John Debay

One of those issues that feels like bike shedding but that nonetheless drives me crazy: whether to keep my RAW files in the original vendor format or convert to DNG. Lots of photography books recommend converting, but this piece has some compelling arguments for avoiding it. I recommend reading the comments, too.

Swift went open source today. A couple of interesting Tweets:

Apple’s Punch card for Swift. Apple never sleeps. pic.twitter.com/EhArtFB4el

— Matt Cheetham (@MattCheetham) December 3, 2015

And:

.@siracusa published "Copland 2010" on June 15th, 2010. @clattner_llvm's first Swift commit was on July 17, 2010 https://t.co/7j2r8ntPb4 👍🏻

— Jake Marsh (@jakemarsh) December 3, 2015

Regarding that last one, I wonder if there’s any relationship there, or if it’s purely coincidental. I’m inclined to think the latter, since starting work on a new programming language doesn’t happen overnight. It must have been something they were contemplating seriously at the very least. But as someone who believes that programming languages matter, the announcement of Swift was a momentous occasion. Really wonderful to see all the work that’s gone into it.

Pretty good list:

I’m not here to share any secret methods to being productive, but I can tell you what has kept me from being productive:

• Open Floor plans
• Developers arguing about Django vs. .NET
• Developers arguing in general
• A coworker coming up to me and asking, “Hey, did you get that email I sent?”
• Chewing. Apparently I suffer from Misophonia
• Not understanding the problem I’m working on
• Not really believing in the project
• Not understanding where to start
• Facing more than one task that needs to be complete BECAUSE THINGS ARE ON FIRE RIGHT NOW
• Things BEING ON FIRE RIGHT NOW DROP EVERYTHING
• Twitter Notifications on my Phone
• Email pop ups
• Really, any pop-ups
• IMs
• My wife asking, “Hey, when you have a minute could you do X?”
• Long build times
• Noise
• Constant parade of people going past my desk
• MandoFun
• Wikipedia (Seriously, don’t click on any links)
• Hacker News
• The Internet in General

Bernie Sanders states the obvious:

What Trump is doing is appealing to the baser instincts among us — xenophobia, and, frankly, racism. You target some group of people, you go after them. You take people’s anger and you turn it against them. You win votes on that. I think that is disgraceful and not something we should be doing in 2015.

This has been an absolutely shameful Republican primary race so far.

A little hard to believe, but Hackers turns 20 today.

“This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.” During a rare quiet moment in Iain Softley’s rambunctious 1995 film Hackers, a Secret Service agent sits in a car on a stakeout, reading a section of The Hacker Manifesto aloud. Written in 1986 by The Mentor, the essay was as fundamental to hacker culture in 1995 as it is today.

It’s also the philosophy that runs through Softley’s hacksploitation flick and cult phenomenon, starring the fresh-faced and soon-to-be-wed Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie. The early moments of the film establish the antagonism of the story with a bang: the Secret Service knocking down the door to arrest eleven-year-old Dade Murphy on charges of hacking. After he has been whisked away in a slow-motion flurry of flashbulbs and credits, we next see Dade in the air, staring down at the narrow streets and wide avenues of Manhattan, gliding towards a new life and one hell of a MacGuffin.

I saw this movie around the time it came out, and have watched it a ton of times since. It would regularly cycle through HBO, often early in the morning, and my wife and I would watch it while we were having our coffee. I have a lot of affection for this ridiculous movie.

Jeffrey Tucker writing in Newsweek:

Just a few weeks ago, Donald Trump was a crank and joke, living proof that making lots of money doesn’t mean you have the answers and further proof that being a capitalist doesn’t mean you necessarily like or understand capitalism. His dabbling in politics was widely regarded as a silly distraction.

This week, he leads the polls among the pack of Republican aspirants to the office of president of the United States. While all the other candidates are following the rules, playing the media, saying the right things, obeying the civic conventions, Trump is taking the opposite approach. He doesn’t care. He says whatever. Thousands gather at his rallies to thrill to the moment.

Suddenly he is serious, if only for a time, and hence it is time to take his political worldview seriously.

I just heard Trump speak live. The speech lasted an hour, and my jaw was on the floor most of the time. I’ve never before witnessed such a brazen display of nativistic jingoism, along with a complete disregard for economic reality. It was an awesome experience, a perfect repudiation of all good sense and intellectual sobriety.

Yes, he is against the establishment, against existing conventions. It also serves as an important reminder: As bad as the status quo is, things could be worse. Trump is dedicated to taking us there.

Trump is a clown, and it’s fun to laugh and make jokes about him, but enough people are taking him seriously that it’s time for everyone else to do the same. The kinds of racism, jingoism, economic protectionism, and militarism he espouses is stirring up the worst corners of the Republican Party. It’s the same part of the political culture fueling conspiracy theories over whether Obama is staging a military takeover of Texas. Easy to laugh at, but Republicans running for office can’t ignore these people, and indeed they’re an important component of the Tea Party, which in turn makes any kind of reasonable governance, of which compromise is a necessary component, very hard for Republicans. This kind of noxious garbage should be put down as quickly and with as much vigor as possible.

Turns out horrible software is at the heart of Toyota’s unintended acceleration problems in their cars:

There are a large number of functions that are overly complex. By the standard industry metrics some of them are untestable, meaning that it is so complicated a recipe that there is no way to develop a reliable test suite or test methodology to test all the possible things that can happen in it. Some of them are even so complex that they are what is called unmaintainable, which means that if you go in to fix a bug or to make a change, you’re likely to create a new bug in the process. Just because your car has the latest version of the firmware — that is what we call embedded software — doesn’t mean it is safer necessarily than the older one….And that conclusion is that the failsafes are inadequate. The failsafes that they have contain defects or gaps. But on the whole, the safety architecture is a house of cards. It is possible for a large percentage of the failsafes to be disabled at the same time that the throttle control is lost.

Even a Toyota programmer described the engine control application as “spaghetti-like” in an October 2007 document Barr read into his testimony.

I’m sensing a trend.

Get ready for the takeover:

It seems there is concern among some folks that this so-called training maneuver is just a cover story. What’s really going on? President Obama is about to use Special Forces to put Texas under martial law.

Let’s walk over by the fence where nobody can hear us, and I’ll tell you the story.

You see, there are these Wal-Marts in West Texas that supposedly closed for six months for “renovation.” That’s what they want you to believe. The truth is these Wal-Marts are going to be military guerrilla-warfare staging areas and FEMA processing camps for political prisoners. The prisoners are going to be transported by train cars that have already been equipped with shackles.

Don’t take my word for it. That comes directly from a Texas Ranger, who seems pretty plugged in, if you ask me. You and I both know President Obama has been waiting a long time for this, and now it’s happening. It’s a classic false flag operation. Don’t pay any attention to the mainstream media; all they’re going to do is lie and attack everyone who’s trying to tell you the truth.

Did I mention the ISIS terrorists? They’ve come across the border and are going to hit soft targets all across the Southwest. They’ve set up camp a few miles outside of El Paso.

That includes a Mexican army officer and Mexican federal police inspector. Not sure what they’re doing there, but probably nothing good. That’s why the Special Forces guys are here, get it? To wipe out ISIS and impose martial law. So now you know, whaddya say we get back to the party and grab another beer?

It’s easy to laugh at this kind of stuff, but it’s also very disturbing that these kinds of wild conspiracy theories would have enough of a pull among the people in Texas that a state governor feels compelled to give them voice.¹ How can we ever solve real problems if this is what’s occupying people’s attention?

Via Conrad Hackett.