Blogging to work out my thinking about issues in technology, programming, religion, and politics.
Trivium Games claims that this spill amounted to the largest dice roll in history, a record previously held by the United Kingdom for Brexit.
Source: Truck Spills Dice, Deals 216,000d6 Bludgeoning Damage to Atlanta Freeway
This article wins the internet for today. Maybe the week. Heck, maybe the year.
Police in Orlando, Florida, obtained a warrant this summer to search DNA site GEDmatch and review data on all of its users—about a million people, The New York Times reports. Privacy advocates are now concerned that police will continue to get broad warrants for DNA sites, including larger peers such as 23andme or Ancestry that have much larger pools of user data.
Source: Search warrant overrides 1M users’ choice not to share DNA with cops | Ars Technica
When are people going to realize that IF a company can collect data, it WILL be sold, and it WILL be accessed by the government. Period. Full stop. No exceptions. I don’t care what the laws say. I don’t care what the companies say. If you give your data — any data — to someone else, it will be monetized and used against you. I don’t say that as anything other than what it is. Everyone must make a value judgement for themselves whether letting someone access their data is worth it. Just understand that once a company gets their hands on it, it will eventually be available to anyone who really wants it.
Addendum: Another story from Ars is really the same story:
The 22 women said they responded to ads for clothed modeling gigs. When they were asked to shoot porn instead, they initially resisted. But they went along with it after the company assured them that their videos would only be sold on DVD to customers outside the United States and would not be posted online. That turned out to be a lie, as their videos wound up on GirlsDoPorn, a website with plenty of American viewers.
Source: Feds hit GirlsDoPorn owners with criminal sex trafficking charges | Ars Technica
Popular Christian comedian John Crist, who just landed a Netflix special, admitted to “destructive and sinful” behavior and canceled his upcoming tour after multiple accusations of unwanted sexting, harassment and manipulation.
Hey, it’s like Trump says: “Let him who hasn’t had sex with a porn star, and directed his lawyer to pay her to keep quiet, while his 3rd wife was pregnant with his 5th kid, cast the first stone.”
You can complain about Trump’s “p***y grabbing” and philandering, but I remind everyone that Bill Clinton is the one who got elected, and reelected, despite having a string of well-known, credible rape accusers, while his wife did interviews at all the major news outlets to smear and victim-blame them. We’re living in the Clintons’ America now. Trump is a symptom, not a cause. Now matter how much the media crows about their hatred for Trump, it was their utter lack of ethics in letting the Clintons slide that paved the way for Trump’s presidency.
Meanwhile, the coverup of the Epstein sex slave ring continues unabated, and the media has circled the wagons around protecting the people who took part in it, including — surprise, surprise! — Clinton AND Trump. They have only themselves to blame by lowering the bar even further, and removing any and all credibility from their arsenal the next time they want to take down a conservative over sexual morality issues.
After many years of decreasing usability, and increasing-user hostility, the same annoyances making the mobile web suck have wormed their way into the desktop experience.
You know what? I’m just closing tabs like this these days. I don’t even care to find the buttons that close the interstitials, because I know I’m going to get more of them, and some gods-forsaken unrelated video is going to start playing, despite all the protections against it that are supposedly built into Safari. Just forget it.
That's what I've been using. Not yet feeling the awesome. But maybe I just have to descent further into the darkness and it'll appear 😄
— DHH (@dhh) October 29, 2019
This has been one of my all-time favorite Twitter threads. David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Rails, is trying to “live” in Windows, and set it up to do Rails work. He’s blogging the “experience,” and it’s not going very smoothly. Everyone is telling him to use Windows Services for Linux for this, but he’s “not yet feeling the awesome.” I’ve tried using WSL several times for doing development on Rails applications. I, too, am not feeling the awesome, despite the cheerleading by Windows thought leader Scott Hanselman. Despite my personal experiences with it, given how vociferously people recommend WSL for Rails work on Windows, I kept wondering if I were missing something. I’ll take this as final confirmation that I’m not missing anything, and delete the mental bookmark to go back and try this again when it becomes WSL 3.
