Modern social media could have learned some useful things from Usenet. Mostly, they haven’t.

Here are some of those lessons:

Of interest to highly technical budget-quality optimizing folks, mostly.

I am aware that this trick never works (cf ‘Hacker’). Still, I need to try.

Please stop using the terms AI, Artificial Intelligence, and even ML and Machine Learning. In the same spirit as “the cloud is just someone else’s computer”, please regard all these systems as Statistical Correlation Networks, SCNs.

When you read, hear, or say AI you carry the baggage of a hundred years of science fiction stories. You will then make mistakes in reasoning about SCNs.

Yes, it is amazing what SCNs can do, but they aren’t people you can teach and reason with.

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Being a mini-review of the Asus Zenfone 9.

(It’s mini because the phone is the smallest current flagship.)

Previous phone: OnePlus 7Pro, a 6.7" screen with rounded edges and an enormous battery life. This one has a 5.9" flat screen. Flat is much better. The manufacturers decided that rounded edges were “premium”, so they put it on the highest end phones… making them less usable and more prone to weird glare and distortion.

If you have an Apple Mail client (MacOS, iPhone, whatever) that recently stopped sending email to some servers, the reason is because Apple doesn’t play nicely with other products. There is a solution…

If your company is planning on hiring 4-6 technical people a year, your next hire should be a recruiter. It is probably best if they do not have experience being a recruiter or a salescritter. Hire someone with a liberal arts degree or technical communications experience.

If your company is hiring more than that, why don’t you already have an in-house recruiter?

External recruiters are lying spammers. It’s the nature of the economics: they don’t get paid until they land a candidate, but they can’t afford to learn enough about your company or the role to get good candidates, so they need to work in bulk. An external recruiting company wants 20-30% of first-year salary as a fee. If you’re hiring 5 people a year, you can afford to pay an internal recruiter the average of their salaries, which should be quite nice indeed - external recruiters are paid on commission, which induces feast-or-famine responses and consequent unethical practices.

An internal recruiter can talk to your hiring managers, ask questions, and build trust. An internal recruiter is inherently more trustworthy to a prospective candidate, too: they can reference the company’s name from day one, and can offer actual details immediately.

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Blogs publish articles, or entries, which are basically the same as Usenet posts – but there’s no widespread mechanism for grouping and replying. We can fix that.

The categories of certainty of knowledge are statistical and fuzzy.

In the course of everyday life, I don’t bother conducting experiments to see if gravity is still working (I haven’t received a bill in ages) or the atmosphere is still breathable. I just assume that they are in more or less the same state as they used to be. Occasionally this is wrong, and I am surprised by a terrible humidity or excess pollen or dust, but it saves a great deal of deliberation time which can be used to think about other things, such as whether I have remembered to take the laundry out of the washer.

I’ve had this idea for seven years and haven’t done anything with it, so I hereby release it into the public domain and hope someone will make it – preferably an open source version.

Live theater rehearsals rely on actors memorizing their lines. Historically, not everyone learns their lines at the same time. So, for rehearsals, people are walking around on stage clutching bundles of paper, usually with highlighter over their lines.

Everybody has a smartphone now, so let’s use that. This application can be handled in HTML, CSS and JavaScript with a fairly minimal backend for synchronization and distribution. Or you can make yourself unhappy and do it as native apps in every platform you want to support.

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Last night Politico published an unprecedented leak of a Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade, the decision that established a right of privacy and the consequent right to an abortion. The opinion of the court’s reactionary majority specifically includes reasoning to overturn the decisions about marriage equality, legal contraception, and general privacy of sexual behavior.

Assuming that the opinion is issued substantially as-is, I will make some predictions about 2023.

• ‘Red’ states will pass laws restricting basic civil rights.
• Corporations that rely on high-skill workers will not be able to hire them in those states.
• Those corporations will move out of the red states.
• The economies of red states are substantially worse off compared to blue states now. When the corporations move out, the tax base will be further reduced.
• When the Federal budget is roughly balanced, blue states subsidize red states. The Federal budget is running at a significant deficit in order to prop up the economy.
• Option 1: the attack on civil rights is enough to change Congress definitively to blue in November.
  • The Supreme Court will be expanded to 15 or 17 justices.
  • The Republican Party splinters.
• Option 2: Congress becomes red in November, or wishy-washy.
  • The United States tends towards a Christian Fascist state.

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When something goes wrong, especially (but not limited to) at startup, you should log an error message that is as informative as possible. In particular, if your service has parameters that might conflict with any other running process –say, it wants to listen to a particular port– you should have the error message mention all of those details.

It’s even better if the failure does a little diagnostic and tells you what other process is using that port.

This message brought to you by the Campaign for More Informative Error Messages. -30-

There are two kinds of smart home enthusiasts: the kind who buy into a particular cloudy ecosystem and need to buy all new stuff every few years, and the kind who spend all their time tinkering on their in-house systems. Fairly often the tinkers also end up buying all new stuff, but they get to do it in incremental steps where everything works (more or less) during the transitions.

I’m not an enthusiast: I want a return on investment in money, convenience or fun.

When a backup fails to complete, that’s a reliable sign of trouble. Most of the time it’s in the backup mechanism, but the second most likely underlying cause is a problem in the thing which is being backed up.

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