I’ve written before about how the business model of Facebook drives the algorithm, and the algorithm drives our current political situation in which lies and conspiracy theories are resurgent.
It turns out that the situation is worse than that.
Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington have built simulations of social networks, in which each node is an imaginary person with a random set of connections to other nodes. To model the real world, each simulated person has a limited attention span — they can only process a certain number of incoming messages.
In 1971, William Friedkin won a Best Director Oscar (and four more Academy Awards) with his 5th movie, “The French Connection”. Based on a true story, the movie’s amazing car-vs-subway-car chase sequence became famous enough that it has been referenced in video games such as Grand Theft Auto IV. In those pre-computer-graphics days, car chases were filmed by actually performing them, and in this case the chase was shot in Brooklyn in real traffic, without a permit, with the car speeding through 26 blocks of the city at 90 mph.
I’m not really a big company person. Big company recruiters look for years of experience in very specific areas. Companies looking for generalists tend to be small. I got into a big company by having some very specific experience, but I survived by being in small autonomous departments.
There’s a common perception that someone who has been at IBM for 20 years has an irredeemable big company mindset; that they would have culture shock working on a small team, and probably can’t even wipe up a coffee spill without filing an APAR.
“If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.”
— General Philip Henry Sheridan
Back in May you might have heard that IBM decided to lay off thousands of workers in response to the coronavirus pandemic. There were apparently cuts in June too, and then North America Sales had its turn, and on July 1st I was told that my position was being eliminated at the end of the month.
Once upon a time there was a talented Irish comedy writer named Graham Linehan. He wrote for acclaimed comedy shows including Harry Enfield and Chums and The Day Today. For The Fast Show he co-created the characters of Ted and Ralph, an impoverished closeted gay English aristocrat and his Irish estate worker. The characters were carefully observed and affectionately and positively portrayed. Linehan also wrote for Brass Eye, a satirical show which, among other topics, took aim at homophobia and media hysteria over pedophilia.
What’s happening? A configurable option is being added to the Git version control software, to GitHub, and to other systems associated with Git.
The option will let you configure what you want as the default branch name for the primary source code branch in newly created repositories.
The default value for the name of the primary branch hasn’t been decided yet, but popular options include “main” and “trunk”.
No existing repository will be affected.
This is the first of a series of articles I plan to write about issues relating to the Black Lives Matter movement. Because we’re in a crisis — well, a cluster of crises really — I’m going to start by writing about short term actions, and move on to history and longer term considerations later on.
Over the last few weeks lot of white people have suddenly realized that America has a massive racism problem.
We’ve now been isolating for well over two months, and distancing for a week or two longer than that.
We went out to see a friend a couple of times, to borrow and later return an oximeter, as we were both feeling short of breath from time to time. We both measured as normal, in my case it was just normal mild panic attacks for the obvious reasons.
We’ve been out and bought takeout food via curbside pickup a few times.
The Signal secure messaging app has started forcing users to set a new PIN, popping up a nag dialog saying
Create a PIN
PINs keep information that’s stored with Signal encrypted.
They’ve done a terrible job of communicating why they’re doing this, so I went away and read a bunch of forum threads, GitHub tickets, blog posts and support documents and here’s my own attempt at an FAQ more clearly answering the questions which immediately occurred to me when I got the nag dialog this morning.
Greg Abbott decided it was time for Texas to reopen, in spite of the opinions of experts.
In spite of Greg Abbott, all the restaurants whose mailing lists I’m on have been e-mailing me to say that no, they aren’t opening their dining rooms up yet, it’s still takeout service only for now.
We went to get groceries this morning (curbside pickup, not going into the store), and it looks as if Austin is still mostly wearing masks and distancing.