AI, The Capitalism Bubble

Socrates ushered in a new age in philosophy.  Academics categorize what came before as "pre-Socratic".  He thought about thinking, argued about arguing, and taught about teaching.  My type of fella.  (Let's acknowledge his exposure to Eastern philosophy as well; nothing human happens in a vacuum.)  Author of a new age, yes; author of any texts at all, no.  Socrates took issue with the written word.

Everything we now know about this person's thoughts come from the writings of his students, and their students.  But to Socrates himself, the written word feels like a trap.  Yes, we can write our words down, but once on the page, they are dead.  Knowledge and wisdom are living things -- practiced, unfinished, and inextricable from the minds which carry and share them.

I don't need to entirely agree (I write, using words) but as I gain some small living wisdom myself, I concede that he has a point, and it's an important one.

Human animals do a lot of neat tricks.  We're perhaps not as novel as we think, but in some ways we're also a bigger deal than we give ourselves credit for.  Let's keep looking at "the written word" but expand the scope a bit to include written music.  Staves, bars, notes, any and all markings on a page you might see in front of a musician.

Even to someone experienced and skilled enough to sight-read any piece of music, there is a difference between interpreting the symbols and hearing the music.  The experience of the sound waves dancing their way across the nerves in our heads is something more rich and more alive than can be adequately captured in written glyphs.  That difference can be staggering -- a lay person may perceive only gibberish of dots and lines on the page, but be moved to tears when hearing a performance of those same notes.

It is a marvelous human trick to translate dormant markings into living music.  When the notes were first scribed, they served as a record, however incomplete, of a human's ideas and experience.  It's shorthand.  It takes practiced work to capture music onto paper, and it takes more practiced work to turn it back into music.  Human minds inject a bit of themselves into each step of the process.  Tuning systems and instrument craft refine over time; what we hear today is not identical to what Bach heard, but nonetheless we get to overlap to a meaningful degree with that specific human experience.

Words in any non-musical language are no different.

The words themselves are indeed dead, but if we take a leap where Socrates refused, we might trust that those who care to read them may breathe life in again.  The original intent may be distorted; it may even become unrecognizable due to translation mistakes or cultural shifts or typos.  Those of us who embrace the written word trust that some future human animal (even simply future versions of ourselves) will be able to either bring what is written alive again, or leave it behind in favor of other thoughts and ideas, which themselves will also ultimately decay and/or find new life.

So, what do poor old Socrates and the potentially-hollow written word have to do with "Artificial Intelligence"?

Large Language Models and various related techniques are what's dominating AI research (also funding) at the moment.  You might have heard these things called "autocorrect on steroids" or "overgrown predictive text" or something to that effect.  Those words feel hollow to AI engineers, but are still fair comparisons.  These models ingest as much written information as the tech companies can collect (steal) and run it through loads of statistical analysis.  Some percent of the time, the word "quite" is followed by the word "often".  Writings which contain the word "Socrates" are more likely to also contain the word "Plato" than "Florida".  Sentences which contain the word "sentence" are sometimes near sentences which are "examples".

A neat parlor trick these programs can do with all those rules about words is to synthesize a coherent-ish conversation.  When a human animal reads the "AI-generated" words (or hears a machine turn text into speech) we do what we always do when we read or hear: we receive and imbue the words with meaning from our own experiences, and breathe life into otherwise-inert material.  It's a convincing trick, because it is tailor-made for a human recipient's brain to assemble the pieces into something real.  After all, the words aren't generated out of thin air, they're made of human writing.  Chopped-up human words, statistically puzzle-piece matched up and Frankensteined back together, ransom-note style.

It's worth noting that this goes well beyond written words.  Different models chop up and rearrange our sounds and images and program code too, among other things.  But it's conceptually the same trick, trained on and working with different data.

It's smoke and mirrors.  We blew the smoke, and we glimpse ourselves in the mirrors.

Which leads nicely to the next point: all of this is computationally expensive.  Ridiculously computationally expensive.  Computers got smaller and faster and cheaper for decades, and they continue to do so, in a manner of speaking.  But in order to simulate a manner of speaking, it takes a whole lot of computers using a whole lot of electricity, sourced principally from a whole lot of burning fossil fuels.  These are incredibly wasteful tricks.  The smoke and mirrors produce a lot of actual smoke.

A rational decision-maker might pause and think, maybe this isn't the best use of those vast amounts of energy.  Maybe our resources ought to be spent making sure we don't kill ourselves off by polluting and altering the climate, here on that one world where we all live.  Maybe we should direct our brightest problem-solving minds toward any of the many pressing problems the planet and its inhabitants are facing.

But that's rational thinking.  Instead, we tech folks imagine a boot so big that we feel compelled to start licking it now.  We pretend that the smoke and mirrors are real thoughts.  A chat bot can pass a standardized test; we might as well entrust it with our life decisions!  We suppose that being good at rearranging words is somehow the same as thinking through plans of action which will have consequences, intended and otherwise.  And we pour all this treasure and energy into what could be the next big thing with the next big profits.  Any other consequence is not worth chasing or even contemplating, apparently.

With 24-hour news cycles, on through social media, and now on through generative content, we've offloaded far too much of our thinking.  We refrain from embracing our own humanity.  Socrates saw the danger right away: the written word truly has gotten us into trouble, letting us shirk our own minds' responsibilities.  It's gone on for so long that human intelligence seems to have fallen out of fashion.

None of this is automatic; everything I've babbled about here is a choice.  Any of us could at any moment turn all this new noise off, and work at rebuilding the living knowledge we've allowed ourselves to lose.  Perhaps ironically, the written word would be one of our best allies in such efforts.

When an interesting question enters my head, I do as many of us do and reach for a search engine.  If it's real knowledge or wisdom I'm after, though, I'm honestly a lot better off if instead I go to a library and do some research the old-fashioned way.  Turning dead words back into human knowledge, without the screens of capitalism running interference, feels novel and refreshing at this point.  Maybe that could catch on.  Much crazier things have happened.

GitLab Pages + NameCheap registrar + Let's Encrypt certs

Nerd Alert:  This post is purely in the hope of saving someone (my future self included) a whole lot of time and anxiety.  It's another one of those really specific combinations that cause trouble, which I keep seeming to find.

