Get Me Out Of Data Hell — Ludicity

The Pain Zone… is an enterprise data warehouse platform. At the small scale we operate at, with little loss of detail, a data warehouse platform simply means that we copy a bunch of text files from different systems into a single place every morning.

The word enterprise means that we do this in a way that makes people say “Dear God, why would anyone ever design it that way?”, “But that doesn’t even help with security” and “Everyone involved should be fired for the sake of all that is holy and pure.”

For example, the architecture diagram which describes how we copy text files to our storage location has one hundred and four separate operations on it. When I went to count this, I was expecting to write forty and that was meant to illustrate my point. Instead, I ended up counting them up three times because there was no way it could be over a hundred. This whole thing should have ten operations in it.

…

Almost every large business in Melbourne is rushing to purchase our tooling, tools like Snowflake and Databricks, because the industry is pretending that any of this is more important than hiring competent people and treating them well. I could build something superior to this with an ancient laptop, an internet connection, and spreadsheets. It would take me a month tops.

I’ve known for a long time that I can’t change things here. But in this moment, I realize that the organization values things that I don’t value, and it’s as simple as that. I could pretend to be neutral and say that my values aren’t better, but you know what, my values are better.

PS:

… I gave a webinar to US board members at the invitation of the Financial Times. Suffice it to say that while people are sincerely trying their best, our leaders are not even remotely equipped to handle the volume of people just outright lying to them about IT.

Source: Get Me Out Of Data Hell — Ludicity

(Emphasis mine.)

That last part is really the kicker. Every middle manager in all the various IT organizational structures inside of a Fortune-sized public company are lying about things, whether by omission or by fact. They’re lying about what it is they do. They’re lying about their problems. They’re lying about their capabilities. They’re lying about their timelines.

They’re lying to people who are either don’t care, or aren’t equipped to understand how the things they’re being told are lies, even if they do care. They’re lying to build “kingdoms” in the company by justifying more people, more machines, and more software than is required to solve a problem. And not just by a little; by orders of magnitude.

Recently, it took me seven weeks of emails eventually involving fifty-odd people to get something done that took literally 30 seconds to do. Part of it was because I didn’t understand what I was asking for. I was asking for the wrong thing. Part of that is because the system is stupid, and no right-thinking person would have implemented it that way. Someone, somewhere, a long time ago (who probably left the company now) decided that this is how it should work, because someone at a consultancy told them that this is what “everyone” does.

I was asking for the logical, straightforward thing that would have fixed my issue, now and in the future. After it became clear that this would never happen, the 50+ “subject matter experts” involved had dozens of chances to respond and explain how what I was asking for actually worked, and clarified that I was asking for the wrong thing. But that didn’t happen.

Why? Because explaining why it works the way it does in front of God and everyone would reveal how idiotic it is. This can’t even be admitted over voice, but after several Zoom calls, you eventually see the pattern. It’s like the old magic eye pics in the 90’s. Eventually, you get your focus depth correct, and see the real picture. The image that no one else sees. They’re not paid to, so they don’t care.

Not only is the process stupid, the “self-help” web site that’s supposed to allow people to address this problem themselves is opaque, and doesn’t explain what’s going on. It masks the issue that I was having, when it would be very easy to show. This is a recurring pattern. Various IT functions have implemented “self-help” web sites that simply do not work, for reasons they are completely blind to because they never use them. They could make two small changes to this page, and it really would (mostly) address this stupid, broken policy. After all this wasted effort, someone involved seemed to finally understand my confusion and understand how this could be fixed, but I’ll bet they never do it.

Unless senior management — and I mean the guys right under the officers, because the officers are never going to care, and the upper-middle guys don’t have the political clout to do it — unless they are curious, concerned, and knowledgeable enough to ask illuminating questions to pierce the veil, the lies will go unchallenged, and the technical debt will continue to grow with every new project, and every project that is introduced to fix one that just failed.

At some point, when your personal sensibilities and the demonstrated collective priorities of the organization repeatedly come into conflict, you have to make a decision if you’re in the right place. For instance, I currently have personal issues which make the “switching costs” prohibitive, but this is an extremely individualistic equation to balance.

