My wife worked for the first public ISP for several years. My first job, still in college, was for a local ISP, eventually becoming the head of all technical operations. And my next job was at a major commercial ISP, one which leased POPs to AOL among other businesses.

Here’s how they worked, at a technical and business level:

It’s a nice title, but what this really is, is my personal preferences on interfaces for reading fiction. Everyone is allowed to have preferences. Mine are special because I read a lot – on average, a little over 200 books each year…

‘Due diligence’ is the business terminology for taking care of details when you enter into a contract. Those details include very basic things like:

• does the seller exist?
• do they have a history of fraud?
• are they on a list of terrorist supporters? (yes, really)…

It is essential to realize that these technologies [large language models, currently called AI] do not answer questions about a model of reality, but about a model of language.

The utterances that they produce are statistically good at being plausible conversation related to the input prompt. Any relationship to reality is basically coincidental. Our tendency to view it as meaningful is a product of anthropomorphism and the social conventions of our culture.

People who use tools are responsible for their actions.

(I first wrote a slightly altered version of the above on the XBBN mailing list on January 30, 2023, in response to a query from Candy Sidner.)

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The thirty year history of the World Wide Web seems to be one of barely glomming together a relatively robust, relatively well maintained set of information sources and then destroying them at the first sign of a company offering a slicker product… which then spectacularly dies.

– Jason Scott @textfiles [twitter.com] June 28, 2022

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I have had phones with fingerprint unlocks on the back, side and in-screen.

Back is best.

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I switched from GNU screen to tmux when I discovered that the minor bug I had been experiencing for years had been reported several times and always dismissed with “can’t reproduce”.

It took about 20 minutes to properly switch over, and another day or two to discover my own biases and desires. What follows is a discussion of my own preferences in tmux config.

People use tools to get things done. Tools vary in capabilities. Using a perfect or great tool is more comfortable, takes less time, or does a better job than using a good-enough tool. Using a poor tool incurs penalties in time, comfort and/or quality.

Minimalism is, in the current parlance, a “flex”. Minimalism is a statement that you can afford to prefer a non-optimal set of tools in order to satisfy an aesthetic fad.

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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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