Technocrats operating with all data and no history are less tractable than evil, as evil almost by definition has a goal, an objective. Even if it insane, apocalyptic or deleterious to human health, something with a goal can be resisted and defeated.

Big Data’s ahistorical adherents have the “truth” in the data and the obvious-to-them veracity of their algorithms on their side, which in their minds removes the need for any more nuanced or contextual understanding. They are not evil because they do not even have the cultural or historical comprehension to proceed this far; in that, they are like children with a dangerous weapon they see as a toy: goalless but casually destructive.

Technocratic rule by misapplied data science shows exactly why we need the humanities now more than we ever have.

I must be a commie spy, too, like Trump and others — I’m linked to Russia. (Oh no!)

I’ve been near Russia. I was in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan once. One of our guides even spoke Russian! Scary!

I believe our air route there was partially over Russia, too. Double scary!

I have a friend who is teaching herself Russian. Obviously an infiltrator!

In other words, don’t buy really anything the press pens about Russia. A resumption of the cold war would be good for the defense industry and good for the elites — at least until the point it escalates into a nuclear war. And I am deliberately using the anachronistic term “Commie” to emphasize what is happening here.

It’s Iraq all over again, but far more dangerous.

I like nightmares. I enjoy scary dreams. Not retrospectively — at the time, even if I am not lucid dreaming.

Maybe because I felt so much dread and the imminence and actuality of violence as a kid that somewhere deep my mind craves still all of those things for their familiarity and for the anarchy of the abandonment of all rules of decorum and convention. It’s a kind of freedom, though a terrible kind — the sort where you can do what you want, but so can the werewolf attempting to devour you.

I don’t want to live in a dystopia, but in many ways I grew up in one so when I wind up there again in my dreams it feels like going home.

You know something like IPv6 is a bad plan when in an afternoon you can design something that makes more sense and is easier to implement.

IPv6 is the perfect example of premature optimization. It was created way back in the 1990s before the truly modern internet had even appeared, and with no thoughts to backwards compatibility, upgradability or adaptability.

What’s going to happen is because people think the IPv6 space is so large that they will start encoding info in the actual address. When you do this, the possible address space of 2¹²⁸ gets a hell of a lot smaller really damn fast.

Better would’ve been an address scheme that subsumed IPv4 into it and supported explicit encoding, and been perhaps a 512-bit space or larger. If IPv6 hadn’t been a perfect example of premature optimization and bad engineering, we could’ve had this and actually had some built-in security for the IoT devices we have now which weren’t even really conceived of in 1999.

Yes, yes, I know this is all impossible — now. After we’ve already settled on IPv6 and it’s all done. But if we’d just done something more intelligent, it would’ve been possible.

But too late for that, and now we have agony of the poorly-designed, difficult-to-implement crapfest that is IPv6.

One odd thing I thought about again as I was shopping at a lavish grocery store in a rich neighborhood recently: many of those people have high incomes, probably many of them far above my own, but are also deeply in debt.

While their earnings are high, they are in debt bondage essentially. A lawyer who makes 150K a year often has the burden of a $600,000 house with $500,000 left to pay on it — and also expensive car payments, student loan payments, etc.

Many of those people are also one or two paychecks away from ruin little different from the janitor making 20K a year.

Sure, those making 150K are inarguably in a better position — at the same time though debt means someone else effectively owns you. And the more debt you have, the more chains there are.

Surrounded by “rich” people most of whom are of likely negative net worth is emblematic of our society on all scales.

I live on about 30% of my net income (and about 18% of gross), not including trading and other activities which I do not count.

Not bad.

Many Americans either by poverty or lack of financial discipline and status competition live on 130% of theirs.

Money in our society alas is power, and freedom. I value that more than having a really nice house or even extremely expensive cars.

Don’t care about status competitions or the like, either. Screw the lawn. I won’t work until I drop dead, how’s that? That’s my status update.

What should be included with all new MacBook Pros.

I have remarkable tolerance for Apple’s premium prices, their lack of configurability in many areas and even their walled garden apporach but now they’ve just gone beyond what I can stomach.

