After a controversial blog post in which CEO Jason Fried outlined Basecamp’s new philosophy that prohibited, among other things, “societal and political discussions” on internal forums, company co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson said the company would offer generous severance packages to anyone who disagreed with the new stance. On Friday, it appears a large number of Basecamp employees are taking Hansson up on his offer: according to TheVerge contributing editor Casey Newton’s sources, roughly a third of the company’s 57 employees accepted buyouts today. As of Friday afternoon, 18 people had tweeted they were planning to leave.
This came back up in an HN discussion about their new web app deployment tool, MRSK. (And, being a big fan of Capistrano, I really want to try.) I remember this happening, and I remember the outsized reaction to it. Here’s a tiny company of only 57 employees, and yet this story reverberated around the IT news world. The audacity!
On top of that outsized reaction, what hadn’t really registered was that 18 people jumped ship. A third! An entire third of the company was so upset that they couldn’t espouse their politics on internal forums that they had to leave. It’s been about 2 years now, and they’ve launched an entirely new product, so I guess the predictions of their demise were… probably just wishful thinking.
Reminds me of another controversial company changing gears, and being predicted to fail miserably…
“Tucker Carlson’s departure from Fox News is, in part, an admission of the systemic lying, bullying and conspiracy-mongering claimed by our client, former top producer Abby Grossberg,” said Tanvir Rahman, one of Grossberg’s attorneys. “Mr. Carlson and his subordinates remain individual defendants in the [Southern District of New York] case, and we look forward to taking their depositions under oath in the very near term.”
Indeed!
Comedian Jon Stewart ridiculed Carlson to his face on CNN, telling him that “Crossfire,” was “hurting America.” Carlson was told by one network boss that he was too fat.
I remember this, and it was one of the most hypocritical things ever said. Stewart was doing the same thing, but hid behind the fact that his show was “comedy,” as though he wasn’t purposely trying to achieve the same effect as Crossfire, but with a different schtick. The exchange infuriated me at the time, and it still infuriates me today when the LA Times uses it to promote the idea that Stewart caught Carlson out on TV, and made a fool of him, but it’s just another perfect example of the blatant and shameless hypocrisy of our politics and media in the US.
History is already showing itself to be unkind due to these heavily-biased polemical platforms. This is why — love him or hate him — I am very excited about Musk’s promise that they will only censor Twitter according to the law, as I said they should, months ago, but cannot find to reference now.
My name is Lars Wirzenius, and I was there when Linux started. Linux is now a global success, but its beginnings were rather more humble. These are my memories of the earliest days of Linux, its creation, and the start of its path to where it is today.
Great little reminisce. I just thought a couple of quotes were particularly funny.
While this was happening, I was taking a nap, and I recommend this method of installing Linux: napping, while Linus does the hard work.
And..
In the spring of 1994 we felt that Linux was done. Finished. Nothing more to add. One could use Linux to compile itself, to read Usenet, and run many copies of the xeyes program at once.
The first version of Linux I installed was Slackware 3. If memory serves, this was early 1995. I downloaded 54 1.5MB floppy images over a 28.8K modem, using a free PPP service called SlipNet. (I think it was located in California. They were around for a long time after this, but I can’t find any reference to them now.) What I didn’t know was that Slackware was a direct descendant of the first “distribution,” SLS.
Some mid account, posting a summary, of a news article, which says specifically the opposite of what he’s saying in the tweet…. 21.2K likes. The truth? Doesn’t even register. But it’s red meat for his audience, so…
Where’s Elon’s vaunted community fact-checking service on this one?
The “news”
There really isn’t a way to fix this on this platform. Maybe not on social media at all. But I’m going to start muting a lot more accounts in a last-ditch effort to make this platform useful to me.
I’ve been having mysterious problems with both of my corporate computers. Things that used to run only sort of run now. Today, I finally figured out that this is happening because #CorporateIT, in its ineffable wisdom, has decided to suddenly start automatically deleting any customizations to either the system or the account PATH variable by way of login (or logoff, or startup, or shutdown) scripts.
Years ago, Arvin was a lovely company with lovely people. Then it was sold out from under us, and eaten alive by Meritor (which has now been eaten by Cummins). They made a big show of bringing in some bonehead whose job was to setup “proper” IT policies. I watched in horror as he obviously just slapped together a bunch of white papers he rummaged through the internet to find, copy-and-pasted them into “controlled” Word docs with company logos in the header, and presented them as a legitimate security posture, despite obvious problems and glaring inconsistencies. Unintimidated, I took him to task about it. We went a couple of rounds, which ended with him literally screaming at me over the phone. I finally got the attention of one of the senior IT directors, and got a chance to vent about the situation.
