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“Essential Worship” by Greg Sheer. It’s a little shallow and broad but still good. Churches in my sphere have been struggling with diversity versus identity politics. Music is a natural battlegrounds.
I really enjoyed You Are Not A Gadget. Dystopic technologist non-fiction is a favorite genre for me.
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To be honest I don’t think the book brings much to the table. Almost through it, and he seems to believe there’s a dichotomy to be clarified as false at every intersection, and is a general-use book for worship leaders. Our worship leader asked us to read it. But I’ve had a couple hard conversations with others about diversity/outward appearance/who I’m worshiping with not being foundational to my faith, and I’m looking forward to more!
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In progress:
- Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, suggested to me by @pushcx and written by Keith Johnstone. No opinions yet, though the intro is neat.
Recently finished:
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Building E-commerce Applications, a complete waste of money and basically just a lazy compilation of undedited blog posts. Booooo.
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Come and Take It: The Gun Printer’s Guide to Thinking Free, by Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed fame. I finished this probably a week before the current kerfluffle started. There’s a whoooole lot of self-congratulatory bullshit and bluster in this, as Wilson is first and foremost (in my opinion) an attention whore, but buried in there are a couple of good reflections on the role of toolmakers in the pursuit of independence.
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Come as You Are, a delightful book by Emily Nagoski that I heard about through OhJoySexToy (webcomic about sexual health and practices). It covers a lot of interesting academic information about sex, attraction, and romance, and can help in debugging certain failure modes of relationships or in preemptively being a better partner.
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buried in there are a couple of good reflections on the role of toolmakers in the pursuit of independence.
We cannot be free until we control the means of production? That sounds like a good reflection, all right :-)
(Note: this may sound like I’m trying to rile you. I’m not, I am genuinely amused to see Marx echoed in this unexpected context.)
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As the good Chairman once said, “Political power grows out of the barrel of the gun…”.
A lot of Marxists, communists, and libertarians I think would actually have a lot to talk to each other about if they weren’t so busy engaging in culture war these days.
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Yup! Certain groups don’t really like to think about it, but because Marx did the first serious systematic analysis of how economies worked on a global scale (and coined the word “capitalism”, although contrary to popular opinion he did not coin but merely redefined “communism”), all modern economics owes a debt to Marx at least as big as the one it owes to Von Neumann. Even those opposed to Marx’s conclusions are using methods he pioneered to fight them. (Or, to be more direct: “economics begins with Marx” / “Karl Marx invented capitalism”)
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You might like this recent podcast episode from BBC Thinking Allowed: Marx and Marxism: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b2kpm0
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Come and Take It: The Gun Printer’s Guide to Thinking Free, by Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed fame. I finished this probably a week before the current kerfluffle started. There’s a whoooole lot of self-congratulatory bullshit and bluster in this, as Wilson is first and foremost (in my opinion) an attention whore, but buried in there are a couple of good reflections on the role of toolmakers in the pursuit of independence.
This was on my reading list; but, after I did the ’ol Amazon “Look Inside,” I took it off because it looked like the signal/noise would be unacceptable. Please give a shout if it ends up being worthwhile. I watched a few of his pre-DD/early-DD lectures on philosopy, and the guy gave me stuff to chew on.
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So, again, having finished it I think the same points could be handled in a pamphlet instead of the drawn-out narrative Wilson attenpts.
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Cody Wilson Philosophy, Part I is the first of a two part series.
Why I printed a gun is short and sweet; but, doesn’t get too deep.
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I usually have one ‘fun’ fiction and a couple of heavier things going on at once, but I’ve run out of fun at the moment:
- Beyond Good and Evil - Nietzsche
- The Souls of Black Folk - Du Bois
- Nausea - Sartre
- The Gulag Archipelago - Solzhenitsyn
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On the same note as The Gulag Archipelago, have you looked at Escape From Camp 14? I haven’t read it, but it’s been highly recommended to me. It’s about the labour camps in North Korea from the perspective of a defector. Probably not as reliable as a source as Solzhenitsyn is, but the excepts I’ve read seem to make it a “lighter” read (quotes because we’re talking about the life history of a man who claims he didn’t know that the outside world existed).
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- Getting Clojure by Russ Olsen
- The Rust Programming Book by Steve Klabnik
(3.) Finished William Gibson’s Neuromancer few days ago.
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How are you finding Getting Clojure? I’m looking for a Clojure book that doesn’t start with “functional x imperative” and assumes I already know some stuff. Learning a new language is hard because there’s few books that meet you there, but I’ve found that to be even more so with Clojure.
