Tag: technology

On the topic of Firearms

This should make for an interesting discussion. At Recommend, they need to determine the appropriate topics and sub-topics where recos will be categorized. Obviously, Firearms is too broad to cover everything from optics to 3D printing, so what are the most important subtopics. For example, I immediately thought of the following:

Firearms: rifles
Firearms: handguns
Firearms: shotguns
Firearms: ammo
Firearms: optics
Firearms: customizing
Firearms: tactical shooting
Firearms: gunsmithing
Firearms: 3D printing

What else am I missing? And I can tell you right now that there will not be a Firearms: sexual orientation subtopic devoted to the discussion of 9mm Glocks.

Also, I’ve got a specific list set up with all of my book recos. 24 so far, and I expect I’ll have the entire 2014 reading list in by the end of the week.

Recommending books

First of all, thanks to the nearly 100 Ilk who went to Recommend and set up accounts there. I’ve already personally found it to be useful, as I picked up a copy of Battle Academy 2 on Kool Moe Dee’s strong recommendation of The Campaign Series from Matrix Games. It was also nice to see the strong recommendations for A Throne of Bones by David Jirovec and even for this blog by Aquila Aquilonis.

One reason you may be interested in following along, even if you’re not initially interested in recommending anything yourself, is that I am methodically working my way through my reading list and making recommendations on the various books I have read this year. So, if you’d like to know my actual opinion of those books, you can join up and read them there. Here are four examples of my recently posted book recos:


FAIR: The Elephant Vanishes and Other Stories by Haruki Murakami occasionally shows the award-winning author at his diffident best. Not all the stories will be new to the longtime reader; the original version of The Wind-Up Bird is here, and frankly, it is more appealing in many ways than the novel it subsequently turned into. The title story is arguably the most interesting, as who but a Murakami character would become fascinated with an aged elephant and his equally decrepit keeper? But the most insightful and most troubling is probably the story of a woman who loses the ability to sleep, and in doing so, also loses her connection to her humanity. As is often the case with his longer works, Murakami seldom provides the answers to his mysteries, but then, it is the journey rather than the destination that is to be most savored here.

DISAPPOINTING: Although Eco is easily my favorite writer and he demonstrates both his
esoteric expertise and his customary attention to detail in this book,
The Prague Cemetery simply isn’t very absorbing. It’s an origin story
for “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”, but the mercenary
protagonist is neither sympathetic nor interesting, a strange identity
device is utilized that is neither relevant nor even remotely
convincing, and the extended detour into the Risorgimento seems forced.
Still worth reading, because, after all, even a lesser Eco book is
better than most books by other authors, but it’s not Eco at his best.

BAD:  Despite the title, the religious need not fear this book. A Manual for Creating Atheists,
by Peter Boghossian, is far less likely to turn theists into atheists
than it is to turn atheists into agnostics out of sheer intellectual
embarrassment. A more accurate title would have been Atheism: Begging the Question.
Boghossian’s entire manual can be reduced to three simple steps: 1. Beg
the question. 2. Redefine any commonly understood dictionary term to
mean something completely different. 3. Declare victory. There are
perfectly rational arguments for atheism to be made, but none of them
are to be found in this particular book. Peter Boghossian would very
much like to replace the late Christopher Hitchens as the Fourth
Horseman of Atheism, but it is no wonder that Messrs. Dawkins, Dennett,
and Harris are disinclined to admit him to their ranks.

AWESOME: Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers, is a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, and as such, is a good book worth reading. But it is more than that. By setting it at the site of her old academic haunts, Sayers also presents us with a vivid portrait of bygone times. The portrayal of female academics at Oxford in the early 20th century is keenly historical, for all that it is fiction, written by a literary master who was actually there at the time. The mystery itself is almost secondary to the fascinating interplay of old rivalries and lingering jealousies that remain active among a group of exceptional women. Sayers always had unusual insight into the human condition, and Gaudy Night is perhaps her novel that most clearly demonstrates this.

