Rubenerd

Miguel A. emailed me this article by Jason Snell from last year, who summarises the integration and usability issues with the latest 1Password, but could just as well apply to any Electron program:

I think it’s fair to say that most users don’t care about the tools that a developer uses to write the apps we use. But using a system like Electron does have consequences: Electron apps have a reputation for being slow, eating up a lot of system memory, and—perhaps most offensively—failing to behave like proper, “native” apps on whatever platform they operate.

He suggests the move is also a grim assessment of Apple’s current development tools like SwiftUI, something I don’t know enough to comment on but I take his word. He concluded the section with:

What’s really causing all this consternation, I think, isn’t 1Password moving to Electron. Electron is a bit of a bogeyman. The root problem is this: 1Password, originally a Mac-forward software developer, has simply decided that the Mac isn’t important enough.

I get where he’s coming from, but in practice I don’t see the distinction; both are symptoms of prioritising an internal process over the needs of paying customers.

Several of you emailed with comments saying the bigger issue with Electron isn’t one app using a ton more resources, it’s the fact they add up quickly. This is especially true for utilities like a password manager that are expected to run continuously. I agree.

I’ve also seen VSCode listed as either the lone or rare example of a good Electron application, but I’m not convinced. Having 1Password even match VSCode would still be a downgrade from what people came to expect from the software before.

Jason ends his post with a broader look at Apple software which is hard to escape, and perhaps goes a long way to explain the visceral reaction the announcement has had:

A banner Mac app and app developer has abandoned a platform-native app for the same web-app wrapper it’s using on Windows. Even if it’s the best Electron app you’ve ever seen, it won’t be the same—and more than that, it says something painful about the future of Mac software.

There are many competing priorities in software development, and Electron has convinced a sufficient number of businesses that they can avoid some pain by pushing it onto their customers. Unfortunately in many cases, they’re right.

The title of this post sounds like someone from the 1990s observing VCR distortion, or a 1970s audiophile worried about tape tension on their reel-to-reel machine. How does a track skip? What’s ripping a CD? How does doing the latter cause the former?

There are people using streaming services today who’ve never bought music, or ripped a CD, or browsed an HVM, Tower Records, or Sembawang Music. I’ve spilled enough electronic ink worrying about why that’s a bad thing for artists, so in this case I merely bring it up as a generational observation. Ripping CDs must seem as foreign as faxing a document, tuning in at a specific time on the TV, or having digital privacy.

Wait, ouch.

Mixtapes were before my time, but we used to rip CDs to have a digital copy on our computers. We’d do it so we could import tracks into our Minidiscs, or media players such as the Creative Zen or iPod. Like tape decks of yore, we could also do this to make mix CDs for cars or CD Walkmans. If you had precious little drive space and two optical drives, software like Nero Burning ROM even supported live ripping and recording across discs, letting you swap out albums to make a mix without needing to rip them to your hard drive first. What a time to be alive!

I ripped all my Michael Franks CDs back in the mid-2000s as 320 kb/s CBR MP3, the same format I use today. Back then I was ripping to whip a llama’s arse, play in iTunes, and transfer to my huge iPod Classic, so compatibility was more of a concern than capacity. They sound as clear and good now as they did back then, even with proper monitors and hi-fi speakers.

But in doing so, I introduced a few audio artefacts I still hear today. Michael’s 1999 jazz/vocal album Barefoot on the Beach must have had a scratch sufficiently large to overwhelm the optical drive’s error correction mechanisms, because in three tracks I hear a few pauses and doubling-up of sounds. My dad and I used to joke they were “bad-rip remixes”.

They’re almost imperceptible, to the point where you might miss them if you weren’t paying close attention, and if you didn’t know the songs. Because they skip at just the right time in the song, they sound like a DJ having a bit of fun with a light touch, not an error.

I’ve been tempted to re-rip these tracks again with another CD copy of the album, but the LP version of the album already sounds weird because it doesn’t have those distortions! It’s as though I have an exclusive, limited-edition version of these tracks.

In the paraphrased words of Dr Glenn Pierce from the game Superliminal, is that weird? Absolutely.

