Rubenerd

Jason Fried wrote this for the Signal v. Noise blog back in July:

The enlightened companies coming out of this pandemic will be the ones that figured out the right way to work remotely. They’ll have stopped trying to make remote look like local. They’ll have discovered that remote work means more autonomy, more trust, more uninterrupted stretches of time, smaller teams, more independent, concurrent work (and less dependent, sequenced work).

They won’t be the ones that just have their waste-of-time meetings online, they’ll be the ones that lay waste to the meetings. They won’t be the ones that depend on checking in on people constantly throughout the day, they’ll be the ones that give their employees time and space to do their best work. They won’t be the ones that can’t wait to pull everyone back to the office, they’ll be the ones that spot the advantages of optionality, and recognize a wonderful resilience in being able to work from anywhere.

I’m lucky that OrionVM is run by people who think like this. I’ve been able to work from the San Francisco office, and remote back in Singapore for a while. And now we’re already thinking that when the worst of this pandemic is over, we may all continue working remote for a few days a week, or more. We already had the infrastructure in place, given some of our colleagues work remote from Auckland, Wellington, and Seattle.

I do like having an office to go to sometimes, if only so I can meet my colleagues face to face again. But a part of me wonders if we could do without entirely, and just meet sometimes in a co-working space, or even a coffee shop. I know plenty of people who do exactly this.

It’s way too early to see if our current WFH world will have any lasting effects. I suspect most people will be expected to jump back on the peak-hour commute. But I hold out hope that this flexibility fostered upon us has demonstrated that it hasn’t been the hindrance to productivity that micro-managers used to argue.

I’ve mentioned before the anti-pattern of having people use two separate forms for their username and password. Whereas previously you would:

1. Type your username and password
2. Press Submit

Sites now require you to:

1. Type your username
2. Press Submit
3. Wait
4. Type your password
5. Press Submit

There are a few reasons why they could be doing this, and none of them are any good. There’s the Titanic lifeboat defence, where having two fields makes the login page look too cluttered. There’s the mutiple-auth system defence, which shouldn’t preclude having two fields for everyone else. But the worst is seeing sites validate people’s usernames independent of passwords, which is such an egregious form of data leakage that I immediately cease using any sites I catch doing it, and encourage you to do so too.

The good news is some sites are waking up to the fact that these split forms are also a huge step backwards for accessibility. But I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw their proposed solution! Okay I lied, I was using my standing desk, like a gentleman:

That’s right, they’ve kept the redundant form, but they’ve added a link to let you edit your username if you made a mistake. But… hold on, you know another form element that lets you edit things? A username text box!

I’m going to call anti-patterns of this nature busywork.

As reported by Maanvi Singh, Kenya Evelyn and Martin Belam in The Guardian yesterday:

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden made their first campaign appearance as running mates. Each noted that they had first connected through Biden’s late son Beau — who was a close friend of Harris. After commemorating the historic moment — Harris is the first woman of color to be nominated vice president by a major party — the Democrats vying for the White House tore down Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. “This is what happens when we elect a guy who just isn’t up for the job,” Harris said. “Our country ends in tatters and so does our reputation around the world.”

Her last point cannot be overstated, as I wrote about three years ago. His truly wields the reverse-midas touch when it comes to foreign policy and America’s standing in the world.

This is especially hard as an Americanophile; with American friends and colleagues; who loves travelling there; who watches, listens to, and reads American media; who makes a living using American technology; and who sees the country as a critically-important ally to the free world. I want to believe in America again. 🇺🇸

It’s the fifth installment in our accidental series exploring the Servant Summer★Festival 2020 event in everyone’s favourite mobile game, Fate/Grand Order. So far we’ve seen Jeanne Alter’s fear of data loss glasses, dolphins and nicknames.

Today she takes a break while Blackbeard explores our current political climate in Australia.

Daniel Andrews doesn’t have a beard, but Blackbeard’s point stands. The media’s one-sided reporting on the Victorian situation has been nothing short of pathetic. During lockdown he was branded Dictator Dan, and now they claim he didn’t do enough. Top that off with his employment of contractors approved by the Commonwealth government that are now apparently his fault too, and weren’t even the source of Victoria’s second wave in the first place, and you may start to think Murdoch’s goons might not like centre-left state Premiers.

Wow, a FGO post turned into something half serious. That’s scary.

I love reading tech retrospectives, retrospectively. Seeing how people discuss vintage IT, in the past. People talking about hardware failures in a world before Spectre, and software failures before Windows 8. They say sci-fi is more a commentary on the present than the future, and I think that holds for these.

Don Woligroski did a compilation of 16 PC industry failures for Tom’s Hardware back in February 2012 . I already can’t remember many of these, but there were a few standouts:

The Zip Drive

I’m an Iomega aficionado; I adored their quintessentially-90s drive designs, advertising graphics, and their driver software for Windows 3.1 was some of the best of any hardware manufacturer. I don’t think I was ever bitten by the infamous Click of Death, but I eventually moved onto Iomega’s Jaz disks for school work and personal projects when I started earning my own money.

