CADT Model in Action

JWZ, the arguably-most-infamous developer of Netscape, has a theory called the CADT: Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers. I got an email this morning as another example of the model in action.

I posted the problem to serverfault.com and opened the bug report. In my opinion, it was a good example of a fully-documented bug, which was easy to replicate. In their bug system, there were 12 “upvotes” of people saying that the bug was affecting them as well. Today, 6 years and 4 months later, the person the bug was assigned to is asking a rhetorical question to document that it’s going to be closed because the version of PHP it applies to is being sunsetted.

I still have no idea why an unavoidable bug in the stock PHP install in a major distribution didn’t cause more of a fuss, but it clearly wasn’t a show stopper. I don’t remember what I did about it as a workaround, but I guess everyone else did it too. I think I just gave up, and decided that I didn’t need a local dev instance of WordPress for this blog.

Stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch | AWS Open Source Blog

Last week, Elastic announced they will change their software licensing strategy, and will not release new versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2). Instead, new versions of the software will be offered under the Elastic License (which limits how it can be used) or the Server Side Public License (which has requirements that make it unacceptable to many in the open source community). This means that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be open source software. In order to ensure open source versions of both packages remain available and well supported, including in our own offerings, we are announcing today that AWS will step up to create and maintain a ALv2-licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana.

From https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/stepping-up-for-a-truly-open-source-elasticsearch/. (Because Amazon seems to have broken the auto-embedding from the WordPress widget.)

Someone pointed out that the company behind Elastic made a profit of $500M last year. This apparently wasn’t good enough, because Capitalism, so after promising just 3 months ago that they would never change their license, they did, in order to try to claw back more money they might be missing out on. They gave anyone bundling their open-source product a giant middle finger to try to spite Amazon, and Amazon gave them the finger right back.

The resources to continue to develop Elasticsearch, post license change, is a rounding error on Amazon’s balance sheet, and you can bet your sweet bippie that anyone actually affected by Elastic’s spiteful license change will simply use Amazon’s version, and avoid the Elastic “tax” on their efforts. In open source, it’s always been about having the largest benefactor on your side, and knowing that keeping Elasticsearch truly open source is in Amazon’s self-interest will swing the choice between versions away from elastic.co. It seems to me that Elastic just misfired the foot-gun.

Best comment of the HN thread on the subject:

Unless it’s not clear yet, the biggest benefactors of OSS have become the 3 largest cloud vendors owned by 3 of the largest tech mega corps, namely:

  • AWS
  • Azure
  • GCP

The multi-billion dollar infrastructure and network lock-in cloud vendors enjoy ensures there will only be these 3 cloud platforms (in the western world) that will enjoy most of the value derived from OSS, who are collecting rents on the backs of ISV’s who developed the OSS products, because of which they’re also going to be most invested in keeping the OSS status quo where they’re able to repackage the resources & efforts others have invested into developing their OSS products and reap a majority of the profits by offering it as a managed hosted service on their platform, since relatively no customer using the cloud is going to want to use an external service if there’s also the same managed service being offered by the cloud vendor.

 

The fantasy that OSS allows equal competition is no longer a reality, ISV’s cannot compete with a cloud vendor who uses their own investments against them in addition to their anti-competitive monopoly lock-in of already having Customers running on their cloud platform.

 

Elastic’s move to SSPL is effectively “OSS + free for everyone with the exception of exploitation by a major cloud vendor”, since without it we’re heading towards a mono culture future where all hosted OSS software is going to be funded and resourced by the billions major cloud vendors have reaped in collecting all the rent for hosting others OSS investments, that AWS gives nothing back in exchange for.

 

SSPL is effectively being used a tool to force AWS to do the ethical thing and reach an agreement with Elastic to distribute a portion of their profits from using their trademarks and hosting their Software they’ve invested a decade in building. AWS has instead chosen the path to maintain their own fork to avoid sharing any profits with Elastic as they’re obviously currently making so much from hosting Elastic’s products that it’s in their financial best interest to start hiring dev resources to maintain their own fork then sharing profits with Elastic to fund its continued development.

 

Will be interesting to see how this strategy turns out, AWS may have already become to big to compete against who will be able to out resource, out fund & take over any ISV’s OSS product, but it’s clear the longer Elastic waits, the harder it would be to protect their own investments being used against them.

This all factors into ideas knocking about in my head about de facto monopolies and what modern society should do about them, which I’m still trying to be able to elucidate succinctly.

 

The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming – Glenn Greenwald

No speculation is needed. Those who wield power are demanding it. The only question is how much opposition they will encounter.

Source: The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming – Glenn Greenwald

Glenn wrote a long article about how all political speech is going to be painted as “inciting violence,” in order to stifle opposition to whoever is in power. He identifies a lot of historical examples from the left, which we are calling “incitement” today, which people are forgetting.