The short story:

A Record	@	35.185.44.232
TXT Record	@	gitlab-pages-verification-code=...
A Record	www	35.185.44.232
TXT Record	_gitlab-...-code.www	gitlab-pages-verification-code=...
CNAME Record	www	myusername.gitlab.io.

• mysite.com and www.mysite.com had to be separate domains in GitLab Pages.
• The second TXT record is most of the host value GitLab Pages suggests, but ends at "www".
• That last CNAME record, I had to add after setting up letsencrypt on www.mysite.com.  (There was no such trouble with plain mysite.com.)

GitLab is amazing, its Pages service is wonderful, and its documentation is even mostly pretty good.  NameCheap is what it says on the tin, domain names for not much money.  Its "clever" DNS config is not my favorite, but it's better than how the entire management UI is broken about every odd time I try to use it.  Let's Encrypt (letsencrypt.org) is half of how web certificates should have worked in the first place (the second half is decoupling identity from encryption, but I won't go down that road).

Anyway, GitLab Pages itself says one thing, its documentation says another, and neither match up to NameCheap's DNS tools.  I had a variation of these settings which worked for domain verification but LetsEncrypt still failed.  I never learned what part was mistaken or why either, since no actual errors are reported; the UI and email report literally say "something went wrong".  Gee thanks.  But, the settings above worked, so I'm preserving them in a public place.

My final note, about the CNAME record, makes me wonder whether in 3 months I'll have trouble again when the letsencrypt cert renews.  But, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

OK, that's all.  I hope it saves somebody some headaches!

[edit, some time later: here's a similar table for gitlab+dreamhost]

A Record	@	35.185.44.232
AAAA Record	@	2600:1901:0:7b8a::
TXT Record	@	gitlab-pages-verification-code=...
TXT Record	_gitlab-...-code.www	gitlab-pages-verification-code=...
CNAME Record	www	myusername.gitlab.io.

 

NopeCoin

Cryptocurrency has been off the deep end since its inception. NFTs are cancer on cancer, and as in most situations, two wrongs don't make a right.

I therefore hereby propose my own implementation of fake money, and offer up all my digital assets on its own exchange!

My development codename for this currency is "nopecoin', but one of its groundbreaking features is that you don't need to name it at all! Unlike other cryptocurrencies, which use expensive hardware, consume massive amounts of energy and poison the planet, you can mine nopecoin by putting your computer or other fancy internet-connected device to sleep. You will begin to profit immediately. Enrich your life at increased pace by shutting down multiple devices; nopecoin mining is compatible with all computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and overpriced wristwatches.

As for NFTs, you may be pleased to know that you already own all the images, movies, games and other digital junk which I have created over the years and will continue to create. These NFTs are special in that you can sell them over and over as often as you please, simply by giving the files or links to others. No special accounts or apps required. Rather than a search for the next trendseeking sucker, you need only find someone to share a chuckle or smirk or moment of confused frustration with.

This is all coming from someone who fell in love with computers and technology at a very young age. I could barely speak English when I learned Basic. Maybe it was inevitable that the capitalists and scammers would take over computing, but that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it, or that I won't speak out when I see conmen and their marks hailing the blockchain. This particular emperor is all kinds of naked, and it's an ugly sight.

(If this was all gibberish to you, then keep it that way! You are living life correctly.) 

(If you want to understand crypto and NFT, set aside a couple hours and watch this.)

End of Another Era

Today the internet as we know it begins its official retirement from being a powerful tool of individual voices.  It is being actively repurposed to serve instead as a tool of late-capitalist and autocratic forces.

Not that the internet hasn't been in decline as it is.  Not that long ago, nobody could even take a stab at how many significant entities there were on the internet.  Every university, every business, every city, every artist, every enthusiast.  Protocols kept springing up - telnet, email, usenet, FTP, gopher, IRC, HTTP -- there were many ways to use the internet.  Now, you can count off a small handful of for-profit companies and account for an enormous percentage of the internet, both in terms of traffic and ownership.  Non-HTTP (well, HTTPS now) traffic is actively blocked as some kind of scary unknown.  Where there was once a young and curious power widely distributed to anybody with some basic technical chops, there are now giant silos of control, a select few in charge of nearly everything.

Today, the (ill-gotten, illegitimate, incompetent) US government has made the situation much, much worse.

ISPs, gatekeepers of the final mile of the internet, are now free to return to the corrupt practices they were dabbling in before the FCC's Net Neutrality rules were enacted just a few years ago.  Comcast (or any internet service provider, but they are the ones who bought the current, illegitimate FCC) can now treat any internet traffic any way they like.  Somebody tries using a competing service like Amazon Prime or Netflix?  Maybe slow those streams down, unless somebody pays a little extra.  Somebody's going to a site which compares service across various providers?  It's legal now to send them a censored or altered version of the site.  Somebody's accessing a blog which points out the devious practices ISPs are now allowed to employ?  Maybe just return a 404 Not Found instead.  All legal as of today.

ISPs will tell you people like me are chicken little, crying about a non-falling sky.  We had years of no Net Neutrality rules before and everything was fine!  (Well, during those years, the diversity and distribution of information and leverage on the internet dried up, consolidating into the few giants we have now...)  If I was crying wolf about Citizens United, saying a great deal of money will now be spent lying to us, then I'm doing it again now.  Nah, we don't need regulations protecting citizens from greedy monopolies.  How silly!


I've become less and less convinced that even sweeping electoral victories will be able to wrest democracy back from the GOP - authoritarians do not play by the rules, and we've seen over and again the willingness to lie, cheat, and steal every seat, every gerrymandered district, every judicial appointment, every drop of power to the point where there are essentially no legitimate positions or institutions left.  I'm not sure how that can be repaired.  "Money is speech" really did a number on this nation; I'm an optimist at heart but I have a hard time imagining a full recovery.  One thing that hadn't been systematically corrupted was the internet; damaged though it may have been, there was still technically a level playing field, some small venue in life where money did not have a direct exchange rate with power.  Until today.

