Tag: technology

WRE: technology conference edition

It is customary for women to lament the way men are openly hostile to their presence when they insert themselves into hacker fests and technology conferences.  And yet, it is hardly difficult to understand why men tend to be less than enthusiastic about opening themselves up to be patrolled by volunteer speech police and self-appointed equality cops.

A Playhaven developer was fired after making sexual jokes in the audience during a keynote session at PyCon, a conference for Python developers. Now Adria Richards, a developer evangelist for SendGrid, is getting rape and death threats via Twitter.

Richards was sitting in the audience immediately in front of two developers. After someone made a comment about forking a software repository, the two began making jokes about forking in a sexual manner, and “big dongles.” After listening for some time, Richards got fed up, took a picture of the two, and posted it to Twitter:

    Not cool.Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and “big” dongles.Right behind me #pycon twitter.com/adriarichards/…
    — Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 17, 2013

One of those two developers is Alex Reid, an engineer at PlayHaven, the mobile gaming monetization and marketing company. The developer on the left, whose name is not yet known but goes by mr-hank on Hacker News, was apparently fired by PlayHaven for the incident.

Adria Richards, having successfully gained the attention she was there to seek, tries to justify her actions in the usual self-lionizing language: “Adria Richards explained her perspective on her blog, But You’re a Girl,
saying that she took the comments for as long as she could, but when
she saw a picture of a little girl onstage, she felt she needed to make a
stand for her, and all the women who have not considered technology as a
career path “because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible
for her to do so.”

What Richards clearly doesn’t realize is that she is the parasitical ass clown making it more difficult for women to pursue technology as a career path.  What sort of idiot employer would want to hire disruptive, self-seeking, controlling employees actively looking for causes to fight instead good engineers who will simply do their jobs and may happen to tell a mildly offensive joke now and then in the process?  At this point, I have no doubt that the conference organizers are regretting their decision to permit Adria Richards to attend.

After all, who wants to attend the sort of conference where merely being overheard by a fellow attendee comes with a proven risk of losing your job?  I’m not a Python developer, but if I was, I’d certainly wouldn’t bother to clear a spot on my calendar for it.  And as a game developer, I’m certainly going to be looking at PlayHaven with a deeply skeptical eye going forward.

As one female developer – in other words a woman who actually works in the industry, as opposed to patrols it on behalf of her equalitarian ideology – correctly observed: “Honestly, I feel like this kind of crazy shit makes it harder for women to manage in tech.”  It does.  It absolutely does. People like Richards are parasites who have no place in technology because they contribute nothing, they create nothing, they construct nothing, they only destroy.  They only seek to destroy.

Even the lowly white knights who desperately desire to be considered good and proper equalitarians understand the problem:  “She damages the reputation of everyone trying to make this industry more
female-friendly. She’s done the opposite of making men and women feel
more comfortable working together; now men will be looking over their
shoulder every time a woman is present in the workplace or a conference
because hey, she might do what Adria did. This is not an environment
anyone wants to work in.”

It is reported that 20 percent of  the 2013 attendees at PyCon were female.  If the men who attended this year have any sense at all, that percentage will be considerably higher next year.  Meanwhile, those of us who don’t give a quantum of a damn about making “industry more female-friendly”, but are focused on creating compelling, entertaining, and useful technologies, see our skepticism vindicated.  Again.

UPDATE:  Apparently SendGrid was unimpressed with their employees decision to evangelize feminist speech control rather than SMTP relay services.  It is a wise move on their part, and should serve as an object lesson to other would-be though police.

“Effective immediately, SendGrid has terminated the employment of Adria Richards. While we generally are sensitive and confidential with respect to employee matters, the situation has taken on a public nature. We have taken action that we believe is in the overall best interests of SendGrid, its employees, and our customers. As we continue to process the vast amount of information, we will post something more comprehensive.“

First Sale doctrine lives

Capitalism and private property aren’t entirely dead in the West, not yet, anyway:

The Supreme Court has sided with a Thai graduate student in the U.S. who sold cheap foreign versions of textbooks on eBay without the publisher’s permission, a decision with important implications for goods sold online and in discount stores.

The justices, in a 6-3 vote Tuesday, threw out a copyright infringement award to publisher John Wiley & Sons. Thai graduate student Supap Kirtsaeng used eBay to resell copies of the publisher’s copyrighted books that his relatives first bought abroad at cut-rate prices.

Justice Stephen Breyer said in his opinion for the court that the publisher lost any ability to control what happens to its books after their first sale abroad.

This will be interesting because the battle over used electronic items, such as ebooks, is only just beginning.  But at least those who are trying to expand copyright to subsume private property rights will have to change the law first.  Of course, the current life+70 Disneyright tends to indicate that there is a reasonable chance they’ll be able to do it.

