Posted on in meander

America 2019

A culture successfully terrorized on a dark day in September of 2001; initially, in anger but, over the long run (to this day), in fear, throwing off the high ground of nominal “truth, justice, and the American way” for Jack Bauer ends-justify-the-means.

A culture particularly prone to disengaging into its own individual, typically violent, often vengeful, entertainment bubbles.

A culture particularly prone to embracing sounds bites and now internet memes to simplify complex issues into narratives that are palatable.

A culture particularly prone to being goaded into team dynamics at the expense of actually engaging people on the “other side” to work through nuanced problems.

A culture particularly prone to sensational voyeurism to the point it lets what has become a “socio-political-entertainment complex” get away with dosing us garbage constantly.

18 years straight of war — leaning disproportionately on people far removed from the political decision making.

Inarguably relaxed service entry requirements — multiple times — in this ongoing span to hit the desired recruiting numbers.

Poor support for those coming back from such horrors facing their own demons as well as an incredibly competitive global marketplace and global workforces.

Governments–especially ours–preserving themselves and their revolving door cronies from unrest over horribly insolvent dynamics THEY fostered (80s – now) via transnational corporate socialism that comes at the expense of “the little guy” who gets robbed in ways “he’ll never [explicitly] understand”. Coordinated currency devaluation, statist direct intervention in the markets, and coordinated messaging. We feel the “real world” fallout.

Decades of institutional rot at the highest levels of power. Normalization of dynastic political power. And now blatant amoral criminality at the top pushing us headlong into cultic authoritarianism.

Active attacks from foreign adversaries. Little to no push back. Or even improved defense.

Overt hatred, open racism, demonization of “the other” crawling out from under the rocks.

And an ever increasing rate of folk trying to hit a real life “kill count high score” and get plastered all over the media for doing it. We look around when we go to airports. We look around when we go to concerts. We look around when we go to school. We look around when we go to movies. We look around when we go to bars. We look around when we go to night clubs. We look around when we go to church buildings. We look around when we go to the office.

It is unacceptable. We must do better.

Posted on in development, meander

Fail, fast

Adapted from an internal p2 post.

Fail-fast is a systems design approach that intentionally fails early and visibly. The gist is that it is better for users as well as better for developers to halt a system if it finds itself in a “critical enough” situation.

Wait, What, Why?

There are worse things than a crash.

Mike Stall (via Jeff Atwood) sketched an “app health hierarchy” which looks thusly:

1) Application works as expected and never crashes.
2) Application crashes due to rare bugs that nobody notices or cares about.
3) Application crashes due to a commonly encountered bug.
4) Application deadlocks and stops responding due to a common bug.
5) Application crashes long after the original bug.
6) Application causes data loss and/or corruption.

Complex systems can reduce their exposure to the darkest parts of that hierarchy in failing fast. Users are immediately presented truth rather than sometime later discovering their actions didn’t take. Developers get immediate, direct feedback in critical scenarios that points directly toward the root cause.

And, perhaps most importantly, halting in the right places prevents on-going corruption, which is what keeps me up at night as a software developer.

We can’t just BSOD our users!

Yes and no.

Yes, we can, if the situation is that critical and we know of no way to recover.

No, we can’t, on anything less than that.

Fail-fast requires (team) wisdom in implementation. Each situation must be considered in its own context. Tricky, at times, but in my experience the effort is very much worth it.

Posted on in privacy, quote

Thank You, Tim

 

We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right. No matter what country you live in, that right should be protected in keeping with four essential principles:

First, companies should challenge themselves to de-identify customer data or not collect that data in the first place.

Second, users should always know what data is being collected from them and what it’s being collected for. This is the only way to empower users to decide what collection is legitimate and what isn’t. Anything less is a sham.

Third, companies should recognize that data belongs to users and we should make it easy for people to get a copy of their personal data, as well as correct and delete it.

And fourth, everyone has a right to the security of their data. Security is at the heart of all data privacy and privacy rights.

Technology is capable of doing great things. But it doesn’t want to do great things. It doesn’t want anything. That part takes all of us. We are optimistic about technology’s awesome potential for good — but we know that it won’t happen on its own.

– Tim Cook, October 24, 2018

Posted on in development, quote

Joel Salatin Programming

…we respect and honor the pigness of the pig and the chickenness of the chicken.

Joel Salatin

Joel Salatin is an innovative farmer / agricultural philosopher(!) who has inspired me personally for quite some time. One of his farming tenets is respecting the inherent nature of the animals and the environment under his care. That resonates with me deeply. And I think it applies to programming.

We need to vigilantly avoid forcing logic against the grain of a language or its associated culture. Instead of asking “can I do this in language X?”, we need to be asking “should I do this in language X?” all along the way.

Because it’s never as simple as just writing logic a new way. Before writing that magical brilliant code in language X derived from paradigm Y, we need to ask ourselves questions like:

  • Does the logic mesh with the language’s natural expressivity?
  • What is the readability cost?
  • What are the context switching costs? Relative to rest of the project codebase? Relative to the rest of an organizational codebase?
  • What are the dev onboarding costs in deviating from community expectations?
  • Is the approach likely to be sustainable over time? Or will the magical library that makes it all possible flame out quickly?
Posted on in privacy

Digital Identity Diversification

Do you signup with the same username/display name on every web service?

Twitter? Instagram? Amazon? Myspace? Livejournal? That Beanie Baby phpBB forum from twenty years ago? WebMD? Goodreads?

If you do, I’d suggest googling that username if you haven’t done that before. There is a high chance you may see a rather exhaustive history of everything you’ve ever done across the web. And that maybe fine depending on your personal POV.

But it can also be a bit freaky. And, if you fall in the camp that finds such an expansive, public, one-click view of your personhood a tad uncomfortable, I have a solution for you: digital identity diversification.

The idea is quite simple1: choose a unique username per service.2


1Hat tip password managers.
2Obviously, if you divulge details about yourself or expose a different unique attribute (eg: your real email address) that will break said compartmentalization. Just a heads up.

Posted on in music

Sgt. Pepper Remixed

Are you a Beatles fan? Run, don’t walk:

( Apple Music | Spotify )

I hadn’t “clicked through” on this release until a couple of days ago as I thought it was simply a cash grab coming on the heels of the exquisite mono releases and the serviceable 2009 stereo remasters. I was wrong.

This is crafted love by George Martin’s son (Giles), remixed for the first time from the original four track tapes. This release immediately obsoletes the 2009 stereo mix for me. Listen to the mono release for the quintessential experience and listen to this to hear the Fab Four alive at EMI Studios.