The US House of Representatives could still put the kibosh on all this and restore Net Neutrality.  86% of the US population is in favor of those protections.  It's not even partisan.  In this day and age!  86%.  But, that would require several Republicans to do their job, and represent the will of their constituents.  I've called mine, and I hope you'll call yours, begging to restore Title II protections and Net Neutrality, but I'm not going to hold my breath.  We know what we're dealing with here.  An irredeemably-corrupt party at the apex of their hostile takeover of what once resembled a republic.  Even with the most inept leadership imaginable, they've managed to chop up and sell off the entire government to the top bidders.  The internet, though a big deal to me, was just one tiny part of all this.

Of some small consolation is that when the United States is officially over, when every last drop of jingoist marketing value has been squeezed from its corpse, I'll at least still live in Minnseota, which is a beautiful place.  We've got our troubles too, but I think we might pull through, more or less intact.  My also-beautiful home state of Wisconsin has got an uphill battle, as it was the testing grounds for the national GOP takeover, but we're already starting to see the rats flee the sinking ship there.  Wisconsinites are no slouches, and you can't fool all of the people all of the time.  It will be tough, and there is a huge amount of damage to be undone, but I hope and think they'll figure things out too.

Things are likely to get worse before they get better, but my hope is that in that time, as more of the voting public will have grown up having active gunman drills in school where I had tornado drills, as the racists and the homophobes and the other piles of fear and ignorance die off, maybe we can overwhelmingly and legitimately get rid of the currently-invincible, infinite-money-wielding autocratic fascists after all.  I just hope there's something left to save.

How to Fix: Firefox 57+ Status Bar

I used to use an extension called Status-4-Evar, which did a lot of neat things.  Mozilla has been ruining Firefox's status bar for a long time, and this extension let us get it back the way we wanted.  For me, I want an area of the screen where URLs and status text can appear, but does not vanish or move depending on where my cursor is.  I also don't want it to overlap with useful page real estate.  Basically everything the new Chrome-style corner status bubble is, I do not want.  Recently, Mozilla made more changes which make Status-4-Evar incompatible with new versions.

Many people would prefer to have their downloads and other extension icons down in the bottom bar as well.  That's where I used to have them, but it doesn't bother me terribly to have them up in the top bar instead.

This fix addresses only my consistent-status-area concern, not the icon stuff.  There are solutions out there which re-position and re-purpose the bookmark toolbar and let icons live there.  This is a much simpler and admittedly less-flexible hack.

Credit where it's due; I started with this:
https://github.com/MatMoul/firefox-gui-chrome-css


My solution is to create "~/.mozilla/firefox/(my profile)/chrome/userChrome.css" containing:

#browser-bottombox {
 height: 1.4em;
 border-top: solid thin #505050;
}
.browserContainer>statuspanel {
 left: 4px !important; bottom: 2px;
 transition-duration: 0s !important;
 transition-delay: 0s !important;
}
.browserContainer>statuspanel>.statuspanel-inner>.statuspanel-label {
 margin-left: 0px !important;
 border: none !important;
 padding: 0px !important;
 background: rgb(0,0,0,0) !important;
 color: silver !important;
}

window[inFullscreen="true"] #browser-bottombox {
 display:none !important;
}
window[inFullscreen="true"] .browserContainer>statuspanel[type="overLink"] .statuspanel-label {
 display:none !important;
}

Your mileage may vary, and unless you use a dark theme (like I do) you'll probably want something other than color: silver for the actual status bar text.

Mozilla, get your house in order.  Let us customize our browser; you are not Google or Apple, that is why we like you.

edit:
In newer Firefox versions, you'll need to enable toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets in about:config.  The link above has updated css files as well; you'll probably want to start with those rather than using mine as a base at this point.

Let's Get This Over With

I know these things happen every four years and therefore cannot last any longer than that, but it feels like I can no longer remember a time when I wasn't worrying that a superbly-qualified world leader might lose the presidency to a prejudiced reality show pseudo-celebrity.

In the primaries I voted for Bernie, because I think we desperately need some socialist ideas and tools to pull us back from the brink of commercialist self- (and planetary-) destruction.  My wife voted for Hillary, and we were both glad to be supporting both candidates.  They each rank among the most honest politicians our country has to offer, and the most progressive.  (Yes really.  Do some actual research if those things sound strange to you.)  Voting felt really good in the primary.

Since then, we've witnessed the rise of a monster created and fueled by the worst runaway features of our young nation - money equaling speech, entertainment posing as news, echo chamber information bubbles, and more racism, sexism, zealotry, bigotry, and other forms of reckless fear-mongering hate than I would have ever imagined.

I've been all but paralyzed by anxiety for what feels like ages.  I'm normally not a terribly worrisome person.  I've always trusted that most of the time, most of the people will do the best they can.  I still feel that way.  But there is so much influence and so much concentrated power which is willing to swallow any pill no matter how horrifying, as long as it means perpetuating itself.  There are so many lies told so often and so loudly.

My wife observed that every four years the Republican party puts up somebody worse than the last time.  We had Dole, who seems a perfectly respectable statesman at this point, then W, McCain, Romney, and now Drumpf.  (I wouldn't necessarily have ranked McCain as worse than Bush if it hadn't been for Palin, who herself almost sounded cogent compared to today's toupee'd cheesepuff.)  In trying to figure out who is next, assuming we get to keep having elections, the only figures who come to mind for me are Scott Walker (yes, more dangerous than Trump, because he's actually accomplished terrible things instead of just blustering on about them) and whomever is the head of the KKK.  (Please excuse my gross ignorance of the grossly ignorant.)

We've always liked the ritual of voting on election Tuesday.  Ours are not particularly ritual-filled lives, but we've got a few we really feel are worth hanging on to.  Next time around though, we think we'll vote early, as so many have done this time.  I doubt I would have quite the same level of apprehension if this thing were already 100% out of my hands.

Anyway, I look forward to being productive again.  I look forward to being able to relax, find some peace, maybe even fall asleep.  I hope I can do it here in the nation of which I was born.  The one where different kinds of people can work together.  I hope that nation is still here.  I think it is.  Hillary Clinton is seeking what seems to me an impossible job, but if anybody on the planet is up to it, if anyone can be prepared enough, strong enough, compassionate enough, she's the one.

Please vote tomorrow if you haven't already.  Let's get this over with.

Mr. President, P.S.

...And now we're supposed to get behind extending various provisions in the friggin' Patriot Act?!