RAMBUS

One of my treasured memories as a teenager was standing around Make Fine Computer in Funan Centre in Singapore joking about RAMBUS with the owner of the store, and another local gentleman. The poor owner hadn’t been able to move any of his stock of the memory, and he said he didn’t blame anyone.

Itanium

I held out hope for this chip, in part because it offered a clean break from CISC x86, but also because having multiple architectures is way more interesting. How would it compete with SPARC and POWER? I even remember trying to spec out a computer with them back in the day to tinker with them. Turns out nobody else did.

IDE-To-SATA Converters

I’d put these in the same category as Zip disks. I knew people who had problems, but I never did. At one point I was using them for an IDE drive in a RAID1 with a SATA, and with my first CD burner. Makes me shiver now just thinking about it!

Pentium 4

The early P4s represented the pinnacle of sillyness from the Megahertz War. I’d moved to PowerPC Macs for most of my stuff by the time these power hungry chips appeared. The Core chips were so much better, they were in my first MacBook Pro.

For some perspective, in February 2012 I was blogging about Android’s support of Flash, bidding farewell to Singapore Airlines’ 747 fleet, and an embarrassing Australian article about the then-new Rasperry Pi.

I wrote about reaching seven-thousand posts last Friday, so I figured it was worth checking another pointless milestone:

$ cd ./drafts
$ ls -1 | wc -l
==> 1023

I reached a thousand drafts at the same time, which is just silly. The oldest is from 2009, and just consists of:

Singapore’s best pies. Or at least, that was the aim. I ended up loearning [sic] about Travan tape drives.

I have no idea how I related the two. But it reminded me that I wanted to get an old Travan drive for my 486 tower, and by sheer chance I got one on eBay for $30. That’ll be a pointless topic for a future post!

COVID conspiracy theories were as contagious as they were predictable, and like most such theories, they depend on gaps in scientific literacy as much as ignorance and lies.

I see people most commonly dismiss evidence-driven refinements to theories as a weakness, not the system working exactly as it should. They grab sound bites from scientists and doctors, compare it to what they’ve said before, and use it as proof that they’re wrong. Last time I checked we don’t have the ability to pluck the perfect answer from the start, so an informed—being the operative word—view based on the best information available is the best shot we have.

Another self-defeating angle I’ve been seeing appeals to simple logic, or lack thereof. If two positions are true but incompatible in practice, they argue that one of them must be a lie, or should be immediately discounted.

Take masks: they reduce exhaled aerosol spread which may carry COVID, and they make breathing more difficult. Both are true, because masks are a mitigation. Nobody wears them because they want to, they’re necessary in a toxic environment. A deep-sea diver doesn’t refuse to wear oxygen tanks because they’re too heavy, or a racing car driver doesn’t tut tut the idea of a seatbelt harness. It’s an issue of mental maturity, like the kid not wanting to brush their teeth or clean their room.

Which gets us to the core issue. We’re not dealing with people in a rational state of mind here, and therefore they won’t be swayed by logical arguments. Conspiracy theories of this ilk are borne of fear, which is among the most basic of our human emotions. Addressing that in this current climate is much harder than facts.

Maybe we need to be more aggressive at coaching these positions as a net positive, instead of a burden. Show people the good they’re doing for themselves, their families, and their communities. Demonstrate that masks and social isolation are protecting and ensuring our freedoms for the long-term, not taking them away. They have the narrative that they should be free to infect people, but what about the freedoms of those they’re infecting against their will?

Rusted-on conspiracy theorists won’t change, they’re too mentally and emotionally invested in their bubbles. But it might be enough to sway people at the edge.

I haven’t been able to stop exploring this vista of Ljubljana by Marcel Haring. The contrast between the castle, the bright orange roofs, the streets, the brutalist-style towers. Go to Wikimedia Commons and view the full image, it’s over ten-thousand pixels wide!

I’ve always wanted to bob around the Mediterranean, from Gibraltar, Monaco, Malta, Sicily, and then up to Croatia and Slovenia. A photo is better than nothing for now.

I was doing some MiniDisc research for Clara’s and my budget, vintage Hi-Fi setup. We love having physical media again, and a MiniDisc deck would complement the rest of the stack in an undoubteldly fabulous and nostalgic way.

This was the summary on a CNET search result in DuckDuckGo:

Discuss: Sony MDS-JE330 - MiniDisc recorder Sign in to comment. Be respectful, keep it civil and stay on topic. We delete comments that violate our policy, which we encourage you to read

I still hold out hope that, one day, treating people properly will be as intuitively obvious as not sleeping on a durian, or wearing a mask during a pandemic.

It’s the fourth installment in our accidental series exploring the Servant Summer★Festival 2020 event in everyone’s favourite mobile game, Fate/Grand Order. It’ll also probably be one of the last, given Clara and I are about done with the story.

So far we’ve seen Jeanne Alter’s fear of glasses, dolphins and nicknames. Today she addresses concerns that these mobile game stories have been an irrelevant distraction on this blog, with a running commentary on data integrity.

This wouldn’t have happened with OpenZFS and some snapshots.