Frank Turner is a musician I've listened to in the past but had forgotten about recently until I read a story on Boing Boing about him trying to break the world record for most concerts performed in different cities in 24 hours.

The video of his most recent single, "Do One", was embedded in the page. Love the message, love the song. The acoustic version is even better in my opinion.

This clip from Tommy Tiernan's Cracked show is around 20 years old but sounds like it could have been written today.

Peter O'Mahony's reaction to John Hodnett's answer to a question is priceless.

Sony Animation released a short film this week based in the Miles Morales universe. I love the Spider-Verse series. The animation is stunning and the writing matches it.

This film follows Miles and how he deals with anxiety. It features a couple of examples of good parenting. It's a great watch.

Ed Zitron is the CEO of EZPR, a public relations firm based in Las Vegas. He's best known to me as the most entertaining critic when it comes to technology, particularly Silicon Valley technology companies. His newsletter, Where's Your Ed At, and podcast, Better Offline, are both worth subscribing to.

He made 2 memorable podcast appearances this week. The first was as a replacement for Leo Laporte, who is on holidays, on This Week in Google on the TWiT podcast network. The second was as a guest on the Tech Won't Save Us podcast hosted by Paris Marx.

Ed can be too caustic for some people. He can be insulting about people he doesn't like and is more confrontational when products don't meet the hype. There is a danger in this approach that you can be too dismissive of new technology that is not ready for prime time. However, he seems to be right about cryptocurrencies and the metaverse at this point in time. I'm not sure he's wrong about AI yet.

One of the topics covered included an interesting story from The Information about Amazon and Google trying to quietly bring down expectations on generative AI.

I came across this clip from CNN about the fact checking team for the ESPN show, Pardon the Interruption. PTI is a sports discussion show where 2 people, normally sportswriters Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon, debate the sports topics of the day. At the time, Tony Reali had a segment at the end of the show to make corrections to inaccuracies or omissions made during the broadcast.

It's an interesting idea that could be more widely used. Getting sports statistics correct is easier than digging through the intricacies and spin involved in something like a political debate.

ESPN show keeps itself honest

As people know, I'm a huge Cory Doctorow fan. He has 18 titles for sale as a Humble Book Bundle to raise funds for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). You can get all 18 for €16.75 so it's a great chance to get some good books for a good price to support a good cause. The offer will end around the 23rd of March so there's a little over 12 days to get them.

The Markup published an interview of Dorothy Gambrell by Gabriel Hongsdusit, the visual designer of site. It covers a number of topics including the importance of publishing to your own site even as your audience move towards platforms and how publishing on the Internet has changed since she started writing Cat and Girl in 1999.

The main topic of the interview is Gambrell's response to finding out her art was used to train Midjourney, an AI image generation model. She wrote a beautiful piece about her journey as an artist that captures the struggle to make work that you find meaningful and the fear of that work being taken and abused.

I've included it below under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. The final 6 frames are heartbreaking.

This letter made me to the Irish Times made me laugh. I have family in the farming community in rural Ireland and they agreed with the sentiment.

Decoder had a great episode where Hank Green interviewed Nilay Patel, the Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, about his experience of building and maintaining the business. It covers a lot of topics like the state of the media nowadays, why creating content for platforms can be a mistake and the importance of distribution channels.

The Verge focused on their website and building a sense of community that attracted people back to the site. There are many media companies that suffered by allowing social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube to act as intermediaries between them and their audience. Email and RSS feeds, while not likely to go viral, can provide a more sustainable foundation for businesses to build on.

This does not mean ignoring social media. It builds on the POSSE (Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) concept promoted by IndieWeb.

A story that stood out is one where Patel was traveling with Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft. They were going through the list of things that Nadella had done during the day. Patel asked how he got so much done. Nadella looked at him and said:

It's your time. You have to be selfish about it.

Satya Nadella according to Nilay Patel (Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future/Decoder)

This reminds me of a quote:

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.

Seneca

Maria Popova wrote a piece on The Marginalian on Seneca and the Shortness of Life that expands on his thinking about this subject.

Damien Dempsey was interviewed on The Fresh Batch podcast and sang Jim Larkin's favourite song, "The Rising of the Moon", towards the end of the episode. This is a similar arrangement on YouTube. A great song for a session.

404 Media published a concerning report that they have obtained internal documents from Automattic that they are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI. Automattic is the parent company of WordPress and Tumblr.

This blog is published using WordPress.com for hosting. I'm going to have to see if there is an opt-out option and to read the terms and conditions attached to that option. If that option is available, I would hope opt-out would be the default option. People should be able to opt-in if they want to. Subterfuge shouldn't need to be used.

A concern raised in the report is that when compiling a data dump from Tumblr for Midjourney/OpenAI, Cyle Gage (a product manager at Tumblr) stated that some data was included that shouldn't have been such as:

• private posts on public blogs
• posts on deleted or suspended blogs
• unanswered asks (normally these are not public until they’re answered)
• private answers (these only show up to the receiver and are not public)
• posts that are marked ‘explicit’ / NSFW / ‘mature’ by our more modern standards (this may not be a big deal, I don’t know)
• content from premium partner blogs (special brand blogs like Apple’s former music blog, for example, who spent money with us on an ad campaign) that may have creative that doesn’t belong to us, and we don’t have the rights to share with this-parties; this one is kinda unknown to me, what deals are in place historically and what they should prevent us from doing.

Tumblr and Wordpress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools (Sam Cole/404 Media)

The benefit of having my own site is that I can move if I feel like I need to. I'll have to consider other options whether it's moving to a new platform like Ghost or by finding another hosting service.

It is disappointing to see Automattic moving in this direction. They have described themselves as the guardians of the open web but this decision will have people considering whether to remove their Tumblrs or blogs to avoid it being included in a training set for a large language model.

The promise of the open web was that it allowed people to connect with each other in a new way. As Gita Jackson wrote:

The internet has been broken in a fundamental way. It is no longer a repository of people communicating with people; increasingly, it is just a series of machines communicating with machines.

The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit (Gita Jackson/Aftermath)

This decision by Automattic, if it is true, will make this problem worse in the short term. There's no guarantee that it will improve in the medium to long term either. Companies like OpenAI have made great promises of progress in the past only to renege on them when it suited. Unfortunately, I have little faith that this will be any different.

I could be wrong. I hope that I am.

One of the wonderful things about cover versions is how they can introduce a new audience to an old artist. They can also introduce old audiences to new artists. I had never heard of Luke Combs when he covered Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" in 2023. Chapman and Combs performed a beautiful duet of the song on during the Grammys in 2024.

Kara Swisher devoted an episode of her podcast, On with Kara Swisher, to the resurgence of interest in Chapman's self-titled debut album since the Combs cover was released titled "Tracy Chapman's Timeless Earworms". Timeless as an apt descriptor because the most notable aspect of Combs' version is how little he changed. It's close to the original version but the song is so good that it can stand on its own over 30 years after it was written.

Hat tip to Yogthos and Brian Krebs for sharing this on Mastodon. It made me laugh.

Josh Wyatt's cover of "Standing Outside the Fire" by Garth Brooks is good.

2023 was a brutal year for layoffs in tech and 2024 has not improved the situation. It can be an incredibly difficult time especially if this is the first time you've been laid off. I was laid off from my first job in tech a decade ago and it's only recently that I've come to realize how much it affected me psychologically.

I came across this series from Joey deVilla, who was laid off from his job as a Senior Developer Advocate for Okta earlier this month. This advice is incredibly important to remember.

If you’ve been laid off — and especially if you’ve been laid off for the first time — you will blame yourself for being laid off. This post is just for you, and it can be summed up as this: you’re probably facing the consequences of someone else’s mistakes.

Laid off in 2024, part 10: Unearned consequences (Joey deVilla/Global Nerdy)

It is hard to reconcile the number of layoffs with the vast profits that the large tech companies have announced over the past few months. It feels unnecessary but it is important to remember that is also a tactic to reset salary expectations in this job market.