I can only hope this is all part of some bizarro, genius strategy to get the right-wing nuts in congress to throw yet another anti-Obama tantrum, and ultimately ends in these terrible ideas dying out.  That wouldn't be the worst plan, actually, but this is a bit confusing for those of us who agreed with the Barack Obama we voted for.

Go and vote. Period.

Moving back to a swing state in the months leading up to an election, even a midterm, has been interesting.  The "news" was on here the other night and after an ages-long commercial break containing literally nothing but campaign ads, the next story was about yet another campaign ad and whether it was true.  The segment after that was a few minutes of free air time for a couple of local candidates.

Between the flood of emails begging for money and the 24-hour mudslinging, I'm beginning to think that even if all the wrong people get elected, resulting in the most crooked and backwards outcome for each office in play, at least this madness will be over.  Small consolation, but palpable relief nonetheless.

I gassed on earlier about how preposterous amounts of money will be spent lying to us.  I sure wish I could say I was crying wolf. There are local politicians I like, those I consider a lesser evil, and those I dread.  But the bigger, money-soaked picture has been all dread.  Well, save for this fascinating little proposal:
https://mayday.us/

I've embraced the irony; the idea of killing ridiculous political spending by means of ridiculous political spending makes me smile (even if I'm also shaking my head).  If a politician's platform includes stamping out the absurd legal equivalency of money and speech, includes patching up known corruption vectors, includes valuing human citizens even if they aren't billionaires, then he or she has my support.

I hope you agree with that sentiment, wherever you find yourself on America's silly one-dimensional political spectrum.  But even if you don't, I hope you go and vote.  Period.

We have no right to complain about our civilization if we don't exercise our most basic civil liberty.

Uninterrupted Power Supply, Interrupted

Preface: a UPS is something a guy like me plugs his servers into. Picture a big heavy battery combined with a short power strip. If the lights flicker, stuff plugged into the UPS stays on.

Admittedly, I bought my last UPS in a rush. I don't actually remember doing so, but I must have picked it up somewhere last-resort-y since it has emblazoned upon it the logo of a certain squad of geeks who shall remain unmentioned. So it was definitely not the best ...purchase, I could have made.

But let us ponder a simple question not even of electrical engineering, but of common sense.
When the device eventually fails, should it become:
a) a heavy, non-battery-backed-up power strip
b) a brick through which no electricity passes whatsoever

I'll give you all a few minutes to think about that, a few more if you work for a blue-and-yellow price-gouging store or their branded-Volkswagen-driving subsidiary.

Did you get it? Do you think that a device, whose entire purpose in existing is to provide uninterrupted power, should be designed to fail in such a way that power will still be supplied? If so, good for you! You have the intelligence of a human being. Have a cookie!

If you got it wrong, then no, I don't wish I'd bought your damn extended warranty, so stop asking! The last thing I want at this point is another identical UPS with aspirations of one day growing up to be a brick.

Cinematic Word Abuse

Hollywood, we've talked about this. Stop it. Just make up your own words when you need some hocus-pocus to happen. Don't steal our real words and abuse them.

It's bad enough in police mystery shows. "Encrypted pixels" and stuff. Don't use or combine words that you don't understand. It's bad writing, and the resulting scenes are bad. But now, there's a film whose very title is wrong.

"The Source Code", the generic deep voice says, after the entire plot is shown in a 30-second TV spot.

I've glimpsed plenty of ads for this movie, which only means it could be anywhere from six months before the theatrical release to sitting in the DVD bargain bin at the grocery store. But "The Source Code", which is English for human-readable instructions for a computer, written in C or Python or Java or whatnot, here means "some magical means of time travel". Do me a favor, while you're in your web browser. Hit "View"->"Page Source" to open the source code for this page; there's some JavaScript near the bottom. See if you go hurtling back in time. Did it work? No? Hm.

See, instead of "modern day vampires = $$$", the lesson that should have been learned from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is this: Set the show up on a hellmouth, or some other place where magic and demons and impossible-but-fun nonsense is real. Don't say the computer is magic. It's not. While we're at it, no more loser-in-a-tree vampires either, 'kay?

But back to my point, don't hijack real words and phrases! Source code is very important and useful for many reasons, but time travel is not among them! I'll even go one step further and try to be constructive. Call it the Ghost Minutes Spell, or the Past Injection Curse. If you really want to have computers involved, stick it in a Matrix-like setting and call it the Crisis Backtrace or the ... actually, I can't come up with any computer words other than "backtrace" that even vaguely could have something to do with time travel.

But who am I to tell Hollywood producers anything, huh? I've only been writing source code since I was six. ...And, come to think of it, I also wrote two terrible movies, complete with crappy (though not outright lying) titles. At least I had the decency to not be able to finish shooting the second one. ;^)

Sony, Go Sue Yourself

Warning: geekiness and venting ahead!

A few years ago, a very fancy (though unimaginatively-named) gaming machine was released, the PlayStation 3. I got one, for gaming reasons (Metal Gear, primarily) and because it had a novel feature for a gaming console: the ability to run GNU/Linux (or other operating systems as well) out of the box. I get to write and run my own code on a high-end 7-core CELL system? Yes please!

Of course, games are the primary business of the system, but the "Other OS" feature was widely advertised and very appealing to people like me. Recently, though, Sony saw fit to steal that feature away from myself and thousands of other geeky, premium-paying, early-adopting, target-audience technophiles. A mandatory system update removed the functionality completely. (I sure hope Ford doesn't remove my emergency brake, just because relatively few people use it...)

So there we were, a bunch of geeks who want to write our own programs to run on our own fancy PS3s, with the rug pulled out from under us. Well, turns out that us geeks, we're kinda geeky. And some of us are pretty clever. (I use "us" rather broadly there; I personally have only a little knowledge of how the PS3 works.) Long story short, some very bright people figured out ways to once again be able to load and run our own programs on a PS3. What Sony taketh, the community giveth back.

Now, Sony has filed for restraining orders against several of the lead geeks who won us back our freedom. As best I can tell, it amounts to nothing more than a scare tactic. Nevertheless, let's boil down this chain of events:
- Sony: Buy a PS3! You can even write your own software for it!
- Geeks: Yayy! Here's lots of money!
- Sony: Mmm, money...
- Geeks: This machine is great! Gaming AND homebrew!
- Sony: Actually... no more writing your own stuff.
- Geeks: What?! We paid for that, give it back!
- Sony: No.
- Geeks: Oh look, we can still write our own stuff.
- Sony: Lawyers ATTACK!

