Rubenerd

The last couple of weeks have been rough, but both Clara and I were in tears with laugher over these recent Hololive Council streams. Thank you!

Do you need to contribute code to an open source project to be granted permission to critique it? I saw the latest theme limitations in GNOME have generated legitimate concern, which in turn have lead to the metric of contributions being used to put people in their place. If you don’t contribute code, you don’t get a say. It’s as simple as that.

Leaving aside documentation, QA testing, security audits, reviews, graphic design, financial assistance, project management, and the litany of other ways people contribute to open source, it’s a bizarre and self-defeating position to take (can you have an opinion on a book you didn’t write, or a movie you didn’t direct?). But its one I can empathise with to an extent.

Being an open source developer can be a thankless, tiring job. The web is replete with articles discussing maintainer burnout stemming from long hours, little recognition, and an over-dependence on their code. Open source was supposed to foster collaboration, but predictably most businesses see it as a source of free code to pilfer. OpenSSL was a tragic example of the industry taking critical software, and its developers, for granted.

Open source projects like GNOME have corporate backers and salaried staff writing code, given its use in OSs like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu that offer paid support packages. But even if it didn’t, and it was just the proverbial developers in a basement scenario, there are real people behind the software we use.

But that attitude and desire for respect cuts both ways. Enthusiasts aside, real people use software to solve a problem or complete a task. They’re exactly the ones who can provide the most valuable feedback for how software works in the real world. Those people are your advocates, and also your potential future contributors. Gatekeeping someone’s feedback on the grounds they have insufficient green squares on GitHub is a guaranteed way to evaporate good will. Proprietary software vendors would love nothing more.

My younger, naive self assumed the collaborative nature of open source software would be a self-correcting mechanism for bad behaviour. After all, many of these projects don’t have the deep pockets and yachts to absorb the impact of churn and treating people poorly, and their users are getting something for free for which they should be thankful. We can still get to that point, but it’ll take respect from both sides.

It doesn’t feel any warmer on our lockdown balcony, but I’m hotly (hah!) anticipating some milder weather and the pretty foilage. Foliage? There’s a Simpsons reference there somewhere. 🍀

I’ve been back in Australia for almost a decade now, but seasons are still a novelty. In Singapore it was either more damp than normal, or a bit drier than normal. It sure made my wardrobe lighter.

Jan-Piet Mens reminded me of Unix Text Processing, by Dale Dougherty and Tim O’Reilly of wood-cut animal fame. I’ve had the PDF of this book in my home directory for almost as long as I can remember, alongside the Camel Book and many of Michael W Lucas’s Mastery tomes.

I forgot that it’s available under a Creative Commons licence to download! You owe it to yourself to get a copy. The introducion to Unix alone is worth it.

Read any news article about a major system breach or data leak, and you’ll see the terms security and privacy bandied around as though they’re either equivalent, or that handing the former necessarily addresses the latter. Neither are true, and we risk confusing both issues by misusing their terms like this.

Computer security concerns the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of a given resource. On the other hand, you have different fingers. Privacy is also concerned with confidentiality, but to the extent where you’re only disclosing information to people you intend. This is an important distinction, because a secure system doesn’t guarantee privacy.

The most visible example is law enforcement. Surveillance might be secure, sanctioned, and authorised, but the privacy of the user isn’t maintained. Ad tech and online tracking use secure protocols like TLS, but their surreptitious trading of user data violates privacy.

Likewise, you can have a security breach where privacy is maintained. Disrupting the availability of a resource with a DDoS attack impacts security, but data that’s encrypted at rest isn’t compromised, and therefore the privacy of the end user is maintained.

A secure system can be asset for ensuring privacy, if it’s a design priority or requirement. But I’d ask people who write about both issues to be more careful. There are actors out there who’d like very much for us to assume security automatically equals privacy.

@dorothyho on The Bird Site reminded me of What’s My Starbucks Name, a fabulous site that invites you to tell a barista your name and see what gets written on your cup.

I’ve written many times here my frustration at how people treat retail staff, especially those in high-traffic stores like coffee shops. It’s inevitable that underappreciated and overworked people will make mistakes with names from time to time. It’s especially true in melting pots like Singapore where it’s normal to be speaking in a lingua franca that’s not either of the speakers’ first languages, so you’re interpreting accents as well as muffled voices in a busy and loud setting.