When my scientist colleagues and I invented the internet 50 years ago, we did not anticipate that its dark side would emerge with such ferocity — or that we would feel an urgent need to fix it.
Source: Opinion: 50 years ago, I helped invent the internet. How did it go so wrong?
When I saw the headline to the link, I said to myself, “You know what’s wrong with it. We all know what’s wrong with it.” To the surprise of no one — except, apparently, LA Times readers — the article concludes that financial incentives are to blame for making the web suck.
What made me click through to the article was the absolutely certainty that I would see the following, and the notion that I would capture the horrible, inescapable irony for posterity. To wit: On the site of one of the nation’s largest newspapers, over an article describing the ruination of the web by crass commercialization, capped with a complaint of the loss of privacy, there is a banner ad for subscribing, overlaid with a warning that you (effectively) surrender any notion of privacy, just by looking at the site.
Well done, all around.
I ran across an article about Facebook’s use of H-1B visas in my news crawl. This part really caught my eye:
Since 2017, as part of his promise to “hire American,” the Trump administration has been denying record numbers of H-1B visas—those offered to high skilled workers with bachelor’s and advanced degrees, including many engineers at Facebook, Amazon, and Google. In the three years that Trump has been in office, the denial rate for H-1B visas has risen from 10 to 24 percent. The United States issues roughly 85,000 new H-1B visas each year. In 2018, 651 of those visas were granted to Facebook employees, the seventeenth most of any employer in the country.
That got me curious. Around these parts, it’s obvious that Cummins is a big fan of the system, but I had no idea how much. If you click through that link from the article, you can see Cummins sits at 29th out of 30 largest users of the H-1B visa program! That was surprising to me!
From state-level data, we can see that, in Indiana, Cummins is #1, obviously.
I think both sets of numbers rather dramatically understate Cummins’ use of the H-1B visa program. Cummins employs lots of people through Tata, Infosys, KPIT, and, of course, my own employer, LHP. It seems like the counts in their totals that represent people working for Cummins ought be applied to Cummins’ count, and I’m assuming that this is same for the rest of the counts. I’m sure Tata and Infosys have people embedded in many of the other companies as well. I guess it doesn’t matter much in the end, but it would still be nice to remove the “consultancy indirection,” and just get final numbers for all of these companies. It would show who’s taking most advantage of the indirection.
Do other countries, like India and China, run programs like this, to get professionals from the US into their countries? I honestly don’t know, and any searches I do online seem to get redirected back to the H-1B program, because that’s all anyone seems to talk about, so it’s hard to tell.
Almost all visa holders I meet are be from India. Second place seems to go to people from various countries in Africa. China has about the same amount of people as India, and about as many as all of Africa combined, but I haven’t met any Chinese visa holders at Cummins. Mexico and Canada are right here on our borders. I’ve never even heard of someone from those countries working here under an H-1B visa. Why does it seem that the program is almost exclusively Indian? Again, I don’t know.
This is all very complex and fascinating to me. Maybe I should read a book and educate myself about the underlying dynamics. It’s just that I have so many books I’m already not reading…
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, could be taxed NINETY-NINE POINT NINE PERCENT of his net worth, and STILL be worth a BILLION dollars. Let that sink in. $10M is pretty wealthy. $100M is pretty crazy. “Just” $1B is ludicrous. He is worth $110 BILLION. It just seems to me that — at some point — the country that set the stage for him to be this wealthy — like, say, oh I don’t know… giving Amazon a TOTAL PASS on sales tax for 20 years — needs to get some of that back to help the rest of society.
I know that makes me seem like a communist to some people, but I promise this is only small-“S” socialist thinking. This is just too far out of whack. I think it’s time to go back to more steps of substantially-steeper marginal tax rates. At this point, the top 400 wealthiest people in the country are paying less than anyone else, on a marginal basis.
I know, I know. I hate our country. If I don’t like it, I can leave. Yada, yada, yada.
