Category: Technology

Unicomp, Inc.: Mini M

The Mini M buckling spring keyboard has the same mechanism, feel and general layout as the original IBM Model M (SSK) keyboard. With the much-loved buckling spring key design these keyboards have been prized by computer enthusiasts and robust typists because of the tactile and auditory feedback of each keystroke.

Source: Unicomp, Inc.: Mini M

I always said that when Unicomp made a tenkeyless version, it’d be a day-1 purchase. I just noticed last night that they started shipping in February, and I ordered one on the spot. I had a Model M on my 486DX2 on my first engineering job, and I still miss it. Now I will no longer have to.

I just hope I can put up with the noise. Measuring with my Apple Watch — which is pretty close to the calibrated decibel meters we have at church — my office has a background noise level of 32 dB. (Like the Geiger counters in Chernobyl, which maxed out at 3.6 Roentgens, 30 dB is the lowest level the Watch can read, so I wonder if it’s actually lower.) Typing on my WASD, with Cherry MX blue’s, produces 55 dB of noise, measured by my ear, and that’s with 0.4 mm o-rings on the stems, dampening the impact with the board. It will be interesting to see where the Unicomp comes in at.

Mighty’s master plan to reignite the future of desktop computing

We’re excited to finally unveil Mighty, a faster browser that is entirely streamed from a powerful computer in the cloud. After 2 years of hard work, we’ve created something that’s indistinguishable from a Google Chrome that runs at 4K, 60 frames a second, takes no more than 500 MB of RAM, and often less than 30% CPU with 50+ tabs open. This is the first step in making a new kind of computer.

Source: Mighty’s master plan to reignite the future of desktop computing

What a joke. This is just a cagey attempt to track user ALL behavior across ALL sites, without even needing cookies or web bugs or other such hacks. Even Facebook can’t track you across sites that don’t load their script. I have Twitter blocked on my network, but the famous VC investor Paul Graham is apparently all about it. Given the completeness of the tracking information you could get from this, it’s no wonder. The potential upside here has probably made it trivial to get the money to run in stealth for 2 years on this thing.

User DaveV1.0 had a good comment on Slashdot:

The modern browser is wicked stressful on computers.

TL;DR: We are doing it wrong.

This is because:

  • Web pages are now the size of entire operating systems.
  • We are asking web browsers to everything an operating system does on top of an operating system.
  • We are using web browsers to do things that should be done with other applications.
  • We are using a stateless protocol to do tasks that require states.
  • We are doing things that require high security in an inherently insecure environment with an inherently insecure protocol requiring bolt-on extensions.

We are doing it wrong.

I mean, yeah, there actually is a use for “Mighty.” We’ve made HTTP do things that Tim Berners-Lee never even imagined in his wildest dreams, thanks to building a Javascript runtime interpreter into every browser, and downloading an entire application with each page of markup. Even in my current Rails app, where I use very little Javascript, webpacker warns me about the size of my current bundle: 249 KB. For comparison, the page is only 30 KB. Thank God for caching, I guess.

User Perseids on “Hacker News” asked the CEO of the company about issues of security and privacy:

I can’t help but ask: As a security conscious person, how can you justify creating the service? You’ll have the data and access of everything your customer does online, which for your target audience is everything your customer does on a computer. For the individual customer this is worse than Google, Facebook, Twitter combined. Also, you’ll have an effective backdoor into every two-factor authentication, be it online banking, valuable Twitter accounts or AWS admins. There are massive monetary and political incentives to hack or infiltrate your service. Given your scale, you can’t have comparable security measures to the big players. And given your location (US) you’ll eventually receive national security letters forcing you to secretly sip off anything secret services or law enforcement wants you to.

He didn’t respond.

People with M1-based Macs aren’t going to care about the performance of their browser. There is so much extra computing power in those things, they’re begging for something to do. Might as well be crunching media-heavy web sites. Maybe there’s some hope that poorly-ported video games will smooth out with the extra cycles…

Whatever. The joke’s on them, anyway. At $30-$50/mo, by the time “Mighty” could reach any sort of serious market penetration, users will interact with apps rather than web sites anyway. With an i9-based MBP, Imgur can make even my computer wheeze, but that’s because they load, like, 50 thumbnails on EVERY page view, and half the posts on the image sharing site are now video. Like Reddit’s execrable web site, I can only guess this is a move to push people to their app.

No, the next big shift is not to centrally-hosted web browsers. It’s to get rid of browsers entirely. Watch for one of the big sites, like Amazon, to introduce an “app” for their site, which will be based on Electron. Either that, or they’ll just go with Apple’s new thing where you can run their iOS app on macOS, and dust off their hands. (Poor Microsoft, with no mobile, and poor Google, with no (real) desktop!) Web sites for the places big enough to make apps will eventually just be a pointer to their app.

jwz: ENGAGEMENT!