If you think “Awesome” is a bit much for the Sayer’s novel, you’re absolutely correct. The four-rating system is a little limiting and Recommend will go to the six-rating system that I personally prefer in November. Two negative ratings, HORRIBLE and DISAPPOINTING, will go with FAIR, GOOD, EXCELLENT, and AWESOME. The idea is that the EXCELLENT rating should be sufficiently superlative to encourage users to actually distinguish between something that is legitimately AWESOME, such as The Lord of the Rings, and something that is more reasonably described as EXCELLENT, such as Gaudy Night or A Game of Thrones. And, of course, I will bump up The Elephant Vanishes to GOOD once the new system is active.

A new project

A few weeks ago, I had an idea for a general review site with certain specific features that all the various review sites are lacking. Then, at a recent technology conference, I saw a French guy presenting a cross-platform review system that rather cleverly combined a scraping technology with a Twitter-like interface. I realized that he’d already done 75 percent of the work my idea would require, found him later, and told him that I thought we should work together, to which he quite naturally responded: “who are you?”

After I explained my ideas, we had lunch, discovered that our visions were entirely compatible. So, instead of another game design, I’m dabbling in technology design again, and I have to say that this is considerably easier than trying to figure out how to manufacture 18-button mice in China. Of course, it’s all just interface in the end, and there are more similarities between game design and this sort of app design than you might think.

The system is called Recommend. The site and iPhone app is live already, you can see it at re.co or via the App Store. There you can also see my first 12+ recommendations, which range from an AWESOME for Advanced Squad Leader to DISAPPOINTING for Disturbed’s Asylum. I will also soon be one of their Experts in the Game and Book categories. It’s a very clever system that automatically adds a picture scooped from the Internet, and it only takes two or three minutes to create and write-up a complete recommendation.

The reason the system is of great interest to experts and influencers is that it permits the linking back to whatever link the reco-writer wishes. So, for example, my reco (as they call it) of John Wright’s THE GOLDEN AGE links to Scooter’s review of the book on the Castalia House blog. There will eventually be considerably more to the system than this, as I am presently designing a gamefication system that will allow Recommend users to build up their influence as the first of at least three new systems that will help turn Recommend into something considerably more advanced and useful than Yelp. Note that it is very much in development at the moment, but even in its early state, it is already informative and useful.

I would love to see a hundred or more Dread Ilk become influential via this system, so if you’d like to help out, there are two ways you can do so right now. The first is very simple. Just go to Recommend, sign up, follow me, and start creating your own recos. I’ll follow you in return and soon we’ll have a dynamic intra-Ilk recommendation system in operation. Right now they only have four ratings, from Horrible to Awesome, but that will be increased to six in the near future. And if you happen to like one of the things I’m recommending, click on the Recommend box to co-recommend it.

The second way to help is a little more complex. One of the things I’ve been asked to do is to find and vet bona fide experts in various fields. So, if you happen to be a legitimate expert in something and are willing to commit to doing 20 recos per month, sign up, write a reco or three as an example and to see how much work in involved, then shoot me an email with EXPERT in the subject. I’ll check them out and then get in touch with you. The field can be literally anything, from astrophysics to video production, and you can recommend anything, from audio software to zoos.

And simply because someone will ask the question, no, this does not change anything at all with regards to Alpenwolf and Castalia House. I usually have between 4 and 5 projects going at once, and since I recently finished two other projects, this is only number three at present. I seldom talk about those other projects, but in this case, since it is a social media project which the Ilk can most certainly assist, it makes sense to do so.

A failure in tech support

Spacebunny has an amusing encounter with Adobe’s fascinating approach to technical support.

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
I have a new focus for my battle. @Adobe they are the reason I can’t print…..

Adobe Customer Care ‏@AdobeCare
@Spacebunnyday Hi there, can you provide more detail on your printing issue? Which Adobe app are you using? ^M

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
@AdobeCare Reader – document could not be printed, no pages selected message. Uninstalled XI reinstalled version 8 and it works.