I've done a couple of interviews a year to research what the interview process is and how it has changed over time. It is not a process I have ever enjoyed.

Wishing anyone entering the job market all the best.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.

The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion)

Penn Jillette has written and spoken about why he was a libertarian in the past. I came across this quote in an interview on Cracked about his attitude to libertarianism has changed recently.

Many times when I identified as Libertarian, people said to me, “It’s just rich white guys that don’t want to be told what to do,” and I had a zillion answers to that — and now that seems 100 percent accurate.

Penn Jillette Wants to Talk It All Out (Tim Grierson/Cracked)

I came across this quote on a post from Jason Kottke's site.

Especially since most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That’s libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)

Twitter blocked searches on Taylor Swift's name last week. The reason: explicit AI-generated images had gone viral on the social media site. This is not a new phenomenon. It did remind me of a depressing quote from Scarlett Johansson when she spoke to the Washington Post about this issue in 2018.

Nothing can stop someone from cutting and pasting my image or anyone else’s onto a different body and making it look as eerily realistic as desired... The fact is that trying to protect yourself from the Internet and its depravity is basically a lost cause... The Internet is a vast wormhole of darkness that eats itself.

Fake-porn videos are being weaponized to harass and humiliate women: ‘Everybody is a potential target’ (Drew Harwell/The Washington Post, December 30, 2018)

Cory Doctorow delivered the Marshall McLuhan lecture in Berlin on January 30th, 2024. It was recorded and posted on YouTube. There are also contributions from Frederike Kaltheuner and Helen Starr.

transmediale McLuhan Lecture 2024 with Cory Doctorow and Frederike Kaltheuner.

The Second Captains Podcast had an episode about the murder of Sean Brown, the chairman of Bellaghy Wolfe Tones GAA club in May 1997. He was locking up the pitch after a committee meeting when he was abducted, beaten and shot by the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF). No one has been convicted for the crime. The PSNI have apologised to the family about the inadequacies of their investigation.

The Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill came into force in 2023 and stipulates that all legacy inquests must be completed by May 1st, 2024. Any inquests that are open on this date will immediately end. The bill was opposed by all 5 main political parties in Northern Ireland and the Irish government has launched a legal challenge to the European Court of Human Rights.

Siobhan and Damán Brown outline the slow progress of the inquest so far and that PSNI and MOD were not meeting deadlines in regards to releasing documentation necessary to complete the inquest. They are afraid that they are stalling until the deadline passes. They do not believe that the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR) will provide the truth that they seek.

They wish to see the inquest finished or, failing that, a public inquiry.

Siobhan Brown read from the club statement from the Bellaghy Wolfe Tones GAC which is scathing in its criticism of the PSNI and the British State. It finishes:

We respectfully request that this correspondence is considered by all units of our Association, at both club and county level, and we ask each club member in Ireland, as you are locking your club gates in the evening, consider – if the same thing were to happen at your club, would you accept this sort of treatment? For your family? Your community? Is this how you would want your memory to be treated?

A STATEMENT IN SUPPORT OF THE FAMILY OF OUR ESTEEMED FORMER CHAIRMAN, SEAN BROWN. (Bellaghy Wolfe Tones GAC)

I ran into an issue with a Windows laptop I was using for work. The internet connection dropped. I tried restarting my laptop but that didn't work.

I then tried using the troubleshooter under Settings to see if that would improve matters. Once the troubleshooter was finished then only option I could see in the Network options was Airplane Mode. Uh oh.

I tried an number of approaches with no joy but I came across this article that provided a good step by step approach to fix the issue. If you have a Windows machine and all the Wi-Fi options disappear then this is a good starting point if you're trying to fix the problem yourself.

The guys on The QAnon Anonymous Podcast had Arif Hasan on to discuss Aaron Rodgers evolution over the past few years. It's an interesting listen if you're into that sort of thing.

QAnon Anonymous Episode 263: Aaron Rodgers feat Arif Hasan

Keith Kurson wrote a great blog post about blogging and provides a number of links to help people to get started.

The advice he gives about starting a blog is great.

1. Share your thoughts on whatever. You’re a blogger, not an opinion columnist in the washington post.
2. Change your mind! Write about why you changed your mind!
3. Write however you want. Run-on sentences. Weird grammar. Write in limericks, sonnets, or haikus – defy the grammar cops.

You should blog (Keith Kurson)

Have some fun!

Éanna Burke's winning point for St. Thomas in the All-Ireland club final yesterday was one of the best scores I have ever seen. Check it out here.

George Orwell died on this day, January 21st, in 1950. Maria Popova shared a couple of post from her website, The Marginalian, worth reading.

• George Orwell on Writing and the Four Questions Great Writers Must Ask Themselves
• Haunting Illustrations for Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ Introduced by the Courageous Journalist Who Broke the Edward Snowden Story

Dare Obansanjo (a great follow on Mastodon) shared a LinkedIn post from Diane Hirsh Theriault, a staff software engineer at Google. The atmosphere at Google sounds grim. The fact that Sundar Pichai notified Google employees that there will be more layoffs this year wouldn't have helped.

This post does run into the danger of reading too much into one person's opinion. However, this is not the first instance I've heard of people complaining about the leadership and lack of morale in Google. Praveen Seshadri wrote this in a Medium post after he left Google last year.

The way I see it, Google has four core cultural problems. They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called “Ads” that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins.

(1) no mission, (2) no urgency, (3) delusions of exceptionalism, (4) mismanagement.

The maze is in the mouse (Praveen Seshadri/Medium)

That's a real indictment of the culture and management in Google.

A couple of things stood out from the LinkedIn post to me.

1. Leadership, or lack thereof, is a major problem

Theriault starts her post like this:

My hot take: Google does not have one single visionary leader. Not a one. From the C-suite to the SVPs to the VPs, they are all profoundly boring and glassy-eyed.

Diane Hirsh Theriault on LinkedIn

and it only gets worse from there. There appears to be a lack of direction and a problem with communication. People are being let go seemingly at random which is disrupting functioning teams.

Google has had the benefit of the money machine that is their search for such a long time that they have taken their eye off the ball in terms of new products.

The Google Graveyard is a real problem because whenever Google launches a new service, people are not using it because it could be gone again in a few years. I don't trust Google to maintain their services. That has become their brand to me.

2. There is a fine line between excitement in work and exploitation

There is a pervasive sense of nihilism that has taken hold. "Well, I guess I will just do the job until they fire me." A lot of people have golden handcuffs situations and aren't going to walk away from the salary, but nobody works late anymore. The buildings are half empty at 4:30. I know a lot of people, myself included, who used to happily do extra work evenings and weekends to get the demo done or just out of boredom. That's gone. 

Diane Hirsh Theriault on LinkedIn

I work in the IT industry and I enjoy my job. I have done the long evenings and weekend work. I regret some of that now.

There are times when extra hours are required. Sometimes you just need to drive through to hit a deadline.

When I see people being encouraged to stay late by peer pressure when there is not urgency to the work, that is a red flag for the workplace. What I regret from working in environments like these is that all my social relationships were tied to work. Companies that encourage this behaviour will drain every drop of effort they can from their employees.

The problem is that, oftentimes, I enjoyed myself while working. There's a real feeling of accomplishment when completing a project or learning a new language, framework or technology. There was a sense of camaraderie that developed in teams when hitting targets we weren't expected to. Most times, we didn't receive any benefit. Maybe a pat on the back, some drinks and dinner. Then get back to work.

If you find yourself in a situation like this, take stock if this is something you want. Is this a temporary work schedule? Is this expected even during quieter times during the year? Can you keep working this way until retirement? What will it do to your relationships?

If you plan to be in this industry for the long haul, consider what is sustainable for you. Keep adjusting that baseline as you get older. You could say life gets in the way. That's wrong. Life is what's important but work can get in the way of that.

"You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype" by Lee Vincel is an essay I return to often. It was the first place I heard of the term "criti-hype".

Criti-hype breaks down as critics of a certain technology warning of the worst case scenario of its adoption end up advertising its features rather than looking at the real world problems happening today. As Lee Vincel puts it:

It’s as if they take press releases from startups and cover them with hellscapes.

