Apr 30

Petty

When you achieve major goals in life, it’s very difficult not to send intensely petty emails to all those who told you that you could never do something, who vehemently pronounced that it just wasn’t possible for someone like you. They’d be along the lines of sending a scan of my offer letter with, “You said I couldn’t, and look what I done did!”

I won’t do such a thing. There’s no reason for it. But it is tempting.

I really should be thanking them, though. Nothing is more motivating to me than someone telling me I can’t do something that I want to do and know that I can do. That’s like the best fuel there is. So, thanks.

Apr 30

Bidness

Something liberals particularly tend not to understand is that regulations, especially as we do them, tend to strengthen the competitive position and market power of large, existing players. Conversely, regs also tend to eviscerate smaller companies who are not well-funded.

So when you support greater regulation, essentially you are enshrining the existing players for nearly all time.

This is not always the case, don’t get me wrong. Net Neutrality benefits smaller players more than it benefits large corporations.

However, even regs as salutary as the Clean Air Act mostly benefit those who are already ascendant. It’s always a balance between what will promote true competition and what benefits the public. In this case, regulating Google and Facebook might be worth the cost. Make no mistake, though: by regulating them with any of the proposals I’ve seen circulated will enshrine them nearly forever in their current state.

Apr 29

Baud(rillard) Rate

Authentic experiences become inauthentic the moment you begin to think of them in terms of authenticity or inauthenticity. Thus, it seems as if living authentically is impossible in an age where we’ve conceived of that distinction. Is there a way out of this trap? I’d argue no, there is not, as we have embraced the simulacrum completely. Experiences hold no grip on reality if not snapped by a smartphone camera or uploaded to YouTube. Without likes, without it being facebooked, an event might as well not have happened.

Even more, with pervasive recording, documentation and ritual re-enactment, each event is only a replay of some other event that has already occurred. Nostalgia now projects into the future and obliterates all before it. We experience nostalgia for an event that hasn’t yet occurred, and if said event is not recorded and re-enacted and reviewed on a screen, both the apprehension and the retroactive experience of the nostalgic miasmic brume is denied, destroyed, and an event becomes a non-event, as this simulation of the simulation is now required for an experience to be considered valid, and to have an epistemic status in our discernment and construction of reality.

Apr 29

Tables

“The physicalist’s list of properties is not inadequate because everything on the list is physical, but because the essence of some properties cannot be expressed on a list.”

–Robert Howell, in “The Knowledge Argument and Objectivity”

Pretty good paper that takes a firm stand against the whole edifice of spreadsheet fuckery, among other things.

Apr 28

NFWay

Yes. The “wherever you go, there you are” philosophy only extends so far. When I decided to leave North Florida and never come back, people tried to gaslight me the very same way. “Oh, things are just the same everywhere. This is where you belong.” Or, “If you hate it here, the problem is with your attitude.”

No. Just no. I hated North Florida because it was terrible and toxic to me. Several people there literally tried to kill me. If I would’ve stayed there, I’d most likely be dead. I never would’ve been CTO of anything. Maybe CTO of a prison cell. The best — by far the very best — decision I ever made in my life was leaving Lake City, Florida. Bar none, no contest.

Gaslighting gobermouches can stay wherever they wish to. I, however, will choose what’s best for me and head out for somewhere that I can enjoy a life not punctuated by random stabbing attempts and the like.

Apr 28

Your Pi-Hole

This is how many queries are blocked even after extensive ad-blocking on local machines in our home network. This is using Pi-Hole.

Why yes, we do have 15 clients on a network for only two people. Actually, a lot more than that. Many are just locked down from leaving the local network, so never make DNS requests. I’m completely not joking about our home having a more complex infrastructure than some small- and medium-sized companies. Anyway, here’s the Pi-Hole blocking stats:

Screen Shot 2018 04 28 at 12 13 09 AM

Apr 27

Mobile – Much Bile

I hate mobile everything and all being optimized for smartphones. So much that used to work just does no longer. Puzzlingly, it doesn’t work on the web or on a phone all that well, despite being optimized for that — allegedly.

Fuck smartphones.

Apr 27

Oog

I’ve never interviewed with Google and I never will, but I’ve had these sort of “technical” interviews before.

One I remember is that someone asked me it were possible to reach the internet on a Windows system without a default gateway set. I said, “Of course it is. You can have use a browser like Firefox that supports a proxy. Or you can use the system-level proxy. Or you can get creative with the routing table. There are other ways, too, that are more complex but would also work, but I’d have to look those up to be completely accurate.”

The interviewer said, “Wrong. You can’t reach the internet with no default gateway set. The traffic must pass through some sort of gateway. That is the default route.”

Of course, because I’m me I argued with the interviewer, finally telling him, “Give me 10 minutes and a Linux box. I’ll set up a squid proxy and then we’ll set no default gateway on the Windows box and with Firefox I can still reach the internet using its proxy capability.”

I didn’t get that job. Can’t imagine why. In my experience, you never get the job when your skills are beyond those of the person interviewing you.

Apr 27

C…Me?

I’m fortunate by chance and training to have enough of the skills required to compete in the capitalist economy, and am also unusually adept at putting myself into places where opportunity not only knocks but jumps up into my arms like an over-eager cat.

This time is no exception.

Hello, everyone, I’m now a CTO.

Well, almost. I haven’t officially started yet. But I will June 1. It’s a small but growing (and accelerating in its rate of growth) company that I helped get off the ground from scratch four years ago, and have worked for as a contracting consultant ever since then part time.

It’s not a publicly-traded company, so it’s not like I’m getting absurd stock options or anything like that, but it’s a group of people that I’ve known and worked with for many years now and I trust them. And likewise, I hope.

C suite…that doesn’t even seem real. The North Florida misfit I was all those years ago wouldn’t believe it.