One of the things I complained about was the removal of cron from all Unix machines, which I (as a Unix admin, at the time) was making liberal use of. First, cron doesn’t allow you to do anything you couldn’t normally, otherwise, do, so why remove the convenience? Second, if running things out of hours or on a schedule is a Bad Thing (TM), then why weren’t we also removing Task Scheduler from all Windows machines? Third, if this is about a security vulnerability in the binary, then just make sure you’re keeping up to date with patches from the vendor, just like everything else.
The director then told me that that particular policy provision was actually written by her, as though this was supposed to make me suddenly backtrack, and withdraw my objection. I asked her why, and all she could do was say that this was considered an “industry best practice.” Yeah, but why!? The bottom line is that this was an unintended consequence of SOX. It’s just a thing that’s easy to suggest by consultants, easy to do by IT staff, and easy to verify, and makes a nice bullet point on a validation study about IT policies. Job done! Give IBM $100K to rubber stamp our SOX compliance report! But it does literally nothing to “secure” anything. All it can do is inconvenience users.
If there’s an actual security flaw in the cron deamon itself, then get it patched! There’s no reason to eliminate it entirely. At least, it’s not worth the inconvenience of uninstalling it on the slight chance that a new vulnerability might be found in it, and get exploited by a bad actor, before it can be patched.
This is a hill I will die on.
I got my cron back.
Today’s issue with #CorporateIT is the same. Now I can’t run rails or rake or git at the command line unless I fully “path” them. This is what has been breaking my scripts. And I know they’re nuking both system and user PATH variables, because I tried the second after noticing that the first was being blown away. Why in the world are we deleting customizations to the PATH variable? On what planet does this make anything more secure? What malware wouldn’t try all known paths, regardless of the PATH setting, or fully path its own executables? How can this do anything but make people’s lives less convenient? It’s still possible to set, of course, so I guess I’ll write a .BAT script to run when I want to start working, which will update my user PATH variable so I can just get on with it.
Wow. We’ve really locked down the configuration, huh, guys? The bad guys have no chance now!
To me, the implementation of any security measure depends on the answers to some fundamental questions: What’s the vulnerability? How large is the risk? What’s at stake? What is the mitigation? Is the preventative fix worth the cost in terms of money, access, and productivity? What’s the data we are protecting worth, such that it makes sense to implement the policy? I understand there’s a lot of subjectivity here, but these questions will separate the wheat from the chaff really quickly.
For instance, the staggering mountain of PowerPoint presentations that no one having a meeting can seem to do without, sitting on the corporate file server, mean nothing to anyone outside of the people who are having meetings about it, and even then, only for the week they’re having the meeting. Does it make sense to install every security product on the market to protect this “information?” Not in a million years. Even Office documents you think are profoundly important are hard to dig up out of your collection after a little while, and hard to make sense of once you do. How would any of this “data” be strung together in any useful way by bad actors? For all of the hand wringing about it, the shared drives could be open to the public, for all the risk to the company it actually exposes.
I have another story about this, but I’ll save it for another time.
Every time we turn around, IT has implemented a new policy, a new layer, a new product that’s supposed make our “data” “more” “secure,” and each time it happens, we lose the ability to do something useful. #CorporateIT dictates that our Teams chat histories vanish after just 24 hours. In a company which requires a month for anything to get done, and often requires multiple tries, it would be nice to be able to refer to that log for a month, no? Does no one in the company see this? What sort of crack-addled meeting was held between legal and IT to come up with this? Deleted email disappears after 30 days. If you want to save it to refer to later, you need to remember to hit the “archive” button. Again, when things take months to happen… But sure, blame it on litigation
The really stupid part of this? These moves won’t save you legally. People involved what whatever is being discovered will be called to testify, under oath, what they said, regardless of records that attest to it. So this does nothing to prevent legal culpability. It’s just another hassle for end users in the name of a tick box on an auditor’s checklist.
Every week, there’s a new thing to justify a budget. Every week, it’s a new, unannounced loss of capability. I’m really getting tired of it.
Update
About a week after I wrote this, a coworker sent out an email to our entire group, saying that hundreds of thousands of documents we still rely on had been automatically deleted from our Sharepoint files and Teams channels. He said that they have restored these things, and he was working with IT to make the auto-delete policy kick in at 10 years, instead of the current 3. This is exactly what I’m talking about when I say that, if a company moves at a pace where even the simplest things take a month or three to do, then we need chat history to last at least this long. Our projects are sometimes decades long. We need our stuff for at least that long.