From Sony's point of view, the new ways of running homebrew are cause for concern, because some folks will very likely figure out how to copy and play retail PS3 games they haven't paid for. (In fact, they already have.) But that's not why I care about it, and it's not why most other geeks care about it. We care because we bought a machine that we could code for, and we intend to keep it that way. We were quite happy with Sony's sanctioned, non-piracy-enabling "Other OS" feature. Once they removed it, what were we supposed to do? Stop being geeks and give up on something we already had? Have you ever met a geek? That's not how we roll.

There is a class-action lawsuit concerning Sony's mass theft, or bait-and-switch, or whatever one wants to call it. But it won't succeed; the law protects wealthy (and foreign, in this case) corporations, not consumers. The homebrew community, all of us still fans of the PS3, simply want the machine we purchased: a beefy system that plays games, shows blu-rays, and runs homebrew.

[update: the class-action case was indeed thrown out.]

That's what you sold us, Sony. That's what we all agreed to. You stole part of our own PS3s from us, and we've taken it back. If you want to sue someone for opening roads that could lead to piracy, go sue yourself.

The Blind Blinding the Blind

I've had more occasion to drive at night lately, so in addition to dealing with the usual Blind-spot Billy, Cell-phone Cindi, Double-lane Doug, Lane-weaver Lenny and Slow-merge Stella, I get to contend with another faceless freeway stereotype: Nova-beam Ned.

You've seen this guy, right? Who could miss him?

Now, I'm an engineer. I understand and appreciate that the task which falls to headlights is one of cruel difficulty. A car's headlight must illuminate (well into human-eye levels) a relatively flat surface (which is usually black), as great a distance as possible, without melting its surroundings (in fact, there's a nice hot internal combustion engine inches away), from an angle that's approaching zero degrees.

It's a ridiculous job. So, in many vehicles (see: status symbol pickups) the headlights play fast and loose with the low angle. Mount 'em higher, and the other problems shrink. Of course, it means that the driver of that car gets to see better, while the drivers of every other car on the road get two retinas full of blinding glare.

A second (and even more evil) tactic is to replace the light bulb with a dimensional portal, connected via space-time-bending wormhole to a massive star currently going supernova. ...Or maybe it's just a really powerful blue bulb, I guess that's possible. Whatever they are, I hate them, and if you have them in your car, I hate you, and you are a bad person.

Nova-beam Ned: To call you a heartless sociopath would be an insult to the heartless sociopath community. I want to mount a heavy and expensive adjustable parabolic mirror on my car, to reflect the torrent of angry light blasting from your evidently nuclear-powered car down to a fine point, focused like the sun through a magnifying glass, directly into your eyes. Once your irises are vaporized and your corneas aflame, I want to shatter those blue bulbs of death, and grind the resulting mess of broken glass and high-voltage wire right into the raw, bleeding cavities once home to your eyes, wreaking havoc on the remaining nerve tissue and sending unholy wattage into the optic center of your brain.

Do I want to do these things because I'm sadistic? Well maybe. But mainly, I want karma to balance. I want done unto you what you have done unto others. ...Actually, I just want you to use regular non-nova-beam headlights like a sane person. Would that work for you?

(see? So much nicer...)

Incompetence Profile: Dish Network

Oh Dish Network, how I loathe thee. Let me count the ways...

Advertising: incompetent
Lies, damned lies, and Dish Network promises. Free installation, they say! "Setup fee" though, that's different. And not mentioned until you've signed up. Up to 4 receivers free, they say! "Free" apparently means "extra $5 a month" in certain contexts. Only $30 a month, they say! Well, $40. Same thing right? $45 if you'd like local channels. No hidden fees, they say! Well, except for a $10 per month "programming access fee" if the phone line isn't hooked up. Even if the installation techs promised that's not the case. Which brings us to...

Installation technicians: incompetent
New house, no TV sets there where they will be yet. Not a problem, says the phone rep. Different story in person. They only have a big utility van full of equipment; it would be silly for them to include a little TV for testing. So my wife, already wasting her day waiting for these jokers, had to drive back to the apartment, grab our small TV, and drive it back, while these guys poked around on the roof and in the utility room, where they knocked out our DSL just to be cute. "One dual receiver in the bedroom, another in the basement" was the order. But my earning-her-3rd-college-degree wife probably didn't know what she was talking about, so they called me at work. Yes, I built a DVR so we want a dual tuner downstairs. As for the other, we might add a TV somewhere else at some point, and the dual tuner costs the same as a single anyway. Bedroom, basement. You install, I'll take it from there. So, naturally, they installed one in the bedroom, and the other ...in the office, two floors away from the basement. My wife was understandably sick of dealing with them by then, so I sorted things out when I got home, no thanks to their unmarked cables. Well, to be fair, a few cords had labels on one end. Not correct labels, but still.

Phone maze design: incompetent
I don't even need to go into details here. All phone mazes are defective by design. Any organization that installs such an abomination is incompetent. No exceptions, no excuses. We'd all honestly rather be on hold listening to muzak if the alternative is trying to appease some robot telling us to punch numbers and speak and roll over.

Customer service: incompetent
Beyond the phone maze await more robots, this time in the form of human beings in India reading from a flow-chart script. The phrase "I do apologize for the inconvenience sir" is used as punctuation, and to fill the silence when calling up the next part of the script. I'm not looking for an apology. Just take this fee, which you promised wouldn't be here, off my bill.

Hardware engineering: incompetent
Ahh, a nice compact dual tuner. What's this? S-Video output? Cool beans! Oh wait, it only works on the RF-remote tuner, which would by definition be elsewhere in the house, tuned to a UHF channel. Well, whatever. Composite's not so bad. No home automation control port, huh? That sucks, but I guess I can get an infrared blaster for my MythTV box. Oh, lovely. The tuner's IR sensor is fickle and ignores digits when it feels like it. Great job guys, wouldn't want to build a sensor that's a few % forgiving, 'cause surely your $3 made-in-Taiwan remote control powered by two AA batteries has more accurate signal timings than a friggin' PC motherboard.