You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype (Lee Vincel/Medium)

It's important to keep criti-hype in mind when extraordinary claims are being made by technology companies about how their new invention will disrupt an industry. Uber spoke of making transit cheaper and more efficient by allowing people to act as taxi drivers on their commute home or in their spare time. A few years later,

Uber's bezzle destroyed local taxis and local transit – and replaced them with worse taxis that cost more.

No, Uber's (still) not profitable (Cory Doctorow/Pluralistic)

AI has been the new technology in the hype machine for the past year. As Lee Vincel writes:

More recently, “AI” is the area of technology that has likely experienced the greatest amount of criti-hype. As Yarden Katz and others have argued, “AI” is really best thought of as a rebranding exercise: around 2017–2018, corporations using “AI” to describe things that had previously been known by other faddish terms, like “Big Data.”

...

First, criti-hype helps create a lousy information environment and lends credibility to industry bullshit. In Bubbles and Crashes, Brent Goldfarb and David Kirsch write about the role of narratives in creating speculative bubbles around new technologies. When academics engage in criti-hype, they lend more authority to these narratives.

Here is one example of how credibility-lending can work: McKinsey says 60 percent of occupations would have 1/3 of their activities automated by “AI.” Let’s be real. McKinsey says this because it sells consulting services to firms and wants executives in those firms to believe they will be soon be dealing with a radically transformed environment. In other words, McKinsey wants to scare the shit out of us.

You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype (Lee Vincel/Medium)

That is not to say that there is no utility from AI and large language models. I've tested out some AI assistants and there are some useful aspects to them. Sometimes they speed up my work process but I've found they have slowed me down more often.

That is also not to say there is no risk to employment from AI. As Cory Doctorow said:

I also think that out bosses have proved over and over again, indeed since the Industrial Revolution, they're happy to replace skilled labourers who make good things with machines that make substandard things.

IBM Predicts AI Job Disruption (Cory Doctorow on This Week in Tech)

The nature of the technology is hype and change. The next thing is the next "big" thing. Get in early so you don't get left behind. Look at the guys who got in early on the previous "big" thing. In times like these, I try to remember the Gartner hype cycle and wonder where we are on the chart before I get too excited about the next thing.

Yanis Varoufakis appeared on the Keen On podcast with Andrew Keen to talk about his new book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. It is an interesting conversation but I found an answer that Varoufakis gave to be bleak when thinking of how society is structured around these digital platforms. When he speaks of digital fiefdoms, he means platforms like Amazon and Facebook.

Within the digital fiefdoms of the 21st century, you are not even a subject. You are certainly not a citizen but you're not even a subject. You are only a resource and an asset to be stripped by the owner. In other words, you have even fewer rights under technofeudalism that you would have had under feudalism. At least under feudalism you could petition your lord and be heard occasionally. Today, this is simply impossible. You enter one of these digital fiefdoms and the algorithm, on behalf of the owner, is matching you to individuals whether they are sellers or other users in a manner which maximizes the rent extractive capacity of the owner of the algorithm. And that's it. You are not a citizen. You are not a subject. You are little bit like in The Matrix, the movie, humans who had been turned into batteries or solar panels providing energy and heat to the system. In this case, the system being cloud capital.

What killed capitalism? Yanis Varoufakis' murder mystery about the death of capitalism and our descent into "techno feudalism"

Sam Kriss wrote a funny review of Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk in The Point. The part that stood out the most was Kriss' opinion of Isaacson.

Walter Isaacson is the perfect writer for the biographies of our times because he appears to be a born sycophant, and fate decreed that he would be in the right position, at the right moment, to spread as much propagandistic bullshit as possible. After stints at Harvard, Oxford, the Sunday Times and Time magazine—Christopher Hitchens called him “one of the best magazine journalists in America”—Isaacson was appointed CEO at CNN in July 2001. During the first phase of the war in Afghanistan, he sent his staff a memo, warning them not “to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” Every mention of people being vaporized in their homes by U.S. bombers had to be “balanced” with reminders that these were the people responsible for 9/11. “You want to make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there, it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.” Later, he told PBS that he wasn’t really so jingoistic: CNN initially tried reporting on the casualties in Afghanistan, but then they received some pushback. “You would get phone calls,” he said. “Big people in corporations were calling up and saying, you’re being anti-American here.” So he caved. What else was he supposed to do? Follow the demands of human dignity even in the face of mild, non-life-threatening opposition? Don’t be ridiculous.

Very Ordinary Men: Elon Musk and the court biographer (Sam Kriss/The Point)

Scathing.

Meredith Whitaker, the President of Signal and chief advisor to the AI Now Institute, appeared on the Big Technology Podcast and she had some interesting things to say about OpenAI, Microsoft and the hype that has built around AI since the release of ChatGPT.

ChatGPT itself is not an innovation. It's an advertisement that was very, very expensive that was placed by Microsoft to advertise the capacities of generative AI and to advertise their Azure GPT APIs that they were selling after effectively absorbing OpenAI as a Microsoft subsidiary. But the technology or frameworks on which ChatGPT are based are dated from 2017.

So, Microsoft puts up this ad, everyone gets a little experience of communicating with something that seems strikingly like a sentient interlocutor. You have a supercharged chat bot that everyone can experience and have a kind of story about. It's a bit like those viral "upload your face and we'll tell you what kind of person you are" data collection schemes that we saw across Facebook in the 2010s and then an entire narrative of innovation or a narrative of scientific progress gets built around this sort of ChatGPT moment.

Suddenly generative AI is the new kind of AI. Suddenly claims about sentience and about the superintelligence and AI being on the cusp of breaking into full consciousness and perhaps, endangering human life. All of this almost like religious rhetoric builds up in response to ChatGPT.

I'm not a champion of Google but I think we need to be very careful about how are we defining innovation and how are we defining progress in AI because what I'm seeing is a reflexive narrative building around what is a very impressive ad for a large, generative language model but not anything we should understand as constitutionally innovative.

Meredith Whitaker on ChatGPT

She also talks about the dangers of trusting the models to return factual information.

I didn't say useless. I said not that useful in most serious contexts or that's what I think. If it's a low stakes lit review, a scan of these docs could point you in the right direction. It also might not. It also might miss certain things because you're looking for certain terms but actually, there's an entire field of the literature that uses different terms and actually if you want to research this and understand it, you should do the reading.

Not maybe trust a proxy that is only as good as the data it's trained on and the data it's trained on is the internet plus whatever fine-tuning data you're using.

I'm not saying it's useless, I'm saying it is vastly over-hyped and the claims that are being made around it are I think leading to a regulatory environment that is a bit disconnected from reality and to a popular understanding of these technologies that are far over-credulous about the capabilities.

Any serious context where factuality matters is not somewhere where you can trust one of these systems.

Meredith Whitaker on AI Hype and Doing the Reading

I remember Ezra Klein talking about the importance of doing the reading and the connections that can be formed in your mind as the material becomes more familiar to you. That depth of knowledge can provoke insights to create something new or to improve an existing service. Loading all your books into an expert system does not help this type of thinking if you never read them yourself.

Productivity in knowledge work is still incentivized to produce more volume rather than more quality. There's great story about Bill Atkinson when Apple decided to track the productivity by the number of lines of code that they wrote in a week. According to Folklore.org:

Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.

He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw's region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.

-2000 Lines Of Code (Andy Hertzfeld/Folklore.org)

I'm afraid that the diligence and craft displayed by Bill Atkinson would not be rewarded today when developers are encouraged to crank out as much code as possible using GitHub Copilot or some other AI assistant.

Justin Garrsion wrote a really interesting article on how Amazon have used their return to office (RTO) policy to quietly lay people off. I heard about while listening to his interview on The Changelog podcast "Amazon's silent sacking with Justin Garrison" which is an excellent interview about the topic.

A prediction he makes is that AWS will have a major outage in 2024 as a result of these layoffs.