It’s sad as I’ve been a devotee of Apple hardware and software for a while now, but I will never buy an Apple device again most likely.

With better high-DPI displays showing up and the prices dropping, and with Windows improving its support of high-DPI and mixed-DPI, my days of using Apple hardware and software are unfortunately numbered.

I can’t understand why we treat disabled people so poorly.

Sure, sociologically I can read the research, understand the transition to Taylorism, the forging of everyone into an interchangeable widget, but at a basic level it’s still incomprehensible because it’d take so little comparatively to make those people feel like full members of society and to also make society itself better.

That piece deals with conditions in Canada, but as in most things except not mostly being ridiculously cold 11 months out of the year the US is far worse.

I have disabled friends. I grew up in an area where people got disabled by workplace injuries fairly frequently. So I know most of the myths about disabled people are just that — mythical. Most people want to contribute, to be given a chance, to be valued.

It reflects poorly on our society that we are so vastly wealthy as compared to our predecessors but are willing to throw so many people in the garbage unnecessarily, people who could contribute to society in all sorts of ways if we gave them a chance.

What the hell, Apple?

Looks like I will never be buying another Apple device again. They have utterly lost the plot. I don’t particularly like Windows, but as soon as I get tired of my iMac or it dies, I’ll be going back to Windows for my main machine. It handles high-DPI unfortunately better than Linux by far. (As secondary machines, I have a MacBook Pro, a Linux server, a Hyper-V server, a backup server and a dozen various virtual machines.)

Apple has no idea what they are doing any more. Just none at all.

The same guy who quoted a Yeats poem a few weeks at work quoted a Mary Pickford movie from 1917 earlier today (also an earlier play).

Impressed.

Specifically, this line:

“Here, in the forest dark and deep, I offer you eternal sleep.”

I couldn’t recall the work from which it came, but I knew it was from an old film. Had to Google it. Rare I have to Google anything anyone says.

Literate IT people are rare.

It’s been a long time since I’ve cared one way or the other about any Microsoft hardware, but the Surface Studio desktop looks pretty damn cool.

Now that Microsoft is going to attempt to fix some of the issues with their high-DPI mess, maybe it’ll be an option again. (I know how to kill all the data-stealing now.)

But the biggest thing: it’s 3:2! Damn, I utterly despise 16:9.

It’d be great to have a display in a usable ratio again.

One thing I really like about the company I work for is that it feels like for the most part that I do not have one of Graeber’s “bullshit jobs.”

If you’ve eaten a banana or a pineapple this week, worn a work uniform, used a first aid kit, worn certain brands of shoes, gotten your car repaired, used a battery and many other things, chances are good that the company I work for (and thus me, a tiny bit) had something to do with that getting to you.

Of course it’s a very tiny bit indeed, but first company I’ve worked for where it feels like I am doing something pretty useful.

Also looks like I will never buy another MacBook from Apple, either. I already won’t buy any phone with no headphone jack.

To make room for that, Apple completely got rid of the function keys that’ve been at the top of Mac keyboards for years. Physical esc key? Gone.

No physical escape key means no sale. I use that about 40 times a day.

Apple, including with their latest OS release “Sierra,” seems to have just completely given up on pleasing anyone but their absolute stupidest users.

Don’t see this as a winning strategy for them with Chromebooks and other similar fare available at far cheaper prices.

Was hoping some company would step up and offer a real workstation-class OS for pro users. Looks like it’s not going to happen, though.

(And no, Linux isn’t this OS. Can’t even support high-DPI or mixed DPI correctly even now.)

So this is a script — really a series of scripts — I bashed (heh) together in a few minutes last night to check when my VPN connection goes down, with a tiny pinhole in the firewall just enough to send an email, and then send another one when it comes back up. Obviously this is useless if the whole internet connection is down, but that isn’t the use case as I don’t have a backup internet connection anyway (although two ISPs with multihomed BGP and my own /24 on each would be damn sweet). I’m using Ubuntu 16.10, by the way.