Software engineering: incompetent
Finally, everything's set up and mostly working. Wait, what? We recorded a friggin' screensaver with a bouncing Dish logo instead of our shows? Every night in the wee hours, program guide updates are downloaded and the tuner reboots and comes up not with the last-tuned channel, but with this ridiculous "press select to continue" mode. This also happens if you don't press any buttons for 4 hours or so. Augh! There's an inelegant workaround I can and do use, but would it really be that hard to just boot up into the last tuned channel? Or update channel listings without a reboot? (What is this, Windows 95?) Or allow numbers to be punched in instead of ignoring all but a "select" signal? Or not have that useless screensaver mode in the first place?

It smells a bit of conspiracy theory, but Dish offers their own, reportedly-awful DVR (for a monthly fee, of course) which could explain the hardware and software issues that make it such a pain in the ass to set up a Dish receiver with an external recorder. Who knows if DirecTV would have been any better; their pricing lies were even more infuriating than Dish's. Don't you just love the "freedom" of choosing between two corporate overlords?

Dish Network. We put the F.U. in T.V.

The Great Beeping of '07

My wife and I got home later than usual last night, welcomed by six smoke alarms blaring just as loudly as their manaical speakers would allow. According to the neighbors, this had been going on for a good long while. Just to get it out of the way, no, there was no fire. There were no dangerous levels of carbon monoxide. There was just noise. Massive, massive decibel levels of noise.

I flipped the breaker ever so helpfully named "Smokeys" or some lame thing, and we set about hunting down each of the unholy ear-gouging devices. Grab, twist, pull it down, yank the AC plug, flip open the side and rip out the 9-volt. As if to add to the surreal nature of this process of systematically finding and killing these hateful abominations, several of them hissed with static and gasped with high-frequency squeals as the last watts bled from their capacitors. Die! Why won't they just DIE?!

Our poor cat was already neurotic and jittery, so this whole episode was just terrific for her. I hate to think what being showered in that acoustic magma feels like after hours and hours, let alone for a critter of super-sensitive hearing. My tinnitus is noticeably worse, my wife could barely focus on her homework, and our neighbors would be quite justified in either pitying us or hating us, all because someone thought it would be smart to design a system of smoke alarms that:

1. Never shut up no matter how long they're raised
2. Connect to each other and all go off if one is triggered
   
3. Are each, individually, deafeningly loud
4. Cannot be turned off remotely by cutting power
5. Give no hint as to which unit's faulty sensor started the whole mess

Yes. Brilliant.

So far, home ownership has been just fantastic. What's next, I wonder? Wait, I know. All the light bulbs simultaneously explode, raining sparks down on carpet and furniture and starting fires on every floor. The smoke alarms aren't replaced yet so nobody is warned, the pipes all magically route natural gas instead of water, and the entire place goes up in a huge plume of smoldering annihilation. Oh, and then our insurance company turns out to be a subsidiary of Enron and vanishes without a trace, our cat miraculously survives only to sue the bejesus out of us, and the homeowners association fines us for burning without a permit.

Token Microsoft Rip

I'm feeling sick today, which has several direct consequences. Firstly, I bet I'm wicked-good at Tetris. Haven't tested that, but generally the worse I feel, the more mad spatial skills I possess. Secondly, and more to the point, my brain scatters when I try to convey a message. It logically follows that this is a perfect time for a blog post. :^)

I was complaining to a friend that a link he sent wouldn't work for me, on either my workstation (GNU/Linux) or my other test box (Mac OSX-point-something). I conjectured that the site authors assume a homogenous world comprised only of those who have drunk the Microsoft kool-aid. Rather than to stay on-topic, I was compelled to rant thusly:

The Windows keys were just the first step, you know. "Vista" keyboards will have no letters, but instead, pictures of various barnyard animals. When the user presses one, a soothing Microsoftie voice will say, "The cow goes, 'Moo'!" And then the system will reboot.

I had gone almost two days without teasing Microsoft about their depressingly shitty software, and maybe it's just my illness-ridden state of mind that leads me to find it amusing, but the idea of a barnyard-noises keyboard to compliment the shiny-jingling-keys UI was too delicious not to share. ...You know, with ...all two of you who will read this.

GPL: DRM for source code...?

Over a very nice lunch with a gang of work buddies, the topic of GPL3 and proprietary versus open versus Free came up, and eventually led to a comment that the GPL is "DRM for source code". If you know me, and you know what that means, then you know that it rubbed me the wrong way. :^) Granted, this was said by someone who is no stranger to playing a devil's advocate role, but it got me thinking, and it's been a while since I've posted anything with even the slightest hint of substance.

First of all, I would define most implementations of DRM the way Richard Stallman and the rest of us pinko hippies do, as "Digital Restrictions Management", as opposed to its intended expansion of "Digital Rights Management". Chunks of code and signed keys wrap the stuff you buy on iTunes, the DVDs you buy, and other things where some party is claiming exclusive "rights" to the distribution of whatever we're talking about. The effect is that you can't use the thing you paid for in just any old manner you see fit. (Say, making a copy.) You can only do with it what the rights-holder sees fit. To me that smells more like "restrictions". It's an artificial and arbitrary limitation. I understand why it's done, but I find it insulting, so I whine about it.

The GPL is something of a bill of rights that someone can apply to the software they write. The Linux kernel is GPL. The GNU utilities are GPL. My silly game Tong is GPL. The authors of those programs have decided to use a software license that says, "I give you this program and its code, which you have the freedom to use and modify as you see fit." Most importantly, the GPL also states that if you turn around and give the program (as it was, or your modified version) to someone else, you must afford them all the same freedoms. Technically speaking, that is also an artificial and arbitrary limitation.

So yes, the GPL places restrictions on what can be done with a program's source code: I can't modify it and/or pass it on without also passing on the right to modify it and/or keep passing it on. (That should already sound pretty different than DRM.) The still-being-drafted GPLv3 adds some further stipulations, because people (well, businesses) have found ways to distribute GPL code while following the letter of the GPLv2 but not actually passing on those freedoms in practice. Tivo is the obvious example. It runs GPL software inside (GNU/Linux), but if you grab the code, tweak it, and try to run that, the hardware won't let you, because it only runs software digitally signed by Tivo's developers. You still have the right to modify it and/or pass it on, but now, that doesn't do you or anybody else any good. GPLv3 spells out that doing that sort of thing is cheating, and closes those loopholes. This is naturally upsetting to businesses who gain from their use of GPL code but don't agree with the spirit of the GPL, so they whine about it.