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I have to say that this could be the best book I’ve read on Clojure (in aspects of learning it). It really has that Clojure vibe, concise, expressive, to the point! I really like it, because I often felt overwhelmed by possibilities of writing simple things. This book explained many aspects of Clojure and functional programming in Clojure (not in general, that’s important) very well, where I had that “ahaa!” moment. Plus it has examples from real world code (open source Clojure projects). If you ask me, go for it, you won’t regret it! This is the book to get to untangle your mind about clj.
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I pretty much always have three books going, so currently:
- Light reading: Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. Risk, uncertainty, heuristics. I’m not usually a fan of books with the structure “I did X for 20 years so let me apply that to all of life”, but this one’s hitting the books for its research and I’m a sucker for poker stories.
- Dense reading: Discourses, Fragments, Handbook by Epictetus, translated by Robin Hard. On a stoicism kick. Reading around the dualism of book one has made this a slog and I may skip ahead or move on to Seneca.
- Programming: Domain Modeling Made Functional, Scott Wlaschin. Still working on this one.
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That’s exactly my strategy as well (one light, one dense and one technical), I find it means I’m always in the mood to read something (otherwise I’ll resort to shallow articles and silly tutorials online).
I’ve also found the full Discourses more “diluted” than the Enchiridion and didn’t finish it. I definitely suggest you pick up the latter, if you haven’t already.
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I dislike CloudFlare because they’re making the internet more centralized (the more small websites use them as a proxy, the less direct connections to small websites are made) and because of some infamous abuse handling incidents, but I would trust them 100000% more than my local ISP.
The local ISP knows where I live, the local ISP has to comply with local laws, the local ISP has monitoring installed by the local equivalent of the NSA. The local ISP didn’t even promise any privacy at all, which is worse than CloudFlare’s privacy policy for this resolver.
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“the local ISP has monitoring installed by the local equivalent of the NSA”
You should assume Cloudfare does, too. They are a venture-funded, for-profit company operating in a surveillance state in ideal position to do surveillance. The NSA/FBI also pays or coerces compliance per Core Secrets leaks. The real question to determine if they won’t cooperate with the NSA is: “Will they turn down $30-$100+ million, go bankrupt, and/or go to prison for me?” If not, then they’ll likely cooperate. The cooperation also always mandates they lie about cooperating. They can promise government-proof anything while relaying data to the government.
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Excellent point! I argued something similar in essay on using multiple, non-cooperative jurisdictions for security. :)
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Couldn’t the opposite be just as true? If you live in a country that’s not friendly enough to the US, it may also be better to have local surveillance than NSA surveillance. If I know my government is out for my data, can’t easily access the stuff the US has, and isn’t sophisticated enough to upstream crypto algorithms into the Linux kernel or tap into underwater fibre cables, I’d pick local any day.
edit: plural
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That’s true. However, your local ISP will still know where you connect. It will still see how much and if it’s unencrypted what you send/receive.
CloudFlare being a big target has to comply with some other country’s laws, as a US company it has to comply with NSLs, which might or might not exist in your local country. CloudFlare being a big company might also comply with other country’s laws - maybe not small ones, bug look at the list of companies that comply with China, etc.
Also this is actually not about your ISP vs CloudFlare. It’s about whatever you have configured vs ClfoudFlare. If Firefox starts making HTTPS requests to CF as a system administrator, when you expect DNS requests you might even miss them.
I think the problem is not that Firefox allows this, but that it’s skipping your system-wide configuration, without asking. After all I can already use CloudFlare’s DNS servers if I want to do so.
And then: CloudFlare makes its money by selling CDN features (including analytics, etc.) to companies, while my ISP makes money by selling internet to me. If your ISP doesn’t promise any privacy (or has no privacy policy, as you make it sound like) maybe consider switching your ISP.
The main point however is: I don’t think “overwriting” things like resolving hostnames is something an application should do, unless it’s asking or by design made to do so. In this case it’s not.
It will per default skip what you, your system administrator, etc. might have done to secure you.
It’s totally fine you trust CloudFlare more than your ISP/your local setup, but I don’t think it’s fine if a piece of software dictates and overwrites whom you trust silently, when you might already have consciously chosen someone else you trust.
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If your ISP doesn’t promise any privacy (or has no privacy policy, as you make it sound like) maybe consider switching your ISP.