Many of the service teams have lost a lot of institutional knowledge as part of RTO. Teams were lean before 2023, now they’re emaciated.

...

I suspect there’ll be a major AWS outage in 2024. No amount of multi-region redundancy will protect you.

There has already been an increase in large scale events (LSE) throughout Amazon , but AWS is so big most customers don’t notice. This is a direct result of RTO and Amazon’s silent sacking of thousands of people.

Amazon's Silent Sacking (Justin Garrison)

AWS provides the resources for a surprisingly large portion of the internet that when it goes down, it can cause major problems for other businesses like it did in 2021 and 2023. Netflix wrote about what they learned from an AWS outage in 2011 but their service still went down when AWS did in 2021.

Amazon used to speak of their "customer obsession" and "customer-centric innovation" but cutting teams in the knowledge that AWS services are going to degrade doesn't seem obsessed by the customer. It looks more like another step on the road to "enshittification" that Cory Doctorow wrote about.

The fact that a large part of the internet is built on such a fragile foundation is a problem but that isn't the real issue.

The real issue is how they treat their employees. The stories of how badly they treat their warehouse workers and delivery drivers are common. I know that a software engineer losing their job because they can't or won't go into the office is not the same.

It's still is a family losing an income. It's someone worrying that they can't make rent or a mortgage payment. It's struggling to find work to replace the salary you lost. Being laid off is hard enough. Pretending that it's a breach of the RTO policy for the company to save face is insulting.

According to this study from Stanford University, the answer is yes. From the conclusion:

We conducted the first user study examining how people interact with an AI code assistant (built with OpenAI’s Codex) to solve a variety of security related tasks across different programming languages. We observed that participants who had access to the AI assistant were more likely to introduce security vulnerabilities for the majority of programming tasks, yet were also more likely to rate their insecure answers as secure compared to those in our control group.

Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?

404 Media reported on a study published by German researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence titled "Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines".

Google isn't the only search engine dealing with this issue. Jason Keobler writes:

Notably, Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all have the same problems, and in many cases, Google performed better than Bing and DuckDuckGo by the researchers' measures.

Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find (Jason Koebler/404 Media)

The research does highlight how much damage search engine optimization (SEO) has done to the ecosystem of the internet. The release of generative AI is only going to make the problem worse. Amazon is dealing with product titles and reviews being generated using ChatGPT.

David Roth had a good piece on Defector about the promises made by the developers and boosters of AI and its actual use in the present day.

One reason it is not very interesting is that everything they have touted as the future of some essential human thing or other—the future of art, or money—has mostly crashed out in ways that left behind very little useful residue. Another is that the ways in which AI is used in the present, by your lower-effort plagiarists and scammers, are so manifestly not the future of anything that works, but rather both the present and the future of shitting-up web search results, which is roughly analogous to saying that robocalls about homeowners insurance are the future of human communication.

The Future Of E-Commerce Is A Product Whose Name Is A Boilerplate AI-Generated Apology (David Roth/Defector)

Tadhg Hickey is an Irish comedian, actor and writer who published a wonderful book last year, "A Portrait of the Piss Artist as a Young Man". I read it after Philip O'Connor named it as The Global Gael Book of the Year 2023.

The book tells his story growing up in Cork, his relationship with his family and his use of drink and drugs. There are a lot of laughs to go with the tales of self-destruction.

An important message is how being an alcoholic is not all tears and tragedy. It may end that way but it is not whole story. He writes:

But the truth of the matter is that I know very few alcoholics who didn't have an absolute hoot on their way to eventual despair. We wouldn't be so preoccupied with drinking if it weren't absolutely brilliant. And I do think it's important to say that because I've always found the best way you can help someone struggling with addiction is to be honest with them. If you come in hot with the 'drink and drugs are evil' routine, you run the risk of alienating them. Drink and drugs are superb until they stop working.

A Portrait of the Piss Artist as a Young Man by Tadhg Hickey (Chapter Six - A Snowball's Chance in Hell, Page 99-100)

Philip O'Connor interviewed Hickey on The Global Gael podcast where they talk about the book among other topics.

https://youtu.be/cPmp92U6nLE?si=qjG2E-Z_mRitO00I

I also liked this passage towards the end of the book about recovery. It can be a depressing thought when you start your recovery and look back all the time and opportunities that have been wasted. It's never too late to get started.

If you're open and honest and you're willing to put the work in, life is just about to start, not end. You won't need to be drunk anymore to cope with the burden of being you. You'll wish your drunk buddies well but you're no longer feel compelled to join them. You won't be smug or judgemental; you'll neither be better nor worse than your fellows. You'll just feel alright. You'll reach an unimaginable summit in an Irish context: having booze-free fun. Imagine that.

A Portrait of the Piss Artist as a Young Man by Tadhg Hickey (Chapter Twelve - Nice Things to Be at When You're Not Demented, Page 218-219)

I listened an interesting interview on the 'Protestant work ethic' and its lesser known, progressive alternative on The Gray Area with Sean Illing. The interviewee was Elizabeth Anderson, a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan.

She recently published a book "Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back" about how the unrelenting accumulation of more has led to the exploitation of working people. Whether you agree with the premise or not, it is a conversation worth listening to.

There is also a profile about her in the New Yorker.

I just finished the second season of Things Fell Apart, a BBC podcast series where Jon Ronson dives into the culture wars. The first season was excellent and the second matched it.

It focuses on the changes in the culture wars brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic but moves through the deaths of sex workers in Miami in the 1980s to Plandemic to a family being terrorized while on holiday in Oregon to George Floyd's murder and the BLM protests to the Great Reset. It's just a fascinating listen.

I've always appreciated Ronson's empathy when interviewing people, especially when he disagrees with them. His curiosity helps me to try to understand why they think what they think. He lets them speak but also puts their claims against actual evidence and experts to see if they have any merit.

I liked how he signed off the series.

This has been a series about the culture wars that snowballed during lockdown told by some of the main players. There have also been stories about untruths and their consequences.

Excited delerium is not real and George Floyd wasn't suffering from it.

Judy Mikovits was not jailed by a medical establishment for exposing Big Pharma's deadly secrets and vaccines aren't killing millions.

I don't believe that Brandon, put on trial for plotting to kidnap the governor of Michigan, was a white supremacist. Nor that Covid and lockdown were engineered to enslave the people.

The family in the Big Bertha school bus weren't Antifa and the media shouldn't scare people that way nor forego evidence for ideology.

Children are not using cat litter boxes as toilets in American schools and being confronted with uncomfortable ideas is not the same as suffering from PTSD.

Finally, tempting as it always is, documentarians should try not to see the world in terms of heroes and dragons.

We all get things wrong sometimes. No one is perfect. But as this series has shown, when untruths spread, the ripples can be devastating. And so it feels more important than ever to try and hold onto the truth, like driftwood in the ocean, because, if not, we might drown.

Things Fell Apart (Season 2, Episode 8: Mikki's Hero's Journey)

Sunday Independent - 17 December 2023

Taxing issue of JP's gifts: Billionaires play by different rules to the rest of us. Their displays of generosity keep us off their backs

"If you suspect that tax is a rigged game, a con, designed to fleece the little guy, you are about to find out how shockingly true that is..."

Taxtopia, The Rebel Accountant

A PR industry has sprung up around billionaires (they make up 0.001 per cent of the world's population) that casts them as humanitarians and heroes. It is important not to rub the little people's noses in it too much. So, you donate a children's hospital wing or support a popular sports star or team and in this way become a national treasure. Except with the bloody lefties and those people before profit commies.

The PR coaxes us not to criticise but to applaud the winners. We are begrudgers if we criticise. We are made to feel spiteful and ungrateful. Why can't you just celebrate the success of these winners? Why are you jealous if their private jets and yachts and helicopters? What the hell is wrong with you?

So, when PBP councillor Madeleine Johansson tweeted "Just pay your f**king taxes," Fianna Fáil TD Willie O'Dea angrily countered, "JP voluntarily donates millions of his own money to good causes. Let's leave the envy to one side and celebrate what's being done."