Now, suppose that all media and all programs were public domain. Neither DRM nor GPL exist, and there are no artificial or arbitrary restrictions on any set of bits. Film studios don't try to equate copying movies with robbery and murder on the high seas, and Richard Stallman doesn't get his undies in a bundle over businesses locking up and selling their own secret-ingredient versions of the software he and the rest of the Free Software Foundation's contributers created. That's total freedom. It isn't particularly respectul, but it's complete and unrestricted freedom.

I bring up respect because that's the key conceptual difference between the licensing restrictions of DRM'ed media and GPL'ed code. DRM respects only the initial provider. DRM says, "You can't do that, because I must have total control." GPL respects everybody, on the condition that everybody also respects everybody. GPL says, "You can't do that, because everybody must have control." I guess they both say, "you can't do that," but it hardly seems like the same deal.

There's another face for all this, the unsettling idea of using legal agreements to dictate ethical behaviour. In principle that's not desirable, at least to me, given the number of legal agreements made by parties whose ethics I would call into question. As it works out, however, I would much rather (and have done) enter a license agreement that tries to guarantee freedoms for myself and others, than one that leaves me and my activities at the legal mercy of, say, a large publisher. Now, if someone can come up with an ethical argument against the effects of the GPL that's not a form of "but I want money!", then I'll be glad to entertain it. (If money's what you want, then Free software is at best a means to an end for you, not an end itself.) Otherwise, at least it's a positive set of ethics that the license is imposing.

In any case, I can see an abstract similarity. But look into it from any direction, and I just don't see GPL and DRM having anything substantial in common. I guess they're both buzzy TLA's.

("Three-letter acronyms." I was attempting to make a joke...)

Free Driver's Ed, part 2

Lesson # 2: Speed Matching
Here we go again, Utahns. You can keep right on driving like that, but I'm gonna keep on complaining and attempting to educate you. Because I know that under your tough facades, at the bottom of your low-mileage hearts, you really do give a rat's ass.

Merging
Picture this. You're not on the freeway, but you want to be. You find one of those big ramps that gets you there. Great! You notice the right lane of the freeway isn't moving. Dumbasses. You zip past all those slowpokes and merge in either at the very last moment or several hundred yards past where that line painted on the road suggested. You can do this, because you are the single most important person on Earth.

But wait! The story isn't done! Turns out, those dumbasses weren't moving because several people in front of you were also the most important person on Earth. Rather than matching speed and slipping in undisruptively, they waited until the last moment or went several hundred yards past the line. The "dumbasses" who were already on the freeway had to give them room to merge, and the dumbasses behind those dumbasses, not wanting to crash, had to slow down too. Maybe they're not the dumbasses after all.

The merging technique that involves the least amount of dumbassery is, astonishingly, to match the speed of the lane you're about to merge into. If they're booking it, you should too. If they've come to a grinding halt, you should too. I know, you're super-important, you deserve to dart ahead so you can be "first", but that leads to the dark side... and to you being a dumbass. If even a small fraction of you 'Tahns would merge correctly, everybody's commute would be an awful lot smoother.

Thunderbirds
Behold, the amazing Utah formation-driving Thunderbirds! You can't help but smile as you approach these adorable blockades. The perfectly-synchronized motion soothes the soul. And it doesn't stop there -- you too can be a Thunderbird! Find your buddy in the next lane, and maybe even the lane on the other side, and lock in! If they speed up, you stay right beside 'em. If they slow down, you make damn sure to follow along. Herd behaviour is a sure path to safety, as well as a live exhibit of your vast intellect. Unison! Parity! Brotherhood! Thunderbiiirds!

Come on. Formation driving is about as cool as Utah Valley's bar-to-church ratio. If you don't want to speed up when you use the passing lane, then don't use it.

Save your ears if Mars attacks

I like to say positive things, to point out, "hey, this is cool" or "try this out". But sometimes, something will come along that requires a little negativity. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. In this case I feel obligated to put up a little warning, a warning about a band whose music is capable of decreasing the quality of your life, and should thus be avoided.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers put on a good show. The music is great, and the multimedia display is mind-boggling. The band that opened for them on this tour, however, was bad enough that I feel motivated to urge you to avoid them. The Mars Volta, as they're called, apparently have plenty of history with the Chili Peppers, but that's no justification for what they did to my eardrums. And my wife's eardrums. She was about ready to leave and hide in a nasty bathroom until they left the stage.

Edit: After hearing more about this band from a friend, I'm willing to permit that this show may have been a very, very off night. It warrants further investigation, but it does not change our first impression...
'Nother Edit: Yeah, they sound much better on their albums. Still not really my thing, but entirely listenable. This warning post stands, however. They put on a crap show once, they could do it again. :^)

To illustrate our criticism of he band's sound a bit more clearly, allow me to list some things their noise managed to remind us of:

• The voice of any adult in a Charlie Brown cartoon
• "Freaky Outie", a song performed by 8-year-olds in Home Movies
  
• A room full of people playing Electroplankton without headphones
• Master Shake's misguided birthday song
  
• Family Guy's stoned talent show performance (at the end of this clip)

Some of the songs themselves sounded fine, at least until the singer piped in. Like his fellow Texan "The Decider", this guy would do well to just shut the hell up. But worse than the songs themselves was the painfully drawn-out chaos that happened in between. I understand the desire to bridge songs, especially during a live show; that can be lots of fun. Less so, however, when the many members of the band do not figure out beforehand which song they'll actually be bridging into.

Each instrument was normally doing something decently musical on its own, but the band members didn't seem any too interested in what the other guys were up to. Maybe it was some high-minded eclectic design style applied to music. I don't know. But it didn't work. I suspect even the band members realize this. At one point the singer was convulsing on stage - a seemingly epileptic fit from which he unfortunately recovered, and went on to do some more shrieking.

So we had a shrieking, unintelligable singer, and instruments feuding over which song was being played, all while two bizarre images like this were shown on a screen behind them. All that was stuffed through the most irritating reverb effect I've ever heard. Somewhere around two or three hertz, its presence was, sadly, the most consistent part of the band's sound. During relative calms in the traumatic bridging progressions, there was an almost whale-like quality about the effect. As a result, I think I actually hate whales.

