https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2019/10/25/enabler/
"When you're already in a hole, QUIT DIGGING."
Sunday, October 27, 2019
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Andromeda in the Future Sky
https://kottke.org/19/10/behold-our-dazzling-night-sky-when-the-milky-way-collides-with-andromeda-in-4-billion-years
I have a long-running fascination with cosmology, which is part of how this blog got its name.
If you live in a city, with its attendant light pollution, you likely have never even seen the Milky Way except in photos. If that's true you owe it to yourself to visit somewhere far from city lights where the pale glow of our galactic disk is visible to the unaided eye. Then imagine seeing not just our own galaxy but another galaxy in the night sky... (now click the link)
I have a long-running fascination with cosmology, which is part of how this blog got its name.
If you live in a city, with its attendant light pollution, you likely have never even seen the Milky Way except in photos. If that's true you owe it to yourself to visit somewhere far from city lights where the pale glow of our galactic disk is visible to the unaided eye. Then imagine seeing not just our own galaxy but another galaxy in the night sky... (now click the link)
Wednesday, October 16, 2019
THIS is what America needs
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/10/13/america-cultural-divide-red-state-blue-state-228111
Caleb Wright, who’s from Chapel Hill says, “The value is that you can staunchly disagree with someone, but also humanize the person.” Adds Gaby, “It was more to learn about each other than to change people’s minds.”
The point, in other words, is to combat “othering.”
Thursday, October 10, 2019
Why Remote War is Bad War
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614488/why-remote-war-is-bad-war/
Just one link today, and it's not one that's going to make you feel good. About anything.
Just one link today, and it's not one that's going to make you feel good. About anything.
The moral distance a society creates from the killing done in its name will increase the killing done in its name. We allow technology to increase moral distance; thus, technology increases the killing. More civilians than combatants die in modern warfare, so technology increases worldwide civilian murder at the hands of armies large and small.
Sunday, October 6, 2019
Sunday Assorted Links 2019-10-06
https://kevinlynagh.com/notes/pricing-niche-products/
I love keyboards and I love auction theory and this link has both!
https://www.eidel.io/2019/04/24/making-my-own-glasses/
Know thyself.
https://qz.com/1721901/hong-kong-anti-mask-law-a-history-of-mask-bans-around-the-world/
Masks are about inverting power dynamics.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/10/college-students-dont-want-fancy-libraries/599455/
Books are good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y
Toasters: another thing that's gotten worse.
I will say though that this machine is awesome, and if you need a toaster just forget all the stuff that only toasts bread and get this instead, because it's better at that and it does other stuff (e.g. it reheats pizza like a boss).
https://williamyaoh.com/posts/2019-10-05-you-are-already-smart-enough.html
"...the perception of what tools, libraries, and concepts are important ends up distorted by novelty and excessive cleverness."
Honestly that feels like reason enough to avoid this whole scene.
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2019/10/05/nxdomain/
Vendor shit is awful. ISPs are awful. Know how your tools work. It's worth spending extra effort to do things properly.
https://towardsdatascience.com/coding-ml-tools-like-you-code-ml-models-ddba3357eace
This is cool and I want to try it.
https://www.slashgeek.net/2016/05/17/cloudflare-is-ruining-the-internet-for-me/
American tech companies pretend most of the rest of the world doesn't exist, film at 11.
I love keyboards and I love auction theory and this link has both!
https://www.eidel.io/2019/04/24/making-my-own-glasses/
Know thyself.
https://qz.com/1721901/hong-kong-anti-mask-law-a-history-of-mask-bans-around-the-world/
Masks are about inverting power dynamics.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/10/college-students-dont-want-fancy-libraries/599455/
Books are good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y
Toasters: another thing that's gotten worse.
I will say though that this machine is awesome, and if you need a toaster just forget all the stuff that only toasts bread and get this instead, because it's better at that and it does other stuff (e.g. it reheats pizza like a boss).
https://williamyaoh.com/posts/2019-10-05-you-are-already-smart-enough.html
"...the perception of what tools, libraries, and concepts are important ends up distorted by novelty and excessive cleverness."
Honestly that feels like reason enough to avoid this whole scene.
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2019/10/05/nxdomain/
Vendor shit is awful. ISPs are awful. Know how your tools work. It's worth spending extra effort to do things properly.
https://towardsdatascience.com/coding-ml-tools-like-you-code-ml-models-ddba3357eace
This is cool and I want to try it.
https://www.slashgeek.net/2016/05/17/cloudflare-is-ruining-the-internet-for-me/
American tech companies pretend most of the rest of the world doesn't exist, film at 11.
React rant
A transcript of something that happened in Slack the other day...