Or as my good friend Tomás Ó Sé tweeted in 2018 when JP donated €3.2m to the GAA, "Is it an Irish thing or what but the negativity aimed at JP McManus for the gesture he gifted on every GAA club in the country is wrong. He didn't have to do it and does so much no one sees or hears. We should be grateful and let the haters hate!! Míle Buíochas JP."

In this world, billionaires know best how to spend their money. Governments are wasters. Charity, not paying taxes, is the true solution to inequality. The new way of saving the world is private, voluntary and accountable to no one.

Let us imagine for a moment that every citizen of Ireland could register in a tax haven for a nominal fee, say €20. Or that every citizen could simply opt out of paying tax. They could, instead, at their sole discretion, make donations to good causes. It is certain that the vast majority of people would opt out. Within months, without tax receipts, Irish society would collapse. No money for teachers or police officers or bus drivers or schools or hospitals or vital infrastructure. So my question is this: Why should tax be optional for billionaires but not for nurses?

Here is the compromise: Leave us billionaires alone and we will look after you when our winnings are win. We will spend it much more wisely than any government. In this compromise, generosity is a substitute for a fairer and more equal system of living. The winners do not have to make any sacrifices. They do not have to play by the same rules as the rest of us. They are great men and we should be thankful that they sprinkle us with some of the profits of their greatness every now and again. And it works. Their public displays of generosity are enough to keep us off their backs and preserve the status quo.

The trick is to donate in a way that is eye catching and pulls at the heart strings. What better way to achieve it than through a beloved community organisation? This provides moral cover. It feels good. And it does good. As Trump might say, "it really does."

But it is a pleasant fantasy. It means that the billionaire does not have to interact with the messy reality. It avoids the duty of citizenship. It is a dystopian world where the rich and powerful get to decide what is best for the world. And what is best for the world is what is best for them.

But if you are an Irishman, if you have respect and empathy for the people of Ireland, you should pay your taxes here. You should be pulling your weight with the nurses and teachers and firemen. Not counting the days to make sure you don't go over your 182-day residency limit.

John Patrick McManus, pay your taxes here.

Sunday Independent - 17 December 2023

FAI is still making the same mistakes: Hill's idea of staff relations is at odds with reality

The FAI's payments to CEO Jonathan Hill epitomised a familiar form of modern entitlement. Yet again, someone already paid more than enough got to plunge their snout further into the trough.

The Ryan Tubridy deal that almost capsized RTÉ was a classic example. The sums are smaller in Hill's case but the mentality, that fat cats can never have enough cream, is the same.

Former FAI chairman Roy Barrett told last weekend's AGM that he made the extra payment to "incentivise the executive." Seriously? Hill earns €258,000 per annum. Shouldn't that be sufficient incentive for him?

FAI administrative staff, meanwhile, are supposed to stay incentivised on an average wage of €32,000 a year. The figure for development staff is €40,000. Comments that the Hill payment doesn't matter because"€12,000 isn't that much money" is an insult to people for whom it's several months wages.

Hill claims he has a good relationship with Siptu, who represent many of those workers. But Siptu Services Division Organiser Teresa Hannick doesn't agree: "We would like to clarify that relations in terms of dealing with management have broken down to such a degree that the employees are bringing management to the Workplace Relations Commission. Both parties have agreed to attend."

Hannick insists Hill misled Wednesday's Dáil Committee hearing by describing their members as merely, "a small cohort," within the organisation. She says Siptu has, "a sizeable membership within the FAI."

Hill has caused, "extreme annoyance" by failing to recognise the union for collective bargaining purposes. "The staff are continuously told 'we are one' but this is far from the truth," laments Hannick.

What also rankles is the double standard operated as regards pay. While the CEO's pay is benchmarked against the public sector, the FAI refused to do the same for staff. The result is that while Hill's pay has risen by 22 per cent in the last years, some employee's with over 10 years experience have seen their pay rise by just three per cent compared to 2011 figures.

This is a poor reward for people who agreed to pay cuts so the Association could stay afloat during the Delaney era. It's a classic example of the modern trend where those at the top are afforded every consideration, but those lower down must like it or lump it. It's Class War.

Four years ago, Siptu asked for a worker director position to be made available on the board. The request, which still stands, was turned down. The workers apparently aren't qualified to deal with the really important issues.

Corporate Ireland's values were writ large in the Hill payment saga. Barrett implied that he didn't tell the FAI board about the payments in case media leaks led to the public finding out. That's a strange attitude for an organisation in receipt of public money.

This is an effective advertisement by the UAW.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhyMwNQRczA

I love this video of Cory Doctorow explaining how the dreams of tech workers have changed over the past 15 years.

https://youtu.be/XwvqecNDHF0

This topic also appeared in his speech that he gave to Defcon earlier this year.

Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?

Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.

Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.

And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.

We deserve better than this. We can get it.

An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification and Throw It Into Reverse

If tech workers needed an example of the power they possess at this point in time, they need look no further than what happened at OpenAI when Sam Altman was fired by the board. He would not be the CEO today if the workers had not threatened to leave.

It's a small example and it will be interesting to see how Altman and OpenAI will react to try and break that solidarity in the future.

Shane MacGowan passed away on November 30th, 2023. He was a huge figure in Irish music and someone whose music still means a lot to me.

https://www.irishtimes.com/obituaries/2023/11/30/shane-macgowan-obituary-rank-outsider-who-became-one-of-irelands-most-feted-sons/

I thought Philip O'Connor did a great job talking through the history of Shane MacGowan and his band, The Pogues, in a recent episode of The Global Gael podcast. He details the importance of the band to the Irish emigrant community as well as giving his own insights and opinions on the music.

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourmaninstockholm/episodes/The-Global-Gael---Remembering-Shane-MacGowan-e2ckvj7

Well worth listening to.

I was scrolling through my RSS feeds on Friday when I came across the news of Sam Altman being fired as the CEO of OpenAI. After the success of OpenAi's Dev Day the previous week, I was surprised by this. After reading the blog post announcing the decision I still didn't understand why exactly he had been fired.

According to the OpenAI board

Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.

OpenAI announces leadership transition

This raised way more questions than it answered. I spent over an hour trying to find out what was going on but then I remembered a quote from Brian Stelter gave in an interview about breaking news.

We oftentimes have the most interest in a news story when there's the least amount of information. You know, something's breaking news and we really know absolutely nothing about it but that's when everybody wants to know everything and by the time we know all the facts, everybody's moved on.

Brian Stelter on the Offline podcast

It's important to for me to remember that I don't need to keep up with events like this. It will work itself out eventually and I can deal with it then. There's no point responding to speculation about things that haven't happened yet. It's usually wasted energy.

Cory Doctorow wrote a piece that appeared on John Scalzi's blog that had some great quotes on writing.

I wrote because that’s how I go from being life’s passenger to taking a small bit of control over my destiny. Writing isn’t just a way for me to escape to a better world, it’s a way to help conjure that world into existence.

Science fiction, after all, is a literature that says we’re not prisoners of history. It’s a way to say, “Things can be different. What we do matters. The future is up for grabs.”

Bill McKibben called The Lost Cause “The first great YIMBY novel,” adding “forget the Silicon Valley bros–these are the California techsters we need rebuilding our world, one solar panel and prefab insulated wall at a time.”

Kim Stanley Robinson said, “Along with the rush of adrenaline I felt a solid surge of hope.  May it go like this.”

For me, these two quotes are the perfect summary of why writing – especially writing sf – feels so satisfying in anxious times. None of us can stop the bus on our own, but if we can break free of the frozen terror of helplessness and understand that the bonds that hold us in our seats are forged of our own constrained imagination. we can grab the wheel and swerve.

The Big Idea: Cory Doctorow

I liked Nate Jackson's book, Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile, on his experience as a professional American football player.

I remember how highly he regarded Mike Shanahan, his first coach on the Denver Broncos, and how much he distrusted Josh McDaniels when he eventually replaced him. When McDaniels was fired as the coach of the Las Vegas Raiders earlier this week, I wondered if Jackson would write about it.

