So True, and So Wrong

This resonates with me. Spend millions on some new equipment to make widgets better? Sure! Spend thousands to improve the functionality of the lifeblood of the company? Well… I don’t know…

Seriously, though, there’s so much wrong with the way this movie treats this plot point. First, there’s the issue where the only other guy who can get in the system doesn’t have all the access. Second, there’s the issue where there are “a million” lines of code in a monolithic application which clearly covers lots of independent systems, and the other guy can’t even begin to track down where the problem might lie. Third, the little grade-school-aged girl says she knows Unix. Fourth, she then navigates a GUI-based filesystem browser — which no one has ever used in any serious capacity — to find and run an executable — starting from /usr, no less — that magically fixes everything.

I always wondered why I never liked the Jurassic movies very much. Maybe this was a large part of the reasoning.

Isolation of an archaeon at the prokaryote–eukaryote interface | Nature

The origin of eukaryotes remains unclear1,2,3,4. Current data suggest that eukaryotes may have emerged from an archaeal lineage known as ‘Asgard’ archaea5,6. Despite the eukaryote-like genomic features that are found in these archaea, the evolutionary transition from archaea to eukaryotes remains unclear, owing to the lack of cultured representatives and corresponding physiological insights. Here we report the decade-long isolation of an Asgard archaeon related to Lokiarchaeota from deep marine sediment. The archaeon—‘Candidatus Prometheoarchaeum syntrophicum’ strain MK-D1—is an anaerobic, extremely slow-growing, small coccus (around 550 nm in diameter) that degrades amino acids through syntrophy. Although eukaryote-like intracellular complexes have been proposed for Asgard archaea6, the isolate has no visible organelle-like structure. Instead, Ca. P. syntrophicum is morphologically complex and has unique protrusions that are long and often branching. On the basis of the available data obtained from cultivation and genomics, and reasoned interpretations of the existing literature, we propose a hypothetical model for eukaryogenesis, termed the entangle–engulf–endogenize (also known as E3) model.

Source: Isolation of an archaeon at the prokaryote–eukaryote interface | Nature

Just a little light reading that caught my eye. I think this pretty well sums it up, don’t you?

Drug Company Set to Pay $15 Million to DOJ Over Doctor Bribery Scandal

Two whistleblowers came forward in April to accuse Questcor of trying to boost profits for Acthar, a medication primarily for infants with seizures. Questcor raised the price of the medication by almost 100,000 percent (not a typo) from just $40 in 2000 to $38,892 today, despite the fact that Acthar has been on the market since 1952. Mallinckrodt currently rakes in about $1 billion per year from Acthar, according to CNN.

Source: Drug Company Set to Pay $15 Million to DOJ Over Doctor Bribery Scandal

Today, in Medicare-For-All-is-inevitable news: One company jacked up the price of a drug for newborns from $40 to FORTY THOUSAND DOLLARS, even though it has been around since 1952, and THEN they were caught bribing doctors to prescribe it!

There’s only so much of this our system can take before enough people get affected by it and vote for a nationalized health care system — despite whatever negatives they might fear — because surely nothing can be as bad as what they’re dealing with.

Why The Internet is Terrible, Part 1

Josh Topolsky, writing at Input:

But thank god for the internet. What the hell would we do right now without the internet? How would so many of us work, stay connected, stay informed, stay entertained? For all of its failings and flops, all of its breeches and blunders, the internet has become the digital town square that we always believed it could and should be.

So true. Feeling isolated? Cooped up? Me too. But imagine what this would’ve been like 30 years ago. This sort of crisis is what the internet was designed for, and it’s working.

Source: Daring Fireball: ‘Thank God for the Internet’

I’m dubious about the quoted article’s opinion of the net value of the internet to society at large, and it’s Gruber’s take that precisely highlights my problem with it. The underlying assumption is that we’re all going stir crazy, and the Internet is saving us from the worst of it.

It’s the information bandwidth created by the internet that is driving us crazy, forcing us all to live at breakneck speed to keep up with it. Thirty years ago, you simply didn’t know the social activities of every one of your acquaintances. Because of that, you couldn’t feel compelled to try to fit them all into your schedule, and participate, in some capacity, or, at the very least, acknowledge them, lest you offend someone, and then suffer their displeasure in the form of them pressuring other parts of your social life in negative ways.

Thirty years ago, you had a small circle of friends, because that’s all your “information bandwidth” would allow for. And you were happy. You made things work. You made phone calls. You went to church. You went over to someone’s place, and talked, or played a game. The internet ruined that. The internet is the reason that families run 24×7 to keep up with every thing and every one. It started with an assumption that, hey, you and I are friends, and if you only knew *this thing* was happening, you would, of course, want to show up for it. And now, every single person you know is trying to get *their thing* onto your schedule. The problem is that we feel socially guilty about saying no, for fear that we will lose standing in someone else’s eyes, and perhaps not be invited to the next thing that we actually do want to be involved with.

