Rubenerd

I just submitted a talk proposal for an upcoming FreeBSD event. I’ve only taked briefly once during a Work-in-Progress session at AsiaBSDCon, but it was fun walking through ideas and getting feedback, especially from the old guard for whom I harbour tremendous respect.

Michael Dexter of Call For Testing and bhyvecon fame asked for some examples of IT discouragement a couple of monthso ago. I shared the story of my first attempt of a talk at a Linux conference back when I was in my early 20s, and having people loudly snigger upon hearing I’d written something in Perl. I was thrown off guard, nervous, and didn’t finish. It was an embarrasing low point in my career, and took almost a decade to work up the guts to attempt again.

If I’m accepted, I’ll let everyone know and will post here :).

Threads are another recent Twitter trend. You’ll be reading your timeline, then see an intelligent comment proceeded with the word THREAD! They’ll then reply to this initial tweet a few dozen times, forming a train of thought.

I admire people who are able to be creative in a limited medium, from people PEEKing and POKEing their Commodore 64s, to journalists making compelling stores in 240 character chunks. It takes skill beyond just splitting thoughts into shorter sentences and pasting them in a row; they need to flow, and remain engaging in a medium vying for people’s nanoscopic attention spans.

But I’ve yet to see a single one of these threads that wouldn’t work better as a blog post. It’s another pernicious element to social media that I think we’re largely ignoring in light of the more easily identifiable problems. Social media has convinced people of three things:

1. It’s less cognitive effort to break up your thoughts into stilted chunks than it is to publish freely on a blog.

2. Thoughts won’t get adequate attention if they’re blog posts, and attention as expressed through likes and retweets are the currency we’re supposed to take seriously now.

3. Thoughts are less valuable if they’re published on a blog.

We can solve #1 and #2 by educating people, making our systems easier to use, and cross-posting with adequate metadata. But the devaluing of independent media in #3 gravely worries me. We’ve been here before, when blogging was seen as a silly hobby and that traditional media outlets were the custodians of reliability and worth. All we’ve done is substitute the New York Times with Twitter. Let the implications of that sink in for a moment.

I fear the window to have a compelling answer to this is closing, before the Internet really is just a handful of players as we all feared would happen. I wouldn’t fauly anyone for thinking it’s already happened.

A well known luggage manfacturer who sponsors many tech podcasts is in hot water for its treatment of employees. I’m sure they’re not the only ones exploiting people like this, but this report by Zoe Schiffer in The Verge is a believable, grim read.

The investigation from The Verge revealed how Korey has used Away’s core company values to push employees nearly to the breaking point. Last year, she told a group of customer experience managers that she was taking away their paid time off in order to support their career development. “In an effort to support you in developing your skills, I am going to help you learn the career skill of accountability. To hold you accountable…no more [paid time off] or [work from home] requests will be considered from the 6 of you,” she said (emphasis hers).

Pot, kettle, etc. But it was this comment that says all I need to know, right down to the cringey excited:

“I hope everyone in this group appreciates the thoughtfulness I’ve put into creating this career development opportunity and that you’re all excited to operate consistently with our core values.”

She released a public apology, but Zoe quoted a response from an employee:

“It’s not like this was the first time she’s needed reprimanding for her management and conduct”

Even if you’re the stereotypical sociopathic boss, I still fundamentally don’t understand how you think you can bring out the best work from people if you foster a toxic company culture. Can someone explain this to me?

I’ll ask my sister for permission to share some of her stories about the banks she’s worked at in the past; they were hair-raising. I’m extraordinarily lucky that I’ve only ever had, and continue to have, good bosses. Clients… well, that’s always another story.

I’m sitting here blogging from our company’s cage in the ME1 data centre in Melbourne, as the name of the data centre may suggest. I took a photo outside the facility to send to coworkers, before realising two things:

1. I barely recognised it, because Equinix are building another giant new facility in front, in what used to be a grassy field. Access is through a precariously narrow walkway now.

2. Far more importantly, I couldn’t help but realise the sky is blue, not an acrid mustard yellow from the weeks of bushfires that Sydney is blanketed with. Even small storm clouds were a welcome sight.

Marco Arment discussed the pushback he and his fellow Accidental Tech Podcast hosts received for suggesting they wanted SIM cards in Mac laptops, emphasis added:

Just because a solution is good enough for you, doesn’t mean that nobody could possibly want a better one for themselves, or their needs, or their priorities.

When people say “just tether”, they’re saying it defensively, because they just tether and it’s fine for them, so why can’t it be fine for us? It’s something than many people never understand. Just because you don’t need something, doesn’t mean no one needs it.

