Rubenerd

Last month I talked about people who get angry or smug at those who run FreeBSD, Linux, and other OSs within VMs, with the implication that they’re not really using them. I pointed out that this was a) technically inaccurate and b) not the way to foster good will or new users in open source software communities.

(The title of that post was originally misspelled as Umbridge instead of Umbrage, which remains in the permalink. It’s the punny name I’ve given to network bridges on personal hypervisors for years, which leads me to instinctively misspell the actual word each time. It’s a bit ironic and especially silly given the topic at hand).

Most of the well-intentioned feedback I’ve had suggests that running an OS directly on a laptop teaches you things you can’t get on a VM. This is a good point; sometimes getting your hands dirty is the best way to learn. Workstation experience doesn’t directly translate to servers, but things like package managers, reading logs, and the boot process certainly would. Who knows, your experience replacing a broken btrfs volume with ZFS might translate into industry experience that will come in handy in the future.

My point wasn’t that running an OS directly on a laptop wasn’t useful, but that it shouldn’t pose a barrier to entry. I’m wary of gatekeepers in general, and this struck me as an especially counterproductive example.

It’s also a wash as far as elitism goes. The most competent, professional, talented people I’ve met at industry events, conferences, and at work all use the right tool for the job, whether they be kernel developers or pre-sales engineers. Unfortunately, that might mean carrying a Mac or Windows machine to use specific software, and a BSD or Linux VM. That VM may be sitting on your local machine or the cloud. Whether you run such an OS directly on your laptop is not indicative of anything useful, nor does it speak to technical competency.

A gentleman by the name of Miguel emailed asking if I’d read anything on /r/blogging on Reddit. I hadn’t, so I thought it was worth taking a look.

There’s some good stuff around blog themes and choosing a platform to write on. But the bulk of the posts and comments seem to be about SEO, how you can gain traffic, and monetisation. I read comments suggesting you cap the length of posts, with prescriptive detail about how you should format and compose your writing to fit.

I was a little disappointed, but I shouldn’t have been. Indie blogging platforms themselves now advertise turning audiences into businesses. Another well-known player discusses creating beautiful websites in their podcast and YouTube video reads, but say nothing about writers beyond saying it does “blogging”.

It’s all backwards.

The most important thing you can do as a blogger is write. Write about topics you’re interested in, in whatever form you want. Knowledge, experience, creativity, dedication, enthusiasm, and joy can’t be faked (for long).

All the SEO tricks and metadata in the world can’t replace or compete with content people want to read and share. I rank highly in search results for a bunch of keywords and phrases having written here for sixteen years, but I still derive more inbound traffic from people sharing what I write on social media, mailing lists, and sites like HN. I’ve been offered my last few jobs as a direct result of people reading this silly site, which have become my primary sources of income for at least the last decade. Doc Searls pointed all this out as far back as 2004.

(But even that thinking falls into the trap that you’re only worth something if you’re getting clicks or attention. Writing doesn’t need a justification).

(While I’m writing asides, I also still think SEO is snake oil. “Search engine optimised” sites comes as a positive side-effect of genuine content, accessible page structure, and correct metadata, in that order. Starting with SEO is yak shaving at best, and textbook premature optimisation at worst, in my experience).

I worry that people channel all their energy into these recommendations from places like /r/blogging, are disappointed when the results don’t meet their expectations, and give up. Then we’ve then lost another writer who would have contributed something special.

From one of their recent Good Mythical Mores:

Have you ever visited a website, attempted to scroll, and…
    …it feels really…
        …jerky and…
            …slow?

Check out the Ring of Saturn website to see what I mean. I don’t mean to pick on them specifically, it’s just a useful demonstration.

I looked at the page source, and found this ironically-named Nicescroll jQuery package which they’d imported. The official site showcases a newer version which is smoother than the above site, but is so floaty and imprecise it could make you feel seasick. The JS Fiddle is equally poor, with a visible delay between when you scroll and when the page responds.