If I have failed in my warning to you, or if you are morbidly curious (in which case I have also failed) you may hear some of the things I apparently heard here:
http://www.themarsvolta.co.uk/
The samples on the site haven't been stuffed through the aquatic reverb, nor is anything being bridged to several acoustic destinations at once, but it's still pretty hard to follow.

The following film has been ruined.

I despise all forms of censorship, which leaks into the greyer area of movies getting butchered. Usually this is seen when a television network wants to show a movie, but doesn't want to show anything that might upset anybody. Well, that and they have to stop it every few minutes to let the advertisers scream at you. Anyway, there are other places this happens. "Family-friendly" video rental shops and other small businesses will sell or exchange for censored versions of movies. It's just been ruled that such businesses are infringing copyright:
http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2006/07/09/film-scrubbing-ruling.html

...I'm not sure how I feel about that. Sure, a little part of me dies when I see television butcher a movie by cutting off the sides of the picture, dubbing horribly cheesy dialogue over four-letter words, and skipping over intense scenes altogether. I think it does the filmmaker a disservice. But I'll bet that that same filmmaker either agreed to or signed off permission to a studio for the contract that let that movie be shown in a butchered format. Plus, it's generally understood that if I want to see the real deal, I can go buy a DVD or order pay-per-view or something. Now, these "family-friendly" rental outfits and other small businesses wear it on their sleeves that they are peddling modified movies. I personally would never set foot in such a place. But the guy who has a van full of kids to keep entertained on a long trip, or a practicing Mormon who never watches R-rated movies, might see these places much more positively. Butchered Matrix is better than no Matrix at all. ...Was that even R-rated...? Well you get my point.

Part of the problem is that society is full of prudes. This wouldn't even be an issue if there wasn't a sizeable part of the population who decides to get offended by certain words and images, who thinks anything sexual or violent is inappropriate, who picks at the details but misses the bigger picture of context and the notion that some stories simply deal with heavy subject matter. Another part is that many Hollywood studios toss in language and gore where really it isn't accomplishing anything. And then there's the problem that big media corporations want to have total control over how we see anything that comes out of their studios. Hence DVD encryption, unskippable previews, and the whole ridiculous ongoing fiasco around high-definition formats. If I honestly want to watch a butchered movie, I think I should be able to do so. Especially if I've paid just as much as I would for the real thing.

This particular ruling is sort of the worst of both worlds. If we bring the idea to its logical conclusion, there will be no more pan-and-scan and/or butchered-for-tv versions of movies, which would be fine by me, but we'll also be in a world where parody and other fair-use stuff is completely thrown out the window, which is absolutely not fine.

Preserving an artist's vision, hooray to that. But a giant boo to the idea of big film studios working with the government to restrict what we do with our own stuff. Here's hoping this judgement gets overruled, because it's totally wrong, even if it was made for the right reasons.

Hell hath no fury like a programmer patronized

Oh, the hell of technical support. The hell of corporate procedures. The hell of futility in convincing an idiot that I'm not another idiot. Praise be to any/all deities that I've had as few of these encounters as I have, and eternal damnation to every agonizing minute of the process.

A little over a year ago, my wife and I craved a new laptop. I particularly craved one that would play nice under GNU/Linux with its wireless hardware, still more rare than it ought to be. Our search led us to Circuit City of all places, where we got a decent deal on a nice little rig that has treated us pretty well. My wife's paranoia won out over my penny-pinching and we also got an extended 3-year service plan for another $300 or so. This has turned out to be a good thing. Sort of.

The hard drive's going bad. It powers up happily, it reads and writes, but when it arrives at a growing number of troublesome sectors, it fails. A failing hard disk is nothing new to me. Been there and done that many times. Scrape off all the data I can, replace it, restore or reinstall, and move on. But right now I'm stuck at the "replace it" step.

Circuit City does a huge amount of business, apparently mostly with idiots. Their unskippable phone maze starts with a very fake-looking (800) 555- number, and goes on to include this menu: "For troubleshooting with your keyboard, press 1. For troubleshooting with your mouse, press 2. For all other troubleshooting, press 3." I wish I was kidding, because that would be pretty funny if it weren't true. As it is, it's just depressingly sad. So after 5 minutes of maze navigation and 30 minutes of mind-numbing hold music punctuated by ear-scorching reminders of how important I am and how busy everybody is, I spoke with a human being. It's pathetic how little things improved after that point.

It gradually dawned on the rep that I knew what I was talking about, but he was powerless but to go through his script and force me to waste my time and his. Had to rule out the possibility of a boot sector virus, for perhaps the disk isn't going bad at all. Perhaps I've been hallucinating that fsck gave me a list of which sectors were bad, and that the list has been growing. Also, apparently lots of boot viruses manage to install themselves in Lilo, perfectly mimicking my specific multi-boot configuration, 'cause not only would that be worth a virus-writer's time, but viruses can work seamlessly across any operating system. ...That's sarcasm, by the way.

The guy I was talking to didn't catch any of my sarcasm, which is fine I guess. He's just doing his job, and probably doesn't understand that he'd save us both a hell of a lot of time if he'd skip the bullshit and listen to me. 'Course, he wants Microsoft-formatted voodoo output from scandisk or chkdsk or whatever goddamn thing windows uses, and what I have is fsck telling me what's actually going on. To his credit, he called my bluff that I had done a bunch of time-wasting steps he'd told me to do. (Hey, it's worked before.) So he knows how long it takes a Windows recovery console to boot up. Whoop-de-freaking-doo. But, until my time has been thoroughly wasted and their ridiculous steps meticulously followed, Circuit City will remain in stubborn denial that I'm looking at bad hardware.

So I get to call back again tonight after running scandisk or whatever, assuming windows lives long enough on the eroding disk to spit up a magic log file with Microsoft-colored descriptions of which sectors don't work. For the love of God, I already did all this homework. I know empirically that the disk is going bad. I paid good money for extended service, now let me send it in, and give me a new one. It's not hard. Maybe I should play the I'm-an-engineer-at-Novell card or something, I just can't believe they make everybody go through the idiot channels no matter what. Then again, I guess I am an idiot after all, for buying anything at Circuit City to begin with, and for paying out the nose for support that they'll do anything to avoid providing.