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Priorities Redux
Me, unixy old person: “… and before end to end encryption was standardized, that meant that something called replay attacks were possible. To mitigate this, kerberos authentication was invented,...
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Misunderstood
On his deathbed, in the final moments, an angel appears radiant and glorious by Machiavelli’s bedside. Niccolo, it says in a gentle, sonorous whisper, your time here comes to an end. Come, the hour...
View ArticleProblems Of Scale
I’ve picked up a game called “Maquette” during the current Steam Sale, on the theory that “find the Annapurna section and pour your wallet into it” won’t see you wrong. It’s a few short hours of play,...
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Zero Again
Hillel Wayne has registered a strenuous disagreement with a bit I wrote in 2013 about zero-indexing and now I need have an internet argument because, I suppose, that is simply my nature. I’ve never...
View ArticleTechnical Note: Bluetooth & Automatic Volume Adjustment
The symptoms for this are that: You’re probably using MacOS, and your bluetooth headset is automatically, seemingly randomly, muting and unmuting during calls, but this muting is not reflected in the...
View ArticleIs Neither Discuss
Every now and then I see some more of the Muskrat Standom’s effluent ooze past my eyes and all I can think is, kid, that boot’s never gonna lick you back. Timnit Gebru recently wrote about Effective...
View ArticlePassing
I’ve said elsewhere that I don’t think that the GPT, OpenAI arbitrary-text-generation stuff is all that interesting. A machine repeating permutations of things we’ve already said back to us is a weird...
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Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions
Over on Mastodon I asked: “What modern utilities should be a standard part of a modern unixy distro? Why? I’ve got jq, pandoc, tldr and a few others on my list, but I’d love to know others.” Here’s...
View ArticleWordplay
Wordle was fun for while, but being a little bit complicit is kind of like being a little bit pregnant except the thing I’d be bringing into the world is a future I don’t want. So that’s the end of...
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Never Work In Theory, Spring 2023
Indulge me for a minute; I’d like to tell you about a conference I’m helping organize, and why. But first, I want to tell you a story about measuring things, and the tools we use to do that....
View ArticlePrice And Performance
A long retired friend of mine – fascinating guy, among other things a former hostage negotiator – used to say “sometimes people bring me emergencies… I always start by asking myself, ‘what if we do...
View ArticleImmaterial Sensations
Over on Mastodon, @therisingtithes makes in important point about the idea that AI “democratizes” artistic expression “I think the really troublesome part in conversations about AI is when people say...
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The Spring Bollard Harvest.
You know Spring has really arrived in Toronto’s when our cycling infrastructure has once again started to bud; as you can see, this year’s harmless plastic bollards are starting to sprout in...
View ArticleThe Interpretive Dance
A side effect of the generative algo-art wave that’s gone at least underappreciated is the total dissolution of the notion that artistic intent exists and is anything worth investigating. Detail and...
View ArticleBrown M&Ms
I gave a short presentation yesterday about understanding the general health of a software engineering organization. It’s a longish presentation – a thirty-second version might read “Technology last....
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Ultraviolet, Light My Way
If you’re concerned about air quality, as a reasonable person might reasonably be these days, you might have been thinking to yourself, self, I keep hearing about all these companies that are really...
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The Shape Of The Monster
This is sort of an early draft, but how often do you get to tie together conspiracy thinking, occultism, hyperreality, weaponizing parastructuralism and (a personal favorite, longtime readers will...
View ArticleAffirmative
I’ve just wrapped up Firmament, the most recent game by Cyan Worlds, of Myst and Riven fame. In a sentence, Firmament is extremely A Cyan Game. Maybe not quite as much so as Obduction was, but still. I...
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A Made-Up Back Story
An eight-year-old child with bright eyes, a dinosaur backpack and a little shovel in hand digs a hole under the furthest tree in their back yard, alone. He hears a little “clink”, but it doesn’t sound...
View ArticleBarbiephonic Forever
Way Back In The Day, 2007, I found and scraped out a Barbie phonecall-generator service and compiled what I’d found into a single .ogg file, with the 17000 names in its dataset. Again, I am obligated...
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