Stage 2:

Documents folder? You want to rule my whole computer, dictate some nonsensical folder structure and then you act like, out of the goodness of your heart, I can have this little set of folders, deep in your weird structure, to store my stuff? And you’re even telling me how to sort it? On my own hard drive connected to my own computer?

I liked agile as it was practiced in the “Extreme Programming” days.

• Rather than attempt to design the perfect system from the get-go, you accept that software architecture is a living, moving target that needs to evolve as your understanding of the problem evolves.

• Rather than stare down a mountain of ill-defined work, you have neat little user stories that can be completed in a few days at most and you just move around some Kanban cards instead of feeding a soul-sucking bureaucratic ticketing, time tracking and monitoring system.

• Rather than sweat and enter crunch mode for deadlines, the project owners see how many user stories (or story points or perfect hours) the team completes per week and can use a velocity graph / burndown chart to estimate when all work will be completed.

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But it’s just a corporate buzzword now. “We’re agile” often enough means “we have no plan, take no responsibility and expect the team to wing it somehow” or “we cargo cult a few agile ideas that feel good to management, like endless meetings with infinite course changes where everyone gives feel-good responses to the managers.”

Having a goal, a specification, a release plan, a vision and someone who is responsible and approachable (the “project owner”) are all part of the agile manifesto, not something it tries to do away with. I would be sad if agile faces the same fate as the waterfall model back in its time and even sadder if we return to the time-tracking-ticket-system-with-Gantt-chart hell as the default.

Maybe we need a new term or an “agility index” to separate the cases of “incompetent manager uses buzzword to cover up messy planning” from the cases of “project owner with a clearly defined goal creates a low-bureaucracy work environment for his team.” :)

I assume this is about the physical connections.

It could be for monitoring (even with unbroken encryption, the routing information and time/server correlation can shed light on social media influence campaigns or where VPN beachheads are located). This information could probably be gathered with ISP cooperation, too, but private business and Russian money can be a problematic mix.

It could also be preparations to isolate Russia from the internet when/if their war expands into Europe. Russia has done the reverse already in 2019, BBC: Russia ‘successfully tests’ its unplugged internet, probably either to stop Russian people from getting news outside of government-controlled media if the tide turns against Putin or to fend off the possibility of Western countries turning the tables and running disinformation campaigns inside Russia.

Incomplete map of internet crossover points to Russia (sorry, couldn’t find a better one, it had low resolution and I upscaled it):

I don’t know why this is collecting downvotes. It’s a reference to George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

Context: “Animal Farm” is a story about how communism can devolve into dictatorship. In the story, the animals on a farm drive out their tyrannical drunkard farmer. They write on the barn wall: “all animals are equal.” and live in communist utopia. Over time, some animals (the pigs) hunger for power and status. Rather then overturn the system, they undermine it by adding “…but some animals are more equal than others.” to the barn wall, legitimizing a ruling class (themselves) because they are “more equal.”

After reading, the gist of it seems to be:

• Vanilla far-right indoctrinated dumbo (his vision: “Reds” welcome, “Blues” not, “Anti-Blue Propaganda” on public view screens)
• Wants exploitative capitalism on steroids with companies controlling everyone’s lives completely
• Claims current capitalism is only bad because it’s “woke capitalism” which he claims the “ruling class” is pushing
• Wants tech bros to butter up police and give security staff jobs to their children as a favor, i.e. intentional social classism

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In short, just another out of touch entrepreneur who sells snake oil cures to people suffering in the current system, so that they may invite in the boot that stomps them down for good.

I’m always hopeful, but at this point, I seriously doubt Russia’s sincerity. Past ceasefire agreements, for example, were broken by Russian attacks, usually within hours of the agreement taking effect.

So… this AI company gets gaming teens to “donate” their computing power, rather than pay for render farms / GPU clouds?

And then oblivious parents pay the power bills, effectively covering the computing costs of the AI porn company?

Sounds completely ethical to me /s.

I wasn’t trying to throw shade on the subgroup that does act in the face of climate change, it’s just my impression that they’re intentionally guided down paths where they fight the fellow people and burn themselves out instead of achieving something.

