advocacy

Scripting News: One way is always better than two

Scripting News: One way is always better than two:

It’s not mentioned in the Wikipedia page on RSS that I had a format that does what RSS does, a year before it existed, but I gave it up so that Netscape and UserLand would build on the same format, RSS.

[I can attest to this. I don’t remember the context, but Dave and I had a conversation about the two formats. His was, from my perspective, clearly better*. I think he had already made up his mind about the situation (we only talked formats, not the larger context of what he was trying to accomplish and with whom), but I didn’t know it at the time. Still the “Scripting News format” was being used by Dave back then.]

[* My perspective was as a developer who had a native desktop editor for blogs. The very first I believe. It was beautifully simple to use. I miss it a lot. But it was written as a personal project, not a business, and I chose an environment and language that didn’t last. It also led to the creation of Really Simple Discoverability, the XML format I created to make it easier to use editors with blogs. Allez!]

Interesting that Edit This Page came up the day before or so. One of the things I loved about using “Archipelago”, the editor I had written and mentioned above, was exactly this feature. There was a link on every page of the blog, and if you clicked it the magic was performed to open that page in the editor. No matter how long ago that page was created you didn’t have to go searching for it in order to edit it, the link was always there. Days like this make me feel that so much was lost along the way to today. The open web is making a bit of comeback these days… who knows? Maybe we’ll catch up with the past.

Daring Fireball: Harvard, M.I.T., and Penn Presidents Under Fire After Dodging Questions About Antisemitism

Daring Fireball: Harvard, M.I.T., and Penn Presidents Under Fire After Dodging Questions About Antisemitism:

The reckoning has come for the bizarro-world political climate that’s taken hold at these universities in the last decade or two. This patently offensive equivocation — when the correct answer was obviously an unambiguous “Yes” — makes sense in the context of the insular far-left worldview where the oppressed are viewed as inherently just, but comes across as absurd to everyone living in the real world. All three of these elite university presidents are obviously utterly tone-deaf and detached from the real world.

[The disease has risen all the way to the top. Imagine substituting another race, creed, religion, etc. for the word “Jew”. I believe the answer would have changed. Thank goodness there were only a couple of these sorts of people teaching when I went to college. Most of my professors were/are brilliant. ]

We are drowning in Google’s magnanimity

We are drowning in Google’s magnanimity – kpassa.me:

In reality of course OKRs are just fine. At least they’re fine for Google. For a company with its particular needs and structure, sure, it’s a fine way to run things.

For the rest of us, though, this well-intentioned subtle reinvention of goal setting just creates confusion. It makes us abandon the right tools for the job. It promises to help us think, but only provides us half-ideas without the context that made them work in the first place.

Lately I’ve been feeling the exact same thing about Kubernetes.

[I could not move people off of “it works for Google”… as if that meant it has to work elsewhere. I’ve seen enough shopping lists in my life to understand how little that is true. Same for Kubernetes. We gave a lot of things a try in one little corner of dev, but the principle that we always applied was “did it improve anything?” If the answer was no, with our own sense of priority (for whom did it improve and how much or not etc. etc) we killed anything that didn’t add up.]

New York May Require a Background Check to Buy a 3D Printer

New York May Require a Background Check to Buy a 3D Printer:

The New York bill, called AB A8132, would require a criminal history background check for anyone attempting to purchase a 3D printer capable of fabricating a firearm. It would similarly prohibit the sale of those printers to anyone with a criminal history that disqualifies them from owning a firearm. As it’s currently written, the bill doesn’t clarify what models or makes of printers would potentially fall under this broad category. The bill defines a three-dimensional printer as a “device capable of producing a three-dimensional object from a digital model.”

[I commented on Instagram… but of course, also here on the blog. I don’t disagree with the problem, but I do disagree with this attempt at solving it. It’s too broad…
]

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FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote | Ars Technica

FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote | Ars Technica:

The Federal Communications Commission today voted to move ahead with a plan that would restore net neutrality rules and common-carrier regulation of Internet service providers.

In a 3-2 party-line vote, the FCC approved Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), which seeks public comment on the broadband regulation plan. The comment period will officially open after the proposal is published in the Federal Register, but the docket is already active and can be found here.

The proposal would reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service, a designation that allows the FCC to regulate ISPs under the common-carrier provisions in Title II of the Communications Act. The plan is essentially the same as what the FCC did in 2015 when it used Title II to prohibit fixed and mobile Internet providers from blocking or throttling traffic or giving priority to Web services in exchange for payment.

[Yeah baby!]

Musk’s process

I find Musk very off-putting to say the least. But I still think this processis worth considering. (From Walter Isaacson’s book)

  1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb.
  2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough.
  3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist.
  4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted.
  5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.

Shop notebooks… with advice from Matt Kenney

I have no religion when it comes to shop notebooks. Not a type, nor paper or tech. But use “some thing” because not having anything at all will be a problem.

