The notion that posting a policeman at a school makes the school safe has been proven wrong.
The police officer assigned to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School resigned Thursday, under investigation for failing to enter the building as a ...
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February 22nd, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
This is an interesting interpretation, but what does it mean if applied to Fox News?
Reality needs to be called what it is. Systematically skewing coverage and providing a false picture of reality to the public constitutes a financial benefit on a huge scale. When a senior politician gets a series of flattering articles from a publisher, it’s worth a lot more to the politician than a box of cigars or a suitcase of cash to finance primary election activists. When ...
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February 18th, 2018
In Business
No Comments
On the Internet, the house always wins the bet, and by “house” I mean Google, Facebook, Amazon — the dozen top online tech companies. Everyone else is a sucker. (This is more true for consumer apps than business apps.)
I strongly agree with this:
Now, almost every website looks the same — and performs poorly. Offline, brands try to make their store experiences unique to differentiate themselves. Online, every website — from Gucci to the Gap — offers the same experience: a ...
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February 18th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
(The following is about the USA, obviously)
I know of Democrats who are currently dreaming of winning a large majority in the House Of Representatives in the elections of 2018. Then they can proceed to launch impeachment proceedings against Trump.
There is an obvious way for Russia to help Trump, and that is to hack the election machines and so ensure that some Democrats win. Bonus points for candidates who were expected to lose — their wins will later seem ...
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February 18th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
This initially sounds smart:
“We like to romanticize the wild, raw, majestic beauty of nature. But when you take a closer look, nature is really just a giant fuckfest. That beautiful bird chirping? It’s a mating call. That pretty little bird is trying to get laid. And why does the peacock have such beautiful feathers? To attract females. Because he’s trying to get laid.
Animals in the wild spend their entire lives trying to stay alive, and to mate. That’s it. They ...
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February 16th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
The population of Bulgaria is in decline. Alex Taborrok raises the question of whether this should be a concern:
A correspondent wrote me asking what to do. I responded what’s the problem? Of course, there are plenty of things one could do to make Bulgaria a richer and better place to live, some of which Bulgaria has been doing and some of which they have not. The more fundamental question, however, is why the number of a particular type of ...
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February 15th, 2018
In Business
No Comments
This was initially inspired by an article posted to Hacker News, regarding Google’s mismanagement of its communication tools.
————————-
When I talk to the 20 tech people who I respect most, what I notice is that everyone respects Google less now than 5 years ago. Is it a successful branding strategy that generates so much dislike?
I’m especially curious because Google is famous for basing its decisions on “data”. I have no idea how things work in Google, but I can say ...
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February 15th, 2018
In Philosophy
No Comments
I was in Germany this summer. My friend and I went to visit her parents. Her parents wanted me to see a historic town nearby. We got in the car. The father drove down the road at 190 kilometers per hour. The other cars were also going fast.
I saw cars at an intersection make turns, in front of other cars, that I would never do in the USA, because I would never trust the other drivers to behave correctly. ...
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February 14th, 2018
In Business
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If President Trump passes a huge infrastructure bill this year, it will go into effect in 2019, and have full effect in 2020, before the elections. Trump will be re-elected, and serve a full 8 years.
So why doesn’t Trump fight for this? Apparently he is only proposing $200 billion over several years, which is a joke. The USA is in urgent need of at least $2 trillion in repairs, and an infrastructure bill would be extremely popular with blue ...
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February 10th, 2018
In Philosophy
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While I’m in favor of a stronger safety net for the sick, if people are able-bodied, I think they should work. This sounds like a good reason to let copyright lapse when an author dies:
Mr. Clarke was a rascally nine-year-old when he inherited that jewel. Ever since, as “Goodnight Moon” has drifted toward the center of America’s collective consciousness, he has floated on the fringes of society. No steady job. No fixed place of abode. Dozens of arrests. Rarely has ...
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February 5th, 2018
In Philosophy
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This is amazing. This tool, for burnishing leather, is still in use today. It is perhaps the only tool that the Neandertals invented and which we still use today. Neandertal culture lives.
However, we cannot eliminate the possibility that these tools instead indicate that modern humans entered Europe and started impacting Neandertal behavior earlier than we can currently demonstrate. Resolving this problem will require sites in central Europe with better bone preservation.
How widespread this new Neandertal behavior was is a ...
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February 3rd, 2018
In Philosophy
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Of the many tragic aspects of predators such as Weinstein, one is the waste of a great creative partnership. For now, this seems like a minor part of this story, a tiny thing compared to the actual violence and harm of these stories, and yet I wonder if, many decades from now, we might look back and wonder about what might have been, if the film industry had not been full of predators. What if these women had been in ...
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February 3rd, 2018
In Philosophy
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Interesting story. Apparently slave children with white fathers were considered free in the 1600s. And then they changed the law in 1662 to make it far more oppressive.
Elizabeth’s father, Thomas Key, was charged with fathering Elizabeth, which he at first denied, and as result he was brought to court to be forced to support her and arrange for apprenticeships so that she could learn skills. That was the protocol at the time for anyone seeing to get a “bastard” ...