Back in the early 2000’s, I was getting pretty deep into Linux. I also had a job which allowed me to have the castoff computers no one needed any more, after upgrades. Linux has always run just fine on older hardware, so I wound up with, at one point, 9 servers in my house, doing all sorts of things, in addition to my hand-built personal computers.
At the time, I had been running a dual phone line connection back to my computer at work, and using their T1 line for internet access. I had cleared this with the person in charge of the network. He was satisfied that I wouldn’t be using it except out of business hours, by definition.
While I knew it at the time, it’s become even more clear in retrospect: Arvin was a pretty great place to work. And Meritor ruined it. But I digress.
I found out that DSL was available at my house, so I got a 512Kb symmetric connection, which was rare. At the time, the phenomenon of the “Super Bowl commercial” was getting into full swing, and I had started collecting them. I was storing them on my “big” server, which had 6 SCSI drives in a hardware-based RAID array, for a whopping 100 GB of space. My collection included things like the old Budweiser “wassup” adverts, and that sort of thing.
Since I had a broadband connection, I started running my own web and email servers, out of my house. On my web server, I hosted an FTP service for all of these videos. You could click on them and play them, but I left it easy to just grab them all, if you knew how. I watched the logs, and saw that many people did. As thanks, a couple of people sent me their collections on CD’s through the mail. It was going well. To me, this is what the internet was all about.
Then along came “farting preacher.” It was an instant classic of the time, and I immediately added it to my collection. In a couple of months, if you searched on that phrase, my web site, running out of my house, was the #1 hit for it. That month, I did 8 GIGABYTES of uploads over my 512Kb connection. And, remember, these were tiny, little, lo-fi vid caps of the time. Most were just a couple megs. I thought about running banner ads on my site, to try to “monetize” the traffic, and then immediately rejected that idea as crass. It’s not that I didn’t think I couldn’t make any money; it’s that I thought the amount of money I would make wouldn’t be worth the hassle.
The very next month, someone created farting preacher .com, and loaded it up with ads. I have to admit that I felt a little whinge of missing the boat, for a moment.
The, the next month after that, YouTube was launched, and it put all of those spammy, one-off video sites out of existence, in favor of a new, spammy video site, where you can randomly get banned or de-monetized, or have your videos removed because of bogus copyright claims.
It’s my experience that the above MVFE is pretty uncommon. The profile describes a person with skills requiring thousands of hours to master, but who doesn’t take part in the holistic decision making process. By nature, the value of a fullstack engineer stems from their ability to make competent unilateral decisions (decisions without asking anyone for permission). I’m sure there are people who mostly fit the MVFE, but I wager that they are few and far between. You could probably summarize my view about the MVFE as:
It’s very impractical to become a fullstack engineer without understanding the big picture.
In my mind, a fullstack engineer’s value is mostly derived from their ability to single-handedly design, architect, execute, and operate an entire end-to-end system. Assuming this is possible, it almost completely eliminates integration overhead.
Source: IMHO: The Mythical Fullstack Engineer – Stack Overflow Blog
There’s a lot of subjectivity in this article, but I think it covers the topic pretty well. I consider myself a full-stack engineer, and that self-identification hinges on both emphasized points above. First, I’ve spent the time to learn all the pieces. Other people don’t see all the late nights, banging away on my home lab, or my church’s setup, forcing things to work when they didn’t want to, integrating pieces all over the stack, setting up solutions to help people get things done, or just to scratch an inquisitive itch.
For instance, I’ve run my own web server on a public address. This will cause you realize how hairy the raw, unfiltered internet is, and will force you to learn about the basics of hardening a server and firewalling a network connection in a New York minute. I’ve run my own email server. That will teach you about spam, attachments, white and blacklists, abuse addresses, and lots of stuff about making your server look legit to other servers. I’ve run a Windows domain for my whole family’s computers, with roaming profiles and everything. (Side note: do NOT use roaming profiles.) I’ve run my own personal cloud. My own mobile sync server. Media servers. TV recorders. The list goes on.