The internet is the reason that you know what people you wouldn’t have even called friends in high school are up to, thirty years on, and you kinda-sorta feel compelled to congratulate them for it. The internet is why you know that that one guy at work is doing this charity thing next month, and you don’t really know him, and don’t really care about his cause, but the event is pulling in a couple of people you want to like you, and you really don’t have anything better to do in that 2-hour block of time, so, fine, you’ll go.

So, yeah, “the internet” is the only thing that can help you refill that emptiness created by “the internet,” which keeps you binging on it. And all the “Web 2.0” companies laugh all the way to the bank for preying on your need for human connectivity and relevance, manipulating your opinion for their benefactors, and “monetizing” your “eyeballs.”

And that’s just the social networks. What about the actual facts of science relating to the virus, and the government’s response to it, and the media coverage of it all? It’s a frightening mess of clashing opinion, creating warring tribal factions about who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s literally tearing society apart, fractioning us into camps which can never be reconciled.

The absolute worst part of this is the United States’ two-party system, and the non-overlapping dichotomy of ideology it forcibly implies. So, given any statement, people feel license to derive an entire worldview for the other person, down to their income level, geographic location, intelligence level, and what they surely must think about every other topic. Twitter, for instance, is almost literally made of strawman arguments. Sometimes, it feels as though, if you used machine learning to delete strawmen from the platform, more than half the content would be gone, and it would definitely be the half that generates all the ad revenue.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It wasn’t that way before. Respectable journalists digested the facts, wrote articles, and news editors gave us a well-formed narrative. Were there oversights? Was there propaganda? Sure, but people found ways to get the story out. Now, any crank with a computer can spew his or her unsound opinion on any particular topic, and entire communities spring up around it, to support it and keep it alive. I’m not talking about flat-earth or faked-moon-landing stuff here; I’m talking about anti-vax, climate change, human rights, and terrorism. Stuff that really matters, now, and to our children’s children.

Right now, the total effect is hardly distinguishable from everyone just stepping out of their homes, into the street, and screaming at the top of their lungs. In the same way as with America’s broken health insurance system, the people who are the fans of the status quo are, predictably, the winners of the current system: the blue checkmarks. You might find it to be great, because you’ve got a really loud voice, but that just makes other people even more upset with you.

“The internet” is perverting just about every element of human relations. Facebook and Twitter are the arch-villains here, but every other online forum isn’t far behind. At this point, I could probably write a book about what I’m seeing, but I’m sure that there are already several out there, and I’m just waking up. So, no, I don’t buy the argument that the internet is vastly more good than bad. To me, it’s marginally better, at best. In another 30 years, I think we will look back this time of the internet, and weep for the damage it caused, and the opportunity for good which was lost.

GitHub goes off the Rails as Microsoft closes in

And this year, Microsoft App Center and Google Container Builder showed up as Marketplace apps, signalling(sic) that GitHub isn’t just a storefront for startups but a cog in the code deployment machines of major tech firms.

Source: GitHub goes off the Rails as Microsoft closes in

Mark my words, this deal is going to wind up biting the developer “community” in the rear end.

I wish they hadn’t sold to Microsoft. It’s too much critical-path infrastructure for one company to manage. They now own the OS, the directory, the cloud, the languages, the dev tools, the database, the code repo, and the deployment tools. I mean, that looks good on paper, but we all know what happens when one company owns the entire vertical space.

It’s a perfect example of monopolies taking over the entire economy, and I think government should get serious about reigning-in this sort of thing. In my opinion, there should be limits on how large companies are allowed to be, based on various combinations of market cap, number of employees, and number of locations, and probably some other things that I can’t think of off the top of my head.

US Government Gunning for the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Again…

Attorney General William P. Barr declared on Monday that a deadly shooting last month at a naval air station in Pensacola, Fla., was an act of terrorism, and he asked Apple in an unusually high-profile request to provide access to two phones used by the gunman.

Source: Barr Asks Apple to Unlock Pensacola Killer’s Phones, Setting Up Clash – The New York Times

Whatever tools we allow the government to have, to abridge, contravene, or curtail our Constitutional rights, in the name of terrorism, they will eventually use against anyone who disagrees with the presiding administration, regardless of party affiliation.

“Justice Department officials said that they need access to Mr. Alshamrani’s phones to see messages from encrypted apps like Signal or WhatsApp to determine whether he had discussed his plans with others at the base and whether he was acting alone or with help.”