Intergenerational war

As if the younger generations don’t already have a strong casus belli given the debt with which their great-grandparents and grandparents have saddled them, Karl Denninger points out yet another reason today’s children will have just cause to hate their parents:

We all have the right to consent to our data being used and even sold in exchange for something.  Today you consent to a lot of that, even though you may not be paying attention to your granting of that consent.

But children are not of age.  They thus cannot consent.  And it is a long-standing principle that a bargain must include something of at least putative value to both parties as consideration, or it’s no contract at all.

There is no benefit to the kids in this paradigm — only costs that are intentionally hidden from them but which, mark my words, will screw them in the future.

Mark this post and wait 10 years. 

Those kids who are being “tracked” now will find that they’ve been violated repeatedly by this data collection and sharing.

If your state is involved in this, and there are a lot that are, you need to get every last one of your state legislators out of office and all of the local school board members must be instantly ejected and shunned to the point of literal starvation.

If you’re in a state that is not participating, make damn sure they don’t now or in the future.

If you’re a parent and don’t do those two things then prepare for your kids to throw you into the wood chipper feet-first when they figure out how badly you allowed them to be screwed.

I utterly guarantee that you will deserve it.

On a related note, don’t put pictures of your kids on Facebook or Instagram.  It’s stupid.  It’s obnoxious.  It’s thoughtless and self-centered.  And it’s their life, not yours, that you’re putting on public display.

In defense of “extremism”

Frank Bruni complains about the loss of the media monoculture in the New York Times:

America these days is an immoderate land of fixed opinions and outsize fixations. More and more we wallow: in our established political philosophy; in our preferred interest group; in our pastime of choice; in whichever health routine we’ve turned into a health religion.

I BLAME the Internet. Well, that and social media and cable television, with its infinity of channels. In theory our hyperconnectivity and surfeit of possibilities have broadened our universes, speeding us to distant galaxies, fresh discoveries and new information. But in reality they’ve just as often had a narrowing effect, enabling us to dwell longer on, and burrow deeper into, one way of being, one mode of thinking.

Whether you’re predisposed to a conservative or liberal view, you can set your bookmarks to Web sites that reinforce what you already believe, take a similar tack with your Facebook and Twitter feeds, and turn for news to Fox News or MSNBC, each an echo chamber for like minds.

And many Americans do just that. The prime-time audiences for Fox News and MSNBC increased significantly between 2011 and 2012, while CNN’s prime-time audience dropped. The percentage of swing voters seemed to shrink, and over the last two decades, the percentage of voters who label themselves “moderate” has similarly declined. 

Bruni is whining about essentially the same “problem” that McRapey lamented in his recent interview.  The Left is deeply and bitterly upset about their inability to control the narrative in the way they were once able to.  Bruni is complaining that although ABCNNBCBS, NPR, the AP, and the New York Times are all still around and putting out news and opinion, Americans don’t have to pay attention to them anymore, and increasingly, they don’t.  Bruni resents the fact that, as McRapey said in the CBC-Q interview, “the internet is a great big world and you
can’t mallet everybody.”

But the Left would like to.  Oh, how they would dearly love to be able to shut out every critical voice, to see and hear no evil, to prevent the innocent ignorant from being able to learn that the Officially Sanctioned Story is not necessarily true and its case is riddled with holes.  This is why the Left so religiously shuns debate, erases its opponents from the history books, and often tries to pretend that the other side doesn’t even exist.  They have to rewrite history, and in some cases jettison it entirely, because the facts and lessons of history simply do not work in their favor.

It’s not the Right that is burrowing deeper into its own way of thinking.  We of the Right have been steeped in leftist propaganda and ideology for our entire lives.  We understand the Left’s thinking, and we reject it due to that very understanding, whereas leftists, when caught off-guard, will readily admit that they are both frightened and confused by what those on the Right are thinking.  This is usually because they are totally unfamiliar with it; in some cases they literally haven’t ever heard anything like it before.  And because their thinking is wholly based on rhetoric and rote-learning, they are almost uniformly incapable of operating on a genuinely dialectical level; what looks like leftist dialectic is almost always, when you examine it, nothing more than rhetoric.

Consider the poor leftist who believes avidly that a) racism is evil and b) evolution is true.  What is he to do when confronted by someone who points out, on the basis of genetic science, that humans are not even all equally homo sapiens sapiens?  If he is to cling to his beliefs, he must either accept a continual state of cognitive dissonance or bury his head in the intellectual sand.  This is why “burrowing” is an apt term for the Left’s response to the changes brought about by the Internet, though not necessarily the Right’s.

Expect more public lamentations from the likes of Bruni as the power of the media gatekeepers continues to fade and more and more independent alternatives whose only credibility is based on their substance, not their credentials or their historical position.  As was once said of liberty, extremism in the pursuit of truth is no vice.  It is, rather, the cardinal virtue.