Election Malfeasance 2024

Here’s a guy who filmed Indiana Department of Transportation workers for a half hour removing Trump signs, and (allegedly) leaving the Harris ones. It’s just one data point among many. Over the past week, my Twitter feed has become FILLED with stories of crazy election problems already. And it’s not just one or two crazy, hard-right, loud-mouthed accounts. It’s many different people, and from all the battleground states.

Strangely, every story seems to only favor one side. Now, maybe that’s just my algorithm’s bias, so if anyone has stories FROM THE LEFT about, oh, I don’t know, a person voting in elections where the person said they never voted, or many dozens of voting “residences” for a single person, I’d actually love to hear about them. These would be headline news in the mainstream media, and I’m not seeing them.

Turns out that there are many, many ways to cheat our elections. It’s not just about hacking the voting machines, though, as a “computer guy,” this is the biggest issue of all, and it’s already been proven times! No, the “beauty” of this situation is that you can hide cheating at many different levels, in many different ways, and in many different regions, as needed.

Because of the issues last time — I mean, boarding up windows so observers couldn’t see!? — finding thousands of votes all for one person in the dead of the night!? — people are watching very carefully this time around, and it’s becoming more and more clear every day that our elections are susceptible to all sorts of shenanigans, and are in danger of being a disgraceful joke.

UPDATE: I sent this to a friend who works for INDOT. He sent it up the chain, and was told, yes, it was real, and that the Commissioner was already involved. Although crews are supposed to remove such temporary signs in easements to work — and whether or not they were, in fact, being selective about it — the optics from this are apparently bad enough that they have been told to leave all political signs alone until after the election.

Musk’s X blocked links to JD Vance dossier after hearing from Trump campaign – Ars Technica

According to Klippenstein, Musk sent a message in which he said, “I’ve asked X Safety to unsuspend him, even though I think he is an awful human being… Important to stay true to free speech principles.”

Source: Musk’s X blocked links to JD Vance dossier after hearing from Trump campaign – Ars Technica

Klippenstein revealed Vance’s social security number in an opposition “dossier” he posted to Twitter. He was suspended. He redacted the personal information, and was reinstated.

Saved you a click, and talk about burying the lede!

Boo, Ars. Boo!

Societal Reprogramming

You Are Being Warned

People are starting to wake up. This notice needs to be expanded to include all printed media, broadcast, movies, streaming, video gaming, and even tabletop role playing. The billionaires in question are at the top of companies like Blackrock, State Street, and Vanguard, which collectively own a controlling stake in almost every single company in the US. Larry Fink has become the poster child of this effort, because he literally said the quiet part out loud.

The next time you wonder why your favorite entertainment started being terrible all of a sudden, realize that these investment companies directed that to happen, and they’ve got more money than God to lose on spreading their messaging. It has become a complete top-down reprogramming of society. The only major platform/channel standing apart from this is Twitter, and that’s why they hate Elon Musk.

Hurricane Hyperventilation

PSA: THE GOVERNMENT CANNOT CREATE OR INFLUENCE HURRICANES

The right-wing of America is having a real “moment” about this topic all over social media, and I’m going to point out the obvious problem with this idea. You can take it or leave it. After several days of making this argument on Twitter, I find a lot of people are leaving it. Still, I do what I can.

Let’s get a couple things out of the way up front. Yes, we can “seed” clouds to cause precipitation. That’s been around for a long time. That’s just chemistry and thermodynamics, and it only works in ALREADY-FORMED weather patterns.

And, yes, there are patents for inventions that would seek to control the weather. So what? There are also patents for teleporters, anti-gravity, telekinesis, ESP, and contacting the spirit world. Getting a patent just means you’re the first to seek legal protection for an idea, not that the invention works now, or that it will EVER work in the future. Even if you think that a patent proves an idea not only works in theory, but is evidence of a working invention, do you think the government would put a weather control device’s method of operation in the public view for others to understand and copy? Do you think other countries would respect that copyright under threat of a patent infringement lawsuit?

This isn’t a question of technology. Well, it IS, but that’s secondary. This is primarily a question of ENERGY.