Adobe Customer Care ‏@AdobeCare
@Spacebunnyday Glad it has been sorted- thanks for letting us know! ^M

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
I like the fact that you don’t CARE that your newest version doesn’t work….

Full points to Adobe Customer Care for being proactive and trawling Twitter in search of customer problems to attack. That’s great. But we really do have to subtract a few points for reading comprehension. And their subsequent response is not exactly confidence inspiring.

Technology making life better

For bankers, anyhow. And don’t think this payment technology won’t eventually be applied to medical systems:

Auto loans to borrowers considered subprime, those with credit scores at or below 640, have spiked in the last five years. The jump has been driven in large part by the demand among investors for securities backed by the loans, which offer high returns at a time of low interest rates. Roughly 25 percent of all new auto loans made last year were subprime, and the volume of subprime auto loans reached more than $145 billion in the first three months of this year.

But before they can drive off the lot, many subprime borrowers like Ms. Bolender must have their car outfitted with a so-called starter interrupt device, which allows lenders to remotely disable the ignition. Using the GPS technology on the devices, the lenders can also track the cars’ location and movements.

The devices, which have been installed in about two million vehicles, are helping feed the subprime boom by enabling more high-risk borrowers to get loans. But there is a big catch. By simply clicking a mouse or tapping a smartphone, lenders retain the ultimate control. Borrowers must stay current with their payments, or lose access to their vehicle…. Now used in about one-quarter of subprime auto loans nationwide, the
devices are reshaping the dynamics of auto lending by making timely
payments as vital to driving a car as gasoline.

Brave New World indeed. They’re really squeezing every last drop of credit out of the economy.

The return of Chaos Manor Reviews

It’s good to see Jerry Pournelle back on his feet again, or rather, back at his desk. As usual, he is full of technological insight:

As of Summer 2014, a large percentage of jobs – I now believe more than 45% within ten years – can be done by a robot costing no more than a year’s salary to the current human worker. With the government keeping interest rates low this raises the temptation to borrow capital and – instead of paying it to a worker – using it to buy a robot that will pay for itself after a year, and thereafter require only maintenance and power, and when that robot is no longer useful it can be scrapped rather than being paid to retire. This will have an inevitable effect on the economy. It may have a direct effect on you.

I got into the computer revolution when my mad friend Dan MacLean talked me into investing $12,000 dollars in 1978 money – a considerable sum in those days – in an S-100 bus 2 megahertz 64 Kilobyte computer, a large green screen monitor that displayed 16 lines of 64 characters, and a Diablo printer that looked like a huge typewriter and which would print several pages a minute on fan-folded “computer paper”.

My wife thought I was mad, but my productivity increased enormously. No longer did I have to use Correcttape and various liquid paints and carbon paper. What I wrote improved, because I could rewrite sentences when needed as well as fix the torrent of typographical errors I made without having to retype the entire page after an edit.

The system paid for itself in a few months. I had already published a number of science fiction stories by the time I met Carl Helmers and we agreed that BYTE needed a User’s Column written not by a computer scientist but by a writer doing useful work on these little beasts. I still continue that tradition.

The point of that story is that in their forty or so years of existence, affordable small computers have completely changed the writing profession, and the changes continue now. It’s the same with the music profession: before small computers, performers were at the mercy of producers and publishers who had the enormously expensive equipment needed to make professional quality recordings, as well as the means for publishing musical works.

That’s all changed. For the past decade any competent performing group can either buy professional quality recording and editing equipment, or hire that work done for reasonable fees. They no longer have to sign egregious contracts giving nearly everything – sometimes including their own names – to the publisher, resulting in the ridiculous situation of one major performer changing his name to “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince” so that he could publish his own works once he could afford to.

Similar advances in technology are changing the movie industry and the health profession. They have caused the invention of podcasting, and improved many other human activities – and of course technology is changing computer programming.