• For example (depending on the distance of your workplace), biking is certainly less convenient in that it takes up more free time out of your day, requires you to bother with rain clothes, proper winter clothes, a place to store your bike while you work (which is surprisingly harder than parking a honking car) and more.

• Buying sustainable meat or eggs means they’re more expensive and in noodles, pizza or cheese, it becomes either impossible or reduces your choice to one or two products which will usually be marketed as super premium. Meat industry spokesmen: “we’re just giving people what they want, if they want sustainable, they need to vote with their wallets.”

• Avoiding plastic packaging also carries extra effort. You need to locate a store that offers bring-your-own-container beans, rice, oats and so on, which is nigh impossible in some places and requires visiting an additional market with a price premium in others.

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I’m not trying to make a case for “oh, I can’t do it because it inconveniences me, someone else fix it please,” I’m observing that those of us that do care enough are (and have been for decades) too few to reach critical mass. For example, we won’t fix the micro plastics in our oceans and food chain problem by calling for “personal responsibility” and sputtering on in that mode for the next 30 to 50 years (like it happened with fossil fuels).

Or, similarly, the entire recycling system is largely busywork for eco conscious people, considering that, still, >90% of trash ends up in landfills, burned or dumped. That is the point where I believe regulation with teeth needs to be established and where instead calling for “personal responsibility” is merely a diversion to tire out people willing to act while everything stays the same.

A point I really think deserves awareness as well:

6. Personal responsibility: It StARts wITh yOu!

Another trick to fend off regulation. Companies rail against regulation, saying that the options are already out there and that now it’s the consumer’s choice, i.e. as an individual, spend extra time when shopping to find greener products, pay more and try to get others to do the same.

You are now disadvantaged (higher costs, more effort, time spent evangelizing) and tiring yourself out, seeing no progress around you. Others may even perceive your advocacy for less convenient life choices as droning and obnoxious, which is a view gladly pushed behind the scenes by the industry trying to resist regulation.

See Coca Cola’s “Anti-Litterbug” gambit (they funded “keep the environment clean” campaigns to resist bottle deposits), or how Prius drivers (an early electric hybrid vehicle) were depicted as holier-than-thou types, a cult, arrogant and elitist (I believe this even found its way into a few South Park episodes).

If, instead, regulators brought the hammer down from the beginning - like they did with Asbestos and CFC - products meeting the new guidelines would automatically become mainstream and cheap. Of course, it would also cut into the profits of established brands and potentially even shake up their power structures (as niche brands already meeting the new guidelines might make gains while big companies struggle to adapt their large production/supply structures).

When you have a bunch of computers networked, each of them is assigned a unique number, so when other computers send data on the wire, they can say who it is meant for (imagine each blurb of data starting out like: “yo, I’m sending these next 500 bytes for computer 0A123FBC32, here they come”).

Now the right computer will listen, but it doesn’t know what program the data is for - is it a chunk of a file your browser is downloading? Or the email your email app wants to display? Or perhaps a join request from your buddy’s computer for the Minecraft game you’re hosting?

So in addition to the unique number of the target computer, the data also specifies a “port number”, which tells the computer which of its running programs the data is meant for (programs ask the computer’s operating system: “if any network data arrives on port XY, give it to me”). Some ports have become standards - for example, a program that serves web pages to other computers would typically ask the operating system that any data arriving on the computer that indicates port numbers 80 and 443 should be given to it, and when a web browser wants to fetch a web page, it will send a request to the computer serving the page, defaulting to port 80 o 443.

If you dig deeper, you’ll find that there are even more unique numbers involved and routers/firewalls let data through not only by port number but also by distinguishing between data that is the initial request to another computer’s port number and data that is an answer to an earlier seen request – and more.

It did change on thing for me: it made me drop support for Oculus in my game dev project.

I still own an Oculus DevKit 2. But after wildly succeeding with his Kickstarter, the founder has done nothing but jerk moves. First he silently dropped Linux support, then he funded a pro-Trump troll army on Reddit and finally he sold his entire VR company to Facebook/Meta, which then did its own jerk move by rendering everyone’s hardware useless if they didn’t sign up to Facebook/Meta. My Oculus account was forcefully obliterated just a week ago.

What a complete nosedive that was.