Hurricanes are caused by the air in the northern and southern hemispheres moving in opposite directions. (If you study mechanics, you can see the reason why this happens in the equations.) These opposing bodies of air move past each other and get mixed, making planet-sized eddy currents. That’s why they only happen on the equator. If you are going to create a hurricane — or direct it, or intensify it, or diminish it — you will need to influence the way the air is moving in BOTH hemispheres, and redirect it to your liking. And then, if could manage THAT, and no matter what sort of machine you think might do that job, you’re going to need to POWER it.

Meteorologists have done the math, and the amount of energy in a hurricane is roughly equivalent to the total output of all of mankind right now. EVEN IF you could produce this much energy for the job, you’d still have to APPLY it to the atmosphere of the entire globe, within HUNDREDS of miles north AND south of the equator. You can’t just stop the air moving in some area to put it somewhere else, and create a void. You’re going to have to control basically the whole thing.

Weather patterns are the movement of a literal astronomical amount of air and water, and are produced by 1) the rotation and orbit of the planet (moving the air mechanically), 2) the heat from the planet’s core and the sun (causing expansion and contraction of air with the temperature over nights and days), and 2) the interaction with the gravity of the moon (causing rising and falling tides, increasing and decreasing pressure on the air above). These forces are MAGNITUDES larger than anything mankind can control.

Lastly, yes, the government has always been DECADES ahead of the private sector in any sort of technology that could be used as a weapon. But let’s be clear: they are only ahead in the PRACTICAL APPLICATION of the technology. They are not BREAKING THE LAWS OF PHYSICS or inventing new ones. Even if you believe the government has created some secret satellite-based raygun to produce these kinds of pressure and heat differentials to influence the atmosphere over most of the globe, there’s no way they could power it. This would be WELL beyond all known or even theorized physics. It’s simply not possible.

The Annotated Watchmen

As my second cerebral processor was doing whatever it does while my primary one is busy doing work, I was reflecting on The Watchmen. Why? I don’t know. I haven’t been watching or reading anything related to comics or superheroes lately. I read the graphic novel in college, on the advice of a friend. He also told me that it was so complicated, there was a second book that explained all the references. I eventually found a copy of that book at a book store, and thumbed through it, but never bought it. I was astonished at how much lied under the surface, which I hadn’t noticed, and I always felt I was a pretty attentive reader.

I just looked and see now that you can get an “annotated” version of the book with those notes in the margins. I wouldn’t mind getting a full-color hardback version of this, but the point of this post is just the amazement of making a piece of art that is so complex, nuanced, and multi-layered that there’s actual utility in making a book like this. I mean, there are some movies that invite this level of introspection, notably Primer, but I can’t think of a lot of others. (I mean, sure, Tenet, but that’s because it needs to be explained, and then you’re forced to conclude that, no, it really did suck.) I can’t think of any other piece of art that deserves this kind of treatment.

Global Emissions

I work in a company within an industry that is figuratively being strangled to death over emissions standards, and I have to sit here and look at this.

Effluence
Comparison

The increases from the East have dwarfed the decreases from the West. I suspect it’s just “off-shoring” the pollution through outsourcing production, while being able to make political hay, and not an actual organic increase.

Sweet Baby Inc. Employee Admits Goal Is “Burning The Games Industry To The Ground”

That may be the biggest “shit-eating grin” in the history of the world

A Sweet Baby Inc. employee named Camerin Wild, who claims to be non-binary, admitted that his goal is “burning the games industry to the ground.”

Source: Sweet Baby Inc. Employee Admits Goal Is “Burning The Games Industry To The Ground”

If you follow the gaming industry, you can’t escape the ideological war that’s being fought about wokeness in modern games. It mirrors the fight about wokeness everywhere, but it’s a much more compact world, and easier to keep tabs on. The wokes have succeeded in education, government, news, and movies, and are moving to the last “safe space” for white males: video games. And, boy, have they done some damage!

Concord’s Online Player Count at Release

Most recently was Concord, a squad-based shooter from Sony, which failed so hard, they forcefully refunded everyone’s money and closed down the servers after just 2 weeks. It’s estimated that development took 8 years and $400M. Almost all of the triple-A releases of the past couple of years have been complete failures, and when you dig around in the credits of these flops, you keep finding one company in common with all of them: Sweet Baby, Inc.