This has become a theme here of late, because I’m so wary of having to justify decisions on why I want to do something. By all means offer alternatives, but if the substance of your answer to a technical question is “why?”, or something condescending like “well, did you consider just not getting sick?”… you’ve contributed nothing.

Just like a couple of Linux people said in response to my recent FreeBSD hypervisor post. They thought they were delivering a burn so sick I’d need a skin graft, but in reality it was just their insecurity showing.

But back to the core question: tethering has several what I would consider obvious drawbacks. You’re draining power in two devices. Pairing doesn’t always work, because iOS 13 is a thing. You could have two different data plans or carriers, so you can fall back to one if another stops working.

And something I hadn’t considered, from Marco:

One of the big changes that happened when you went from dial-up to broadband—yes it did get a ton faster—but it was also always connected. As opposed to having to go to a thing in your menu bar and say connect to the internet please, then wait a few seconds, and have it connect. That’s exactly what tethering is!

This lets me easily forgive him for saying the RAZR was the only Motorola phone people remember. One day I’ll make my FreeBSD-powered Raspberry Pi SIP FrankenTAC, just you wait.

Simon Kuestenmacher always posts great maps on Twitter. Here’s one of the more arresting ones he shared from this Reddit thread by u/Spooderman89, showing the parts of the world where people live past eighty (dark green), or close to it (light green).

In the developed world—for want of a better phrase—we have blank areas around the American South, Nevada, the Northern Territory in Australia, and more of Eastern Europe than I expected. The Northern Territory has the greatest percentage of First Nations people in Australia, who continue to be downtrodden and ignored by passive coastalites. Much of South America and Asia are gone, save for a few areas around Chile, Israel, Bahrain and Qatar, if I’m reading it right.

Zooming in above Australia, we see Japan, South Korea and Taiwan in dark green, along with the PRC provinces of Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai. I had to look up the other province showing light green, it’s Zhejiang where Hangzhou is, which makes sense. You can also just make out the other Asian Tigers in Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore right at the bottom if we zoom in.

Of course this map doesn’t tell a lot of stories. For one, the high rate of mental health issues and suicides in high pressure, developed countries like Japan. But also the tremendous progress that has been made in the last century. Fewer people are living in poverty, and more people are living longer, than at any point in human history. But there’s still clearly a lot more work to do, and it starts with the developed world owning up to its ethical responsibilities to our fellow humans.

Via Michael Dexter on Twitter:

Make #bhyveVirtFS/9p a thing today at bsdfund.org! The first $1500 in sponsorships are MATCHED by an awesome company that is using bhyve 9pfs in PRODUCTION. They’re motivated. We’re motivated. Let’s do this!

And from BSDfund.org:

This project will complete the current bhyve VirtFS/9p work with a roadmap for feature competitiveness with QEMU/KVM and Windows WSL2.

I remember getting excited about this back in late 2016 when I saw this newsgroup message by Jakub Wojciech Klama from earlier that year. If we could have this in bhyve, I would be unreasonably happy.

For those unfamiliar, at a high level VirtFS allows you to pass through folders directly into virtual machines from a host, rather than dealing with generic NFS or Samba/CIFS. This paper by members of IBM’s Linux Technology Centre goes into great detail explaining the motivation behind the system, and its implementation. I’ll try and blog more about it.

It’s Music Monday time again, that time of the week where I engage in writing redundant sentences to explain the day of the week and the type of post a Music Monday entry is.

My dad introduced me to Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s adaptation of Aaron Copland’s composition growing up, and it’s still one of my favourite songs. I’d never heard the full cut before though, and it’s glorious.

Us commoners all need a little fanfare every now and then.

I love vintage computers, so it came as a surprise and delight to discover the Hyperion on Wikipedia, a Canadian luggable released in 1983. It was a similar vintage to the original Compaq Portabe and also ran a flavour of DOS, but weighed a third less.

Uncle Roger has some details:

The Dynalogic Hyperion was the first MS-DOS luggable, beating the more famous Compaq to market by a few months. Although stylish, it had its problems and could not compete with Compaq. In addition to being first, the Hyperion has the distinction of being one of the few Canadian computers. Unlike most luggables, the Hyperion stored its keyboard beneath the system unit, rather than using it as a cover for the front of the computer.

The understated design was gorgeous, especially compared to the Osbournes and Kaypros from the time. Thanks to Boardhead for sharing the photo below.

Elon Musk tweeted that Tesla have had 140,000 orders for the Cybertruck, and without any money spent on advertising. I have to hand it to Twitter; my entire timeline was exploding earlier this week about:

• how awful the new truck looks
• how the demo had failed
• memes, doctored screenshots, and more memes
• commentary that should be on a blog post threads

I didn’t know the demo had happened, or what a Cybertruck was till I saw these. Why would you waste money on advertising when your detractors are so willing to discuss it ad nauseum?