I'm sure I'll have more to say about this in the future, but having transcribed this here I feel it's worth expanding on it a little.
Circa 1997 I got my first Pentium-era PC, which was also my first internet-connected machine. It had a 200MHz CPU, 32MB of RAM (which was somewhat luxurious at the time, 16MB being much more common), a 3.2GB hard disk, and a 33.6Kbps dial-up connection to a local telco ISP. The internet was much less a part of our daily lives like it is today, but being a huge nerd it was certainly important to me even at the time. This comic is from a few years later, but it captures the spirit of what living with dial-up was like.
Fast forward to now. My current PC has a 3.8GHz (up to 4.4 boosted) CPU with 6 cores, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD plus 4TB of spinning rust, and a 200Mbps cable internet connection. Let's review the gains:
See, about that...
Let's use Firefox developer tools to measure a few websites:
It's so disappointing, so draining, I don't even have the energy to keep ranting about it. All the hard work by hardware engineers over the last two decades has been eaten away by developers making their own lives easier at the expense of their customers, and I just can't fucking stand it.
me, trying to avoid starting a rant: [vicious off-topic React rant]So yeah, my throwaway "I don't want to rant about this today" comment became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy and I ranted anyway.
(ed: literally what I wrote, brackets and all)
FE specialist friend & former coworker, stepping in it: ...since you brought it up again, I'm curious why you say it's user-hostile (I'll agree up-front that a lot of its uses can be)
(ed: lightly edited to conceal identities)
me: so like, once upon a time the web was documents, right? and people had slow computers and poor internet connections and retrieving a few KB could be perceptibly slow, as in multiple seconds
me: and then a lot of stuff got better. The experience of browsing a document-based site in 2019, even on a bad machine on a bad connection, is generally lightning-fast. The highest-profile example, though imperfect, is Wikipedia
me: but we don't see that, in general. In general, we see "modern" web development, where, for the convenience of the developer, we routinely ship multiple megabytes of executable code to the client, not just once but repeatedly
me: we consume the client's bandwidth, the client's CPU cycles (and battery power!), to do the same exact operations, over and over again. Instead of sending them the document that results from those operations.
me: And sometimes, this is justified. When you are building an app. Facebook, twitter, google maps, gmail, etc., these are all applications that use the web as a delivery mechanism. But Wikipedia, retailers (including Amazon), newspapers, blogs, these are document sites just like we had in 1995
me: and we are constructing them in such a way that they are hundreds, even thousands of times slower than they could be
me: and we do this in a way that systematically disregards who our client is. We stand at our electrically-raisable desks, with our $3k Macs, 27" monitors, and multi-hundred-Mbps internet connections and revel in the beauty of what we can create. But our client has a 2-year-old mid-range Android phone and intermittent/noisy metered 3G service
me: and we are shipping that client five goddamned megabytes that render into less than a kilobyte of content
me: WE. SHOULD. BE. ASHAMED.
me: </rant>
I'm sure I'll have more to say about this in the future, but having transcribed this here I feel it's worth expanding on it a little.
Circa 1997 I got my first Pentium-era PC, which was also my first internet-connected machine. It had a 200MHz CPU, 32MB of RAM (which was somewhat luxurious at the time, 16MB being much more common), a 3.2GB hard disk, and a 33.6Kbps dial-up connection to a local telco ISP. The internet was much less a part of our daily lives like it is today, but being a huge nerd it was certainly important to me even at the time. This comic is from a few years later, but it captures the spirit of what living with dial-up was like.
Fast forward to now. My current PC has a 3.8GHz (up to 4.4 boosted) CPU with 6 cores, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD plus 4TB of spinning rust, and a 200Mbps cable internet connection. Let's review the gains:
- CPU: rounded to 4GHz, a 20x gain (or if we count all the cores, 120x)
- RAM: 512x
- Disk: over 1000x in capacity, speed-wise I don't even know, but if we use bus bandwidth as a proxy, this suggests Ultra SCSI was 160Mbps vs NVMe at 32Gbps, so that would be 200x
- Network: ~5952x, yes that's right, a nearly six thousand-fold gain
See, about that...
Let's use Firefox developer tools to measure a few websites:
- nytimes.com: 1.58MB (on the wire), 5.39MB (decompressed), 6.16s, 47 requests
- washingtonpost.com: 4.67MB / 6.15MB, ~8s, 93 requests
- slatestarcodex.com: 1.15MB / 1.47MB, 2.31s, 48 requests
- marginalrevolution.com: 0.98MB / 2.47MB, 2.98s, 35 requests
- that Wikipedia page linked above: 219KB / 858KB, 1.71s, 22 requests
It's so disappointing, so draining, I don't even have the energy to keep ranting about it. All the hard work by hardware engineers over the last two decades has been eaten away by developers making their own lives easier at the expense of their customers, and I just can't fucking stand it.