Helen’s Page

Dr. Helen has introduced a new page that is intended to be a right-wing online Craig’s List.  It’s called Helen’s Page.  If you’ve got something to sell, a service to offer, or even just a worthy blog post to pitch, you can sign in and post it there.  People can add comments; for example, here is a post about A THRONE OF BONES I put up there last week.

It’s still in live beta, but it’s an interesting concept.  Check it out.

Nexus 10 $399 to $499

Google bags the launch and announces its new hardware anyhow:

Hurricane Sandy can’t hold Google (GOOG) down, as the company has just gone ahead and unveiled the Nexus 4 smartphone and Nexus 10 tablet even though its press conference was canceled. Nexus 4 specs include a 4.7-inch True HD IPS Plus display with 1,280 x 768-pixel resolution, an 8-megapixel camera, a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, 2GB of RAM and Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. The phone starts at a shockingly affordable $299 without any contract or subsidies, and it will launch in the United States on November 3rd.

The Samsung (005930)-built Nexus 10 tablet sports a 2,560 x 1,600-pixel display with a pixel density of 300 PPI, a dual-core 1.7GHz Samsung Exynos chipset, 2GB of RAM, NFC and a 5-megapixel camera. Pricing starts at $399 with 16GB of storage and tops out at $499 for the 32GB model, and both will launch on November 3rd alongside the Nexus 4.

Not quite as aggressively competitive as I’d thought, but it doesn’t sound bad at all.  I’m just hoping that they got the fragile screen issue from the Nexus 7 resolved.

The idiot assimilators

Sara Hoyt has a legitimate complaint about Facebook and the mindless Faceborg who successfully attempt to enlist unwitting others in their cherished causes:

People with zero affiliations with — or even knowledge of — particular
groups are publicly made members of them without their consent. All it
takes is a friend putting you in a group, and then you are in it without
your consent….

There is something downright Orwellian about this, and if you don’t
think it can be used for Orwellian political purposes, imagine yourself
working in an office with Facebook friends who include supporters of a
presidential candidate for whom you don’t intend to vote. If that
“friend” puts you in, say, an “I’M VOTING FOR JILL STEIN!” Facebook group, then you are in it, and you have to un-join. Suppose
your supervisor or next door neighbor put you in it? The implications
are as obvious as they are odious; not all of us are political junkies
with the balls to issue public statements about whom we support or don’t
support, and not all of us are so public that we might find something
like this amusing enough to write a blog post about the experience.

Now, I’m not active on Facebook.  While I do use Twitter, I only belong to most social media groups in order to prevent my more creative critics from attempting to pass themselves off as me.  But I am a registered user there, and so every day I am the recipient of spam from groups like Friends of Protection For Men.  Not only is the constant barrage of email annoying, but it has the counterproductive result of making me feel entirely unsympathetic to the Friends of Protection For Men.  Every time I see another stupid piece of mail from them it makes me want to kick the sender in the teeth.  Not that I often see one, of course, since my spam filter is cranked up to 11, which is why I occasionally fail to receive legitimate emails from readers attempting to contact me.  But I just looked in my Junk folder, and sure enough, there are a pair of emails from the wretched Friends that arrived this morning.

So, for the first time in ages, I logged onto Facebook and removed myself from the various groups into which others have conscripted me.  But, as Miss Hoyt points out, I shoudn’t have to do that.  Opt-out is reprehensible and opt-in should always be the standard.

I appreciate that Facebook and other social media can be a useful means of contacting individuals and organizing groups.  But don’t ever sign people up for causes that you believe to be worthy, even if you are 100 percent sure that they agree with the goals of that group.  It’s just obnoxious, and to be honest, Mark Zuckerberg should be repeatedly punched in that flat, stupid, thieving face of his for his refusal to prevent Faceborg from assimilating others.

The need to restrict drone use

Those discussing the use of killer drones, both pro and con, at the New York Times somehow managed to completely fail to consider the two most problematic aspects of their use:

One point in favor of drone strikes is that they are weakening Al
Qaeda, the Taliban and affiliated groups, and hence protecting lives,
American and other.

Also, there don’t seem to be better means of doing
so.

Points against drone strikes are the cost in civilian lives, the
alienation of parts of the Islamic world, potential harm to the
authority of international law, and the possibility that drone use will
spread around the world, generating more conflict and harming long-term
U.S. interests.

These are all valid points, and I respect that reasonable people
could be convinced by either set. My own reasoning turns on four
arguments.