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February 2nd, 2018
In Technology
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The whole thing is interesting, but Jens Stimpfle’s comment comes close to representing my view:
“I see the value in learning by building yourself, but from a software engineering point of view, using a tried and tested framework is likely to give you higher quality product in less time.”
Well, the framework I was to use last (Qt) had bugs that simply can’t be fixed by users (memory leaks, double free leading to segfault when exiting after reloading QML engine) and immature ...
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February 1st, 2018
In Philosophy
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This is a good story, and it communicates how insane things can get when one is chasing down a bug.
Having calculated the theoretical peak throughput, I decided there was no good reason this microprocessor shouldn’t be able to maintain a much higher level of throughput. Time to do some low-level packet analysis.
I set up Wireshark and started capturing packets. At first, everything seemed ok but looking at the timestamps showed clearly that the transmissions were very bursty. Sometimes there ...
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January 30th, 2018
In Business
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Christian McCarrick is CTO at Global Tel*Link and he has also created the SimpleLeadership podcast. SimpleLeadership is designed for both new and experienced software & technology managers who want to build high-performing teams, better motivate & mentor their employees, reduce attrition and advance their career. It is for people who want to go beyond just being a manager and become a true leader.
McCarrick interviewed me a week ago, and we spoke about the issues of productivity, and especially how group ...
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January 30th, 2018
In Business
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Because I interact with people from many countries and cultures, I’ve adopted the rule that I tend to let them set the tone and style of our interactions. I try to minimize the number of cultural faux pas I commit (speaking of which, should I follow English or French rules of pluralization when I went to pluralize “faux pas”?) . Most of the time, I simply mimic the style they set.
So a few rules I follow:
If they address ...
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January 27th, 2018
In Business
2 Comments
Sarah Kessler has a post on QZ, the goal of which is left unspecified.
The title is “Writing 5,000 words about why you quit Google is the ultimate privilege”. I’m pretty sure the ultimate privilege is cheating your workers, sexually harassing 20 women, and then getting elected President Of The United States of America. There are other great privileges in this world, such as the ability to avoid paying taxes because you keep most of your assets in overseas ...
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January 26th, 2018
In Philosophy
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This is the history of almost every software project I can remember:
When I started preparing for teaching the chain rule in my class, I didn’t like the way the book did it. I felt like the proof was overly complicated and seemed to deliberately avoid an easier method. I couldn’t figure out why the author approached the proof the way he did. I started writing up different notes that I thought would be more clear. After a few hours ...
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January 25th, 2018
In Philosophy
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I’ve reached a point in my life where I think only two possibilities can explain my relationship to the world:
1.) Over the last 25 years, I’ve gone completely insane.
2.) The world is insane, and over the last 25 years, I’ve become more aware of this.
I worry about the sheer number of things that seem painfully obvious to me, and yet which are met with widespread resistance from many groups, often the overwhelming majority of all people who care ...
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January 17th, 2018
In Technology
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This initially sounds like it is going to be interesting:
I say it with much admiration and respect to all the members of community. I’ve learnt so much from being in this microcosm of dynamism, ideas and learning over the past 8 years. Clojure has allowed me to get to know so many amazing people, to travel to a whole bunch of places and to do things that I had never thought possible.
Having said that, I’ve gone from a wide-eyed, ...
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January 17th, 2018
In Philosophy
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When Jane Austen was 17 years old she visited some cousins, who had some old copies of the Spectator. Since she recognized the name, she started to read the famous magazine. She was horrified. The vulgar language, the sexual terms, the gross metaphors invoking shit and maggots and eating babies — everything disgusted her. She said that she could form no liking of an era that had tolerated such coarseness.
The Onion reminds us that we will surely someday have ...
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January 16th, 2018
In Philosophy
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An interesting bit from Barbara Kingsolver (I am a fan of her novel The Poisonwood Bible):
Most progressives wouldn’t hesitate to attend a football game, or to praise the enlightened new pope – the one who says he’s sorry, but women still can’t lead his church, or control our reproduction. In heterosexual weddings, religious or secular, the patriarch routinely “gives” his daughter to the groom, after which she’s presented to the audience as “Mrs New Patriarch,” to joyous applause. We ...
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January 16th, 2018
In Technology
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When I go to the website of Narrative.io all I see is black. Is this because I have an ad blocker installed? If so, this is the most dramatic ad-block caused bug that I’ve seen. Something like 20% of everyone on the Web is now using ad-blocking. Narrative.io should keep that in mind when they design their site.
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January 8th, 2018
In Business
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This democratic experiment sounds good, but the lack of structure sounds bad. The lack of structure won’t scale to large enterprises, and I believe large enterprises will always be with us. I wonder if the same psychological benefits can be gained by allowing workers to elect their CEO at large firms? The firms would have to be highly structured hierarchies, but the workers could still be allowed to vote for the leadership. That must bring some change of attitude, yes? ...
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February 20, 2019 10:41 am
From Just An Observer on Don't waste your life on Twitter
"A couple of my favorite bloggers started doing twitter. Instead of permanent additions to knowledge, there is..."