OMG. How many times can the universe scream at me that I’m in the wrong business?
“Ultra-fast capacitors.” Sigh. I’m no electrical engineer. In fact, I’ll admit that circuits were the worst part of my mechanical engineering studies. However, I do know that capacitors — selected for their specs — can only go at the “speed” constrained by the voltage and amperage of the entire circuit. You don’t get to select the “speed” at which they store and release charge. You can’t just swap out capacitors with different specs, and expect that the circuit will still perform the function it was designed to do. None of the usual, audiophile-type nonsense, like “oxygen-free, demagnetized, free-range, gluten-free, organic dielectric compounds” could even possibly be rationalized here.
The best part of these things, as always, is the slavish commentary claiming to be able to “hear” vast improvements. Now, normally, I’d “tap the sign” about all ratings and review systems being gamed — and I would (no doubt) be right in predicting it here — but I’ve seen enough “audiophile” commentary that I’m absolutely sure that more of it than I would like to admit is, in fact, genuine. Linus addresses this as well, though he much more generous than I would be.
In our example, there are no fat models in charge of doing too many things. Recording::Incineration or Recording::Copier are cohesive classes that do one thing. Recording::Copyable adds a high-level #copy_to method to Recording’s public API and keeps the related code and data definitions separated from other Recording responsibilities. Also, notice how this is just good old object orientation with Ruby: inheritance, object composition, and a simple design pattern.
This is an “implementation” of my guiding philosophy of programming:
If you truly understand the process you’re trying to implement, the code will “fall out.”
This article is discussing adding a Rails concern for making ActiveRecord objects copyable and “incineratable,” and then implementing these operations in PORO models. That’s great, but this sort of redirection is only needed to commonize the human-to-machine naming that might be used for different classes in the application. (There’s probably a term for this, but conceptualizing the terminology used in classes and methods is an art unto itself.)
I don’t think I’ve ever written a concern, but, then, I’ve never written a Rails application (out of at least a dozen and a half now), with 500 classes, which would inevitably have some overlap in their “business” functionality. My current app is the most complex thus far, and it only has 52.
If you don’t have that situation, you don’t need this level of abstraction, and, and — and here’s the important part — if you do have that situation, you will find yourself starting to write duplicated code. When this happens, as a programmer, your “spidey sense” should start tingling, and telling you there’s another level of abstraction to implement.
And that’s what I mean about the code “falling out” of implementing the actual process of what you’re trying to program.
I suppose there’s a case to be made here that you might wind up with duplicated code on a large codebase, simply because one programmer didn’t know what another programmer had done, but these kinds of things will happen. Refactoring the duplication, once discovered, is just part of the job.
Fallout finishes its month-long 25th anniversary celebration strong with a spine-tingling Fallout 76 event, behind-the-scenes looks, in-game rewards and more.
Awww, yiss! My playthrough is stuck because of a bug in the unofficial patch, and I can’t finish Nuka World, i.e., the best part of the whole game. I’d be glad to start over on this edition. I’m sure “2023” means something much later than I would like, but at least we finally have a year!
“I shot a note to LinkedIn and said please remove this, and they said, well, we have to contact that person and arbitrate this,” he said. “They gave the guy two weeks and he didn’t respond, so they took it down. But that doesn’t scale, and there needs to be a mechanism where an employer can contact LinkedIn and have these fake profiles taken down in less than two weeks.”
When I “went to college” at Purdue, I stayed in the dorm all 4 years. What can I say? I liked the convenience of someone else cleaning the bathrooms and doing the cooking. For freshman year — and second half of senior year, because I had such a light schedule — I worked in the kitchen, for fun and profit. I usually ran the grill and deep fryers. I have a knack for keeping track of time in my head, and I almost never (like, only once) ever burned food.
After working a supper shift, everyone had a cleaning job. If you ran the grill, of course, it was to clean it. They had these “bricks” to help with the job. (I’ve attached a screenshot of one from Amazon, but that price seems high. I’m sure you could do much better from some commercial kitchen supply place.) Anyway, the first time I had to do it, it was explained to me by a shift supervisor that this was a hard job, and it took most people 2-3 hours to do, and they gave me one of these griddle bricks to help.
The brick they gave me was worn down, and literally caked with grease. All the little pores that you can see in the picture were clogged. The front of the thing looked smooth. I started scraping with it, and noticed that, while the thing was very hard, it was also brittle. I noticed that you could “crunch” the brick if you leaned on the edge. This would expose a new “row” of pore edges to actually scrape gunk off the grill. Once I figured this out, I used a spatula to shave off all the clogged part of the brick, and figured out a technique of very slowly rotating the brick, while putting all my weight on the edge. This move kept gradually exposing a new set of “teeth” as I worked the brick, and cleaned the grill. In direct opposition of what I had just been told, it worked amazingly well.
