Rubenerd

Clara and I were a headachey, mentally exhausted mess by Friday night, and Fauna’s stream was one of the nicest ways we’ve ever ended the week. Mumei even joined in to say hello.

Last month Bruce Schneier summarised Apple’s ill-conceived iCloud image scanning technology thusly, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head:

This was a bad idea from the start, and Apple never seemed to consider the adversarial context of the system as a whole, and not just the cryptography.

Whether you agree with Bruce’s assertion, the outcome is the same. And I see the same train of thought (or lack thereof) that he’s describing everywhere in IT. There’s this insular, prevailing attitude that you can address the tech, and people will come. Or worse, that you don’t need to consider externalities at all, because the tech can justify itself and stand on its own.

So much of the Internet, from tech journals, news sites, social media, and aggregators like Hacker News, Lobste.rs, and Reddit, spend their time talking about the technical merits of a system, to the point where ethical, moral, or business discussions devolve into technical nit picking and yak shaving. I liken it to not seeing the forest for the trees, and it’s beyond tedious.

(It was the other reason aside from spam that I turned off blog comments a decade ago. We’ll have a cure for cancer one day, and a kiasu will complain the peer-reviewed paper didn’t have its LaTeX fonts exported properly).

Those of us in this industry don’t have the luxury of theoretical physicists or Scott Morrison’s speech writers. We have to live in the real world, where our technical decisions have an impact on people’s lives. Burying one’s head in the sand and falling back on a technical detail is no longer tenable.

What concerned me about Apple’s decision, even if suspended, was that even a layperson could see the incoming ethical trainwreck and threat to people’s safety it represented. For one of the only large companies talking seriously about privacy, it represented a breach of trust. Few things are as easy to lose, and hard to earn back.

Speaking of Wouter Groeneveld, he wrote of his adventures with a portable photo printer earlier this month. It went as well as you probably expect:

I don’t get that reviews from PC Mag and others focus on the printing quality (the paper is bad, but I don’t care, and I knew that), and not on the quality and accessibility of the obligatory software that comes with it. Not a single negative word is mentioned about it: are we somehow getting used to shitty apps? Other bloggers that use it for scrapbooking seem to be generally content with the printer.

What really kills it though, is that one word. Smartphone. I cannot use my MacBook to send a picture to the mini printer. I have to use the app. This is simply ridiculous.

This is a plague. Designers are offloading their appliance UI to a smartphone app, en masse. And as Wouter points out, you know they’re not using open protocols.

I used to get the business case here, but I don’t think it holds. Embedded systems can be bought for cents on the dollar, which would be a tiny fraction of the overall cost for a complicated device like a printer or a kitchen appliance. Then there’s the time consuming cross-platform development one would need to do to build and test a tolerable mobile application across a variety of handsets (assuming they’re doing that, or we have another problem), to say nothing about keeping it maintained and current with platform updates.

(I set the bar at “tolerable” here, because we all know these apps are rubbish. And we all know they won’t be maintained, or will become abandonware in a few years. Tying the lifetime of a device to an app is quite the trick; pity about all the ewaste).

Clara and I had the same experience recently with a home laser printer. Rather than implement standard printer drivers like we’ve all had for decades, it only works when paired with a phone’s Bluetooth, or connected to your home Wi-Fi network. Why? Printers are the butt of IT jokes for their perceived flakiness, and somehow they managed to make it worse! I (almost) couldn’t believe it.

I’m also not surprised by the silence from reviewers. My bugbear I’m sure you’re all sick to death reading about is my bafflement about PC monitors and laptops. No reviewer, ever, talks about HiDPI. It’s as though they’re all stuck in 2006, when widescreens were the new shiny. You’ll read about every attribute about a monitor, but when it comes to how many pixels it has… oh yeah, it’s “Full HD” or something something, move on. Is it because they all know PC monitors are rubbish compared to Macs, or are they simply not doing their jobs?

I think it’s time to buy a new coffee grinder, or stand mixer to channel my frustration into baking instead. They don’t need a smartphone app to turn on, do they?

I’m passing this on for any of you who need it. Please read it.

Today I’m here to give you permission to stop giving a fuck about every little thing. Unless of course your life goal is to have a heart attack at forty-five, you need to stop.

Seriously, stop. Right now.

I’ll wait.

…

…

…

…

Have you done it? Stopped giving a fuck?

I don’t believe you, but that’s ok. The psychology of this isn’t that I believe you, it’s that you believe you.

Doc Searls summarised our current security situation so succinctly last Wednesday, this introduction is longer than the quote itself:

The best we can do with passwords is the best that password managers can do.

I’ve written before that even getting password managers widely adopted is an uphill battle, let alone the fact they don’t solve the root problem either. Ultimately we’re still anchoring our trust with a word or phrase (we hope) that only we know.

There are compelling alternative auth systems today, but we’re stuck in a chicken and egg scenario where widespread adoption is hampered by a lack of understanding, which exists because there’s no widespread adoption. But I feel like something has to give soon.