For years, above all the hand-wringing about it, we heard Bush-administration officials tell us how they had obtained vital intelligence from the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” — i.e., torture — that the US government used against captured terrorists after 9/11. The Senate conducted an oversight investigation into these practices. The report was released in 2014. Turns out, it was all lies. All of it. They gained exactly zero actionable intelligence from a dozen years of those practices. Out of thousands of torture sessions. Not “a little.” Not “one.” ZERO.

And the two retired military “advisors” who led the “EIT” program walked away with $80,000,000 of our tax dollars.

(And, yes, I admit that it’s a shame that it took a movie to educate me about this, but, to be fair, the government took pains to limit the scope and exposure of the report, and pressured news sites to downplay coverage of the report.)

The deep state of the military-industrial-intelligence complex has repeatedly shown that they will utterly shamelessly lie and propagandize to control the narrative to their wishes, against any pressure of truth or justice or the American way in the Constitutional free press.

The only thing that has lead to capturing and killing other terrorists has been good, old-fashioned surveillance. In the aftermath of targeted killings like Bin Laden, we are said to have known their whereabouts most of the time, with a high-degree of certainty. No cell phones or apps needed at all, encrypted or otherwise. Yet we have this continual demand from law enforcement that they be allowed to decrypt all communications at will, in direct contravention of our Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights.

It’s not that I have anything to hide. Rather, I do not trust the opaque intentions of our government, particularly when so many whistleblowers have outed so many internal programs of malicious intent, and effectively zero oversight.

Amazon and AI/ML

At this point in our glorious capitalistic society, it’s the companies who are running the country, and they’ve got us by the short hairs. Who could have guessed, even 25 years ago, that the American public would literally fall over themselves letting companies track everything they do — and therefore surmise our thoughts — in the name of getting directions, seeing friends’ baby pics, and getting an illusory 3% discount on purchases?

Amazon has stated that they see themselves becoming a SHIPPING company. They’ll just send you the stuff they know you want and are ready for. On the odd occasion you DIDN’T want what they shipped you, you just send that one back. Once they get their predictions algorithms down to a theoretical 5% return rate, they’re going to start doing it. That’s how well they feel they can predict our thinking.

Amazon, Google, and Facebook all have an internal profile of every person in America. Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast too. Even if you don’t have an account, these profiles are built over decades of data collection, colluding with other tracking companies, and collating everything you do which could have left a digital trail.

These companies know IF you’ll vote, and who you’ll vote for, and they know how to present things to people on the fence in order to tip their preference. This is all in the documentary on Cambridge Analytica: The Great Hack. Yes, the last presidential election was hacked, but not by Russia. By the Republicans. In aggregate, it’s a definitive science. I don’t even see the platforms being used in this regard (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) necessarily preferring one party or the other, as long as they push votes to candidates that they feel will allow them to continue to extract rent from society, unchecked.

This is what we’re up against now. Silicon Valley has captured our government through campaign contributions, and they have the means to keep it in their pocket going forward. The United States is now a corporatocracy. We are now the United States of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon. (And Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, and Apple.) Some people want to use the full weight of the US government to fight climate change. I would rather use it to break up the tech companies to manageable, competing pieces, and return to a government of, by, and for the people; not companies.

Software disenchantment @ tonsky.me

Programs can’t work for years without reboots anymore. Sometimes even days are too much to ask. Random stuff happens and nobody knows why.

What’s worse, nobody has time to stop and figure out what happened. Why bother if you can always buy your way out of it. Spin another AWS instance. Restart process. Drop and restore the whole database. Write a watchdog that will restart your broken app every 20 minutes. Include same resources multiple times, zip and ship. Move fast, don’t fix.

That is not engineering. That’s just lazy programming. Engineering is understanding performance, structure, limits of what you build, deeply. Combining poorly written stuff with more poorly written stuff goes strictly against that. To progress, we need to understand what and why are we doing.

Source: Software disenchantment @ tonsky.me

About 20 years ago, I was working as a Unix sysadmin, and sat in on a meeting about moving an internally-developed application from another data center to mine. It ran on Windows, and died, literally, every day, and required a restart of the whole machine to fix. The manager in the meeting (who, I note, I recommended not be hired, and who was fired for sexual harassment just a few months later) said, “OK, we’ll just schedule it as part of maintenance tasks to preemptively reboot the machine every night.”

I literally snorted. I asked if it were not possible to, you know, actually fix the program? Find the memory leak, or whatever was the problem? I mean, it was written by us; couldn’t we get the programmer to fix their own program? The answer was, of course, no, with the added insinuation that it ridiculous that I suggest that the programmer still had work to do!

About 4 years ago, I wrote a program that helped a lot of people get their jobs done much more easily and efficiently. Per Douglas Adams, “This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” I was forced to hand the program over to another team, where it has run, with only one tiny patch, for 4 years now. It is not a trivial program, or architecture. To my knowledge, neither the clients nor server ever crash, or need to be restarted. I’m very proud of this.