Your workflow will determine how the next step occurs. You may be prototyping something, and so there’s no notes to guide you. But at some point you will get to “nice” and you’ll want to build it “for real”. That would be the moment to take detailed notes. If you are working in CAD or a drawing app, it might be worthwhile to print out shop drawing and scribble some additional notes as you work. Etc. But these “sources of truth” are very helpful when questions and problems arise.

If I had one rule (snicker) it would be that your scribble paper, notebook, etc. assuming it is atoms not electrons should be graph paper. It was invented for just this sort of thing, take advantage.

Matt Kenny suggests the following…

  • Be as detailed as you possibly can. The more detail, the less work you’ll need to do to make sense of what’s written down.
  • Write in simple, clear statements and equations. A shop notebook is not a Faulkner novel or a Fields-Medal-worthy mathematical treatise.
  • Write down: dimensions, notes about materials, things you discovered that made construction easier, problems you encountered and how you solved them, and anything else that’s important to you.
  • Clearly identify which piece of furniture a note belongs to. A year from now you probably won’t remember.
  • Do not worry about how it reads or looks. If it makes sense to you and you can go back and make sense of it a month later, that’s all that matters. You will develop a style, organizing principles, etc. as you continue to work and fill up notebooks.

Google and HTTP

Google and HTTP:

The web is a miracle

Google has spent a lot of effort to convince you that HTTP is not good. Let me have the floor for a moment to tell you why HTTP is the best thing ever.

Its simplicity is what made the web work. It created an explosion of new applications. It may be hard to believe that there was a time when Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter etc didn’t exist. That was because the networking standards prior to the web were complicated and not well documented. The explosion happened because the web is simple. Where earlier protocols were hard to build on, the web is easy.

I don’t think the explosion is over. I want to make it easier and easier for people to run their own web servers. Google is doing what the programming priesthood always does, building the barrier to entry higher, making things more complicated, giving themselves an exclusive. This means only super nerds will be able to put up sites. And we will lose a lot of sites that were quickly posted on a whim, over the 25 years the web has existed, by people that didn’t fully understand what they were doing. That’s also the glory of the web. Fumbling around in the dark actually gets you somewhere. In worlds created by corporate programmers, it’s often impossible to find your way around, by design.

The web is a social agreement not to break things. It’s served us for 25 years. I don’t want to give it up because a bunch of nerds at Google think they know best.

The web is like the Grand Canyon. It’s a big natural thing, a resource, an inspiration, and like the canyon it deserves our protection. It’s a place of experimentation and learning. It’s also useful for big corporate websites like Google. All views of the web are important, especially ones that big companies don’t understand or respect. It’s how progress happens in technology.

Keeping the web running simple is as important as net neutrality.

[Anything open is inherently better than anything closed. I tell you 3X.]

Everything all the users know and more

Scripting News: Monday, April 3, 2023:

A sense that because I work for the company that made the product, I know everything all the users know and more. It’s the same fallacy that applies to Silicon Valley billionaires. You have to step into a new perspective to love the product, one that has nothing to do with who you work for or how validated you are by reporters and the public.

[I made a similar point recently. “Just because some process or thing works for you doesn’t make you an expert.” ]

The Vanishing

The Vanishing – Tablet Magazine:

The same pattern holds across America’s elite institutions: a slow-moving downward trend from the 1990s to the mid-2010s—likely due to all sorts of normal sociological factors—and then a purge so sweeping and dramatic you almost wonder who sent out the secret memo.

Museum boards now diversify by getting Jews to resign. A well-respected Jewish curator at the Guggenheim is purged after she puts on a Basquiat show. At the Art Institute of Chicago, even the nice Jewish lady volunteers are terminated for having the wrong ethnic background. There’s an entire cottage industry of summer programs and fellowships and postdocs that are now off-limits to Jews.

In 2014 there were 16-20 Jewish artists featured at the Whitney Biennial. After a very public campaign against a Jewish board member with ties to the Israeli defense establishment, the curators got the message. The 2022 biennial featured just 1-2 Jews.

Comb through the dozens of Jewish names for the 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship (I count 30-40). You’ll have a much harder time finding them 10 years later (14-16). There were 3-4 Jewish Marshall Scholars in 2014. I don’t see any in 2022.

From 2010 through 2019 there were at least three Jews in every MacArthur Fellowship class, sometimes as many as five or six. The Forward would write effusive columns celebrating the year’s Jewish geniuses. Since 2020, just 0-1 Jews a year have been awarded grants. The Forward hasn’t bothered to take note.

Today American Jews watch with Solomonic bemusement as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard is argued before the Supreme Court. On some level we sympathize with the Asian American plaintiffs, who are suing Harvard for using admissions criteria that discriminate against them on the basis of their race. Maybe they really are the new Jews, facing the same barriers—insidious racism, personality scores, rural geographic preferences—that we once did.

On the other hand, fancying ourselves to be high caste members of a beneficent elite, we pretend not to notice that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is a cudgel used to exclude certain groups of Americans, including Asians and Jews.

[I have no words.]

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