Rubenerd

Bon Appétit’s YouTube videos were one of Clara’s and my most comforting escapes when COVID first hit. Claire’s Gourmet Makes and Brad’s It’s Alive! shows roped us in, but we eventually fell in love with the whole cast. They all struck me as personable, funny, passionate, entertaining, and above all, genuine.

Here are just some of my posts about their channel:

• Music Monday: The Vanilla Bean Situation
• It’s Alive! Brussel sprout kimchi
• My ratings for foods Bon Appétit rated
• Identifying vegetables

We had an inkling, like I assume many of you did, that something was up when their channel hadn’t received updates for a few weeks. Our favourite editor Matt “Hunzi” Hunziker was suspended for blowing the whistle on inequitable treatment, not long after their manager resigned for his response to a photo of himself in blackface. The news then broke that their non-Caucasian staff had been grossly and cynically underpaid, and negotiations for better treatment had fallen through. Grub Street had the best summary of the whole mess.

Like a certain shingled HDD manufacturer, I can’t understand what Bon Appétit’s management must have thought. What was their end-game? Did they think their staff wouldn’t notice the inequitable treatment, or wouldn’t care? That it wouldn’t be exposed eventually? Even the most selfish and cynical of management teams would know it’d at least be a bad look, which could cost them advertisers and the staff that bring in the views.

I invoked Betteridge’s Law of Headlines here, because I hope this isn’t the last we hear from all these lovely people.

(I may have also locally-downloaded every episode with youtube-dl in case it all goes away. Our PleX server is basically a time capsule of lost material now).

I’ve written a few times about working from home since COVID hit, including how bosses handle remote work better than others, that Australian Internet can be a challenge, and both the mental and physical health concerns from being more sedentary.

But it took an Apple commentator tweeting how great it is that we can “all” work from home, and double-down with insults when asked about it, that made me appreciate how blinkered I’ve also been by the experience.

I’ll go out on a limb here and say most people can’t work from home. Worse, millions have to make brutal decisions to go to work during a pandemic that could impact the health of their families. Remote work, like so much of our modern economy, disproportionately favours the middle class in white-collar jobs. And, dare I say it, it has come to depend on the so-called gig economy which further stratifies society into the haves and have nots.

The whole thing reminded me of defending tipping culture, or another Twitterer saying back in March—without a trace of irony—that food delivery meant nobody needed to leave home. I… wait, what?! It all demonstrates the same disconnection from people struggling in the real world, and I realise I’m just as guilty of it.

It also highlights the need for more social security. I say as a taxpayer, someone who donates a chunk of his income each month to medical research and charities, and who’d continue to work after its introduction: we need universal basic income. My heart goes out to people doing it tough right now, but individual actions and good will aren’t sufficient. I’d also expect to see a shakeup in the labour market when certain employers realise they can’t threaten people with destitution.

This is the accompanying photo for today’s Wikipedia article of the day, by Lvklock on Wikimedia Commons. It’s so calm and pretty I’m using it for this month’s desktop background.

I got this message from The Facepalm Book, a social network I log into at least once a year, maybe even twice:

Join groups to connect with people who share your interests. RECOMMENDED FOR YOU: [..] GET COLLEGE HOMEWORK HELP [..] Canberra Local Meetup Group [..] PENRITH REGION: “Buy, Sell, Swap, Free, Trade”

I haven’t been in COLLEGE for years, I’m not a Canberra Local, and I don’t live in the PENRITH REGION. You’d think this would be basic, entry level stuff they could glean even from the precious little data they have on me, and what they creepily pieced together from friends and family.

One thing that will save us from malevolence is incompetence.

Adam Davidson wrote this in the context of American politics, but I think it just as easily applies to discussions on online privacy and security, and to every country in the world:

Any reporter who thought it was important to point out that most Americans don’t know $THING are in a different position from the one I’ve been in. Our core job is to report on things people don’t know they should care about. And to make them care.

I even feel that responsibility as a silly guy with a blog.

In 2014 a simple but critical OpenSSL vulnerability was disclosed, affecting the security of hundreds of millions of websites. We rapidly realised the entire industry had come to depend on this one underfunded, understaffed, and underappreciated community to maintain this critical piece of Internet infrastructure. Companies and the wider community committed to funding its future development, and other projects also adopted its codebase.

The latest layoffs at Mozilla hint at a similar situation, though fewer people are talking about it.

How we got here

It’s hard to overstate Firefox’s role in the creation of the modern web. Mozilla didn’t just offer an alternative browser bourne from the ashes of Netscape Navigator and the Mozilla Suite; it ended the dark, monoculture days of IE. This had two effects:

1. Broad web standards could be proposed and put into practice because no one player owned or dominated the conversation.

2. Developers got back into the habit of testing sites against multiple rendering engines, and justifying to their managers that it was necessary.

Now we’re faced with every major browser being built upon WebKit and its derivatives like Blink (referred to as WebKit here for the sake of brevity). Microsoft went as far as saying they weren’t judging their Edge browser on standards compliance, but whether it rendered the same as WebKit. Now it also just runs Blink, the same engine behind Chromium, Chrome, Opera, Naver Whale, Vivaldi, and others.

In other words, we’re perilously close to a monoculture again. There are a few important differences this time, but I fear they’re overstated.