Every time we post to our Facebook account, it immediately gets 2-5 one-word comments from random Indian dudes with locked accounts that are years old and have thousands of friends:

Source: jwz: ENGAGEMENT!

There’s never post about Facebook on “Hacker” “News” where the comment thread isn’t filled with people saying, “I hate it too, but what do you want me to do? Never know anything that’s going on around me? There’s literally no other option.” Even JWZ himself, who abhors Facebook, still uses the platform to promote is nightclub in San Francisco. That’s how deeply ingrained the service has become to society, and how irreplaceable it is to local businesses.

This is a pitch-perfect example of what I was talking about in my previous post. This irreplaceability is precisely what all tech investment is gunning for: total control of a channel. Eliminating all competitors in the space, and establishing a monopoly. If you want to advertise some local social event, at this point, Facebook is your de facto only choice.

Right now, Uber seems like a good idea. Door Dash seems pretty nifty. WeWork sounds great. But make no mistake, once those platforms have removed all the competition in their spaces, their services will start to experience the same sort of corruption that is being described here. Scammers will flourish, as they focus their efforts. All of these services will come to feel like shopping at Amazon, where you used to be able to trust the reviews and delivery times, and now it’s just a roll of the dice on both.

How People Get Rich Now

The tech companies behind the top 100 fortunes also form a well-differentiated group in the sense that they’re all companies that venture capitalists would readily invest in, and the others mostly not. And there’s a reason why: these are mostly companies that win by having better technology, rather than just a CEO who’s really driven and good at making deals.

Source: How People Get Rich Now

I’m sorry, but this is pure fiction, told to one’s self to feel better about the real facts on the ground. What we’re seeing in “tech,” over and over, is not an effort to come up with “better technology,” but the play to capitalize on some particular niche, and then monopolize it. This is key.

It’s not good enough to provide nice co-working spaces; the goal is to own every rentable building in a city. It’s not good enough to provide a ride sharing solution; the goal is to run taxis out of business, and be the only ride share in town. It’s not good enough to run a respectable social media site; you have to be the only one that people use for a particular purpose. It’s not good enough to provide a food delivery service, you have to be deliver all the food in a metro area.

VC’s are not looking for the next “better mousetrap;” they’re looking for the next monopoly. That’s where all their money is going. Don’t go to Y Combinator with an idea that you think can make “X” millions of dollars per year. Go to Y Combinator with an idea to corner the market on some product or service, and make all the money for it. Established companies (like the latest $20 billion Microsoft gobble) are scrambling to own a monopoly vertical workflow stacks of their own, but it’s all the same idea at play. The only people left standing at the end of this century will be monstrous, global companies which control an entire end-to-end chains of a particular thing, or entire walled gardens that provide so much of what you want that you never step outside of them, and the only people who will be able to pull their strings are billionaires who fund them.

Unless the governments of this world suddenly find their spines, and learn how to tell a billionaire “no,” we’re heading directly for the cyberpunk, citizens-of-global-corporations future that people have been writing about for decades.

Also, this guy has a great deconstruction on the actual wealth inequality fiction Graham was spinning here. It shows how the middle class is being decimated by increasing disparity.

Paul paints a rosy picture but doesn’t mention that incomes for lower and middle-class families have fallen since the 80s. This golden age of entrepreneurship hasn’t benefitted the vast majority of people and the increase in the Gini coefficient isn’t simply that more companies are being started. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

 

The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk

Finally, Sociopaths and Losers speak rarely to each other at all. One of the functions of the Clueless, recall, is to provide a buffer in what would otherwise be a painfully raw master-slave dynamic in a pure Sociopath-Loser organization. But when they do talk, they actually speak an unadorned language you could call Straight Talk if it were worth naming. It is the ordinary (if rare) utilitarian language of the sane, with no ulterior motives flying around. The mean-what-you-say-and-say-what-you-mean stuff between two people in a fixed, asymmetric power relationship, who don’t want or need to play real or fake power games. This is the unmarked black triangle edge in the diagram.

Source: The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk

I am re-reading the whole series, because it came up as a response to something I said on HN. Basically, I had reinvented this 3-layer dynamic from first principles, based on my observations of the past few years of my career. Now that someone pointed me back to it, I remember reading it originally, but this was written twelve years ago now.

Anyway, this passage really resonates with me. Every time I’ve gotten face time with a serious power broker in a company, this has been true. No games. No BS. Just straight down to business. I have something to say that will help the organization, and they’re ready to hear it and incorporate it. It never accomplishes the full intention, but I understand that they have a lot more pressures that I can see from my vantage point.

… for Sociopaths, conditions of conflict of interest and moral hazard are not exceptional. They are normal, everyday situations.  To function effectively they must constantly maintain and improve their position in the ecosystem of other Sociopaths, protecting themselves, competing, forming alliances, trading favors and building trust. … They never lower their masks. In fact they are their masks. There is nothing beneath.

Though distant from our worlds, criminal worlds have the one advantage that they do not need to maintain the fiction that the organization is not pathological, so they are revealing to study.