In my professional career, I’ve gotten to work on some of the biggest, baddest tech ever made. I’ve setup a Sun E10000 from scratch. When I took the official Sun training on the kit, I fixed the lab’s setup when it broke. I’ve configured a 384-tape robotic backup system. I’ve commissioned $15M of EMC disk cabinetry. I’ve trained extensively on Oracle, and setup a North-American-spanning network of 20 instances. These technological implementations are fading, now, but the concepts haven’t. We just answer the same questions with different hardware and software these days.
When I encounter a new technology, at this point, it usually doesn’t take long to slot it into the larger context of computing services. For instance, I recently tried to use Elasticsearch for a project at work. While I eventually found an easier way to do what I needed to do, through several weeks of experimentation, I now know what that technology is about, what problems it solves, how it works, and what it takes to implement it. Now I have this tool in my toolbox, and it’s very possible that I will yet use it for a different project. I’m incredibly grateful that I have a job where I can occasionally do a little “R&D” like this, to learn something new, but it takes substantially less time to divert my attention like this, than other people might spend, because of the experience I already have.
Second, I understand the field I write software to support, because I studied it. I think the modern incarnation of the programmer, toiling away in the bowels of a big company — which is most developers, by simple numbers — is the total inverse of this ideal. I have a degree in mechanical engineering. I’m a good engineer, for the same reason I consider myself a “full-stack” guy. I see the big picture, and how everything underneath it contributes to making it look the way it does.
Even more than studying the math and physics, I was drawn to engineering, because that’s how my mind works. When I look at an engine, I notice the systems that are interoperating: the mechanical masses, the fluid flows, the thermals, the electrical connections, the air flow. I feel these things in my gut and see them in my mind’s eye. I understand how all of these subsystems work to produce power and torque, the difference between those two things, and when it’s appropriate to focus on one over the other. To me, it’s the same thing with an IT solution. I can picture the large subsystems working together to make up the final system in my head, and see the servers, the services, the networks, the databases, the networking, and the automation that will be needed to implement it.
In a lot of ways, the training in how to think about a problem in engineering school is perfectly suited to creating full-stack solutions. Start with restating the problem. Get to the heart of the business problem you’re trying to solve. Where’s the friction? State the givens. What do we know already? What pieces of data do we have? How do we get that into the system? Finally, specify what you’re solving for. What are we missing? How are we going to transform what we have into what we want? How will the people who will use the system need the program to work, and the data to be shown?
Most people working in software in my industry have been trained in how to write some code, and that’s about the end of it. They might understand how to write a loop in Java, but they don’t understand how to setup a Java application server, or a load balancer, or a firewall, to say nothing about the database. They also don’t understand how our products work, how they’re designed, or what the engineers working on them need to help them in that endeavor. I find myself in the rather rare position of understanding both halves of this equation. In my 25-year career, I’ve met only a handful of people who can straddle the fence between the physical, engineering problem domain, and the IT implementation like this. In the manufacturing world, we are indeed few and far between.
There’s one other thing I want to talk about, and that this article’s presumption that Javascript is the piece for the front-end, in the jigsaw puzzle that is a full-stack web application these days. I still like Rails’ templates, and, of course, Microsoft is pushing Razor. Javascript enhances both of these things. However, the article hints at how a lot of people are doing the entire front-end in Javascript now, and I find that disappointing. In an aborted effort, I tried writing an application in Java with an Angular2 front end. The amount of duplication astounded me. When you combine this duplication with the fact that Java and typed Javascript are two of the most verbose languages to work with, well, you get a mess.
Using an API back-end and a pure Javascript front-end is, perhaps, the single greatest argument against full-stack development you can make. Given the sheer amount of work involved in separating the front-end, completely, from the back-end, it almost requires two different people or teams. If you sat down, and wrote out the most terrible theoretical idea you could come up with for software development, it would probably look like “write a single application, broken right down the middle, in 2 different languages.” Unfortunately, that’s the nature of web development right now. I lament that this is where we’re at in our technological evolution, but until network bandwidth takes another leap forward, this is what we’re stuck with.