In most of the US, that isn’t feasible. Most places have at most two residential broadband providers: the phone company (typically AT&T), and the cable company (either Comcast or Spectrum, depending on location). And not counting MVNOs, there are, what, four mobile broadband providers?
I do basically agree with you that this may skip what your local sysadmin has done to secure you. But it’s making the trade-off that most people do not have a local sysadmin doing anything to secure you, and will never opt-in to anything to secure themselves.
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Given how good fluid reasoning is of a predictor of complex job performance, I wonder if a battery of novel logic problems in a programming veneer would be a good substitute for traditional initial employee screenings. Then the remaining candidates could get evaluated on a paid take-home task that replicates what the actual work would be as much as possible.
It would be great to just go straight to work-like tasks to evaluate prospective employees, but it’s costly, time-consuming, and will filter out candidates that won’t make that much of a commitment on first contact.
I, personally, won’t do any take-home work without the prospective employer also having invested something in the process. For all I know, my 2-hour project has been given to 100 other candidates, and there’s a good chance they’ll decide they don’t actually need to hire that position and not look at a single one.
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I buy into your premise that fluid intelligence correlates with complex job performance, but how many of us work in truly “complex jobs”?
For churning out stylish CRUDs and ticking off tasks from a backlog, there’s very little fluid intelligence required. Ability to focus and deal with the occasional boredom would be a much better predictor, I conjecture. Concretely, you can probe for this by asking candidates about projects they’ve been working on and making sure there’s at least a handful of them that they’ve taken to completion.
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I think machines are coming for the sort of tedious jobs that only require work ethic, i.e. the ability to focus and get through boredom. If that’s so, we’ll only be left with the complex jobs that require real intelligence.
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Curious that the “Linux Geek bundle” books that catch my eye are the OpenBSD-related ones: Book of
pfand Absolute OpenBSD. Thought on these two books, anyone?For background, I switched to OpenBSD a couple months ago, after being on Linux since 2.4…
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I’m a tourist from Linux, but I love Michael Lucas. Absolute OpenBSD was an awesome read, even though I don’t use OpenBSD much at the moment.
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Reminds me of this piece.
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Another day, another this could totally happen to anyone but just happened to hit npm story.
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Would the scale have been the same though? This particular package is pretty popular by itself, but I’d bet a big chunk of its 2M+ weekly downloads comes from the fact that it’s a dependency for popular packages such as babel and webpack. Why on earth would I need to download a linter in order to run babel? What kind of dependency tree is that?
Even if you try to keep your dependencies as slim as possible, it’s absolutely unreasonable to expect to be able to audit the thousands of dependencies a single dependency may have, with all of them having the same permissions as the code I write to run arbitrary code on my machine. Are these really possible elsewhere?
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gsg
2 months ago
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link
| on:
Office 365, Skype, MS Teams, and VS Code are all being rewritten in React Native
Leaving the React Native part aside just for this thread. Are they actually rewriting Office 365?
I thought that was a thing you should never do.
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Looks like it’s just the UI layer, other components are still written in different languages according a tweet later down.
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Is it really wise to solve something as high-volume as name resolutions with TCP with all its overhead? If so, why HTTP? What do you need headers for?
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VSCode is such a great piece of UX. I don’t use it myself, but I always browse the changelogs for ideas of things I may want to improve in my Emacs config.
The multiple cursors for the file browser is interesting, I guess it’s the closest thing I’ve found to dired
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I use a dumb phone.
A phone is for urgent contact. Email is at the work desk. Chat is at the work desk. When I’m idling, I take out my e-reader and read a book. When I walk around, my eyes are scanning the environment to keep my situational awareness up. When I have dinner, I just eat.
The only time my smartphone is online is when I am traveling and I need to check in via a wireless/cellular network.
It is funny because when I was younger the ‘normals’ used to make fun of me for being on the computer a lot but now the table has turned, and they have now instead decided that not being in front of a computer all the time is a ‘weird’ thing. They were on mindless TV then and are on mindless social media now and they don’t like it when I don’t join them in this brain-melting process.
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now the table has turned
Exactly. Same experience I had. Also like your characterization that they kept with the mindless stuff when they got on board. I was trying to sell them on what one could create and do before rather than consume.
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I have been feeling some of this, and am considering going back to my BlackBerry Q10. There’s a couple of reasons I wouldn’t ditch smartphones outright:
- I can miss having most apps, but perhaps not having access to the mobile Internet.
- WhatsApp is the de facto standard communications and organization platform for my social circles. I probably couldn’t get by without it at this point.