On my first attempt, I think I finished in about 45 minutes. The supervisor was incredulous. But she looked at the grill, and admitted she had never seen it so clean, and I clocked out.
The next time I cleaned the grill, I had mastered my technique, and I was done in 15 minutes. However, I had used up a good portion of the brick. About half to three quarters was ground off during the process. I figured, hey, that’s what they were for, right? Wrong.
The supervisor was angry this time. These bricks cost a dollar apiece! I couldn’t just use one up every night! Granted, minimum wage at the time was $3.15, so this seemed like a bigger deal then. But I just asked, would they rather pay me for 3 hours of work, and spend $10 on labor, or pay me $1 for 20 minutes, and ¢75 for the brick? Well, at least she could see the math, and left me alone about it.
I had to explain this a couple more times to other managers. However, I couldn’t manage to impart my technique to anyone else, so others continued to struggle with the job.
I have no idea why I’m thinking about this today, or why I feel compelled to write about it.
Postscript: Amazon listings are really, really stupid sometimes. This copy says the bricks cleans the grill without abrasives. LOLWUT? This brick is the most abrasive thing in the world. That’s why it works. There’s also a lifetime guarantee. I have no idea how someone could ever put that on one of these, and I can’t imagine trying to collect when you figure out that these things are expendable. Truly mystifying.
This, I think, is my point: The system is complicit in the abuse.
And right now, right here, YouTube and Google are complicit in that system. The architecture they have built to extract the maximum revenue from online video is being hacked by persons unknown to abuse children, perhaps not even deliberately, but at a massive scale. I believe they have an absolute responsibility to deal with this, just as they have a responsibility to deal with the radicalisation of (mostly) young (mostly) men via extremist videos — of any political persuasion. They have so far showed absolutely no inclination to do this, which is in itself despicable. However, a huge part of my troubled response to this issue is that I have no idea how they can respond without shutting down the service itself, and most systems which resemble it. We have built a world which operates at scale, where human oversight is simply impossible, and no manner of inhuman oversight will counter most of the examples I’ve used in this essay. The asides I’ve kept in parentheses throughout, if expanded upon, would allow one with minimal effort to rewrite everything I’ve said, with very little effort, to be not about child abuse, but about white nationalism, about violent religious ideologies, about fake news, about climate denialism, about 9/11 conspiracies.
This is simply not true. It’s not true at all. Google made 85 BILLION dollars last year. They absolutely, positively, unquestionably can invest in some more machines to flag more types of content, and hire people to review the flags.
And don’t try to tell me they couldn’t programmatically de-list the kinds of accounts that are pumping out the kind of generative garbage described in the article. I could write a 100-line Perl script to catch this. It’s like the argument about how the App Store is so big that Apple couldn’t possibly catch all the fraudulent apps, but one guy looking at it in his spare time has identified scores of easily-caught problems that scam hundreds of millions of dollars out of the ecosystem.
At the end of the day, it’s a problem with misaligned incentives. Just like with Apple and the App Store, Google doesn’t want to fix the problem, because they benefit from the algorithmic/generative advertisement click-bait fraud scheme made possible by their platform being “game-able.” Corporations being the beasts they are, the only way to solve this problem is through legislation. Unfortunately, campaign finance laws being the beasts they are, that’s not going to happen.
And, as if on cue:
Zhukov’s trial established how the trade in fake clicks works. Between 2014 and 2016, the so-called King of Fraud—a name he gave himself in a text message, revealed in court—ran an advertising network called Media Methane, which received payments from other advertising networks in return for placing brand’s adverts on websites. But the company did not place those adverts on real websites. Instead it created fake ones, spoofing more than 6,000 domains. It then rented 2,000 computer servers in Texas and Amsterdam and programmed them to simulate the way a human would act on a website—using a fake mouse to scroll the fake website and falsely appearing to be signed in to Facebook.
Click fraud has been around since the rise of Google, but I guess everyone collectively agreed to ignore it as a cost of doing business, like “shrinkage” in retail. It stands to reason that these efforts have gone full-blown industrial now, and surely must be making a dent in someone’s pocketbook, but I guess everyone in the advertising economy is too entrenched now to do anything different. Advertising may be the single biggest sector in the American economy at this point. So they go after one dude, and make an example of him, meanwhile, the algorithmically-generated advertisement-bait is considered legitimate.
“Algorithms” are ruining everything that made pop culture interesting.
This video reviews an “audiophile” “tool” from back in the day to “improve” CD audio quality by cutting the edge of the CD at an angle, and marking it with a black marker, to prevent “light scattering” of the laser that degrades audio quality. This guy treats a disc, and feeds the “before” and “after” recordings into software, mathematically subtracts one file from the other, and shows that there is no difference. Literally zero. There cannot be an improvement, no matter how good your hearing, because nothing has changed.