If you use uBlock Origin or a similar plugin, you can banish it by adding the following to your blocklist:

*/jquery.nicescroll.js

Anti-patterns like this aren’t new. Certain web developers have been duplicating browser functionality in JavaScript for years, at huge cost to accessibility and page load times. It’s equal parts hilarious and tragic, like the kid who bounced a basketball into my face and bent my glasses last week. Only at least the kid didn’t try to sell the result as a vision improvement!

If this were a @ShitUserStory:

As a: website visitor
I want to: have native scrolling replaced with a JS library
So that: I can s-s-s-scroll worse.

Dr Amanda L. Giordano wrote for Psychology Today about why telling people to change doesn’t work:

Now, suppose someone approaches you and begins telling you all the reasons why you should make [a] change. [H]ow likely are you to change? If you are like the average person, not very likely at all. In fact, paradoxically, all the external pressure to make the change may actually make you less likely to change.

She raises an intersting point:

Oftentimes, a person’s most compelling reasons for making a change are linked to their personal values and goals—something that others might not know or might not fully know.

It reminds me of what Daniel E Lieberman wrote about exercise this month for The Guardian:

Myth 9: ‘Just do it’ works. Let’s face it, most people don’t like exercise and have to overcome natural tendencies to avoid it. For most of us, telling us to “just do it” doesn’t work any better than telling a smoker or a substance abuser to “just say no!” To promote exercise, we typically prescribe it and sell it, but let’s remember that we evolved to be physically active for only two reasons: it was necessary or rewarding. So let’s find ways to do both: make it necessary and rewarding.

Back to Dr Giordano, she also cites research by Miller and Rollnick in 2013 that suggests a motivational interview (MI) approach:

The heart of MI is to join with the ambivalent person and create opportunities for them to give their own reasons for making a change (you see, we are much more apt to listen to our own advice than the advice of others!). [..] Rather than falling into the predictable volley of “yes, but…” statements, MI encourages a specific communication style that invites individuals to voice their own reasons for making a change.

Some of the examples she provides from Miller and Rollnick include asking what would be the benefits of making the change? How significant is making this change to you? What would you like to be different from how things are now? If you don’t make the change, what might happen? What are the most important reasons why you would make the change?

She’s given me a lot to think about. I can see how my efforts to help people have failed by not doing this, and I’m starting to see how others offeirng to help me have fallen on deaf ears because I fell into this trap myself.

I overheard a song at a coffee shop that transported me right back to the late 1990s. Then I heard this lyric again:

Fake honey, real plastic;
What you see ain’t what you are getting.

It’s funny that we see both as bad. Authenticity isn’t as important as taste or impact. Give me real honey, and compostable, plant-based fake plastic instead, please.

(Though is it “fake” plastic if it’s still a polymer, just not based on synthetic hydrocarbons? Why do I do this to myself)?

I saw this question floating around both on Mastodon and The Bird Site yesterday, so I took it as a sign. This was also written before the Fastly incident!

The most dangerous things in tech, for personal health and safety, are malformed process control system instructions without sufficient error handling. You don’t want to tip molten steel onto a worker below because you miscalculated where an inlet was, or accidentally fire an ICBM, or hit someone in the face with a robotic arm. These have all happened, and I’ll bet more often than we’d like to think.

But if we broaden our definition of dangerous, is a sentence fragment with eight words! I come back to my recurring theme here that hubris is the most dangerous thing in tech. Here are a but a few examples:

• Everyone from UI designers to system architects thinking they know better and can discard lessons from the past. Electron, the most recent versions of macOS, and systemd come to mind, but I’m sure we could all cite dozens more.

• Blockchain pyramid schemes, and those who spruik them. They’re only useful for fleecing and extortion.

• Governments thinking that mandated cryptographic backdoors can be both mathematically feasible and impervious to exploitation.

• Sales teams that claim 100% uptime, or full fault-tolerance.

• Managers who claim the tech sector is a functional meritocracy. I’m surprised at how pervasive this still is, though I probably shouldn’t be!

• Silly people still blogging in 2021, thinking that there’s still a chance for independent media in an age of social networks and their desperate attempts to kill the likes of RSS. I’d prefer to see that as optimism ^^;.

