This CNN article is aimed the right way, but kind of perpetuates the very sexism it’s trying to combat.

Quick, name a couple of famous female coders in the vein of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. Nobody comes to mind, eh?

Actually, more than a few come to mind. This is six just off the top of my head:

Grace Hopper.

Limor Fried.

Jeri Ellsworth.

Joanna Rutkowska.

Jasper Nance.

Addie Wagenknecht.

Joanna Rutkowska is fucking awesome — the security research she does is virtuosic. I probably identify with her the most because her interests align most closely with my own, but all of the women hackers I named above are doing very high-level, important work and should be more widely known.

But I know them already and pay attention to their work. So should everyone else.

Sweet, just figured out how to do custom key mapping on my keyboard using Karabiner.

I got a new keyboard with an integrated number pad and arrow keys, and I want the plus and minus signs on the number pad to also be an enter key (as I only rarely use the number pad and I’d never use the plus or minus signs).

So now anything I hit on the right side near the mouse is “Enter.”

Much better.

The consequences to Microsoft releasing a free OS is that it steals all your data and sends it to Microsoft, the NSA and advertisers.

Great work, Microsoft! Keep it up!

But seriously, if I ever use Windows 10 outside of a VM, I’ll be nuking “features” left and right until my install resembles Sing Sing in lockdown after a riot.

Packets will desultorily crawl out of that OS after being beaten into submission by various firewalls, filters and data bouncers.

What’s really sad and scary about all of it is that is that just as with DRM most people just don’t care and are perfectly content to be just as their masters shape them.

Today I learned that one of the people I went to high school with and attended many classes with is a leader of the absurdist art project that is the fat acceptance/fat celebration movement. That’d be Marianne Kirby.

But MacBeth said it better concerning how I feel about this:

“Accursèd be that tongue that tells me so,
For it hath cowed my better part of man!
And be these juggling fiends no more believed,
That palter with us in a double sense,
That keep the word of promise to our ear,
And break it to our hope.”

Ay. Oh no.

Man, these people are powerful stupid.

What does this mean? What is this person even talking about?

Lifestyle changes are much easier than dieting. I made a lifestyle change, lost a large amount of weight and I don’t spend more than a few minutes a day thinking about food or what to eat.

If you can’t spend a few minutes a day to make sure you don’t die of diabetes-induced complications at age 50 I don’t know what to fuckin’ tell ya.

All modern OSes are terrible and they all annoy me.

If I had a billion dollars, I’d pay someone a hundred mill to construct an OS just for me, to do exactly what I need (and that does include the integrated Space Laser and Any Mention of Jerry Seinfeld Anywhere Destructifier features).*

*Note: Space Laser also pewpews Jerry Seinfeld. From Space!

They are really good. I’m a sucker for music with weird spacey noises and this has plenty of that.

Also the blonde singer has really pretty slightly crazy eyes. Like not the kind of crazy eyes where she’d kill you in your sleep, but where she’d figure out who your greatest enemy was and if they deserved it, they’d just disappear one day.

Me: What happened to Fred? I haven’t seen him around in ages. Not that I mind.

Blonde singer lady: Yeah, who even knows? I heard, um, he liked Madagascar. He probably moved there. Let’s not talk about that.

This is a very programmer-y piece to write, because it examines open offices from a completed systemic and mechanistic viewpoint, even though the reason open offices are so prevalent really has nothing to do with any factor cited in the article.

First, the notion should be dispelled that companies care primarily about productivity and profit. No one in the company cares primarily about either of these things, except perhaps the CFO. Doubtful even in that case.

Most managers and executives care foremost about control and obeisance*. Productivity is tertiary if even in the top 10. Often it is not. The behavior and preferences of managers and executives is the primary shaper of an organizations culture and characteristics. Worker preferences do not really matter much. Hence the observed and realized “preference” for open plan offices.

And this is the culture of the vast, vast majority of places I’ve worked and is probably embedded in human nature. Many maladaptive tendencies in fact are, contra current (mostly) liberal beliefs.

In short, some study of sociology and history would do the article writer well for understanding the ascendancy of open plan offices. As workers have lost power, open plan offices have dominated despite being clearly contrary to worker preferences and also harmful to nearly any measure of productivity.

Attempting to understand the rise of these productivity-destroying offices from the perspective of the worker is like attempting to understand the operations of an oil rig from examining a single bolt. It makes no sense. One must look at what the supervisor mandates and prefers. And they prefer being able to see everyone, to have their minions laid bare before them and easily viewable and interruptible. On display for themselves, and for others.

Such is the case here. As I always stress, a little study of sociology, anthropology and history goes a very long way.