I don’t bring work up here often, but we’re trying to figure out what to to after CentOS 7. The platform provides VM templates on a rebrandable portal for MSPs, SIs, telcos and the like. These can be enabled or disabled depending on what the partner wants their customers to deploy.

We were tempted to have CentOS 8 be the new default and let partners decide, but the universal feedback is that its no longer fit for their purpose.

Right now we’re debating which of these to make our officially recommended upgrade path:

• AlmaLinux
• Rocky Linux
• Scientific Linux

I prefer OpenSUSE for RPM-based workloads, but I empathise with the need for drop-in RHEL compatibility. Not everyone can afford support contracts or certified hardware.

What are your thoughts? What would make your life easier?

Via The Bird Site:

One of the hard parts of evaluating tech is viewing it through the lens of what was possible/available when the project started, not when it was finally delivered, possibly many years later.

I haven’t thought of it this way before. My mind is racing in multiple directions!

So often I’ve come into a project with people professing their exquisite hindsight, forgetting that the project started when their chosen solution wasn’t available, or is more often the case, wasn’t production-ready. It’s the system architect’s version of hiring people with ten years of industry experience in a technology that’s only existed for five.

Developers of consumer tech and web development frameworks have the attention span of gnats. After this you have orchestration platforms and tools, which seem to go in and our of vogue every few years. Then you have programming languages, and finally big iron stuff which can run for years. Most modern systems have to bisect every layer of this technical cake.

The existence of the new also doesn’t invalidate the old (other than perhaps in hiring). There are huge Java, Ruby on Rails, and even FORTRAN code bases in production and being updated, today. There are people like me who still think tech operating systems like systemd (burn!) were a needless distraction, and still use POSIX-like tools when available.

An old colleague often referred to the “maturity tax”, or paying more in perceived time or money for a mature, tested solution as opposed to the new shiny. Lately I’ve noticed it being paid in the future as well, with people who question why an architect used something from “back in the day”.

If you follow any new social media accounts this week, make it the US Department of the Interior. They post some stunning photos, including this adorable seal, and this stream in Wisconsin. But this photo by Scott Eliot still takes the cake:

I still have a dream of hitching up some Timberland boots and doing some serious nature hiking one day, especially around Montana and British Columbia. All it would take is sixteen hours of flights, give or take!

I wanted to thank K.G.Kobayashi for their recent email about FreeBSD, and for the JoJo references! In my post back in 2019, I wrote:

# pkg-static bookstrap -f

Instead of:

# pkg-static bootstrap -f

Bookstrap sounds like an independent light novel or manga publisher. Ora ora ora!

Nvidia have launched their latest 3090 Ti graphics card for the eye-watering price of a kidney donation or house deposit. Here I was worrying about whether to get a 3060 Ti, 3070, or 6800 XT when I refurbished my FreeBSD/Linux desktop last month, and now a card exists that makes even the 3090 seem ridiculous rather than unattainable.

Secure in the knowledge that I’ll never own one of these space heaters, I’m therefore more interested in the power draw, and what it represents.

This lone graphics card has a TDP of 450 watts, fed to it through three—count them, three—power connectors. That’s one more connector than I have arms. That’s a nasty pun, but will only make sense in a moment.

For comparison, the MacBook Pro on my table has a 90 watt power supply, and my first four PC clone computers and iMacs I owned had less than 250 watts each. Granted its not an apples to apples comparison, because some of them were PCs. Thank you, I’m here all week… unfortunately.

I suppose one could draw parallels (using their graphics card) to needing four connectors across two SLI cards, and that they’d draw similar power, if not more, than this single 3090 Ti. It still seems ridiculous though.

Even calling such a thing a graphics card feels like an anachronism. Nobody would be buying this card for gaming, so it’s almost certainly for parallel workloads and rendering, what people now euphemistically refer to as content creation. It’s basically a standalone computer with a PCIe slot to connect to a CPU, which at this stage is a glorified bridge to your peripherals and IO.