- I consider having a camera on hand at all times valuable, even if I don’t use it all the time. I would consider the one on the Q10 borderline serviceable in 2018.
- I use a lot of two-factor auth services, and I don’t want to carry a dedicated device for this.
I would like to be less tempted to pick up my phone to play a game, or check the news, or read a news article. The Android emulator on BlackBerry would run all the apps I need today, but perhaps not for long (emulation level is roughly Android 4.3 without Google services).
Keeping an Android tablet at home and a limited smart phone to take with me might be a suitable solution.
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I use a Q10, and I’m happy enough with it. The physical keyboard is so much better than any screen keyboards I’ve tried, and I mostly use it for SMS. But it can support my other use cases when I need them: mobile maps, camera, alarm clock and timer, terminal, web browser. Mostly I just appreciate that it’s neither iOS nor Android. And of course I’m fond of QNX.
Still, I’m thinking of ‘upgrading’ to a Q20 just for the physical cursor keys. Text editing is pretty annoying without them. Long term, I’m not sure where I’ll go. My previous phone was a (dumb) Nokia Asha 210, and when I had accomodated to the S40 OS quirks I really liked it… but then when the mic stopped working I couldn’t replace it: they had vanished from the market altogether. Not even eBay had them.
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I’m considering the same thing, for some of the same reasons. I’m mostly concerned I won’t be able to reach anybody in my circle (especially my family, who’s in a different continent) without WhatsApp. I’m thinking of getting a 4G tablet that stays mostly at home and runs WhatsApp and whatever else I may think I may miss, and upgrading from the iPhone to a feature phone (eg: Nokia, Blackberry) for being reachable for important things. That’ll probably require making sure my family knows how to use Skype for phone calls, etc, but I think it can work!
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Are you saying you’d stop using Firefox because of default “sponsored content” in New Tab?
It’s pretty easy to turn that off, just like all the other New Tab content. The article even links detailed instructions.
Or is it a matter of principle for you? How do you suppose Mozilla should make money?
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There absolutely are—or were until fairly recently—ads in unfilled tiles on the new tab page. Here’s an example support forum thread asking how to get rid of them.
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Mozilla corp is not incentivized to produce a profit, it is quite openly their goal to “just” keep the lights on. But that already needs quite a bit of cash. That’s a huge difference.
Mozilla corp is for-profit, as for certain legal reasons, producing software is not 501(c)3 compatible. It’s a very usual setup.
Yes, Mozilla should make money. Otherwise, they’d shut down.
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Mozilla is a non-profit, so no, they don’t have to make money. But the people who work for Mozilla don’t work for free. You can’t build a product like Firefox purely on volunteers, so Mozilla should at least be able to pay their workforce.
They can’t keep up with the rest of the world and provide a quality, free software alternative browser without money.
If you think the work Mozilla does is valuable (I do!) and feel like they should stay away from alternative monetization methods (I do!), you should consider donating to Mozilla so that they don’t have to find other ways of funding development.
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what do you mean? they even have prebuilt images for all major platforms. On MacOS, you can install it from Homebrew as well (
brew cask install qutebrowser). -
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If you’re already an Emacs user you probably know this, but note that you can use dired and eshell via tramp, meaning you can do all those things without leaving you local Emacs instance.
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I’m not sure that the resume matters in a hiring environment dominated by keyword search and Linkedin aside from having one that is presentable after the conversation has begun. However, I invest a lot in my personal resume and have a fairly traditional structure:
- Contact Info
- Overview phrase/pull quote
- Table of high-level areas of expertise
- Chronology of experience where each entry has
- Job Title
- Company, Location, Date
- Key technologies, single line
- Active voiced outcomes using the tech above
- Education
- Notable projects, memberships, etc.
As a hiring manager I like to see and as an applicant I try to write concrete quantifiable “W outcome using X to do Y for Z”, ex. “Reduced B2B execution time by 15%, reduced error rate by 9%, and increased ROA by 4% by designing and developing keyword-based replacement for business_unit some_function”, that show not just that there was work but also value and the purpose for the work.
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re: LinkedIn being a “hiring environment”, I’m constantly hearing (in the Lobste.rs LI group, for example) people complain about getting harassed by recruiters and the like, but not once has that happened to me. Every once in a while, the thought crosses my mind “that’s probably because you’re fundamentally unhirable – don’t quit your job!” which I quickly dismiss, but this time I’ll ask: is this more common to the more senior folks, or maybe more of a matter of location (not in the US)?