I bring it up though because of that meme that circulated in 2016 that Starbucks baristas spell your name wrong on purpose. The source video (which I won’t link to) made some dubious claims that spread across all the typical mainstream media outlets without much fact checking. Maybe because the story was so believable.

Speaking from my own experience, “Ruben” isn’t a rare name, but it’s sufficiently unusual that I’ve had everything from “Ribbon”, “Rupert”, “Robert”, and “Renee”. I abbreviated it to Ben, which became Bin and Pen. Curiously, Kopitiams, and indie coffee houses almost never spelled it wrong… or did away with names entirely and used numbers. The data scientist in me appreciates the resulting reduction in collisions.

Move aside every Korean horror film, I had something ghastly and terrifying happen to me today that eclipses them all. I can already tell the experience will become a fixture of my weekly nightmare routine, alongside such memorable dreams as needing to get to the airport but having too much stuff to fit in my luggage, and not knowing where my passport is.

I was preparing for a video conference call, which is the new way to do business during These Times. I have the drill down pat on account of doing a few million of these a month. I start the conference bridge, take a sip of water, orient myself correctly in my chair, do a few shoulder rolls, prop my phone on the stand within eye shot, make sure I haven’t bumped the camera off kilter, then wait for my colleagues and the client to appear.

This time started like any other. One of the clients was early, so we got down to some small talk. He appreciated the weather too, missed being able to come up to Sydney, and apologised for his unkempt hair. I appreciated that neither of us were in collared shirts. We laughed, and I excused myself to get some water and wait for everyone else to join.

I hit the mute button on the conference bridge software. Nothing happened.

I pressed it again. Still nothing, my audio remained active.

I smashed it again, this time with enough force that I was surprised my mouse remained in one piece. Nothing.

I’m in a room with Clara who also works full time and has to take conference calls. Sometimes I have to sneeze, or take a drink of water. Nobody needs to hear that. Now I was facing the prospect that I’d be live, on air, the entire time.

It hadn’t occurred to me before just how much I’d come to rely on the ability to silence myself, or remove my video for a moment. If we’re going to be stuck working remote and using these tools all the time, at the very least we could get some perks. But now, there I was, in full broadcast mode, and for a call in which I wasn’t even the primary participant.

I caught myself wanting to mute many more times during that arduous call. I had to signal to Clara to be quiet, and I didn’t have time to explain why, which made me feel like a dick.

We were all lucky that I didn’t have to mute for anything serious during that call. But I was on edge the whole time. Never again!

Did Clara and I save the best new Hololive Council member’s debut stream for last? I don’t know, they’ve all been spectacular in their own way. Today’s painfully late review is Hakos Baelz, everyone’s favourite harbinger of chaos.

What can I say, is a phrase with four words. Bae’s intro was marked with another familiar accent that dipped into Australian, but her creative energy had her jumping into a mock Californian, and her amazing Japanese (sorry, まだまだです doesn’t fly here)! I’d be fascinated to learn if her actor learned English in Australia, or whether she’s from here originally. Yis!

I thought her debut stream was easily the most creative of all the new Council members. The way she set up those multiple choice questions, only to scribble all over them when it came to pay tribute to her senpais, it was masterfully done! Just as we first felt with Gura at the start, we could tell that she’d either done her homework, or was as much of a fan of the franchise as the rest of us. That enthusiasm makes all the difference.

I like to think her character design pays homage to the OG Kureiji Ollie from Hololive Indonesia, but is also thoroughly unique. Her rigging and design were all so expressive, and all the detail around her hair would prove to be a real asset in later Garlic [sic] phone episodes! I think her floofy detached sleeves and socks are my favourite part of her design. Why are you telling me floofy isn’t a word, Vim?

She has an 8-bit OP and uses Fixedsys in her graphics! She drinks coffee (you’d have to with that level of energy) and promised to do coffee review streams! She has an infectious laugh and a great sense of humour. But what cinched it for me was her rendition of “Fuwa Fuwa Time” from K-On!, one of my all-time favourite anime and manga series, and one that means a lot given what was happening in my life at the time. I won’t beat around the bush here, I choked up.

