Author: Daniel

Daniel https://turnings.phrasewise.com/ In the 4th grade Daniel was asked to step in into the hall because he was coaching fellow students on a similarity assignment he provided the class. Since then, Daniel’s passion for helping people has propelled him to be a creative developer of software and systems, and a team coach who excels at successfully delivering business value. Daniel founded QuietlyHelping in 2009 in order to have a direct hand in helping families with the struggles of debilitating disease. QuietlyHelping is an organization of compassion and empathy that brings ease, comfort, smiles, laughter, healing, and love to people battling cancer and other diseases. Spare time activities include cycling, occasional work as a musician, woodworking, photography, and reading books he never got around to in school. Unsurprisingly, Daniel is able to cook minute rice in just under thirty seconds.
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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.]

DaKid’s™ Big Adventure

Yesterday, DaKid™ left on his biggest adventure to date. I’m just marking the date.

When I was 13 and did something similar, it was a different world. I had to use a pay phone to call home. Entertainment was reading a book (the school did not permit students going to the movies), or playing sports, etc. (No game consoles, laptops, cell phones, internet…)

So we’re eager to see how that ability to reach out (or back) or continue to live on line impacts their experience. Also, he’s not 13…

Anyway, noted for the future Monday the 28th of August was the Big Day.

Scrypted

Scrypted:

Scrypted can bridge most cameras to the three major home hubs: HomeKit (including HomeKit Secure Video), Google Home, and Alexa. Scrypted streams are fast, low latency, and have rock solid reliability.

Cameras: Unifi, Amcrest, Hikvision, ONVIF, RTSP, Ring, Arlo, Nest/Google, Tuya, Reolink, and more…

[Hmm…]

Jason Aldean’s ‘Try That in a Small Town’ Gives Country a Black Eye

Jason Aldean’s ‘Try That in a Small Town’ Gives Country a Black Eye:

“Try That in a Small Town” was risible enough as a single, but in case anything about its lunkheaded songwriting felt like it was left as subtext and not made explicit, Aldean has released a music video for the rising hit. It, too, is in the business of handing out black eyes… to country music, that is, much more than any imagined invaders.

The setting, outside the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, has proven upsetting for some who know or learn the history of the building. It’s where, in 1927, a white lynch mob dragged a young man named Henry Choate through the streets behind a car before finally hanging him from a second-story courthouse window. Let’s give Aldean and video director Shaun Silva the benefit of the doubt and assume they had not indulged in a history lesson when they decided the same frontage where a Black man was murdered in front of a crowd would be a good place to alternate projected footage of protesters being put down with a draped American flag. (Hard to blame anyone for thinking that this history did show up in Aldean’s or the filmmakers’ web search on the location, but imagining that they knew that and proceeded anyway, as a known dog whistle, is… just tough to contemplate.)

[I think Dave said it better here…

They want to go back to when they could kill anyone with impunity. And btw, it doesn’t matter if he “really” believes it or if it’s a business model. It makes absolutely no difference. Someone should teach these pitiful spineless so-called reporters how and why to be angry. BTW, I live in a small town so fuck you Jason Aldean.

]

Nobody Uses Threads Anymore, It’s Too Crowded

Daring Fireball:

Dare Obasanjo, writing on Threads, retorted perfectly:

The idea that an app that is clearly an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) doesn’t have 100 million active users is a failure is the sort of addle brained thinking that the tech media has saddled us with.

The tech press can only write 3 stories:

This company is a success
This company is a failure
Look how much funding this company got

Arguably, “look how much funding this company got” stories are just variations on the first two, depending on the sum of the funding.

[John and Dare nailed this one. It’s so pathetic.]

Run OpenTelemetry on Docker

Run OpenTelemetry on Docker:

At this juncture in DevOps history, there has been considerable hype around observability for developers and operations teams, and more recently, much attention has been given to help combine the different observability solutions out there in use through a single interface, and to that end, OpenTelemetry has emerged as a key standard.

[Nice to see OTel gaining traction.]

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.]

Source:

This New Breed of Generator Can Run on Almost Any Fuel

This New Breed of Generator Can Run on Almost Any Fuel:

It doesn’t matter that it’s been raining for two weeks because your utility is tapping into ammonia produced with last summer’s sunshine. It’s consuming that ammonia in a linear generator.

The linear generator can quickly switch between different types of green (and not-so-green, if need be) fuel, including biogas, ammonia, and hydrogen. It has the potential to make the decarbonized power system available, reliable, and resilient against the vagaries of weather and of fuel supplies. And it’s not a fantasy; it’s been developed, tested, and deployed commercially.

The cofounders of Mainspring Energy, of which I am one, spent 14 years developing this technology, and in 2020 we began rolling it out commercially. It is currently installed at tens of sites, producing 230 to 460 kilowatts at each. We expect linear generators at many more locations to come on line within the next year.

[Facinating.]