This evening started out like any other, with the setting of the sun and a natural decrease in atmospheric temperature that accompanies that subsequent lack of sunlight. I had made my way home on the train, stepped aboard the lift in our building, and busied myself typing out a quick email to a client.

The lift arrived, the doors whirred open, and I stepped out into the lobby for my floor. I was so engrossed in the technicalities of this message that I let my muscle memory and peripheral vision guide me around the corner and down the warmly-lit corridor to our apartment. I may or may not do this regularly, when I should be paying attention to my surroundings. But that’s a mindfulness discussion for another time.

Then something started nagging at me. My surroundings didn’t feel quite right. It began with the colour temperature of the lighting being slightly off, and even some cooking smells that were unfamiliar. The carpet looked a little more worn. It was unsettling, though I still hadn’t figured out why.

It felt like I’d stepped into an alternative dimension, where everything was almost exactly the same as I expected, from the floor layout and positions of the apartment doors, to the wall light sconces and the emergency exit signs. It felt weird.

As you’ve no doubt grokked from the heading of this post, I’d made my way onto the wrong floor… and it was only until I stood at the door of what should have been Clara’s and my apartment with the wrong colour and number that I realised. Suddenly what I’d taken for granted moments before now felt foreign and unusual, and my presence felt unwelcome and hostile.

I was puzzled all the way back up to my floor. You need a swipe card to unlock your floor in the lift, and I was the only person in it before to choose a destination. I couldn’t have chosen the other floor accidentally; it would have denied me access.

Someone could have pressed the button on that lower floor to go up, then walked away without catching it when it arrived. But how often does that happen? Almost everyone only goes down from their floor to the lobby, and from the lobby back to their floor. To go up in the building from your floor, you’d need a swipe card not only for where you are, but the destination floor as well. The chances of that seem improbable under normal circumstances. Maybe the person knew someone and was borrowing their card, or were moving within the same tower.

Maybe someone caught the lift earlier and chosen the lower floor, but then got out early themselves, leaving me to leave on that floor while I wasn’t paying attention. But I was fairly sure the button panel was otherwise empty when my card activated my floor and I pressed the button.

Who knows, perhaps the security system lapsed for a moment and granted me access to a floor for which I had no authorisation. The button panel itself could have glitched and registered the wrong button, or the lift simply took me to the wrong floor. I’ve been in lifts where the doors inadvertently open halfway below the floor they’re supposed to be arriving at, and one in Malaysia that would register the floor next to the button I chose, but not my target floor. Microcontrollers aren’t perfect, and are working in the physical world where operating conditions can’t always be guaranteed.

The only other explanation is a RIP in the space-time continuum, or maybe an OSPF. I’ve been routed in the wrong direction before.

Tom Gauld is a rather excellent cartoonist for New Scientist. His most recent work lets us write an intriguing science headline, and with bonus points for invoking Betteridge’s Law of Headlines!.

Avocados are improving my pancreas, by Elon Musk is clearly altering all our sourdough. Damned Tik-Tok.

Derek Thompson interviewed Jordan Ellenberg about his new book Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else. Alongside a discussion on how many holes a pair of pants has, this was my favourite observation:

Pizza has a surface with zero curvature, which means a slice resists bending both vertically and horizontally at the same time (unlike the double curvature of, say, a Pringle chip). Your brain intuits this without any assistance from geometric theory. But the theory exists anyway. In 1827, Carl Friedrich Gauss proved the Theorema Egregium—roughly “Awesome Theorem”—which, extremely simplified, says that you can’t change an object’s curvature and keep its geometry intact. An orange peel has positive curvature, and you can’t flatten it without ripping or stretching the peel. Paper has zero curvature, and you can’t fold it into the shape of an orange. A piece of pizza is like a piece of paper: Fold it horizontally, and it will not droop vertically.

And this was the best among my “wait… huh!” moments:

[A]n irrational number is a real number that you can’t write as a simple fraction. The golden ratio turns out to be the most irrational of all the irrational numbers. That is, it’s the hardest to approximate with a fraction. Pi is irrational, but a mathematician discovered that you can get very close to pi with a simple fraction: 355 divided by 113. That’s much harder to do for the golden ratio.