He did. He notes early in the piece how "it has the air of a lover scorned. Of course I'd say Josh McDaniel is a shitty coach: He cut me". He does make a point to show the lack of success the Belichick coaching tree has had in comparison to the coaches groomed by Shanahan. It has become more apparent how much of the success of the Patriots was related to Tom Brady.

The article is worth reading in full but I liked this part about the importance of coaching and what it is. This goes for people in leadership in general. There are engineers promoted to management positions based on the quality of their code but some just aren't suited to the position. Sometimes all they need is time or training to change their mindset from personal to team success. Other times, they just don't get that it's not about them, it's about the team.

Ultimately, this should be a lesson to everyone in the sports world. If you don’t have the respect of your team, it doesn’t matter how clever you are on the fucking whiteboard. Coaching is about connecting with other humans. It's about paying attention to what they are going through and responding to it. It's about listening to what they tell you. It's about putting them in positions to succeed, challenging them to be their best, and respecting the effort they give you. Honoring their sacrifice. Believing in them. Showing them that you love them, not just as players, but as people. 

It's about setting them to up shine, not running off the brightest among them so you can be the star instead.

The Problem Was Always Josh McDaniels by Nate Jackson

"There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints." - Rita Dove

Interview with Jesse Kornbluth for "The Book Report". April 8, 1997.

Interesting development. All WordPress.com users can now use ActivityPub on their blog.

I came across this post on Mastodon and it's a good reminder of what voting for someone actually means.

I was listening to an interview on The Stand with Eamon Dunphy with Philip O'Connor on the current situation in Sweden where the prime minister has called in the head of the armed forces to help deal with a surge in gang related killings.

The conversation progressed to deal with more recent Swedish political history such as the rise of the Sweden Democrats and how they went from neo-Nazi skinheads in bomber jackets to the power brokers in the Swedish parliament. This can provide a warning to those dismissing the Irish far-right figures.

He also mentioned "The Oxygen of Amplification" report written by Whitney Phillips which provides some useful guidelines for reporting on the internet. I want to read that again.

MacRumors reported that all first generation Apple Watch models were going to be added to the obsolete products list according to an internal memo. This includes the gold edition which cost $17,000 when released 8 years ago.

When a product is added to the obsolete product list "Apple discontinues all hardware service for obsolete products, and service providers cannot order parts for obsolete products" according to Apple support. This means there are no more repairs, system updates or security patches. The product should still work as long as the hardware holds up. Once it breaks, that's it.

Kyle Wiens, the CEO of iFixit, gave a great response to Motherboard about this story.

“It's ludicrous,” Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, told Motherboard in an email. “High end watches are heirlooms. You can, and should, pass them down to your kids. Technology the way Apple builds it is a flash in the pan. Civilizations thousands of years from now will laugh at how short-sighted we are. Batteries that wear out in two years? Service networks that shut down after seven? That's not how you build a society that values craftsmanship.”

'It's Ludicrous': Those $17K Gold Apple Watches Are Now Obsolete - Jordan Pearson (Vice Motherboard)

This is the talk that Cory Doctorow gave at the DEF CON Conference earlier this year. The whole talk is a lot of fun. A room full of hackers is a receptive audience for his message. It's well worth watching or listening to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

This is a list of recent podcast episodes where Kara Swisher spent some time discussing Elon Musk that I found interesting over the past few weeks..

Why We Can’t Quit Elon with Ronan Farrow & William Cohan - On With Kara Swisher

This was recorded in the wake of Farrow's article in The New Yorker about the US government's reliance on SpaceX and Starlink. I also appreciated hearing William Cohen's viewpoints on the performance of SpaceX and Tesla on the stock market.

Elon Musk: Somebody That I Used to Know - On With Kara Swisher

This is an interview of Swisher by Nayeema Raza that was originally recorded in November 2022 when Swisher and Musk's relationship broke down after he acquired Twitter.

"Kara Swisher" - Smartless

This episode had the odd event of Swisher defending Musk.

I came across this story of Tim Mackinnon recently. It provided a valuable reminder of the importance of looking at your vision of success and how you structure incentives to realise that vision.

You see, the reason that Tim’s productivity score was zero, was that he never signed up for any stories. Instead he would spend his day pairing with different teammates. With less experienced developers he would patiently let them drive whilst nudging them towards a solution. He would not crowd them or railroad them, but let them take the time to learn whilst carefully crafting moments of insight and learning, often as Socratic questions, what ifs, how elses.

With seniors it was more like co-creating or sparring; bringing different worldviews to bear on a problem, to produce something better than either of us would have thought of on our own. Tim is a heck of a programmer, and you always learn something pairing with him.

Tim wasn’t delivering software; Tim was delivering a team that was delivering software. The entire team became more effective, more productive, more aligned, more idiomatic, more fun, because Tim was in the team.

The Worst Programmer I Know

There is a concept on sports teams of a glue guy. Someone who isn't a star but provides the foundation for teammates to thrive.

Shane Battier was the epitome of a glue guy when he played in the NBA. He wrote of what it took on The Players' Tribune. One part that stuck out was:

One way is by never worrying about looking cool. (Not that I was ever mistaken for cool.)

I knew my value was helping us notch victories however I could. So there were certain things that I did to ensure that my team was always as prepared as possible. For example, I used to ask really basic questions during film room sessions.

“Coach, can we run through that last set one more time?”

“Hold up coach, which direction do I roll out of this pick?”

“Wait coach, which player is supposed to switch here if the point guard drives?”

“Sorry, can you run through that set just one more time?”

Yeah, I was that guy.

Nobody likes that guy. I know that.

But there was always a strategy behind why I did it: I always knew that if I had a certain question about a game plan, there was almost always going to be a younger, less experienced player on the team who had the same question but was too intimidated to speak up. Having that question answered could ultimately pay dividends during a game. If the moment of truth comes and that player is prepared, that’s a plus for our team.

Elite 'Glue Guys' 101 - Shane Battier (The Players' Tribune)

This is difficult to capture in metrics. It's more of an eye test or a gut feeling. The team plays better when they're on the floor. Sometimes it's providing support for less experienced colleagues.

If everyone is trying to be a star then the team won't win. Players take possessions off on defence and are disengaged on offence when the ball isn't in their hands. People will look for credit in a win but avoid responsibility in a loss. They will expend time and energy blaming others instead of looking at how to fix the situation. The team will fall apart. They won't reach their goal.

The incentive of winning a championship provides the opportunity for people to find their role in the collective that will provide the platform for success. The incentive of "I need to put myself in the best position to get a new contract somewhere else" will lead to division and losses. A team full of stars rarely wins. Just ask Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and James Harden on their experience on the Brooklyn Nets.

You won't win a title without stars but glue guys need their flowers too.

I was also reminded of the Bill Atkinson -2000 lines of code story in Apple from the early 1980s. The story goes that managers decided to track productivity by asking engineers to fill in a form at the end of each week. In the first week of this change Atkinson was working on QuickDraw, a 2D graphics library that he had wrote.

Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.

He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw's region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.

He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.

-2000 Lines Of Code - folklore.org

The idea of using lines of code written as a metric makes sense in a blunt force trauma sort of way. You can use a hammer to open a door when you forget your keys or you could call a locksmith or pick the lock yourself. The first option may be the quickest to route in and may be necessary in some cases. However, you're going to need a new door afterwards.

Incentives can work in a similar manner. Reward people bugs fixed and there is an incentive to write bugs to fix them later. Track lines of code written and the incentive is to write more code, not better code.

This is why the story of Twitter engineers printing out their code for evaluation by Elon Musk and Tesla engineers made no sense. I didn't care much about Elon Musk before that point but when I saw that story, my feelings were summed up perfectly in this post on Mastodon.

Accountability is important and it is important to measure what is and isn't working. Just don't pick the easiest tool you can think of. Pick the right one.

Take the time to think about how I want my team or company to run. What behaviour do I see providing the most value? How can I reward it so other people will be incentivised to copy it? It's not easy and it will require iterations to make it better.