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the thought crosses my mind “that’s probably because you’re fundamentally unhirable – don’t quit your job!” which I quickly dismiss,
I don’t know you but it’s probably not that. I also don’t know what other people’s threshold is for feeling “harassed”. I get a few inquiries a week across all of the job sites, most of them are dismissible low-quality hits (no, I would not like a three month entry-level contract in the rust-belt of the U.S., go away) or rookies trying to swell their contacts and I block or unsubscribe from those. I do freely connect with in-house or well-connected recruiters even if I’m not currently interested and those bring up something intriguing a couple of times a year. I don’t job hop.
but this time I’ll ask: is this more common to the more senior folks, or maybe more of a matter of location (not in the US)?
I believe it’s several things: connections and the network of their connections, the industries you’ve worked in, keywords/technologies, and location.
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I didn’t start getting cold-contacted by recruiters until I was 5-6 years into my career, but since then the frequency has grown pretty continually.
Sometimes I have no idea how they got my phone number, other times they pull my email from git commits… It’s not super frequent but I find it a bit creepy to take my email address from a commit to some OSS project and use it for an unrelated for-profit enterprise.
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I’ve had, at most, two calls from recruiters. One was someone I used at a previous engagement, the other I have no idea. I use various email addresses and plus addressing (where accepted by whatever vetting is in place) to track where things come from. I generally give out a VoIP number configured with an automated attendant to a mailbox and forwarding group so I can vet calls.
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After reading some of Alan Kay’s comments on media (in a broad sense), I went with some instantly actionable resolutions: quit Netflix, quit Facebook, stop reading the timeline on Twitter, block some distracting web sites.
It’s partly to facilitate my goal of creating more time for undistracted work and reading, partly because I got tired of being manipulated into being a media consumer, and partly because I need to set an unambiguous example for my daughter - if I don’t want her to get sucked into this stuff, then I shouldn’t be either.
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Do it. After a month you feel super weird and you realise that despite not being connected to the fire hose the world carries on.
Also, it makes you appreciate the things you do give your time to a lot more when you do, like a new movie, etc… I was starting to just not be excited by anything anymore because I could just watch whatever I wanted, when I wanted. Now when I see a movie coming out I really want to see I actually feel really excited about it. You become more selective. Nowadays I honestly only look at doc web sites, lobste.rs, and occasionally hacker news and the reddit home page. There’s nothing else I consciously open in a browser. You become more invested in the things you do decide to give your time to. You also lose the whole incessant feeling like you’re not keeping up with everything pretty quickly.
I don’t think I’ll ever go back as it’s been over a year now.
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This is the sort of results I’d like to get. The never-ending torrent of information and content created negative feelings for me, in addition to being a time sink.
This actually carries over into the real world as well in the form of too many consumer choices. Luckily, where I live (New Zealand) the choices are limited, and I’m often grateful for that.
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Thanks, I’m going to read it.
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because I need to set an unambiguous example for my daughter
I don’t think it would work as simple as that. You daughter is going to be exposed and sucked in. Given that it takes conscious effort and discipline to go against the natural tendency to fall for the infinite-scroll, just seeing your dad not doing it won’t be enough. It’s still better than seeing your dad doing it, though.
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I totally agree, and the point is for me to have a leg to stand on with regards to enforcing boundaries. It’s much easier to point out that mum & dad don’t do it either than to create some sort of justification for why we can do it and she can’t.
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It’s a bit hard to point to a specific comment. He touches on it in this interview: https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-about-the-iphone-and-technology-now
He also made some comments in HN discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11944999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11945066
I wouldn’t say that these comments changed my perspective, but rather that they nudged me when I had some time to think about how I want to spend my time, which made me make the little bit of effort to ditch social media and Netflix. The point is, I’m not sure that Kay’s comments are the best source of information if you want to understand the manipulative nature of modern media (although I’m not sure what other sources to recommend).
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Distraction is the primary concern with regards to media for me, so I think I have to stay away from Mastodon too. I enjoy thoughtful and thought-provoking discussions which are not biased towards quick responses, but I haven’t really found any online media that facilitate this sort of interaction (other than email).
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Lastline is looking for network threat analysts and IDS (Suricata, Snort) developers. Most of the team is in London, but remote is an option, particularly for the NTA position. Traditionally we’ve been featuring our sandbox most prominently, as that’s where the expertise of our founders (some of the founders of shellphish) lies. However, we’ve been investing heavily in the network security side, and have been running a few interesting experiments.
Email me at
ggoncalves AT company domainto discuss details or to skip HR.