From Iain M. Banks and Charles Stross to John C. Wright, science fiction writers have contemplated the Post-Scarcity economies, but few appear to have thought very deeply about Post-Labor economies. The two have similar attributes, but they are most certainly not the same. Unfortunately, that extension of the so-called Knowledge Economy appears to be rapidly upon us; there are few things so inaptly misnamed as the so-called “knowledge worker”, who for the most part doesn’t need to know anything at all.

It reminds me of how a friend in the tech-investment sector says that he’s never seen bigger deals, or fewer of them. And of how the mid-list authors are being abandoned by publishers, who increasingly insist their authors go big or go home. It appears we are increasingly living in a winner-take-all world where the robots work and the rest of us are all in the entertainment industry, competing to entertain one another.

How can this be sustainable? And who, beyond the winners taking all, is going to want to sustain it? Compared to some of the nightmare scenarios one can envision, it shouldn’t be too surprising that the 7th century philosophy of the neo-caliphate looks attractive by comparison.

An Open Source project

Calling all interested programmers:

We have a potential problem down the road. Our favored means of making ebooks is to construct them manually, which permits us to create very clean, professional ebooks without all the extra HTML trash that is an artifact of converting files from the various word processors. We do this with a program called Sigil, which is open source software, but unfortunately Sigil is no longer being maintained.

Some of the functionality of Sigil is being brought into Calibre, which is an excellent Open Source program, but is not focused on ebook production and has an editor that is more limited in its capabilities. Calibre also now requires QT5, which means those using older OS like XP cannot use it.

Now, other than a few minor features it would be nice to add for the sake of efficiency, Sigil works perfectly fine now. It’s not an immediate problem. But, as the EPUB standard changes over time, that may not always be the case. So, I’d like to find a programmer or two with OSS experience, and one or two programmers interested in gaining OSS experience, to keep Sigil alive. We have the server space that can be used to host it and are quite willing to provide it, so if you’re a programmer who is genuinely interested in helping maintain and improve Sigil, please shoot me an email with SIGIL in the subject.

If you want to have a look at the source code first, you can DL the 12MB file here.

UPDATE: Good news. The project leader, John, says that the project was merely pining for the fjords for lack of contributors. He’s quite happy to advise and so forth. We’ve got six or seven volunteers so far, so I’ll get in touch with everyone via email tonight and we can discuss what to do first.

The big question/problem is QT. John’s current plan is to go foward with QT 5.3, which rules out XP and that user base. So, the question is what is the best way to get the new user features into a version that does not require the latest QT short of a fork.

The problem with STEM

What people fail to realize is that the problem in the tech industry isn’t that there aren’t enough women getting STEM degrees, the problem is that too many are doing so:

Research shows women share negative experiences far more widely than men. Does that have an impact on diversity? Do women start avoiding certain companies because they are well informed about the culture?

Barbara: Absolutely. There were two technology companies which had this enormous turnover, and we actually tracked where the women went. And again, these companies had this huge focus on recruiting women but the culture wasn’t inclusive or gender intelligent, and so the women would end up leaving.

We have these amazing women with STEM degrees, and they’re shelving that education and going off to do something else.

When we tracked down where they went, what we found is that they went to smaller or mid-sized companies, or some of them just left the sector. They would say, “I do not even want to be in technology anymore.” So here we have these amazing women with STEM degrees, and they’re shelving that education and going off to do something else.

What’s one of the most common frustrations you hear from women in the tech sector?

Barbara: One female engineer described it as a drip-drip-drip: it’s not just one thing that happens once. She calls it being “cleverly dismissed.” So, she’ll bring up a concern or something, and it gets cleverly dismissed. If you have these drip-drip experiences of feeling excluded and dismissed over years and years, this is where women don’t feel valued for their intellect, for their ideas, or for the different way of thinking they bring, which is so useful and so important.