You don’t need to look any further than the popular reaction to a tweet made by Ted Cruz to see that he was correct:

The “hot take” here is that he’s “trying to incite,” and I was provoked into blogging about this because it was the third such hot take I saw on Imgur about this tweet in my doom scrolling. Here’s an elected member of Congress saying the same thing:

The problem, of course, is that there’s literally and absolutely nothing in Ted Cruz’s tweet that could be construed by a rational, reasonable person as an incitement to violence. The whole thing just proves Greenwald correct, and in record time.

As a followup, here’s The Daily Caller, hosting a former Facebook exec, who is complaining about not being able to control the flow of information, and suggesting that we need to get AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast to block right-wing news sites from their internet service. Regardless of hosting provider, they would simply not be able to reach Americans, because of the regional monopolies on local internet providers, and the duopoly of phone service.

The Debt Question Facing Janet Yellen: How Much Is Too Much? – WSJ

A big question hangs over Janet Yellen this week at her confirmation hearing to become U.S. Treasury secretary: How much debt is too much?

 

In the past four years, U.S. government debt held by the public has increased by $7 trillion to $21.6 trillion. President-elect Joe Biden has committed to a spending program that could add trillions more in the year ahead. At 100.1% of gross domestic product, the debt already exceeds the annual output of the economy, putting the U.S. in company with economies including Greece, Italy and Japan.

Source: The Debt Question Facing Janet Yellen: How Much Is Too Much? – WSJ

There it is, and Biden hasn’t even taken office yet! For the first time in four years, someone in the press noticed the national debt. We only care about the debt when a Democrat is President. Search and see for yourself. WashPo, CNN, Pro Publica all wrote articles about the debt in the past 5 days.

I don’t even know where the WSJ got their number. According to the Debt Clock, the current figure is $27.8T.

We added $7T to the debt under Trump, including $4.5T for two rounds of corporate welfa… — I mean, “stimulus” — and now we worry about adding another $1.9T? Are you trying to tell me that another 7% is suddenly going to topple the world’s economy or something? Trying to inflame political tensions about this just before Biden takes office is as disingenuous as it is completely predictable, and Lord knows we don’t need any more political inflammation right now.

Through the 90’s, lots of people, including myself, advocated for a flat tax, thinking it was “fair.” Well, without anyone in Congress stumping about it, that’s what we’ve quietly wound up with:

I hope the people in the 99.99% bracket are mad at the Top 400

The problem is that it’s piling up debt. There’s never any money to do anything extra. So we just print more money. That sounds very scary to us normal people, who view the country’s economy like our own household’s, but apparently it doesn’t matter, because we’ve been doing just that for several decades now, and we’re just now reaching levels of debt, relative to GDP, that some other first-world countries have.

My thinking on taxation has flipped 180º, fast and hard. If we ever want to actually fund the government, and pay for all of these bailouts and stimuluses and old-fashioned “safety nets” like welfare and social security, we’re going to have to go back to a steeply progressive tax scheme, and cut out shelters that cater to the ultra-wealthy. But just like Congress voting for a pay cut or term limits or killing corporate political PAC’s, this will never happen, because these desperately-needed changes would affect the people that fund campaigns.

 

Our paranoid friend who fears Facebook’s power – Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

As a demonstration of how irrationally paranoid this guy is for imagining that a combination of political rulers and corporate cronies would suppress his speech via deplatforming, Facebook has deplatformed him…

Source: Our paranoid friend who fears Facebook’s power – Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I have nothing to add.

Apple Developer Program

In the endless internecine wars about Apple on “Hacker” “News,” there’s a common complaint that the Apple Developer Program costs $99/year. I can never get my head wrapped around that particular protest, as though it were some great barrier to entry. To put it in perspective, I subscribe to <deep breath> Prime, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Now, Apple One, Office365, PS+, and Xbox Live, and that’s just off the top of my head. Most of them are for purely-optional entertainment, and all of them cost more money than the developer program. I suspect most people who frequent the board pay for several of these too. So, in comparison, the $99/yr for the developer program is not a lot of money. It’s certainly comparable with other optional digital services. It’s less than a single restaurant lunch per month.

You can complain that it’s not right to charge for the program, purely out of principle, but I look at it as though the developer program has a cover charge to keep out the riff raff, and I don’t think this is a bad thing. We all know how much junk is in the App Store as it is, and how long it takes to get a review. Imagine if they didn’t charge for the opportunity to submit apps? How much quickly-abandoned junk would suddenly appear, and how long would it take for proper apps to get approved?

Playstation 5: First Thoughts

I keep promising myself that I’m going to finish Spider Man and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, but I’ve been playing through Skyrim. Again. Yeah, I know. A 10 year old game being played on a 7 year old console, now playing on a PS5. But that makes it a good benchmark, because I’m so familiar with it now. Skyrim on the PS4 plays alright, but will skip frames if you turn really fast.

Of course, I had several mods installed. However, they were only gameplay mods. I had tried some graphics enhancement mods, but they slowed down the game. Not terribly, but noticeably. So I took them back out.