This first thing to do was putting an entry at the bottom of /etc/network/interfaces like this:

# interfaces(5) file used by ifup(8) and ifdown(8)
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
up vpnup

The “up vpnup” might not be strictly necessary, but some guides suggested it was and it works, so I’m leaving it. This kicks off a script in /etc/network/if-up.d called vpnup that deletes a file present in /var/run. I’ll explain why later. (If you don’t know, the contents of /var/run are deleted on each reboot.)

Do sudo chmod +x /etc/network/if-up.d/vpnup

That script looks like this:

#!/bin/sh

if [ "$IFACE" = tun0 ]; then
rm /var/run/vpnup
fi

The tun0 is my VPN connection.

Then in crontab I have an entry that runs every minute that does some things and kicks off some other bits in a script depending on what events occur. That crontab entry looks like this:

*/1 * * * * /usr/local/bin/vpndrop.sh >> /dev/null 2>&1

That script “vpndrop.sh” is below, but first I’ll explain it.

The first bit is a ping of four packets that attempts to ping a VPN gateway. If it can’t be pinged, then (after a function declaration and some other crap I should really move), it echoes to a log file and then sends an email (if the base internet connection still works). No leaks — only port 587 is open, and only to a specific address range.

Then it sleeps for three seconds and restarts the Network Manager service. This is because there are a few bugs in Network Manager (actually loads of bugs, but two I care about) that requires restarting it when VPN drops. One is that DNS resolution doesn’t work when VPN drops and then reconnects — at least with certain providers. Hmm, the other bug I seem to have forgotten but there is a second one, not as major. Will add if I recall it.

Then it sleeps again to allow the network connection to fully recover, and then attempts to reconnect to the VPN.

Another five second sleep to allow that to happen, and then it looks for the file in /var/run. If it does find that file (meaning that tun0 and thus the VPN did not come back up), it does nothing in this bit. It just exits. Then it sleeps for 10 and always attempts to write the file I am looking for when the VPN comes up.

There is probably a better way to to do this, but I care the most about knowing for sure when the VPN comes up again so I want that file to be destroyed when it is definitely up so I get an email.

I won’t even go through the nightmare it is configuring an MTA in Linux to relay mail to an outside server. I’m using exim4, and for being an “easy” MTA it took me a long time to get anything to work and many painful steps. Explaining all that would require another tutorial five times as long as this one, so you are on your own there.

Do sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/vpndrop.sh

But here’s the script:

#!/bin/bash
if ! ping -c 4 10.15.20.2; then
timestamp()
{
date +"%Y-%m-%d %T"
}

FLAGFILE=/var/run/vpnup
echo "$(timestamp): Damn! That sumbitch disconnected." >> /home/myusername/vpndisconnect.log
echo "VPN disconnected at $(timestamp)" | mail -s "VPN disconnection notice" -r "VPN Alert" myemaile@myemail2.com
sleep 3
sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager.service
sleep 3
nmcli con up id YourVPNConnectionHere
fi
sleep 5
if [ -e $FLAGFILE ]; then
exit 0
else
echo "VPN reconnected at $(timestamp)" | mail -s "VPN reconnection notice" -r "VPN Alert" myemaile@myemail2.com
fi
sleep 10
if [ ! -e $FLAGFILE ]; then
touch $FLAGFILE
fi


Note that I’ve replaced all my private info — including IP addresses — with dummies and aliases.

Yes, I could replace the “sleep” statements with better checking, but the script works for me and I don’t really need (or want) that complexity. I’m not launching rockets here.

Any questions, put on your own rocket and send them my way. I’ll answer with as much as I know.

That both sides are rational doesn’t make nuclear war less likely, but rather most often makes it more probable.

The delusions of rationality and empiricism increase the likelihood of nuclear war because it’s easy to calculate a possible “win,” whereas raw emotionalism in almost all cases obviates the possibility of even thinking about it in those terms.

In other words, technocrats can end the world because it looks fine in a spreadsheet….