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

Here are some of those lessons:

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.

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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This blog is created by Pelican, a static site generator that combines some text files that I write with a layout and some CSS styles to produce the HTML that is rsync’d over to the nginx webserver which answers your requests.

I just upgraded from 4.6 to 4.71, and also from an older python3 release to Debian’s current 3.9 release. Nothing appears to need to be changed, which is nice and relaxing compared to the last few upgrades.

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I just realized that I internalized the O’Reilly house style decades ago, and so I think it’s the proper way to write documentation.

Primary elements: the document, even at book length, takes the form of a precise, pedantic, but informal letter to the audience. The author might reference themself as “I” and tell brief anecdotes to contextualize the material, and frequently encourages the reader in the second person:

You can also reticulate the frobnitz with the ‘–frob-harder’ switch if that feels more natural to you.

As a side effect, this style of technical writing minimizes the number of gendered pronouns, which I always prefer because I don’t know who is reading the work.

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When you stop looking for ways to improve your sound reproduction experience and instead look for new music to listen to, you have begun to recover from audiophilia.

Or at least, I have.

Places in the house with acceptable sound systems:

• my bedroom
• the living room
• the den/theater
• the office
• the other end of the office
• the third system in the office
• two portable systems

Places in the house with marginal sound systems:

• the kitchen
• the dining room

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Twenty-five years ago, approximately, my housemates and I bought office chairs – rolling five-star bases, adjustable arms, comes in a box with an L-shaped hex driver like IKEA stuff – and put them in our dining room around the table. They were cheap and comfortable.

I can’t tell you how many people looked at that arrangement and needed to talk about their sudden feelings.

The Cloud – where did we get that metaphor?

The answer is pretty simple. Imagine you are a techie working on an Internet project in the late 1990s. You are explaining to a less-technical audience how your application is going to be built. You have a whiteboard, and you draw some simple things as you talk: