Tag: technology

The new browser

Brave was announced today:

It’s amazing how fast a page loads when you strip away everything but the real content.

Up to a whopping 60% of page load time is caused by the underlying ad technology that loads into various places each time you hit a page on your favorite news site. And 20% of this is time spent on loading things that are trying to learn more about you.

Performance, privacy, and convergence-free. What’s not to like? Brave CEO Brendan Eich explains:

How to Fix the Web

The Web is always in trouble for some reason or other. I remember when Microsoft came after Netscape and threatened to lock Web standards into IE. Only the Web is so big, with such reach to billions of users, that no one owns it. This means it will always be contested ground.

But the Web today faces a primal threat.

Some say the threat to the Web is “mobile”, but the Web is co-evolving with smartphones, not going away. Webviews are commonplace in apps, and no publisher of note is about to replace its primary website with a walled-garden equivalent. Nor can most websites hope to develop their own apps and convert their browser users to app-only users.

I contend that the threat we face is ancient and, at bottom, human. Some call it advertising, others privacy. I view it as the Principal-Agent conflict of interest woven into the fabric of the Web.

You use a browser to find and contribute information, but you generally do not pay for the websites who host that information. Across billions of people, for most sites in most countries, it isn’t realistic to expect anything but a free Web. And as Ben Thompson points out, “free” means ad-supported in the main. Yes, successful sites and apps may convert you to a paying customer, but most won’t.

You might object: “Hey, I’m ready to pay for websites I support”. I’m with you, but many people are not so well-off that they can support most of the commercial sites they use. Also, the Web missed an opportunity back in the early days to define payments and all they entail as a standard.

Once you grant this premise, that the Web needs ads in the large, it follows that your browsing habits will be surveilled, to the best of the ad ecosystem players’ abilities. Also, depending on how poorly ads are designed and integrated, you may become blind or averse to them. Since the ‘90s, I’ve seen several races to the bottom along these lines.

The Principal (you) uses a browser (one of a layer of agents, both software and humans) to browse the Web and keep its lights on. Consider your primary agent, the browser. It’s a complex piece of code, but now thanks to Mozilla, WebKit, Chromium, and even in part Microsoft, this billion-dollar investment is available as a mix of free and open source software.

Yet thanks to tracking options that are inevitable with anything like the Web, your valuable and private user behavior and browsing intent signals can be extracted via your current browser. And that may not be a fair deal.

Everyone’s talking about ad blocking. Blockers can make the user experience of the Web much better. But as Marco Arment noted, they don’t feel good to many folks. They feel like free-riding, or even starting a war. You may never click on an ad, but even forming an impression from a viewable ad has some small value. With enough people blocking ads, the Web’s main funding model is in jeopardy.

At Brave, we’re building a solution designed to avert war and give users the fair deal they deserve for coming to the Web to browse and contribute. We are building a new browser and a connected private cloud service with anonymous ads. Today we’re releasing the 0.7 developer version for early adopters and testers, along with open source and our roadmap.

Read the rest of it there.

The techno-gods have spoken

Do you see what happens when you unverify Milo, Twitter? Do you see what happens, Twitter?

Millions of internet users are unable to use Twitter after the site crashed at around 8.20am GMT. Users of the micro-blogging site are being confronted with the image of a broken robot and cannot view or send any tweets online or on their phones…. An outage map created by downdetector.co.uk shows the problem is affecting users in western Europe, including the UK and in Japan. 

Je suis Milo.

I love it when a song comes together

The one thing I miss most about Psykosonik is the process of creating a song from scratch with the guys. Whether it turns out the way you first conceived it in your head or not, the process is always an interesting experience.

After Gene and I mixed and mastered the record, I listened back and knew we had something. I took a promo copy up to the Bronx and played it for my friends. But when the 45 ended, there was complete silence. Everyone looked at me, and someone said, “Dion, what did you do to it?” They were remembering that night at Ellen’s party and the spontaneity of what we had done.

I never thought I had screwed up the song, but I knew what they meant. I had had those feelings before—a record not quite capturing what I had intended. But with “Runaround Sue,” I knew I had nailed it, even though that didn’t come across for my Bronx friends.

After “Runaround Sue” came out in September ’61 and hit No. 1, I went to the old neighborhood for a party. My friends said, “You know, we couldn’t really hear how good the record was at first, but it sounds good now.” Ellen gave me a hug and said, “Wow, what a birthday gift to watch that song come together.” By then, the song’s attitude had grabbed everyone’s spirit. But you know, as great as that song sounds on the record, it was even better at Ellen’s party. Sad but true.

I get a little of the same buzz from designing games and software, but because the process is so much longer, it’s nowhere nearly as emotionally satisfying. With the music, you can hear it decades later and still recapture a little bit of what it felt like at the time it was all coming together. It’s really less about the destination than the journey.

The social media war

Mike Cernovich puts what is already happening on Goodreads and Twitter and Facebook into perspective:

Until recently journalists loved social media, social media lined their pockets:

  •     Journalist writes a story.
  •     Readers share and discuss the story.
  •     Websites gets more pages views and journalists set the agenda.

Social media was great until a mindset shift happened.

Readers became writers. Readers began setting the agenda. Social media is the new media. Everyone in media knows this, and everyone is terrified.

This is about control of the information flow. It’s not possible to indoctrinate and propagandize when there is a sufficiently strong countercurrent, and the Alt Right is an increasingly powerful countercurrent. That’s why they are desperate to mute us.

The fight for social media is the fight for democracy.

Most people believe social media is a scrap book for your life, and if Zuckerberg has his way, that’s what Facebook will be for. The rubes and slobs can share memes, but if you share any thoughts that threaten the political establishment, you’re finished.

If Jack Dorsey has his way, the mainstream media will regain its power as gate keepers of information.

The rapefugee crisis will not be reported. The brutal beatings of women will be swept under the rug. Presidential elections will involve two sides of the same globalist coin.

Keep fighting back.

That’s what we’re discussing tonight. There is only ONE way to ensure that they can’t turn off our microphones, and that is to build our own. We need our own information flow, we can’t expect to be permitted to borrow the other side’s indefinitely.

They often talk a techno-libertarian game and proclaim their channels are for everyone, but their actions have repeatedly belied their words. It’s not a coincidence that it is always the voices on the right that are silenced and the memes of the right that are banned while the left is permitted to violate the so-called rules at will.

Code of Merit

Rosarior has made a solid attempt at providing an alternative to the Codes of Conduct that SJWs are successfully using in their attempt to enter and converge many open source software projects. It’s called the Code of Merit.

A meritocratic code of conduct devoid of social politics.

This Code of Merit should not be necessary. The fact that it is necessary means there is something wrong with the solutions the software industry is trying. They should recognize that fact and not insist that their solution is the only solution.

  1.     Software is like nature: it evolves, so the best implementation must prevail.
  2.     You will contribute, you will learn, and mistakes are allowed.
  3.     Mistakes are not final and everybody has a second chance.
  4.     Don’t expect others to do your work or help you with your work forever.
  5.     Harassment as defined by law will not be allowed. Questioning is not harassment. Repeated questioning after an individual has stated their desire for disengagement is harassment.
  6.     Censorship will not be permitted. Seeking to silence an individual voicing constructive opinions will not be allowed. Silencing vitriol is not censorship.
  7.     This is a space for technical prowess; world politics have no place here.
  8.     Everything that makes a person an individual, including but not limited to body, sex, sexual preference, race, language, religion, nationality, or political preferences are irrelevant in the scope of a technical project.
  9.     Everybody is different, so differences will not be mentioned by anyone, even by the individual suffering/experiencing/having/enjoying them. We are all individuals seeking the common goal of improving ourselves and improving our collective project.
  10.     Everybody has the same rights and the same opportunities to seek any challenge they want. The chance to screw up will not be denied to anybody.
  11.     There is no room for ambiguity: if an individual is ambiguous regarding a statement it is up to the individual to provide more context. Ambiguity will be met with questioning; further ambiguity will be met with silence.
  12.     If a discussion arises that cannot be solved in the space of the project, it will be discussed in a separate space. Disruption of the project will not be allowed.
  13.     This Code of Merit does not take precedence over governing law.

It’s a good start, and I certainly support the idea, but I find it both defensive and excessively explanatory. I also find that it leaves a few small cracks that SJWs will, as is their wont, ruthlessly attempt to exploit.

Here is a first pass at a weaponized version that I believe will be more effective in both rooting out and deterring SJW entryists.

OSS Code of Merit

Everyone who joins this project agrees to abide by this meritocratic code in the interest of successfully reaching the objectives of this project.

  1. No objectives beyond the stated objectives of this project are relevant to the project. Social Justice Warriors are not permitted to join this project in any capacity.
  2. Any attempt to suggest, propose, or otherwise advocate for an alternate Code of Conduct or to advance social justice ideals will result in immediate expulsion from the project.
  3. Your value to the project will be solely determined by your direct contributions to the project in the objective form of code, documentation, fundraising, and testing.
  4. No member of the project who has not contributed [a specified amount of code] is permitted to accept any board position, administrative position, or management-related role in the project.
  5. You will do your own work. Any attempt to pass off the work of others as your own will result in immediate expulsion from the project.
  6. Individual characteristics related to body, sex, sexual preference, race, language, religion, and nationality
    are irrelevant and will not be taken into account concerning your value to the project.
  7. If a discussion arises that cannot be solved in the space of the
    project, it will be discussed in a separate space. Disruption of the
    project will not be allowed.
  8. The director of the project is king, emperor, and god of the project. There are no limitations on his ability to make decisions and discipline members of the project. Cross him at risk of expulsion from the project.
  9. All present and future advisory boards will answer to the director of the project. The director can disband any and all boards and committees at will and at his sole discretion.
  10. The director of the project is X. The vice-director is Y. If the director is incapacitated or otherwise unable to perform his duties, Y will assume the director’s role for three months and will appoint a substitute vice-director. If the director is still unable to perform his duties after three months, Y will become the director of the project and the substitute vice-director will become the vice-director.
  11. If you do not approve of the direction or the objectives of the project, then leave the project.

One thing I’ve noticed is that SJWs always attempt to minimize the role of whoever started the project and made it successful, ergo shutting down any possibility of that by protecting the status of the project director and giving him the unrestricted ability to boot any member seeking to effect change should be the first priority of any project that wishes to remain productive and unconverged.

    Flying in the face of reality

    I have no doubt that the Germans are going to go full-Nazi as soon as they overthrow their traitorous political class and their corporate PC lobby.

    The involvement by foreigners flies in the face of Germany’s PC lobby which has ruthlessly called critics of Merkel’s migration programme ‘Nazi’ or ‘racist’.

    Take 59-year-old Akif Pirincci, an outspoken Right-winger and German writer of Turkish origin, who has warned that Christian Germany is becoming Islamic. His books, one of which is called Germany Gone Mad, were best-sellers until last autumn, when big publishers and bookshops chose not to distribute them any more. It is the first time since the Nazi era that such censorship has occurred.

    In another controversy, Catholic journalist Matthias Matussek lost his job at the respected German newspaper Die Welt after he posted his views on November’s massacre in Paris on his personal Facebook page, saying mildly: ‘I think that the terror in Paris will move our (German) debate about open borders and … young Muslim men in our country in an entirely new and fresh direction.’

    Despite the censorship, unpalatable truths have still slipped out. Last month, the interior ministry in the large south-west state of Baden-Wurttemberg published figures on criminal offences committed by asylum seekers between January and November 2015.

    They made alarming reading. Asylum seekers represent one per cent of the population of the state but were involved in five per cent (27,255) of all registered crimes, among them 1,000 cases of grievous bodily harm, 22 of attempted murder, and 700 of domestic burglary. The highest number of offenders were Syrians, committing 5,576 of the offences.

    Andre Schulz, head of Germany’s criminal police association, said recently that in his experience 10 per cent of the migrants would turn to criminality, including theft, sexual assault or drug dealing.

    ‘The policy has been to leave the German population in the dark …ordinary citizens are being played for fools,’ he declared.

    The same process is at work in the USA. It’s a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one; Germany is getting hit harder and faster. This is why establishing new, Alt Right institutions is an urgent necessity. And they are being developed; I have spoken to three separate groups that are in the process of doing this, so be ready to support them and use them and police them as they begin to appear this year.

    Because, like the snakes they are, the SJWs are going to throw everything they have into trying to strangle them in their cradles.

    Ilkotism

    Two IT jobs in North Carolina:

    We are looking for two senior level IT positions and are having a hard time finding good candidates.  I would love to see the positions filled by members of the Ilk.

    Senior Converged Infrastructure Engineer
    In this case we are looking specifically for someone who is an expert in Compute-Unix/Linux specific and Storage-EMC specific.  AIX/Red Hat, VMware, IBM Power, EMC Storage, VCE Vblock.

    Senior Storage Engineer 
    7+ years of direct experience managing storage in a large enterprise environment.  EMC experience is highly preferred, but possibly not required. 

    No remote option.

    If you’re qualified and you’re interested, email me with a resume attached and I’ll forward it onto the relevant party.

    On a tangential note, we’re going to have an IT-related January Brainstorm session soon. It will be closed; I just have to work out the date with the panelists.

    The Game Dev course begins Saturday. I’ll send out the emails tonight.

    Social justice convergence on social media

    It’s easy to see they are terrified of the rising tide of nationalism, because they are absolutely determined to try to stop the signal. But all they will do is guarantee their own demise:

    The two largest social networks, Facebook and Twitter, and the world’s largest search engine, Google, have teamed up with German law enforcement to delete “hate speech” within 24 hours in what is being seen as a last-ditch effort to silence public dissent about a gigantic wave of Syrian immigration.

    The partnership to crack down on what Germany deems illegal speech comes after German law enforcement’s reported concerns about “racist abuse” posted to social media after the country’s huge and extremely controversial import of over a million Syrian refugees.

    Justice Minister Heiko Maas is reported to have warned social networks that they must not become “a funfair for the far-right” and that “the benchmark to be applied will be German law and no longer just the terms of use of each network.”

    Specialist teams will be used to track down, examine, and remove offending posts, and the process is not to take more than 24 hours.

    The only reason they think they can do this is because they believe they have a monopoly on the rightful use of force. But because they have betrayed the Westphalian bargain that granted it to the State, they have lost the necessary Mandate of Heaven. History suggests that events will proceed accordingly.

    You’ve heard of technocratic government, but the Merkel regime is the first technostasic one.

    The convergence spreads

    You can safely write off Swift, Mono, and Discourse, as all three have succumbed to Social Justice Convergence and adopted SJW Codes of Conduct:

    One of my heroes, Miguel de Icaza, happens to have lots of life experience in open sourcing things that were not exactly open source to start with. He applauded the move, and even made a small change to his Mono project in tribute:

        When Swift was open sourced today, I saw they had a Code of Conduct. We had to follow suit, Mono has adopted it: https://t.co/hVO3KL1Dn5
        — Miguel de Icaza (@migueldeicaza) December 4, 2015

    Which I also thought was kinda cool.

    It surprises me that anyone could ever object to the mere presence of a code of conduct. But some people do.

            A weak Code of Conduct is a placebo label saying a conference is safe, without actually ensuring it’s safe.

            Absence of a Code of Conduct does not mean that the organizers will provide an unsafe conference.

            Creating safety is not the same as creating a feeling of safety.

            Things organizers can do to make events safer: Restructure parties to reduce unsafe intoxication-induced behavior; work with speakers in advance to minimize potentially offensive material; and provide very attentive, mindful customer service consistently through the attendee experience.

            Creating a safe conference is more expensive than just publishing a Code of Conduct to the event, but has a better chance of making the event safe.

            Safe conferences are the outcome of a deliberate design effort.

    I have to say, I don’t understand this at all. Even if you do believe these things, why would you say them out loud? What possible constructive outcome could result from you saying them? It’s a textbook case of honesty not always being the best policy. If this is all you’ve got, just say nothing, or wave people off with platitudes, like politicians do. And if you’re Jared Spool, notable and famous within your field, it’s even worse – what does this say to everyone else working in your field?

    Mr. Spool’s central premise is this:

        Creating safety is not the same as creating a feeling of safety.

    Which, actually … isn’t true, and runs counter to everything I know about empathy. If you’ve ever watched It’s Not About the Nail, you’ll understand that a feeling of safety is, in fact, what many people are looking for. It’s not the whole story by any means, but it’s a very important starting point.

    I’m not sure which amused me more. The Gamma tell: “Which I also thought was kinda cool” or the idea that a short humor video serves as an adequate rebuttal

    Now, it is true that “a feeling of safety” is what many people are looking for. It’s why they should not be permitted to vote in a representative democracy. But (and this would be the only relevant point), “a feeling of safety” is not what people are looking for in technology projects.

    As I told Robert Rosario, there is soon going to be a significant movement of talented programmers away from projects that have converged. Perhaps it is time to create a qualification that is awarded to sufficiently skilled and credentialed open source contributors who vow not to work on any open source project with a Code of Conduct, and to fork any open source project that adopts one.

    This isn’t my field, but I have a vision for an effective anti-SJW technology force that will benefit greatly from the many open source projects bogging themselves down in social justice. If anyone who is actually in OSS in a signficant way would like to lead a Brainstorm discussion of it, let me know.

    Apple design fail

    Former Apple designers think the post-Jobs Apple has lost the plot:

    Once upon a time, Apple was known for designing easy-to-use, easy-to-understand products. It was a champion of the graphical user interface, where it is always possible to discover what actions are possible, clearly see how to select that action, receive unambiguous feedback as to the results of that action, and have the power to reverse that action—to undo it—if the result is not what was intended.

    No more. Now, although the products are indeed even more beautiful than before, that beauty has come at a great price. Gone are the fundamental principles of good design: discoverability, feedback, recovery, and so on. Instead, Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read. We have obscure gestures that are beyond even the developer’s ability to remember. We have great features that most people don’t realize exist.

    The products, especially those built on iOS, Apple’s operating system for mobile devices, no longer follow the well-known, well-established principles of design that Apple developed several decades ago. These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations, establishing Apple’s well-deserved reputation for understandability and ease of use. Alas, Apple has abandoned many of these principles. True, Apple’s design guidelines for developers for both iOS and the Mac OS X still pay token homage to the principles, but, inside Apple, many of the principles are no longer practiced at all. Apple has lost its way, driven by concern for style and appearance at the expense of understandability and usage.

    I find the Apple UI almost unusable. But I’m not really equipped to judge, since I have staunchly refused to use Apple products since my last experience with one. After spending two hours trying to figure out how to do something very simple on SB’s Powerbook or whatever it was, I called up a technical friend who had switched to Macintosh.

    “Oh, you just can’t do that,” he explained. “It’s not possible.”

    And that was before the screen failed and the battery developed a massive tumor that prevented the computer from lying flat.