When I installed the game on the PS5, I saw the graphics mods in my list and thought, why not? I installed all of the popular ones for lighting, weather, fog, and water. I’m happy to report that Skyrim on the PS5 now looks quite a bit better, and never skips frames. I know this isn’t a proper demonstration of what the hardware can do, but it’s just nice, you know?

Playstation 5: At Last

I finally got a Playstation 5, thanks to Best Buy and Twitter. The new hardware can apparently do 4K at 120Hz over HDMI 2.1. I have a monitor that I use at 4K@60Hz over DisplayPort for my Mac, but it can only do 4K@30Hz over HDMI. So I went looking for a new monitor. The problem is that what I want doesn’t seem to exist. I can’t find a single model in the 30-inch range that can do 4K@120Hz. There are a lot that do 1080, and many that can do 1440, but if there are any that can do the full 2160, I can’t find them. What I don’t understand is that there seem to be a lot of big screen TV’s that can do 4K at 120Hz. Why aren’t they making them in desktop monitor sizes? I guess I’ll have to wait and hope that the new-gen gaming consoles push the market to make them.

UPDATE: I’ve been able to find a few select models that will do 4K@60Hz in a 32″ size, but, so far, none of the them support HDMI 2.1. Only 2.0. I’m not buying until I can find a unit that satisfies all the display features of the PS5.

UPDATE: Aha! My prediction about the next-gen consoles pushing the market was spot on. Asus — from whom I’ve bought all of my monitors for years, now — has just announced a new model, the ROG Swift PG32UQ, and it was covered just 3 days ago. It supports HDMI 2.1 and HDR and 4K@120Hz.

At the time of this writing, Amazon has listings for the 25″, the 43″, and a 34″ models. The 43″ is listed at $1,100, but I don’t want to go bigger than about 34″, and that one is being listed by some 3rd-party scalper at $1,600. (Good job, buddy.)

B&H lists them as a new item, “coming soon,” for $800, and that seems correct, but then I notice that it’s a ROG Swift PG32Q (not “UQ”), and the specs say it only supports HDMI 2.0, and I’m right back where I started. Why is this so hard? Researching further, this article says that the UQ version will be available starting at the end of the first quarter. Sigh.

Note bene: This means that all three listings on Amazon for the “UQ” model are fraudulent. They can’t possibly be that model yet. Nice, Amazon. Really keeping up your reputation here.

Anyway, I guess that will give me time to recoup from the PS5 itself, and get my tax return…

The Lies that Can Undermine Democracy (You Said a Mouthful)

While I understand that many people distrust the mainstream press, the fact that his lawyers have filed a blizzard of lawsuits and got precisely nowhere, proves that there is no evidence for the election failures that he claims. But his denial of the result has created a belief among his supporters that he didn’t really lose, a belief that is likely to further poison our society in the coming years.

Source: The Lies that can Undermine Democracy

This is self-incrimination of the sin of only reading news from one side. There’s absolutely not “no evidence” of election fraud. There are many, many stories of irregularities, and the fact that they all seem to go in favor of Biden is, in my opinion of fact, worth filing a lawsuit or two about. And the two statistical analyses I’ve noted are smoking guns of interference, in my opinion.

Trying to search for actual results, I found this WashPo article, which seems to be common among the legal wrangling that is actually recorded about these cases:

“Something far more fundamental than the winner of Wisconsin’s electoral votes is implicated in this case,” Hagedorn wrote, in declining to hear a case brought by a conservative group that asked the court to overturn the election results. “At stake, in some measure, is faith in our system of free and fair elections, a feature central to the enduring strength of our constitutional republic.”

In this particular case, the judge seems to have simply refused to hear the case out of the fact that it would be unprecedented. I suppose that’s a legal reason?

The other references I can find seem to all point to the problem of “standing.” The federal courts seem to find that the President of the United States has no standing to bring suit against a State legislature in federal court, and toss the case, and that certainly seems to be a reasonable position to take. However, it’s a catch-22. As a petitioner, he has no standing in State courts, except the one in which he might be a permanent resident, which, in this case, is New York, and of no interest in these matters.

Even in the case that went before the Supreme Court, the suit was brought from Texas, and the court found that they had no standing to sue the other 4 States for their handling of their election results. I find that entirely reasonable as well. But it leaves an interesting gap in our legal system. How is any Presidential candidate supposed to seek injunctive relief in a federal election? It doesn’t seem to be possible.

The trouble with pointing at the failed efforts of those lawsuits as proof of their lack of merit is that all of the lawsuits (that I can see) have been thrown out without investigation of their actual claims. It’s hardly conclusive. As I said before, I’d really love to see an in-depth investigative documentary about all of this. There’s just no reasonable way to put all of this together through a bunch of disconnected news articles, blog posts, and Twitter rants.

Anyway, Fowler is a well-respected person amongst programmers, and he prattles on for many pages after this complete disregard for the actual, unsettling facts which he tacitly ignores, and I’m sure it’s a lengthy screed against the alt-right, and blah, blah, blah. It’s just hard for me to take anyone seriously any more who only ever looks at the eye chart with their left eye.