That’s one aspect of the problem right there. The “different way of thinking they bring” is neither useful nor important. It’s irrelevant. All those clever dismissals are just the tech gammas being nice to their coworkers, because in most cases the correct response to the concerns being raised would be: “what on Earth does that have to do with our actual objectives and responsibilities?”

The main reason there are not more women actually doing technology-related work in the technology sector despite their expensive STEM degrees is a very simple one: all those amazing women don’t like the nature of the actual work itself. They’re not good at it, they don’t like it, and so they tend to gravitate towards tangentially related sectors, like marketing technology or selling it.

Which is fine, but it’s hardly an efficient use of resources or an indicator that forcing even less-interested women into the field is a good idea.

So much for the Cloud

I’ve always thought the idea of putting your data up on someone else’s server was absolutely and utterly retarded. I’ve turned down more offers of cloud-based storage than I can recall for just that reason. But most people don’t understand that because MPAI. So, it seems likely that what 4chan is calling “The Fappening” (one has to love the way those guys name things) is going to throw a monkeywrench into more than a few business plans, including those belonging to Apple and Microsoft, because even idiots can understand the problem when naked pictures of celebrities are involved.

In case you’re not aware of what happened, a hacker got access to a number of directories belonging to celebrities and discovered that a number of young actresses such as Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, and Kirsten Dunst rather like to take pictures of themselves sans clothing. Which is a fine, time-honored tradition, of course, but again, storing those pictures on public servers protected by dubious security is not exactly what one would describe as the technologically sound option.

Another purge?

There are claims there has been another purging of a tech organization, albeit this time with the full knowledge of the founder:

I need for this info to get out. Most of the mods on 4chan have only been in that position for a couple of weeks.

The day after the #ShutDown4CHAN thing happened in july, moot called a meeting with all the mods in a IRC. He said that a girl did atempt suicide and that she had connections and they wanted blood.

Moot demanded that we use everything we can to remove anything wanting to “fuck up sjw shit”. Needless to say alot of mod anons called out moot and were kicked from the chat.

Before one was kicked he told every mod agianst this shit to meet in a 4craft server. We all did and discussed how fucked up this was. Over the next few days our chats about it became emails wich became skype calls. In the end we agreed that the next big fuck up the sjws make then we will let whatever happens happen.

What came next was dashcon.

We let the discussion go on like normal. Some mods did moots bidding and banned. Others were in the threads bumping. What was left was nearly 2/3 of 4chan`s given the boot.

We we’re all purged and outed. We fell on eachother and to bitch and moan. I swear to god our chatlogs the day after must look like mr. meeseeks.

One ousted mod anon was also a mod for 420chan and wizardchan. He said that alot of the mods thier were also exiled.

He gave proof, in the form of a collection of perma banned notices for dozens of IPs. And a list of those same IPs in log records for mod services.

We flipped our shit and began looking for more chans that this had happened to. 7chan, mchan, getchan and even shrekchan had massive mod axeings on the same day as 4chan.u

The next day a mod who wasnt outed contacted us. To our horror he told us that the new mods are complete sjws and openly call for permabans for alot of 4chan “board culture”.

As we dug deeper we found out that the same thing was happening to alot of subreddits. Normally we would say fuck em. But they told us that tons of non sjw mods had thier accounts sieged and them ip banned.

Deeper we dug and found out that dozens of forum mods and website mods were either changed or became rabbid sjw over night.

Currently this is the deepiest we have dug. The girl who attempted suicide was kassie washington, niece of nick denton owner and publisher of gawker media

There is only one answer to this exclusionary behavior, of course. Start your own organization. Build it up. And then POLICE YOUR ORGANIZATION’S DECISION-MAKERS on a regular basis. Any sign of supporting “inclusion” or “outreach” or posturing for PC approval should be grounds for immediate removal from any decision-making responsibilities.

My purging from SFWA was, as I warned at the time, a small harbinger of much bigger things to come. Don’t think you’re safe simply because you’re not controversial. It’s not only the controversy they hate, or even the open resistance, it is the mere fact of failing to kowtow to their dogma.