Rules of thumb for a 1x developer | The Other Mickey Wiki

Posted on May 4, 2020 by David K.

But I’m feeling ambitious. I would like to become a 1.1x developer. I’m trying to figure out how to get there.

Source: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer | The Other Mickey Wiki

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GitHub goes off the Rails as Microsoft closes in

Posted on April 28, 2020 by David K.

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.

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

Posted on April 15, 2020 by David K.

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.

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Amazon and AI/ML

Posted on April 15, 2020 by David K.

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.

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Software disenchantment @ tonsky.me

Posted on April 15, 2020 by David K.

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.

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Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability | Hacker News

Posted on April 15, 2020 by David K.

I am giving up. WSL1 was a great invention but Microsoft gave up on it, either because of the filesystem performance problems or because of the debuggers.

It was a very nice dream, pity it didn’t work out.

Source: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability | Hacker News

I’ve been making the same sort of comments about this technology for a long time now. Please pardon my schadenfreude. It would seem that the “Microsoft loves Linux” astroturfing for this feature is showing some cracks, and people are finally being honest about the actual impact of the technology on development workflows. Several people in the comments get one step away from my own conclusion: just install VirtualBox or VMware Workstation, and be done with it.

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What the Hobby Lobby Ruling Means for America – The New York Times

Posted on April 2, 2020 by David K.

If the court follows the logic of its Hobby Lobby decision in the decades to come, it’s not so hard to imagine a job market where people must interview employers about their religious and political views. Or where people who need to make a living may just feel compelled to accept a work environment increasingly shaped by their employers’ beliefs.

Source: What the Hobby Lobby Ruling Means for America – The New York Times

Scary quote by the Times, from years ago, but which I’m just now seeing. Scary, because you might feel pressured to adopt a more Christian-aligned mindset. God forbid!

Everyone who works for someone else feels at least a little pull towards their mindset, even if it’s just one person working for one other person. If you’re already compatible, great! If not, you have to decide for yourself if you’re so incompatible that it’s better to find other work, or start your own business.

The Times seems to be pretending that only Christian-owned companies have a culture that some people might feel uncomfortable with. The truth is that every organization — including companies — has a culture, and some people who are a part of it — including employees — may not feel completely comfortable in it. People join all sorts of organizations — companies, churches, charities, sporting leagues, neighborhood groups — with which they don’t completely agree, because they get enough out of the association that they are willing to put up with the stuff they don’t like. This is called “living in a society.” We all have to “live and let live.” You know, do our thing, while not preventing others from doing theirs.

As our society becomes more insular because of social media and, now, quarantine, this concept is indeed becoming lost. Also, I can understand why this writer at the Times, in that ivory tower of monoculture, seems to be confused about this situation. And, frankly, the fact that a Christian built a business with an overtly-Christian culture is easy target to attack because it’s so rare.

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Windows. And Skyrim. Again.

Posted on March 18, 2020 by David K.

I’m on vacation. At a beach. I don’t find the beach compelling. So I’m bored. Bored, but with a computer. Unfortunately, for this exercise, the computer is a MacBook Pro. And I want to play Skyrim. I’ve been having just a lovely time playing through it again on a PC I stitched together from parts, but how does one play it on a Mac? Good question.

The first attempt at an answer was to try using Parallels. Again. No bueno. Still no clues on the internet, which just seems wrong. Then again, if it were possible to do this, you’d think Parallels would advertise that fact, along with the other games they say it supports.

The only other realistic avenue was to try using Bootcamp to run Windows on the machine, directly. I’ve resisted this for a long time, because I just didn’t buy a Mac to run Windows games. Philosophy aside, this is surprisingly easy. I even still had the Windows 10 ISO file from when I built the PC, and Bootcamp found it on my hard drive, and offered to use it. I just clicked a couple of times, expanded the partition a bit, and waited. Within 15 or 20 minutes, I was in Windows (and denying all of Microsoft’s telemetry options).

Then begins the process I know pretty well by now:

  • Update Windows
  • Use Edge to install Firefox
  • Use the master key to setup 1Password
  • Get logged into Steam
  • Download and install Steam
  • Install Skyrim
  • Download and install Skyrim Script Extender
  • Get logged into NexusMods.com
  • Download and install Vortex
  • Download the dozen or so mods I like
  • Use Vortex to…

BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH

And this one was like there were 2 interleaved slides forming the BSOD message, and they were jiggling back and forth, stuck down in the lower, left quadrant of the screen, and that was enough for me. It just confirmed that this isn’t something that’s going to be well supported, and I don’t have time for this kind of nonsense any more. I rebooted into macOS, and immediately used Bootcamp to wipe out the Windows partition.

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Coronavirus in N.Y.C.: Why Closing Public Schools Is a ‘Last Resort’ – The New York Times

Posted on March 10, 2020 by David K.