Why it’s the same, again

The most argued point is that WebKit is a better shepherd of open standards than IE was. This is true, but while Google and Apple weren’t pushing us to use ActiveX or Silverlight, they aren’t above unilateral action either. AMP, mandatory HTTPS, shorter certificate durations, and platform exclusivity have been dictated outside independent standards bodies, thanks to their market reach and clout. And let’s not forget Google bafflingly tried to argue that Android was more open because it included Flash, another proprietary browser extension. The use of this tech as a marketing bullet point set back its deprecation years.

But what about innovation and compatibly? WebKit has dozens of browsers targeting multiple platforms, whereas IE kept so many sites tied to Windows. I remember the dark days when I had to keep a Windows 2000 VM so I could log into my Singaporean banking site. Yet these new these companies also have their own ambitions: Google’s ad-driven business model gives it a powerful ulterior motive to hamper meaningful progress in online privacy.

Cross-engine testing is also slowly, but noticeably, feeling like a lost cause. It’s as though I’ve gone back twenty years, only this time I’m told to “just” download Chrome instead of IE. Or worse, sites simply don’t work. I’m right back there again spoofing my useragent, with memories of Lou Bega playing through Winamp, and my Palm Treo buzzing on the desk next to my school work. This isn’t progress.

The web depends on Firefox more than it realises, just as it did and does with OpenSSL. And we risk forgetting again at our own peril.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

47:35 – An impromptu discussion on everyone’s favourite comestible beverage conveyance, among several other unrelated topics. Recorded July 2020, only getting around to producing... gulp! Hey, that’s the sound someone drinking from a mug makes.

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released August 2020 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts; this one notwithstanding.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

You know that feeling upon seeing something so specific from your childhood that you hadn’t thought about in years? After what could be described as a challenging week, it was such a happy surprise to see an ultra-high resolution scan of this old graphic appear on a ton of the ’booru image boards!

For some context, is a phrase with three words. My sister and I grew up watching Sailor Moon like so many kids in the 1990s. I think we liked how flawed and real the characters were allowed to be; the DIC dubbed version made them out as these superhero role models with life lessons, but they dealt with the same mundane stuff we all had to. It also subtly introduced us to so many Japanese tropes, art, and culture.

The cute, blue-haired bookworm Mizuno Ami was easily my favourite character. She was intelligent, careful, and shy, but fiercely loyal to her friends and could summon tremendous courage when push came to shove. She also carried a portable computer before the age of smartphones, back when I coveted such devices above everything else. She was so cool.

I got into the original Japanese versions of Sailor Moon in my first couple of years of university, and soon realised how much more mature it was compared to the sanitised versions DIC produced for the west. I also had enough disposable income to trawl through eBay, and found the above poster for my dorm wall. Even during my darkest moments in those years, she was there offering encouragement with her smile and slightly-awkward pose that so typified her character. Come on Ruben, if I can do it, you can too!

Alas, during a trip back home to Singapore, water had leaked from the roof of the dorm building and down the sides of the wall, destroying most of the posters I’d put up. I peeled it off but it disintegrated in my hands. I won’t lie—as opposed to all the other times?—I was gutted.

Now I can print it again, and maybe this time frame it! Clara and I were thinking of putting her by the door to offer us encouragement before we leave to tackle the outside world.

Coffee shops are where I get much of my writing and work done. I tend to find a handful of them wherever I live and type away in them for hours at a time. For me there are no environments more conducive to thought, enthusiasm, and energy, and I don’t think it’s just the caffeine! It also means I develop quite an attachment to them, which makes their closure all the more sad when I revisit an old suburb or city where I lived.

Earlier this week I discovered the Three Beans in Greenwood Plaza was gone. Clara and I got our first apartment together up the street, so I used to spend a lot of time sitting there writing many of the posts you probably read a few years ago.

The staff were friendly and already prepped my order the moment they saw me standing there. The coffees were also among the better brews in the area. I also thoroughly enjoyed sitting under the huge glass dome of the shopping centre atrium which let in plenty of warm, natural light. All that’s left now are the curved floorboards where the counter used to be, some spare chairs, and a background billboard perhaps explaining why it had to close up.

North Sydney is overwhelmingly a commercial area, so I’m not at all surprised the lockdowns have taken their toll. I hope the owners and staff are okay.

If everyone uses a tool a specific way that ends up causing problems, is it the fault of the tool, or the operators?

The temptation is there to place the blame square on users. It’s why we use phrases like idiot-proof, or the poor worker blames their tools, or PEBKAC. Certainly I’ve shaken my head at those hammering square pegs into circular holes, then blaming the peg.

What do you mean your platform doesn’t support RDP for your FreeBSD templates? Okay fine, as long as Linux does it.

But it’s not always clear cut. Ill-conceived or poorly-implemented software will necessarily attract bad uses. A lock-picking set resembling a potato peeler will be used to prepare crisps, despite frustrated responses from its designer. You don’t want it used that way? Well, then why does it look like a potato peeler?

Slack is a perfect example, though it applies to many other chat applications. So much electronic ink has been spilled saying the software isn’t the problem, it’s that people use it to replace email, or don’t set boundaries, or create too many rooms, or post too frequently, or that it’s merely dysfunctional company culture writ large. Medium writers seem especially enamoured with this concept.

That all may be true, but if the tool happily accommodates people projecting their problems onto it, doesn’t it share some of the blame? If not, should it?

Good software is improved when its operation causes problems, even if they weren’t foreseen, or even the fault of the designers. Bad software is defended by only blaming users.