This is a perfect example of IT setting “security” policy without asking the basic questions above, and living in a fantasy world where they are free to believe that their consultant-and-whitepaper-suggested rules don’t have costs. At least my coworker didn’t throw up his hands, and say (basically), “You can’t fight city hall!” He took them to task, and now they’ve had to realize, in at least this one case — for, again, no actual legal benefit — the utter hassle they incur when their incentives are misaligned with the people who do the work that keeps them employed.
Update 2
Here we go again
Now people are educating each other about how to save important documents from being automatically trashed from OneDrive.
Elder statesman of system software makes a shocking revelation:
Thompson replies:
I have for most of my life – because I was sort of born into it – run Apple. Now recently, meaning within the last five years, I’ve become more and more and more depressed… And what Apple is doing to something that should allow you to work is just atrocious… But they are taking a lot of space and time to do it, so it’s okay. And I’ve come, within the last month or two, to say: even though I’ve invested a zillion years in Apple, I’m throwing it away, and I’m going to Linux. To Raspbian, in particular.
This article is a fantastic summary of the public highlights of this living legend of computer science. I, too, fear that Apple is transforming their general purpose macOS computers into walled-garden computing appliances like iPhones and iPads. I have lamented the switch to locked-down bootloaders, but… dang if it doesn’t basically prevent theft of Apple devices (almost) outright, whatever the security and privacy considerations.
I, too, will switch to Linux, if that day ever arrives. I suspect a lot of people will do the same, particularly the cohort of developers that does not use macOS to write iOS software. When last I left Linux, I would still have given it the edge in web application development, and non-iOS/non-Widows development in general. The problem now, of course, is that my entire life is now contained within my Apple ID. That’s how they get you, and they know it.
This all makes me want to try some current version of Linux now, and see how much of my workflow I could do on it, and what I would lose. Unfortunately, the bottom line is how well a MacBook works with its own hardware, especially things like power saving and dealing with the lid and external monitors, and how it works with all of the other devices: phone, tablet, watch, video device, “pod,” tags, and especially iMessage. This alone “covers a multitude of sins,” but Apple should know that the integration benefits have limits, and chief among them is the ability to do our information technology jobs the way we want to, with the applications and environments we find best. Take those choices away from us, and it will be a line that we cannot cross.
Can these new large language models really replace software engineering? GPT is showing that it can write trivial code, with well-defined inputs and outputs, but I work on very complicated applications, and the trouble is specifying the problem we’re trying to solve. I’ve thought a bit about trying this exercise with my own software, that is, telling GPT the general issue we’re trying to address, and seeing what it comes up with. The difficulty is that it took months for me to understand the depth of what is going on, so it would be very hard for me to boil it down to a prompt.
I was at Purdue University, studying mechanical engineering, in the late 80’s. An electrical engineering friend had gotten an internship at a Fortune-100 company. I marveled, but he explained that, as a “new guy” at a monstrous company, you would spend you time… oh, I don’t know… designing a very specific screw until you work your way up the ladder for a decade or two.
From the start of my career, I fell into writing software for fellow engineers in manufacturing companies, and I’ve been a full-stack guy, inventing new things, for about 27 years now. It’s been very intellectually rewarding. Unfortunately, I make a lot less than I could make in a coastal city, working for a non-manufacturing, “internet”-type company. My total career compensation is likely staggeringly smaller than than it could have been.
But when I think about chucking this approach, and trying to leverage my experience to get a job at an “software” company, I go back to my buddy’s comment from 30 years ago. What is intellectual satisfaction worth to you? To me, it works out to being worth literally millions of dollars in career earnings, I guess.
As a picture-perfect example of being able to do big, novel ideas in software, I find myself in a unique position to try to make my own model to do, essentially, what a lot of the engineers at my company do. I have the data. I have the freedom to spin up whatever infra I need in the cloud. I have the ability and the time to learn machine learning, which I’ve already started. If it works, some managers will love me, and a lot of engineers will hate me. It’s basically the story of my career, just writ larger this time. Yay.
Last night, in my continuing saga of playing Fallout 76, I finished all the main quest lines, and turned my attention to one of the first side quests that you’ll run into when starting the game. You meet a robot who is a Fallout version of a Boy Scout leader which starts a mission to become a “tadpole” scout. Turns out that this “mission” is really composed of about 9 parts, each of which has about 7-10 other parts, and you probably won’t even notice that the game adds a tracker for all of these steps in an obscure place without telling you, leaving you to wonder how to accomplish these things.
Many of the steps require things you’ll need to acquire that I still don’t have at level 190. At least one requires an item that is a rare drop in an infrequent event which I can’t solo. So there’s that. For reference, you unlock the 5th legendary perk slot of only 6 at level 200. So, even by the game’s standards, it would seem I’m fairly well along the path, yet I have a long way to go to finish something that started when I was in single-digit levels.
The point of this exercise is to acquire a better backpack. Like other MMO’s, you’ll be spending about half your time in inventory management, in some form or another. After leveling up, getting a few key perks, and grinding for some critical upgrades to your gear, an extra 45 pounds of carrying capacity goes much, much further than it normally would, so this is a really nice thing to try to obtain. The good news is that you only have to complete 3 of the initial badges to obtain it, and they can be any you feel like fooling with, but there are only about 5 that you can do without being, well, apparently a much higher level than me.
The “bad” news — or, the expected news, given that we’re talking about an MMO — is that completing three “tadpole” badges unlocks a whole new series of achievements in order to obtain “possum” badges. About 19 of them. All with 8-12 steps each. Many of which require… you guessed it… things you’ll need to acquire that I still don’t have, and have no idea how long they will take to obtain.
One thing that has become clear is that it’s time to launch a nuke. There are about 3 achievements that relate to it. I saw someone else comment on a forum that they didn’t do it till level 200. I get it now. I tried it once, and realized what a slog it is, and quickly set it aside. The mission continuously generates enemies until you traipse back and forth around the level and find the thing and unlock the other thing and finally enter a code. Normally, you would have to get the code by killing special enemies in the overworld and collecting the parts, but, thankfully, these codes are game-wide for a particular time period, and people figure them out and put them on a web site. Soloing this mission will require extreme sneaking to just avoid as many bad guys as possible, and I’ve got the perks and the Stealth Boys to try it now. I just wish I could stumble on a team that had some level-1,000 guy who was doing it to start the Scorchbeast Queen encounter, and just get the achievement by osmosis. But so far, no good.
So the net-net of all of this is that I’m trying to tick off about 300 different to-do’s off my list, in as efficient a manner as possible, to speed things up. You know… Do this while on the way to do that while using this and eating that and picking up these things to craft these other things… You get the idea.
A surprising amount of this activity is taken up with taking pictures of various creatures with the in-game camera. (As opposed to using the game’s photo mode for other achievements.) What I’ve noticed is that taking a picture of some animals now counts for multiple achievements, between the various “badges,” and the game’s “overworld” baseline achievements, which means I’m probably going to just walk around parts of the map where I can run into a bunch of particular kinds of creatures to photograph in one area. Oh, and be on the lookout for rare plants and mining deposits exclusive to that region.
Anyway, the point of writing this down is to note how similar this exercise feels when I’ve finished a major sub-project in my professional life, and start looking over my backlog in Pivotal Tracker, and trying to prioritize my next tasks. I realize that I’m looking over the list for ways to combine activities and push the lowest-hanging fruit to the top of the queue. And, suddenly, it dawns on me why, despite so many frustrations, I’m still drawn to MMO’s, and, at the same time, why they often feel like work to me.
Once again, the UK media is doing the job the US media won’t. This has been the case for several years now. Whatever truth-to-power legacy the likes of Ellsburg and Woodward and Bernstein laid down is utterly washed away now. I smell collusion between the US deep state and ALL US media companies now.
There’s a bunch of legal mumbo-jumbo here about how the laws are written and interpreted, versus the departments following their own, internal guidelines. To me, it’s all the same as the situation with privacy laws, and all the privacy policies we click through and agree to every day. These kinds of laws are written to be exploited in specific ways, and designed to be completely obtuse, even to other lawyers. Even if you could somehow look inside these organizations, and prove that laws were being broken by either the government or some Fortune 100, it would take an army of elite lawyers and specialists to successfully litigate it. The end result is the same: “they” are going to do whatever they want, regardless of the legalese they throw down on the desk.
Look no further than the continuing saga of Edward Snowden. He laid several smoking guns on the table, proving that the government knowingly broke their own laws, regarding several of our Constitutional rights. He’s still on the lamb, and Congress has done nothing to change the situation. So, this is nice and all, but, really, who cares? It’s clear nothing can be done about it, or anything like it.
Videos of people absolutely losing it are becoming really, really popular on sites like TikTok. What they show is a society in which a lot of people are at their breaking point at any given time. In my opinion, these kinds of stories — that we are absolutely powerless against a government that is actively, purposely violating the basic tenets of its charter — is a large factor in why everyone is so pissed off all the time.