He notes in the video that this didn’t stop many “audiophile” publications from printing reviews about the device, saying that it improved everything about the sound, from “clarity” to “noise floor” to “bass response.”
I’ll never forget the first time I read an “audiophile” catalog, and seeing a replacement knob for your receiver. According to the description, what you probably don’t know is that the plastic one that came with it is adding “harmonic distortion” to your audio. Their “tuned” replacement would fix this, and improve your system’s sound. What was it, you ask? Wood! It was a 3″ wooden hockey puck. And how much, you ask, for such an upgrade? $300, in 1991, or $650, today, for a little, wooden disc.
I’ve often thought about doing exactly what this guy has done, and proving that these kinds of “audiophile” things are snake oil. The thing that drives me the craziest are overpriced digital cables. There is no difference between the output of this cable and some Amazon Basics piece of junk. As long as it meets the spec, there CAN be no difference, and I can prove it with math.
I Need This for My Printer so my Pages Will Print Better
What has kept me from doing it is knowing that the people who believe such copy will never be persuaded. I’ve had conversations with actual people about these kinds of cables, and they don’t believe me. They will hear and see a difference, and pity me for not having the ears to hear or eyes to see what they clearly can.
I wish I could shirk all ethics and character, and invent some of my own snake oil to sell in this market.
Oligarchs, with their financial ability to influence mass media, education, and marketing, quickly proved to be the social force most able to manipulate the public will. With all three branches now functionally subject to the same democratic selection pressures it is no surprise an oligarchy came to achieve hegemonic social force in the United States.
Combine that with this (spoken of Reagan’s effect on anti-trust, via Robert Bork’s influence):
It was obvious from the start that “consumer welfare” was a scam, a ruse designed to let monopolies flourish and to install “autocrats of trade” on their thrones. Despite its ideological bankruptcy, “consumer welfare” was able to repel its critics for decades, because it had deep-pocketed backers – no different from tobacco-cancer denial or climate denial.
And we have all the elements we need to conclude that the US is now a complete corporatocracy, under the control of our oligarchs, or billionaires.
I remember reading a post on Reddit, a long time ago, by a guy who claimed he was friends with a half-dozen billionaires. The thing that stuck out at me was that Congressmen ask, “How high?” when asked to jump by a billionaire, because the checks they can write for campaign contributions can swing an entire election.
Lisa Kahn may make some headway with modern trustbusting, if given the time to get moving with a second Biden term, but with the Citizens United ruling, it’s only a matter of time until the powers that be get her out of their way through a sympathetic administration.
Office 365 went from being an online version of Microsoft Office to being a bossware delivery-system. The Office 365 sales-pitch focuses on fine-grained employee tracking and comparison, so bosses can rank their workers’ performance against each other. But beyond this automated gladitorial keystroke combat, Offce 365’s analytics will tell you how your company performs against other companies.
That’s right – Microsoft will spy on your competitors and sell you access to their metrics. It’s wild, but purchasing managers who hear this pitch seem completely oblivious to the implication of this: that Microsoft will also spy on you and deliver your metrics to your competitors.
I feel like a fool. I watch Microsoft like a hawk, and I didn’t even know about this. Every time I think I’m too cynical about a FAANG company — and Microsoft in particular — I find that I haven’t been nearly cynical enough.
With this new LinkedIn connection, in Outlook, it’s now possible for Microsoft to connect a particular person to a particular user in your current company’s “metrics.” I suppose they could use this to juice search results for recruiters in LinkedIn, or provide reports to potential employers. I wouldn’t put any of this past them.
Another one of Indiana’s largest companies is expressing its opposition to the abortion bill signed into law Friday by Governor Eric Holcomb. In a statement shared to employees on Saturday, Columbus-based Cummins Inc. (NYSE: CMI) said it is “deeply concerned” how the law impacts its employees and impedes its ability to attract and retain a diverse workforce in Indiana.
There’s a growing trend of corporations which threaten to take tax monies out of a state unless the state passes laws in a manner they deem acceptable. First of all, if a company will shift operations or holdings to a different state over one particular human rights law, why do they continue to do business with entire countries whose governments have long and terrible records of human rights abuses, say, like China?
Further, if they’re so concerned with social justice and making statements, why do they remain silent on such issues as China’s treatment of Uyghurs? I can’t find any reference to any statement Cummins has made to condemn this unilaterally bad policy. Even if they don’t change actual business practices, the least they could do is show some disdain for the situation.
Second of all, companies are led by a relative handful of people, which are supposed to follow the direction of the shareholders — i.e. banks — presumably to maximize profit. Why should the officers of US corporations get to leverage the enormous resources at their disposal to, in essence, blackmail our governments to pass a law, especially one that has such a dubious connection to profit? I don’t support the Indiana abortion law either, but I also don’t think corporations should be allowed to engage in this sort of strong-arming behavior toward our government. It’s not democracy. It’s corporatocracy.
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