It will require trust. That can mean giving your team some time to experiment with different approaches to the work. It's not efficient at the beginning. But it will pay in the long run.

It won't require bossware or expensive consultants. We know their answers already. Fire people. Hire contractors, preferably from somewhere cheap. Make your service worse for your customers by investing less time and effort into it. Just don't make it so bad that they leave. Buy competitors to lock up the market. If they don't sell, sue them. Cut prices to starve them out. Jack up the prices when they leave the market. If someone offers to buy you, take the money. Don't bother building a business. That's too hard. Take the money and call yourself an entrepreneur. Pretend that you run a business. Write a book.

I heard of this project on This Week in Google and it looks to be an interesting application of LLMs with writing. I haven't found it useful so far but it can worth playing around with.

https://textfx.withgoogle.com

This is a discussion between Mike Masnick of Techdirt and Professor Andy Przybylski from the University of Oxford about research Przybylski has done about the effects of social media on children, mental health and video games and the effects of Facebook on well-being.

https://soundcloud.com/techdirt/social-media-mental-health

In short, he didn't find a lot of evidence supporting the claims that social media and video games had a negative impact on people's well-being.

It is a good conversation to listen to and consider in the light of the increased scrutiny that the tech industry is under. The tech industry has escaped scrutiny for too long but there are times when bad regulation is worse than no regulation. There is a danger of the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction.

I want to see better regulations drafted when considering the best available evidence. A major problem is that the data required to perform this research is locked within servers owned by the companies who aren't really incentivised to allow academics to use it, especially if they feel it could impact them negatively. There is need of a transparent process to give researchers the access they need while also protecting the sensitive data that the companies should be protecting.

I didn't know of Jeff Jarvis until I started listening to This Week in Google. He can be quite strident in his opinions but he provides a valuable perspective when it comes to technology policy and regulation.

I came across an interview he had with Andrew Keen on the Keen On podcast back in May. They go on a tour through Jarvis' history on the internet starting with blogging and moving onto social media.

The story of Jeff walking up from the subway in New York after the first plane hit the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001 was harrowing.

This is around the time that he started blogging. Listening to his description of the importance of blogging in his life, it became easier to see why he's such a staunch defender of allowing people access to new technology.

There are times when I feel he's too dismissive of potential downsides of a new technology. In his defence, there are many examples of moral panics in the past that have turned out to be overblown.

I lean more towards Andrew Keen's side when it comes to the tech industry. I think that the uncritical coverage of the tech industry has been a major problem but I am more aware of the potential downsides of inaccurate regulations can have. When I hear of a negative news report about the technology industry, I stop and say "What would Jeff say about this?".

A useful anecdote is Jeff talking about seeing some of his old newspaper colleagues and how they are surviving in an industry that is shrinking, if not dying. He recounts how he was told he was crazy to leave his job as a columnist with the San Francisco Examiner. Sometimes taking the risk to move to a more uncertain field like the internet was at the time is the right thing to do.

I was looking at improving some PowerShell scripts I had written in the past and I came across PowerShell.org. While looking around the site I came across the guidelines for blogging at PowerShell.org. They have great answers to some of the common excuses for not blogging.

https://powershell.org/contributing/blogging-at-powershell-org/

My favourite answer is:

It Takes So Long to Make it Perfect!

Stop trying. The world isn’t a perfect place and you’re not writing for Encyclopedia Brittanica. Start with a problem you set out to solve. And then just document the ugly process you went through. What did you try? What didn’t work? Why? What did you try next? You see, teaching isn’t about preventing a learner from seeing the mistakes. It’s about showing them the mistakes, so they don’t have to experience them on their own. The process is usually far more important that the outcome. So just write about solving, and not about solutions. 

Blogging at PowerShell.org

I came across this interview with Jake Tapper on The Bulwark podcast.

And then I try to write for at least fifteen minutes a day every day when I’m in the middle of a writing project because even if I’m busy, everybody has fifteen minutes a day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, whatever.

And if that’s all you do that week, that’s still an hour forty five. That’s two pages maybe. And That’s the lesson is I wrote a novel in my twenties. Mhmm. It didn’t get published.

And then I put it down. And then I didn’t try to do fiction again for another, like, twenty years. And if you don’t sit down and write, then that will happen to you too. Twenty years will go by and you haven’t written a word of fiction, or you’ve written a word, but you know, you never finished anything. And it can happen like that unless you have the the schedule and make yourself abide by it.

Jake Tapper: “All the Demons Are Here” - The Bulwark Podcast

Success isn't guaranteed if you do the work but it will not happen if you don't. That's important to remember.

While reading Kashmir Hill's profile of Mike Masnick I was reminded of the series she did on "Life Without the Tech Giants" while she was working for Gizmodo in 2019.

It was eye opening to see how much of the digital infrastructure runs through such a small number of companies. Sometimes there is no alternative as their services have been embedded into business and government systems and can't be avoided.

I remember being surprised at how many services ran through AWS. I thought someone with the size of Netflix would be running their own infrastructure.

I'd be interested to see how many services are being run through the 3 largest cloud providers today: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

The series is still worth reading and viewing today.

• Life Without the Tech Giants
• I Tried to Block Amazon From My Life. It Was Impossible
• I Cut Facebook Out of My Life. Surprisingly, I Missed It
• I Cut Google Out Of My Life. It Screwed Up Everything
• I Cut Microsoft Out of My Life—or So I Thought
• I Cut Apple Out of My Life. It Was Devastating
• I Cut the 'Big Five' Tech Giants From My Life. It Was Hell

One of the things I appreciate about movies and television is how old songs can be exposed to a new audience. I remember wondering years ago why was "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey was all over the radio. Someone had to tell me it appeared in the final scene of The Sopranos. A more recent example is Stranger Things and the song "Running Up That Hill" by Kate Bush.

I was reminded of this fact this morning. This song woke me up as my alarm clock turns on the radio.

Indigo Girls - Closer to Fine

I hadn't heard it before. The DJ mentioned that it appeared in the new Barbie movie. I still enjoy that experience of finding new music. It doesn't happen as often for me anymore.

It's great for the musicians as exposure to a new audience can breathe new life into their careers. The Indigo Girls seemed genuinely surprised at how their song was used in the Barbie movie and how it was received. They also played NPR's Tiny Desk Concert earlier this year. Hopefully the success will continue for them.

I briefly introduced Mike Masnick and Techdirt in a previous post. I was thinking about writing a longer article about him but then Kashmir Hill did a better job than I could in this profile in the New York Times.

An Internet Veteran’s Guide to Not Being Scared of Technology

I was listening to the Bill Simmons' conversation with Chuck Klosterman on his podcast and this quote stuck out for me.

The size of your reality is the size of your memory.

Chuck Klosterman on the Bill Simmons podcast

It's for quotes like this that I started this blog. I had completely forgotten about it until I was going through my unfinished posts today.

I listen to the Second Captains to stay updated on sport in Ireland. They introduced me to podcasting when they left Newstalk in 2013. I admired their ambition and principles when they took that risk. I'm happy to see how well it has worked for them. Success wasn't guaranteed.

One of the benefits as a member is that I get exposed to some non sport commentaries and interviews such as this one with Mark Jones. Mark Jones is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Global History at University College Dublin and is a specialist in the history of political violence, war, and revolution. He is also a recognized authority on the history of the Weimar Republic.

He recently published a book "1923: The Forgotten Crisis in the Year of Hitler’s Coup". The interview mostly focuses on the period in question. The state of Germany post World War 1 and its relationship with France and the occupation of the Ruhr region. This led to the German response which was to attempt to support what amounted to a strike where the German population of Ruhr region refused to co-operate with the French. They attempted to do this by printing money. This eventually led to hyperinflation that inflicted so much suffering on the German population. This helped set the stage for Adolf Hitler ascent to power.

The book sounds fascinating and I'm looking forward to reading it. Listening to the interview you hear of messages and slogans that are echoed today. There are some worrying similarities in the rise of extremist politics. Just this week there were attacks in Cork and Dublin related to the housing of refugees. The library in Cork had to be closed due to fear for staff safety because of a protest taking place outside. It brings to mind the quote attributed to Mark Twain - "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes."