Thursday, October 3, 2019
Thursday Assorted Links 2019-10-03
https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/3/20895798/bird-scooter-fundraising-valuation-unit-economics
Bird managed to lose ~$100M in Q1 on revenue of only ~$15M. Despite that I guess they managed to raise a bunch more money. For some reason The Verge parrots (get it?) Bird's claims about the lifespan of its new scooter models. I get that you can project 15 months of life based on testing, but when the things have only been on the street for 1-4 months you need to say it's a projection.
https://www.delish.com/food-news/a29351591/mcrib-back-mcdonalds-2019/
The McRib is coming back. Does that mean Chipotle Chorizo is next? That wacky theory that McRib runs have something to do with pork futures always struck me as crazy enough to be true.
https://www.objectstyle.com/agile/why-developers-hate-agile
Assertion: Agile Process Bullshit is about legibility, in the Seeing Like A State sense.
https://doisinkidney.com/posts/2019-10-02-what-is-good-about-haskell.html
Look, I get what you're trying to do here, but it's not working. "Let's implement a basic data structure and a sorting algorithm!" is such a Haskell programmer thing to do. If I mostly write code in [general purpose language] I don't need those things, because they're in the standard library, or a popular-consensus third party library.
I think programmers frequently forget just how different other kinds of programming are from whatever it is they do. Web programming is not game programming is not systems programming is not embedded programming is not kernel programming is not [et cetera]. Speaking as a web/data guy, showing me how awesome your thing is at foundational data structures / algorithms stuff is just 100% irrelevant, because I will never implement those things myself.
Ask HN: Who Wants To Be Fired?
You think your job sucks? Reading this is gonna make you feel better.
Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 pre-order
What they want for extra RAM and disk is fucking reprehensible. It's three hundred dollars to go from 128GB to 256GB. Buying 128GB of NVMe at retail is like forty bucks. A nice 1TB NVMe drive can be had for $170. They know this. They know 8GB/128GB is for suckers, and that almost everyone will upgrade. It's Apple-style price anchoring. The margins on this must be fantastic for Microsoft.
...I may buy one anyway.
https://www.pcgamer.com/world-of-warcraft-classic-players-cant-stop-feuding-over-the-abbreviation-for-an-old-dungeon/
Every time I'm in Westfall someone is having this argument and it drives me nuts.
Bird managed to lose ~$100M in Q1 on revenue of only ~$15M. Despite that I guess they managed to raise a bunch more money. For some reason The Verge parrots (get it?) Bird's claims about the lifespan of its new scooter models. I get that you can project 15 months of life based on testing, but when the things have only been on the street for 1-4 months you need to say it's a projection.
https://www.delish.com/food-news/a29351591/mcrib-back-mcdonalds-2019/
The McRib is coming back. Does that mean Chipotle Chorizo is next? That wacky theory that McRib runs have something to do with pork futures always struck me as crazy enough to be true.
https://www.objectstyle.com/agile/why-developers-hate-agile
Assertion: Agile Process Bullshit is about legibility, in the Seeing Like A State sense.
https://doisinkidney.com/posts/2019-10-02-what-is-good-about-haskell.html
Look, I get what you're trying to do here, but it's not working. "Let's implement a basic data structure and a sorting algorithm!" is such a Haskell programmer thing to do. If I mostly write code in [general purpose language] I don't need those things, because they're in the standard library, or a popular-consensus third party library.
I think programmers frequently forget just how different other kinds of programming are from whatever it is they do. Web programming is not game programming is not systems programming is not embedded programming is not kernel programming is not [et cetera]. Speaking as a web/data guy, showing me how awesome your thing is at foundational data structures / algorithms stuff is just 100% irrelevant, because I will never implement those things myself.
Ask HN: Who Wants To Be Fired?
You think your job sucks? Reading this is gonna make you feel better.
Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 pre-order
What they want for extra RAM and disk is fucking reprehensible. It's three hundred dollars to go from 128GB to 256GB. Buying 128GB of NVMe at retail is like forty bucks. A nice 1TB NVMe drive can be had for $170. They know this. They know 8GB/128GB is for suckers, and that almost everyone will upgrade. It's Apple-style price anchoring. The margins on this must be fantastic for Microsoft.
...I may buy one anyway.
https://www.pcgamer.com/world-of-warcraft-classic-players-cant-stop-feuding-over-the-abbreviation-for-an-old-dungeon/
Every time I'm in Westfall someone is having this argument and it drives me nuts.
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