All that said, anyone have any good 300-level anthro or sociology textbooks to recommend? I’ve read many (most?) of the ones below that level used in the US. But want to get back into those areas of study again.

*If you doubt this, just try doing something that clearly increases the productivity and profit of the company but is implicitly or explicitly against management wishes. 99% chance you will be fired, so I don’t actually recommend trying it.

If I get time, I’m going to write a Windows 10 Powershell de-crapifier script that removes all the annoyances, privacy violations and boneheaded decisions of Windows 10.

It’ll do this:

1. Remove all metro crapplications.
2. Change firewall to deny/deny and only allow ports 53, 80 and 443 by default, and then only for a web browser.
3. Turn off remote assistance.
4. Turn off Bing being integrated into Windows search and disable all related services.
5. Turn off Cortana and disable all related services.
6. Disable any unnecessary services (to be determined).
7. Turn off automatic Windows Updates downloading and installing.
8. Remove all live tiles and other associated bullshit still left (not sure if possible via Powershell)

Anything else? Sure there is more to do.

This will make the OS more secure and less likely to be a total piece of crap.

By the way, yes, the Start menu is back in Windows 10 and it’s also a terrible alphabetized mishmash of disorder and derangement. It’s not better than the Start screen, really.

Install Classic Shell to restore some sense to the mess.

I have a strange desire to read Dante’s Divine Comedy again.

First read it when I was 12 or so. It infected my brain. In a good way, but made me feel apart from the world.

Maybe this time I’ll try it in French, which means I’ll go at 1/10 the speed and won’t understand at least 20% of it without looking a lot up since it’s so complex.

But then it won’t eject me from the known universe quite so forcibly.

More on the IT Implications of a Grexit. Spot on. Most people have no idea how hugely, ridiculously, intimidatingly complex banking and insurance systems are. (Note: I have worked in banking and in insurance, in IT.)

And how thoroughly they must be tested before any changes are made.

Bill Mitchell sounds like a real tool who doesn’t actually know anything about IT at all.

Anyone who thinks that Y2K wasn’t actually a real problem with huge negative possible real-world consequences is a goddamn huge moron by default.

Y2K didn’t cause problems because millions of people spent billions of person-hours fucking fixing it.

The war against general-purpose computing and being able to modify the devices you own continues.

Two of the routers we own have unofficial, modified firmware on them. Both give capabilities the routers otherwise would not have possessed.

Wonder if the NSA isn’t actually behind this, so as to prevent installation of firmware that nukes NSA wireless router backdoors.

Or just plain corporate greed. Probably both.

Seattle was pretty hellish when I lived there and now it sounds like it’s getting worse.

I work in tech but I don’t like most people in my field. Funny how I was not a jock in high school and wanted nothing to do with those people, but as I get older I find I have more in common with those types than fellow tech geeks. (Though misogyny runs high in both cultures.) As much as I have in common with anyone, I guess.

The reason is that jock types don’t need to constantly prove their masculinity and such. With geeks it’s a constant attempt to rectify past rejection and “prove” to everyone (that is, other geeks, the only people who give a shit) their manhood and how they aren’t losers anymore.

I just want no part of that. None.

You know what? I like women and I like hanging out with them. Having women around makes everyone less dumb. And tech geeks are like kryptonite to women. And for good reason, for the most part.

As for Seattle, I wanted nothing to do with you while I was there and now it sounds like you are even more abominable than before.

This is why I dread the incipient new world.

“If you take two people with the same job and circumstances, like whether they have kids, five years later the one who had the higher G.P.A. is more likely to pay a debt,” said Paul Gu, Upstart’s co-founder and head of product. “It’s not whether you can pay. It’s a question of how important you see your obligation.”

That is most likely strictly true; however, there are usually good reasons people have lower GPAs. They have less money and therefore have to work more and study less. They have other commitments such as a sick family member. They themselves have a chronic illness. Etc.

The practice of using algorithms that “judge” people’s character is absolutely no different at all in any way than phrenology and physiognomy. This is witchcraft via Big Data, an incantation uttered over a steaming data cauldron out of which emanates some predetermined expulsion of pseudo-truth and faux-insight.

Even if — and that is a big if as I don’t believe most of their data and am quite sure they don’t understand it themselves — these techniques work, is this ever-increasing surveillance how we wish to proceed as a society? Is it really what is best for everyone?

For engineeritis infectees like Chu, it doesn’t matter. It’s what he thinks the data is telling him, never mind if he should even be asking such degrading questions, or allowed to even possess such information in the first place.

This sort of thing will also soon be used in employment background checks too, I have no doubt at all.