Ken Early does bring up the question of what is the value of knowing this? Jones brings an impassioned defence of historians and the importance of knowing history. How vital it can be to look back to see the similarities in the present. It is important to remember.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

1984 - George Orwell

One disturbing thought is they discussed the possibility of violence, especially when one side celebrates its use. I heard someone say before that violence is never the answer until it becomes the only answer. The Nazis were only defeated after an astonishing amount of violence, death and destruction. It is worrying.

It is important to remember that it is not inevitable. There is always hope even when there are no clear answers.

It's no secret that I'm a fan of Cory Doctorow. I do like Mike Masnick and the work he does on Techdirt. I don't always agree with them but they can make compelling arguments. I appreciate hearing an alternative viewpoint that is smart rather than just contrarian for the sake of it.

Cory appeared on the Techdirt podcast this week to talk about his most recent book "Red Team Blues". A lot of the conversation covers ground that has been dealt with in other interviews.

What stuck out from this conversation comes towards the end of the episode. Doctorow talks about the using the infrastructure that unions and organised labour had built in the preceding decades to participate in protests. He speaks of his experience as those structures were degraded and eventually dismantled.

Once those structures are gone then everything gets so much harder. There isn't a solid foundation to build on. It takes time to build something solid. Digital tools have helped to regain some of the ground lost over the past 40 years.

Mike Masnick has an undergraduate degree labour relations. He suggests that the internal corruption of the unions meant that they needed to be burnt to the ground before they could be rebuilt.

I'd agree with Doctorow's retort the the labour movement should be improved instead of jettisoned.

Once that ground has been taken or that institution destroyed, it is so difficult to get back to where you once were. The opportunity cost can be extremely high.

I listened to a podcast episode from the Things Fell Apart podcast. It's an interview with Jon Ronson and Dolly Alderton on his career and the podcast series covering the culture wars.

The whole interview is worth listening to but I loved this quote in particular.

“No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.”
― Isaac Babel, The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel

One of the podcasts I enjoy the most is The Free State podcast. The normal structure is a discussion between Dion Fanning, a journalist with The Currency, and Joe Brolly, a barrister as well as a former Gaelic football All Star and current GAA pundit.

The quality can vary depending on the topic but as this review attests, the political discourse is where it comes into its own.

Where these two presenters add real value, for this listener, is when they get stuck into politics: class politics, Northern politics, political punditry, and when Brolly in particular brings his personal context to the conversation. He and Fanning air their differences, and it’s smart and heartfelt and fascinating listening. They up the ante to the point of real difference, and still they keep talking. Nobody cancels anybody else, nobody walks out, nobody stoops to insult or opprobrium. That’s the kind of conversation I can pull up a stool for.

"Free State With Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning aims at too many easy targets" - Laura McCann (The Irish Times)

Joe Brolly does have an axe to grind with RTÉ as he used to work as a pundit with them for 20 years before his contract was not renewed in 2020. He has expressed he felt badly treated at the end of his time there.

With that said, the last 2 episodes, which have focused on the ongoing crisis in RTÉ, have been excellent.

RTÉ The Musical - Part 1

RTÉ The Musical - Part 2

Joe's experience as a barrister allows him explain the gravity of the situation that RTÉ finds itself.

One of the topics he narrowed his focus on was the influence of the agent Noel Kelly. I don't think I had heard of him before but when I visited NK Management website I was surprised by the amount of people he represented who have shows on Irish radio and television. Brolly speculated on just how large an influence Kelly had on the programming decisions in RTÉ and it looks to be not insignificant.

I enjoyed his disdain for the RTÉ executives and their appearances before the Oireachteas committees over the past few weeks. It's a valuable lesson that sometimes the people given the jobs with a lot of responsibilities and correspondingly high salaries are sometimes not deserving of those positions.

We learned this lesson before. Fanning brought up this quote from a Michael Lewis story on the Irish banking collapse in 2008.

In McCarthy’s view, the dominant narrative inside the head of the average Irish citizen—and his receptiveness to the story Kelly was telling—changed at roughly 10 o’clock in the evening on October 2, 2008. On that night, Ireland’s financial regulator, a lifelong Central Bank bureaucrat in his 60s named Patrick Neary, came live on national television to be interviewed. The interviewer sounded as if he had just finished reading the collected works of Morgan Kelly. Neary, for his part, looked as if he had been dragged from a hole into which he badly wanted to return. He wore an insecure little mustache, stammered rote answers to questions he had not been asked, and ignored the ones he had been asked. A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will. Two weeks earlier the collapse of Lehman Brothers had cast doubt on banks everywhere. Ireland’s banks had not been managed to withstand doubt; they had been managed to exploit blind faith. Now the Irish people finally caught a glimpse of the guy meant to be safeguarding them: the crazy uncle had been sprung from the family cellar. Here he was, on their televisions, insisting that the Irish banks were “resilient” and “more than adequately capitalized” … when everyone in Ireland could see, in the vacant skyscrapers and empty housing developments around them, evidence of bank loans that were not merely bad but insane. “What happened was that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was the first time they’d ever seen this little man,” says McCarthy. “And then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that??? Is that the fucking guy who is in charge of the money??? That’s when everyone panicked.”

"When Irish Eyes Are Crying" - Michael Lewis (Vanity Fair)

This crisis is far from over. There will be more revelations in the coming weeks and months as auditors comb through the accounts of the national broadcaster.

This is also an opportunity. It's an opportunity to display accountability. The people responsible should lose their jobs. If they have broken the law, they should be prosecuted. Justice should be pursued. I've heard too much talk of punishment and cuts. Some people want to see RTÉ tarred and feathered and made to do the walk of shame. I want to see change.

It is also an opportunity for the Irish citizens to define what they want from public service broadcasting. What does it look like in the age of the internet? How should it be funded? Should commercial advertising play some part? Should there be a ceiling for pay? Should the ceiling rise with inflation? Who sets it? What measures should be put in place to make sure that this doesn't happen again?

There are so many possibilities. I hope this moment isn't squandered.

I listen to some of the podcasts on the TWiT network and as someone who uses a Windows PC for work, I enjoy both Windows Weekly and Hands-On Windows. They are useful in keeping up to date in the Microsoft ecosystem but, more importantly, they are entertaining. I was familiar with Richard Campbell for .NET Rocks and RunAsRadio but I enjoy Paul Thurrott's rants.

The latest episode of Hands-On Windows goes through how Paul chooses a browser and I found the check he does using the Cover Your Tracks tool provided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) useful.

It's a quick check that displays whether your browser blocks ads and trackers by default or if it randomizes its fingerprint to prevent tracking across the web.

He also displays which extensions should be added such as Privacy Badger and an adblocker like Adblock Plus. It's worth watching the video to watch him go through the different browsers and what he thinks of each.

Hands-On Windows 49: Choosing Your Web Browser

I disagree with his evaluation of Firefox but I can see his point. The fact that it doesn't support progressive web app (PWA) installs does not make sense. All the other browsers have moved to using the Chromium browser engine but I appreciate Mozilla trying to provide an alternative. I mainly use Firefox and Brave in a personal capacity but I also use almost the other browsers at work.

It's always worth checking your browsers using Cover Your Tracks after moving to a new computer or after installing a new browser to see what the privacy settings are.

I was listening to the latest episode of The Irish Passport podcast with Naomi O'Leary and Tim Mc Inerney titled "How the wealthy and powerful muzzle reporting in Ireland". They discuss the report that O'Leary wrote for the International Press Institute detailing the costs of defamation lawsuits and the chilling effect that it can have on reporting.

The report is well worth reading. There are some shocking stories about the threats issued to journalists and their sources. It also goes through the some of the costs involved and how it can cripple some smaller media organisations.

Ireland has been warned about this before. It is past time that the law needs to be updated. Knowingly publishing lies should be punished but those same laws should not be used to hide the truth.