My blog here has been rendered with the Hugo static site generator since at least 2016. Having all my blog posts stored as plain text files, wrapped with a simple enough theme, and generated on a server makes so many things easier. Hugo cuts through my almost 8,000 blog post archive like butter, rendering it in fewer than 20 seconds. My web server is the most basic thing imaginable, because all it has to do is deliver HTML.

But my first experience with static site generation—as opposed to server-site software like WordPress or a homebrew Rails app—was Jekyll. Its upending of how sites were created spawned a cottage industry of static-site generators, and a renewed interest in simplicity over what software like WordPress had become.

Jekyll got a boost when it was used to power GitHub Pages, GitHub’s static page hosting service. Suddenly anyone could upload text to a public repo, and have a rendered site on the other side.

I loved Jekyll. I made the switch in 2013, and it forever changed how I write. The Liquid template system was a joy to use, and having all my posts in plain text meant I could use basic *nix shell tools to edit, search, organise, and process posts. I’m good with SQL, but sometimes raw text is just easier.

But why the nostalgia trip today? Unbeknownst to me, media outlets are reporting that the writing has been on the wall for Jekyll for a while. Tim Anderson reported for the Register that one of the former core developers Frank Taillandier (rest in peace) described the project as being “in frozen mode and permanent hiatus”. GitHub Pages is also stuck at version 3, despite the 4.x branch being available for years.

The official repo is still being updated though, and active discussions are ongoing, so I wouldn’t be quick to rdiscount it yet. Get it? Because that Markdown renderer that Jekyll used to use was called… oh shaddup. Much of the Register article was lifted from a blog post about the maintainer of a new Jekyll fork, so I take it with a grain of salt.

Dare I say, there’s also something to be said for mature software that does its job not needing such regular updates. I know people who continue to run and maintain Jekyll sites successfully for large clients today. I’m willing to reserve judgement for now.

The Guardian’s Datablog has an interactive map to show where we’re allowed to travel within our Sydney Covid lockdown bubble.

Zooming in, I didn’t realise we could go as far east as Northbridge within our LGA. Clara and I have ventured no further than Artarmon for months.

Mike Carter, Wouter Groeneveld, and Rebecca Hales wanted to know how I created my version of the favourite game meme. Thanks for the kind words!

It was a quick and dirty job in Inkscape, which I exported as a PNG. Each panel is transparent, so I could open it in The Gimp and put each graphic behind it without worrying about getting the dimensions exactly right. You can download the template if you want to make one of your own.

I wanted each box readable in the narrower space on my blog, and I don’t play all that many games, so I reduced the number of columns. With hindsight I should have used an HTML table so I could link to each picture, but it was a fun experiment.

Wouter also linked me to the original, which I reckon is probably still more interesting.

I don’t post about games that often, but maybe I should. I think we all could use more levity.

I’m always late with memes, but why not?

Anti-vaxxer sentiment has to be among the most counterproductive, wasteful, and pointless follies humans have ever advocated. It’s hard not to look at the current pandemic with despair, knowing that we’re dragging it out so a cohort can cut off their nose to spite their face. And for what?

There’s an element of gullibility, as with all conspiracy theories. Anti-vaxxer sources would crumble if held to the same standard as the institutions, researches, and doctors they seek to discredit. Charlatans exploit this gap by peddling their bullshit; for a price, of course. It’s also transparently easy to flip around based on the same dubious claims, such as anti-vaxxers are part of a left-wing environmentalist conspiracy to thin the world’s population to stave off climate change. The truth, as tends to be the case, is far more mundane.

But the biggest issue isn’t facts or evidence. Human emotion rarely follows either, especially when we’re dealing with a pandemic of global significance, and when politics gets its grubby hands involved. Detractors feel as though taking a vaccine is mandatory, invasive, and therefore robs them of agency and liberty.

You know what, I can empathise with this more than the bullshit merchants above. Having a government inject me with something I don’t understand, against my will, is scary. The “not understand part” can be addressed with education, and the latter is a lesson in civics.

Vaccines are a privilege. It wasn’t that long ago when we had to accept death for these sorts of diseases. It’s humbling to live in a time period where we have the medical and scientific capability to develop effective protections against these ailments. There are people without access to vaccines today that are screaming for them to protect themselves and their loved ones, who can’t understand why loud people in the West would shun them.

If you want to live in a society, you don’t shirk your responsibility when it’s under threat. It is your moral, ethical, and (dare I say) patriotic duty to be informed, and to reduce the spread of this disease. Even if you’re only doing it for selfish reasons to reduce your chances of a hospital visit, you stand a better chance if those around you are healthy as well. If you think the disease was somehow developed in a lab, or state sponsored, arming yourself with a vaccine will not let them get away with it!

Vaccines are no panacea; just as turning your lights off during The Blitz didn’t stop all the bombers, or seat belts don’t always save you from crashes. But it’s a quick, simple thing you can do, then immediately forget about and live your life. I felt awesome after getting my second shot, knowing how lucky I was that I could.

Please spread the word if you have a platform of your own, no matter how small. The only vaccine against bad ideas are good ones.