For me, as a non-sociopath, this is a source of continual failing: to recognize that the the people pulling the levers of power in the organization are, in fact, sociopathic, and out for their interests, without regard for anyone else’s feelings or fortunes, not mine, or even necessarily the organization’s. Forgetting this base and simple fact has bitten me in the rear end more times than I can count.

Imgur. Again.

I think Imgur is currently running 40% on the liberal programming right now. I know I’ve talked about it before, but I’m convinced it’s a sociological experiment, no different than the Cambridge Analytica scandal that drove the liberals out of their minds in the 2016 election.

Months ago, I stopped looking at the site, because every 3rd or 4th post was a “thirst” post. Those are gone. Completely. I’ve scrolled through everything on the front page over the past couple of days, and I don’t think I saw a single one. They have been replaced by reposts — almost always from Twitter — which contain liberal talking point hot takes. I don’t even necessarily disagree with the content of most of them, but the ones that gloss over logical fallacies irritate me, and there are a lot of those.

Someone there made a conscious choice to change the algorithm. You have to watch these things over months to notice, but it’s very real. Either the voting membership at Imgur has changed demographics entirely in the past several months, or someone’s running an experiment on the public through that site.

Now all of those thirst-y posts are at 9gag. I wonder if, in 6 months, they too will be replaced with liberal talking point posts.

Wait no longer my friends! – whatadeal post – Imgur

Wait no longer my friends!

Reddit says this is from 1981. Google says this would be $9,800 in today’s dollars.

I’m surprised by that date, though. Even in 1994, when I got my first job, 10 MB was the standard desktop hard drive size in a PC. In that amount of space, you could fit DOS 6.22, Windows 3.11, Quatto Pro, Word Perfect, and even Doom.

The last time I downloaded a fancy mouse driver, it was 150 MB. Compressed. Lord knows what it expanded to on installation.

I checked the browser dev console. The Imgur web page showing this post took 3.5 MB of data transfer to display.

I remember when my rule of thumb for my internet connection speed was 1 MB per 10 minutes.

Get off my lawn.

Google and “Privacy”

Does iOS even have any other categories that could be added to this list?

I do as little with Google as possible these days. All my “cloud stuff” is in iCloud now. But I can’t get away from their search. Especially for programming-related questions. DDG just can’t bubble up answers like Google can. I’ve tried several times, and keep coming back.

Liberals and Conservatives Are Both Totally Wrong about Platform Immunity | by Tim Wu | Medium

Everyone is, in short, currently asking for the wrong thing. Which makes it worth asking: Why?

One reason is that this area is confusing, and the idea of making tech “responsible” does sound good. There are, as I discuss below, ways in which they should be. Also, as described below, the mere threat of 230 repeal serves its own purposes. But I think, at its most cynical, the repeal 230 campaign may just be about inflicting damage. Repealing 230 would inflict pain, through private litigation, not just on big tech, but the entire tech sector.

We don’t like you; we want you to suffer. Very 2020.

Source: Liberals and Conservatives Are Both Totally Wrong about Platform Immunity | by Tim Wu | Medium

I’m not convinced by his arguments, but I can’t say his final conclusion doesn’t have a big part in my thinking about the issue.

On Changing Blogging Format

I’m really late in coming to an understanding of this, but I’m just realizing that “blogging” has moved to video. I mean, the kinds of things I’m writing down here are mostly being done, these days, as 10-15 minute videos on YouTube. That’s why it’s so hard to find good blogs now. The problem, for me, is that video is effectively linear. I can read much faster than I can watch something. When I’m reading, I can track where a thought is going, and skim forward to the next thought. You can’t do that with video.

So much content I would love in written form is just being “wasted” in video form. And so many videos are just bullet point lists of things I’m tangentially interested in. At least, with a written list, I can neatly skip over the points I already know, or am not interested in.

I’ve spent an hour watching various videos on YT, mostly about the Battlefield game series, and the MCU movies. Of course, there’s endless repeats of various clips in the background, but the voiced-over script has (almost) nothing to do with what’s being shown. These videos could have easily been blog posts, with a few screenshots for effect, and I could have gotten through all of these thoughts in 20 minutes.

The “best” example of this was “This Is What Captain Marvel Has Been Doing For The Past 24 Years Before Avengers Endgame,” at 10:11 run length, which I watched in its entirety at 1.5x speed, and which ended without giving any reasonable explanation about what she might have actually been doing. That’s “content” I could have figured out in about 10 seconds if it had been a blog post.

And that’s really the problem right there. It’s clear that something magical happens on YT around 10-15 minutes. It must be something about the advertising. Almost every one of these videos is that length, and it must have something to do with making money from the site. So, like banner ads, people are trying to get paid, but the net effect for the end user is 10x worse. People just pad their videos with fluff to hit this magic mark, turn what would be a 2-minute thought into a 11-minute “piece,” and the net effect is that I just don’t watch much video.