They had the nicer tech (Oculus uses infrared LEDs around the headset that are filmed by special cameras to track your orientation, i.e. it’s steady state – HTC Vive / Valve Index have light-sensing diodes on the headset itself and their lighthouses swipe light curtains horizontally and vertically through the room, with an annoying whining noise and all the wear & tear from constantly rotating parts), for a while, Meta even had John Carmack polishing the system.

I still hope VR will not completely die. Half Life: Alyx was fun, some archery, zombie shooting and climbing games were highly enjoyable and I could well imagine getting into sculpting / 3D modelling that way if only the tools were better.

But if, as the HTC exec in the article says, Meta has defined the “market perception of what this technology should cost” (and they’re producing at a loss, too), then Meta has walled off most of the VR market to Facebook boomers (sorry, Meta boomers) and is hogging the more robust tracking tech for itself, too.

I happened across the Kaiju No. 8 manga two years ago. While it’s not a never-seen-before concept, it kept me engaged until the last published issue (at the time). Definitely going to check that one out.

I think the caveman wouldn’t fare any better :)

There was a (possibly unethical) experiment where scientists tried to induce stress symptoms (lack of appetite, depression, panic, etc.) in rats.

They found that sudden scares or bringing the rats face-to-face with predators had little long term effect. But placing them on a floor with a constant, slightly uncomfortable electric current (low-level stress over a longer period) did cause them to develop all the symptoms.

So perhaps we’re just not naturally equipped to deal with permanent time pressure, upcoming appointments and deadlines in the way modern society gives them to us.

Probably not needed, but just to be sure… the entire graphic is satire and all statistics it shows are made up :)

Indeed.

But after reading the article, it feels to me like the “EU Observer” just wanted to insert “AI” as a buzzword. They used volunteers to count voters at polling stations. The “AI” likely was just vanilla security camera software that counted unique individuals appearing in a rectangle in the video frames.

Anyway, good for them, now there’s hard evidence in addition to statistical analysis.

The article says they used volunteers and AI to count the number of people who voted from video feeds:

after counting votes and comparing them with the official turnout, the software found discrepancies in 11 regions so huge that it made it impossible for the election result to have been accurate

based on volunteer analysis of video footage from 233 polling stations in 17 regions revealed a discrepancy in turnout equivalent to 81,731 voters. Based on election statistics, analyst Sergey Shpilkin estimated that 10 million additional votes had found their way into ballot boxes nationwide.

So they have strong evidence for around 10 million forged votes, but not which party they were cast for. Then again, when you consider that all political parties except Putin’s come in below 10 million votes, the selection of who might have benefited from it becomes rather small :)

Yes, I do that on all my VMs about every 3-5 weeks when it turns itself on again.

I love the “Let’s finish setting up your device” popup that prevents me from using my VMs regularly.

Like some condescending peddler trying to slam-dunk your agreement as a foregone conclusion.

Come on, buddy, let’s do those remaining tasks, let’s have Microsoft scan your face, tell Microsoft about your phone, let’s go and install those Microsoft apps on your phone, too, and then we finally buy that Office subscription and store your important files on Microsoft’s server and we should really get around with switching to Microsoft’s web browser.

And the only option you get is “Yes” or “Remind me later.”

If you turn it off (and it needs to be turned off in two places), it’ll be back on as soon as Microsoft publishes the tiniest update to any of its unwanted services. Harrghrrr! (artery popping sounds follow)

I have a Windows VM that runs Visual Studio and a small number of developer tools so I can test my code on Windows. And another windows VM that runs Daz3D, Clip Studio Paint and the Epic Launcher (to download stuff from the Unreal Engine Marketplace).

Sometimes I misuse either VM by creating a snapshot and installing Garmin Connect so I can update the music library on my watch :)

SuSE Linux (a German distribution), some niche, single CD distrubution, Debian for a while and, finally, since ~2006, Gentoo on my servers and since ~2015 Gentoo as my desktop.

Debian and its derivatives never felt right for me. I find too many drawbacks with binary packages (non-configurable build options, therefore dependencies that can’t be disabled, relying on humans to keep ABI compatiblity, trouble integrating my own packages or unstable versions) and I just don’t like systemd.

It’s weird, I’ve seen more than enough of those “Install Gentoo” memes, but I find it the most pleasant system to run in the long term.