So here’s a GDOC — a game developer of color — who works for Sweet Baby — giving a talk about how to “burn the games industry to the ground.” Now, I get it. Yes, those words are literally on one of his slides, but I understand the larger context. He wants to see the games industry as it has existed to be destroyed, and rebuilt in his image. Which means he wants to see any and all stories about straight, white, male protagonists eliminated in favor of anything and everything else. The forthcoming Assassins Creed Shadows is the picture-perfect example. It features a black, gay samurai in feudal Japan. I don’t think you can get any more removed from context or expectation in favor of an anti-whiteness narrative.

There are plenty of good stories that don’t center on a white male. It’s not even uncommon. Lara Croft in “Tomb Raider” and “Rise” is an amazing character. Pretty and well built, yes, but skilled and clever. Her femininity is never used against her. Her physical attributes are never a plot point. Aloy in the Horizon series is similarly amazing. You can play as Alexandria in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and the story is interchangeable. I like FPS games, so these are what I’m familiar with, but there are a lot of other examples.

The difference here is that Sweet Baby have taken a concept centered around straight “white” males — laying aside that Japanese people are not “white” — and they’ve simply substituted the main character with something that’s the antithesis of the concept. For people who are strutting around trying to tell other people that they’re the experts in how to write “engaging” stories, they don’t seem to understand what they’re doing at all.

I watched some of the video, looking for the problem, and found it pretty easily.

Oops! Brooks did not write the jokes to come “at the expense of whiteness.” He didn’t write it to simply offend; he wrote the jokes to come at the expense of racists and racism. Conflating this is a massive, critical flaw in reasoning and understanding. Gene Wilder is the co-star. His character is white. He’s “us” in the movie. He’s showing white people how you can be white and not be racist. No one denigrates or humiliates or makes fun of Wilder’s “whiteness.” To say that the jokes took white people to task simply for being white is to miss the entire point of the movie. This logical fallacy presumes all white people are racist. Not only is that wrong — which I’m sure this GDOC would admit — but it’s also being racist yourself.

It’s not an incidental matter that the movie is hilarious. That’s another critically-important piece of the puzzle these “woke warriors” seem to miss. It entertained! It succeeded, not because of the message, but because it was well-written, and had talented actors and a talented director. These people think they can just “put a chick in it, and make her lame and gay,” and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. They forget it still has to succeed on its own merits.

The biggest miss, however, is that the movie shows that people can change! That’s the brilliant subtext: the moral arc of the townsfolk, wherein they throw off their racism and embrace the sheriff. The jokes that come at the expense of the townspeople attack ignorance, and ask the viewer to reflect on historical attitudes and the things they have been raised to believe that need to be abandoned. The movie doesn’t just beat people up for being white. It demonstrates growth. This is how you persuade with art, whether it’s a movie or a video game. You give people a shovel, and show them where to dig. You don’t just hit them over the head with it to make them feel bad, and make yourself feel superior.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone be so blithely ignorant while presuming to be taken seriously as an expert before.

The bottom line is that 73% of the US is still white. I know George Soros and his NGO’s are working overtime to bring as many non-whites as possible over the border in as little time as possible, but we’re still a majority-white country for now. Also, current estimates are that 90% of the population is straight. If you want to make any money in popular entertainment, you’re going to have to at least make it palatable to straight white people. That’s the majority of the market. That’s where the money is. You can’t just insult people for the sin of having been born white and straight, and then expect them to grovel in penance, and give you money. Well, I mean, you can, but then you don’t get to act surprised when your projects fail, and you and all of your friends get laid off. If you want to succeed, use your art to illuminate the future you envision. Show how it’s better. For everyone. Don’t condemn people. Give people a way out of the sins you are accusing them of; a path of redemption. That’s the lesson of Blazing Saddles.

Look no further than the past couple of years of Star Wars and Marvel programming from Disney to see how well Sweet Baby’s approach works. They’ve desecrated the canon of both of these universes, and changed the fundamental elements that made them popular to begin with. Both of these billion-dollar franchises are circling the drain thanks to these kinds of ham-fisted efforts to force all characters and story lines to come “at the expense of whiteness.” They’ve spent loads of extra money on expert advisors and a small army of the “right” writers, and they still can’t even manage to make new installments entertaining!

Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street are leading all of this charge to eliminate “whiteness.” Which is kind of funny, since the CEO of Blackrock is an old white guy! These three own controlling interest in every media company. They’re destroying the very vehicles that give them an audience in the name of trying to eliminate “whiteness.” Many customers have fled to “the long tail” for their entertainment. Soon, there will be no more worldwide franchises left to continue to preach the message with. Critics of this multi-media, multi-company scorched Earth campaign seem to always want to talk about how much money new, woke projects lose (as I admit that I did, above) But it’s alright; they have the money. They’re extracting it from the US economy, and will continue to burn it to reprogram society.

It’s not about money. It’s about sending a message.

Who Decides What Constitutes Disinformation?

AOC Calling for Censorship

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “You know, I do think that several members of Congress in some of my discussions have brought up media literacy, because that is a part of what happened here. And we’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation. It’s one thing to have differing opinions, but it’s another thing entirely to just say things that are false. And so that’s something that we’re looking into.”

“It’s another thing entirely…” Is it really, though? Remember that the government-permitted, medical-community-approved, corporate advertising about tobacco used to be this:

Keep this in mind while you ponder the past 40 years of messaging from the incestuous government-corporate relationship about what our diet should consist of, and the products that fill our grocery store shelves. Think about how the tide is turning against highly-processed foods and seed oils as more and more data about how harmful they are escapes the clutches of the 7 “food” companies that make up 95% of our supply chain, and the FDA. In another 10 or 20 years, we will be looking back on what they have collectively done to the US and the epidemic of chronic disease that has happened as the result, and wonder why we let them get away with it. Again.

Jillian Michaels

Jillian Michaels: People are being “sacrificed on the altar of unchecked corporate greed.”

And what about examples of other kinds of corporate harm? The movies Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action, and Dark Waters all document cases where huge companies knowingly caused harm to people, their communities, and even their own workers. When cornered by inescapable evidence, they deny, deny, deny, and have the press write favorable articles. When finally convicted in court, they either declare bankruptcy or continue to fight the ordered payments. All the while, the board and the executives continue to get paid extravagantly as the legal proceedings drag on for decades. And every time we find a public-safety atrocity being knowingly committed in the name of corporate profits, we discover that it was a collusion between the senior officials of the company and the governmental departments that were supposed to be regulating them. It’s not the exception. It’s the rule. Our corporations are literally killing us in the name of profit, and the government and the media are all in on the grift.

So now, because of the “dangers” of “misinformation,” we’re supposed to ignore this history of “science” and “safety”-based “standards” from the government and the media and corporations, hand over the keys of our national public discourse to the likes of AOC — or, rather, some faceless, unaccountable, unelected governmental agency she intends to create — and trust that they are going to correctly separate fact from fiction, and keep everyone honest? Really? After all of this? That’s the plan? And there are actual, living people who are in favor of this? People smart enough to tie their shoes believe this is a good thing?

The government has been wrong about so, so many things, and more are coming to light all the time: tobacco, a new “ice age,” “peak oil,” weapons of mass destruction, vaccines, climate “change,” COVID, seed-oils… the list goes on. I’m not trying to go full conspiracy theorist here. These are complicated topics that defy one-line answers about how we should deal with them. But it’s been shown very clearly over the past few years that our government doesn’t have a special dispensation of understanding. They’re bureaucrats who hire experts, and experts are all over the place. The only way to get to the truth is to talk about it, even if that includes people saying things that are wrong. And, yes, even if it includes people saying things they know are wrong.

Besides the realm of pure conspiracy theory (9/11? Las Vegas shooter? Trump assassin(s)?), the government has been telling us things that have been proven they knew were wrong since WWII. Given all we know now, why should we grant them a monopoly on purposely saying wrong things? What could it possibly take for you to be distrustful of the government, if you’re not already? I’m not saying you have to completely disbelieve anyone in government ever says, but at this point, how could anyone believe that the truth isn’t at least somewhere between the three-headed government/corporations/media monster, and knowledgable people in the public? Besides the complete abrogation of the First Amendment, this alone precludes any notion of creating a governmental bureaucracy to police information.