New York City has the largest public school system in the United States, a vast district with about 750,000 children who are poor, including around 114,000 who are homeless. For such students, school may be the only place they can get three hot meals a day and medical care, and even wash their dirty laundry.

Source: Coronavirus in N.Y.C.: Why Closing Public Schools Is a ‘Last Resort’ – The New York Times

So, in addition to all the roads, the electricity, the water and sewer, the welfare, the Social Security, the Medicare/Medicaid, the farm subsidies, Fannie/Freddie/FHA — and, apparently, now, homeless shelters running on top of the public education system — tell me again how nationalizing health care would be some sudden, unimaginable lurch into communism.

The best answer is to deregulate the industry and let the market truly sort it out, but the Anthems and the Uniteds and the Aetnas of the country are not going to let that happen, so the system will eventually fall over on itself, and the government will be forced to nationalize the system. This is what they’re waiting for: all those companies will become part of the government, and their C-levels are going to get some sort of huge payout/off.

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Ebay (and PayPal); Is This Really the Best We Can Do?

Posted on March 5, 2020 by David K.

I see various Ebay competitors advertising on TV. It’s not hard to see why. It’s 2020, and Ebay’s web site hasn’t fundamentally changed for 20 years. Their incestuous relationship with PayPal, and all its attendant problems, is legendary.

I have an account balance. I keep getting emailed about it every month. It’s only $28.11, but it’s been, like, a year now, and I’m really tired of those emails. So I finally decided I’d try to get the amount sent to me as a check, because I don’t want these folks touching my bank accounts.

So I look around Ebay’s site, and, of course, I can’t find any reference to how to do this. So I search, and find a Q/A about it, and on their own site, to boot. I see that I have to actually call them to request a credit to be paid to me, like it was still 1998, and they hadn’t actually bought a payment processor. Really?! So I click the link, and then another, and another. Five clicks in, I see a phone number. I dial it, enter my one-time code, and get put on hold. Then I have a thought! I want an iPad cover, and that amount of money should just about cover it. So I hang up the phone, and start searching around.

Of course, I find something I want on Amazon, because, as bad as Amazon’s search is, Ebay’s is much, much worse. Then I go back to Ebay, and dig it up. I try to be very careful in the checkout process, but there’s no option to change any purchase methods. I double check the email I get, and, of course, Ebay has not used my balance; they’ve charged my credit card.

So I redial the phone number I called before, tell the system twice that I don’t have a one-time passcode, get put into a queue. When I get to talk to someone, I tell them what I want, and they ask for my account number. I don’t know what this is, and can’t find it immediately. She asks if I’ve made any recent purchases, so she can look up my account. I tell her the one I just made, and then she asks 3 different questions relating to getting a refund for that item. Once I finally get through to her what I’m really asking, she puts me on hold.

Another guy joins the call, and quickly refunds the money, but there’s no option here. Before I can even bring up how this will be refunded, he says he’s sent it TO PAYPAL, and then informs me that it will be SEVERAL DAYS before this transfer finalizes. So now I have to wait, and deal with it there. Sigh. At least there, I know I can have them cut me a check for a hefty fee, but then I’m done with both Ebay and PayPal.

Ebay created a way for collectors to connect with each other, and the marketplace corrected for the scarcity economics of finding buyers for old junk in local areas. This took the premiums out of it, and leveled the playing field. Now, whatever you might want to sell, the Ebay price for it IS the market price for it, even if you don’t use Ebay, and this is a win for people who are trying to buy esoteric things. Basically everything that can be sold, is sold on Ebay, so there’s a market price just about everything now. But, as an application, and as a business, it’s run its course. It’s boring. It’s overburdened by hassle. You take your life in your hands every time you sell something on the platform. Luckily, this has left the door open to competitors.

If you search on Ebay competitors, you find something fascinating. None of the top 10 sites are auction sites. Ebay has set the price in the “e-market” space, and the only “auctions” happening now are the figurative dances to weave your way through hundreds of no-name accounts all selling the same thing for differences of a few dollars.

But this list of sites is geared towards people who are trying to make a living selling handmade tchotchkes or Chinese knockoff imports. What about poor schlubs like me, who just want to clean out their closet? An another list, I see about 2 dozen eligible alternatives for selling stuff you don’t want any more. So I think a lot of people are finding newer applications to do the same thing, without all the overhead.

The next time I want to try to sell something, I will try a different platform.

For example, I see Decluttr is a clearinghouse, buying things and then selling them for a profit. They have a particular bent towards tech and… Lego. And I may or may not have about 8 large tubs of Lego that I’m tired of moving around in storage… However, I just looked at how that works, and apparently they simply buy Lego at $1/lb. Are you serious with me right now? Sheesh. I know I could get a lot more for my collection…

on…

Ebay.

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