  1. First, states have a primary responsibility for the protection of
    their own citizens. If drone strikes are the best way to remove an
    all-too-real threat to American lives, then that is an especially
    weighty consideration.
  2. Second, I doubt that ending drone strikes would substantially reduce
    anti-Americanism in the Islamic world or put a dent in radical
    recruitment.
  3. Third, the U.S can do a lot to moderate some harms caused by its use
    of drones. By being clearer about what it’s doing and offering detailed
    legal justification, the U.S. could mitigate damage to international
    law and the threat of uncontrolled proliferation.
  4. Finally, there is evidence that drone strikes are less harmful to
    civilians than other means of reaching Al Qaeda and affiliates in
    remote, lawless regions (for example, large-scale military operations).

There are two serious problems with the use of drones overseas, both of which outweigh their potential benefits.  First, it has successfully established a precedent for using them domestically for routine law enforcement.  Second, and more problematic, the administration has foolishly granted a comprehensive justification for the use of drones by foreign forces against Americans on American soil.  When foreign militaries acquire access to drones, and they will, the US will find little sympathy from other nations when the equivalent of Hellfire missiles begin raining down on New York and California.

And the threat of disproportionate response won’t necessarily be a convincing deterrent, because clever attackers will be careful to disguise who is piloting the drone.  An Iranian drone might actually belong to China.  A Chinese drone might actually be utilized by American rebels… or by China making it look like American rebels.  The widespread use of drones is a very foolish move on the part of the U.S. Commander-in-Chief and can be safely expected to result in some serious blowback.

Bombs before GDP

Karl Denninger considers the problem of energy production in a world of increasingly expensive oil and coal:

We experimented with Thorium as a nuclear fuel in the 1950s
and 1960s.  Carried in a molten salt there are a number of significant
advantages to this fuel cycle.  Chief among them is that the reactors
operate at atmospheric pressure, have a strongly-negative temperature
coefficient (that is, reactivity drops as temperature increases) and
because they operate with their fuel dispersed in the coolant and rely
on a fixed moderator in the reaction vessel shutting them down is
simply a matter of draining the working fuel into a tank with sufficient
surface area to dissipate decay heat.  This can be accomplished
passively; active cooling of a freeze plug in the bottom of the reactor
vessel can be employed during normal operation and if for any reason
that cooling is lost the plug melts, the coolant and working fluid
drains to tanks and the reactor shuts down.  In addition thorium is about as abundant in the environment as is lead, making its supply effectively infinite.

Finally, these reactors operate at a much
higher temperature; the units we have run (yes, we’ve built them
experimentally in the 1950s – 1970s!) run in the neighborhood of 650C. 
This allows closed-cycle turbine systems that are more efficient than
the conventional turbines in existing designs, making practical the
location of reactors in places that don’t have large amounts of water
available.  That in turn means that the risk of geological and other
similar accidents (e.g. tsunamis!) is greatly reduced or eliminated. 
Finally, the fuel cycle is mostly-closed internally;
that is, rather than requiring both fast-breeder reactors and external
large-scale reprocessing plants to be practical, along with a way to
store a lot of high-level waste these units burn up most of their
high-level waste internally and produce their own fuel internally as
well as an inherent part of their operation.

So why didn’t we pursue this path for nuclear power?

That’s simple: It is entirely-unsuitable for production of nuclear bombs as it produces negligible amounts of plutonium.

A decision that might have made sense in the middle of the 1950s arms
race doesn’t make sense more than 60 years later.  So, why aren’t we
utilizing thorium-based nuclear power plants?

Apple’s high water mark

All declines have to begin from a high, and with regards to Apple, it would appear to be all downhill from here.  A few weeks ago, I ranted about the way Apple’s walled garden and forced upgrade approach was being adopted by foolish technology companies.  Two of our four Kobos ended up bricked, both due to the same buggy updated firmware; I could have avoided bricking the second one were I not inadvertently forced into an unwanted update by the computer software.

Apple was able to get away with this very risky strategy due to it being run by a perfectionist, detail-oriented, technofascist.  It didn’t matter if the updates were forced, because anyone working for Steve Jobs was going to be triple-damn certain that the updates would work properly… or at least not contain any fatal bugs.  Now that Jobs is gone, it doesn’t surprise me in the least that Apple is running into the same kind of bugs that plague most of the other companies that stupidly tried to imitate it.  I received this email from a friend of mine who was so bold as to update his iPhone to iOS 6:

I updated my iphone to IOS6 last night. New
app appeared called ‘passbook’ which apparently is ‘the simplest way to
get all your passes in one place’ … except it doesn’t connect to the
itunes store. Also I found I had lost
all my playlists from my music … this also happened to a friend but his
have since automagically reappeared … mine haven’t so far!

It’s now been two days and he is still missing his playlists.  Not a big deal, hardly a fatal bug, and yet likely indicative of more serious problems to come in the future.  Meanwhile, Karl Denninger notes that Apple has forced its users to give up Google Maps in favor of its own lower-quality map software.  It’s far too soon to pronounce final judgment, but these recent events tend to bolster my expectation that the second post-Jobs era at Apple is not going to go any better than the first one did.