She was advertised as being chaos, and gave off big energy, but this and her subsequent coffee and chill streams have already shown another side that I can appreciate and respecc [sic]. Her streams have been so good for so many different reasons, it’s fun to see what side we get each time. That’s the mark of a fantastic, well-developed character. 🧀

Alphas aside, that’s it for the Hololive Council debut stream reviews! I felt bad that I never wrote ones for the original English or second-gen Indonesian characters when I got into the fandom. I suppose it’s never too late to do a retrospective!

You’ve likely noticed the world is a bit shit right now. If you’re tired of Netflix and need something fun to chill too, consider giving some of the Hololive characters a try. Clara and I are so glad to have fallen down this rabbit rodent hole. ♡

Back in July I wrote about that silly little Compaq tower I always wanted as a kid, and my process to convert the empty case into a sleeper PC. On the weekend I decided to review GPU options, like a gentleman.

My aim is to have:

• The ish factor. A budget(ish) card that can play the few world building and simulation games I care about on medium(ish) settings, and otherwise work well for daily desktop use.

• 230 cm or shorter (ideally 220 cm), to fit inside the case. My OC’d GTX 960 from my last build would probably have still been fine here, but alas it’s too long.

• Comperable or better performance than the 8 GiB Radeon Pro 5500M in my MacBook Pro, or the aforementioned “4 GiB” GTX 960. I figured that shouldn’t be too hard.

• Nvidia, not AMD. Regardless of which you think is better, Nvidia have better binary FreeBSD drivers, and certain older games like Train Simulator hang on modern Radeon cards, which sucks.

2019’s GTX 1660 Super looks like it’d be the best balance of the above. It is slightly above what I’d be willing to pay, though the prices get much sillier after that. There also seem to be a lot of second-hand cards with a shorter profile, without going all-in with a low-profile card that would have less (and therefore louder) cooling.

Insert obligatory comment about how much crypo-“currency” miners have ruined the world here!

I was struck this morning by a thought, and a bird. The latter appeared out of nowhere on our little balcony and swiped at my hat, before being startled and flapping away. The former was borne of reading, an activity that’s just as perilous depending on the material in question. Not in this case though, which leads me to the conclusion that this entire opening paragraph was pointless. Just like birds who think a flatcap is a threat to be neutralised, or a comestible to be eaten.

I’d been reading up on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine that Clara and I have now had two shots of, and ended up on the Wikipedia article on obligate nasal breathing. Obligate sounds like a Beatles song, in which the singers opine that life goes on. Obligate, obligate, life goes on, WAH! Ah na-na-na life goes on. Those lyrics are apt given the aforementioned form of breathing’s role in our continued survival.

I grew up saying wah in Singapore, but I hear Ina whenever WAH comes up. Hololive has taken over my life over the last year, and I’m all the better for it. Wah.

If you’ll stop interrupting me, I’m sure we’ve all realised that breathing though our mouth is less desirable than our nose. Having a blocked nose always results in a sore throat and loss of taste when we switch to our backup failsafe mode of breathing. It’s not fun, though better than the alternative.

One of my silly sci-fi novellas in high school used an alien species’ inability to breathe through their mouth as a plot device. They had a non-invasive contraption in their pockets at all times that would allow them to breathe if a nasal blockage or other complication was encountered. Humans had reverse-engineered them to allow us to breathe underwater, but ran into dependency issues where subjects couldn’t wean themselves off using them after they’d started. My English teacher said it was a derivative and uninteresting idea, but it was at least believable based on how we humans react. That’s my blog in a nutshell, now that I think about it.

Getting back to nasal breathing though, I didn’t realise it conferred all these benefits:

According to Jason Turowski, MD of the Cleveland Clinic, “we are designed to breathe through our noses from birth — it’s the way humans have evolved.” This is because it is the job of the nose to filter out all of the particles that enter the body, as well as to humidify the air we breathe [..] and warm it to body temperature. In addition, nasal breathing produces nitric oxide within the body while mouth breathing does not.

The more you nose.