This is a big deal not for the card itself, but what it represents for the industry. Rumours abound that Nvidia are testing the waters with this release, pending their next-generation cards that will all ship with similar performance envelopes and power requirements. That scares me a bit, I’ll admit.

Remember when Windows 11 came out and everyone scrambled to get motherboards with TPMs to satisfy its arcane requirements? I suspect people are soon going to realise that all but the most expensive power supplies will be able to deliver the required power, consistently, for these new GPUs as well. Efficiency and ATX/SFX sizing aside, I think we’ve all got comfortable with the fact that we can pick up any power supply we want and it’ll just work. This may no longer be the case… which is the box where you’d be putting such a PSU.

We’re really starting to see a divergence here between ultra power efficient components like Apple’s M1 Max desktop SOCs, and these behemoths that throw caution and electricity to the wind in the pursuit of ultimate performance. Which leads me to wonder where the reasonable midrange will end up.

I was in a waiting room for a while last week, so I finally got around to watching Brian Deer’s 2004 documentary on Andrew Wakefield, the former English doctor who claimed vaccines cause autism. Wakefield’s 1998 press conference spurred a wave of needless controversy and press coverage, and gave ammunition to anti-vaxers that persists, and continues to kill people, to this day.

I’d always wondered where this nonsense came from, ever since I heard about it on a podcast I used to listen to. I had no idea it was so transparent and blatant, and anyone who still subscribes to it now is grossly misinformed (deliberately or otherwise).

Brian Deer uncovered that Wakefield had a legal and financial incentive in an alternative mumps, measles, and rubella (MMR) vaccine in the late 1990s. Wakefield ignored findings from his own lab that contradicted his thesis that measles in the gut caused autism. Wakefields’s co-author of the retracted Lancet paper claimed he could cure autism with his bone marrow, and his tenuous conclusions were based on a sample size of a dozen children, some of whom didn’t have autism.

(Ducks quack too, but they don’t pass themselves off as medical professionals. At least, none that I’m aware of. Not even Subaru-chan would admit to being a doctor… shuba shuba 🦆).

Wakefield is no longer permitted to practice medicine in the UK, and has relegated himself to being a conspiracy theorist in the States. This seems to be the standard career trajectory for people of his ill… pardon, ilk, when academia and the medical community have exposed your shenanigans.

But as I eluded to in the opening, this is moot given the damage has already been done. The irony is, Wakefield wasn’t anti-vax, he had a vested interest in people taking a different one. This is one of the ways that he disingenuously passes himself off as an underdog taking on the establishment to sympathetic crowds. People eat this stuff up, especially when it conforms to their worldview.

It’s up to us to make sure people don’t forget any of this. Lives are at stake.

@Chordbug wrote this excellent observation:

I think Ethernet cables are simply the most satisfying ones to plug in/out of a computer

I would tend to agree. When the clips aren’t broken or obscured by mushy plastic, they have among the most satisfying and rigid clicks. The only connector I liked more were those coax Ethernet cables you’d screw and click into place on those T-shaped bus connectors.

We had some weird connectors in my past process control life, and the main thing I remember about them was the reassuring click when connected. Think old school Centronics or SCSI port connectors, but with a latch mechanism.

QDR+ InfiniBand, Fibre Channel, and SFP transceiver plugs also feel like you’re sheathing a sword, which is a bonus.

On the other side we have USB-C, which feels mushy, imprecise, and has zapped me more than any other connector I’ve ever owned, to say nothing of its multitude of incompatible modes and cables.

Have you ever wished you could block specific images, not just keywords or text from social media? Or even RSS feeds?

Some actors did something yesterday, and it’s all the news outlets and social media cares about. Last week it was an Australian politician doing something ridiculous, with equally tedious results. One can filter such news by muting words, phrases, and names, but that doesn’t stop reposted images without alt text.

In some ways, memes are the perfect format for image blocking. The bulk of the photo necessarily doesn’t change, so the fuzziest of pattern matching tools could detect and block them.

I’d be willing to pay extra to get this! You could call it Twitter Clear, or Mastodon and RSS clients could highlight this as another differentiating feature.