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American - kieranhealy.org

American - kieranhealy.org:

It perfectly expressed the principle, the claim, the myth—as you please—that America is an idea. That it does not matter where you are from. That, in fact, America will in this moment explicitly and proudly acknowledge the sheer variety of places you are all from. That built in to the heart of the United States is the republican ideal not just that anyone can become an American, but that this possibility is what makes the country what it is.

It's easy to get lost in the events of the day and forget that the worst of us, even though they hold power right now, are not the most of us. To forget that what we are going through as a country right now will not last. I believe that our American experiment will continue, and that starting this Fall we will reject authoritarianism and start restoring decency and dignity to our government.

Write about the future you want - daverupert.com

Write about the future you want - daverupert.com:

There’s a lot that’s not going well; politics, tech bubbles, the economy, and so on. I spend most of my day reading angry tweets and blog posts. There’s a lot to be upset about, so that’s understandable. But in the interest of fostering better discourse, I’d like to offer a challenge that I think the world desperately needs right now: It’s cheap and easy to complain and say “[Thing] is bad”, but it’s also free to share what you think would be better.

This is the challenge we need. Enough complaining, start dreaming of something better, then go build it.

Liberty as Resistance — Matt Gemmell

Liberty as Resistance — Matt Gemmell:

Then there are the services and subscriptions. We use the iCloud family features, and so we pay for additional iCloud storage. Our photos are in iCloud, automatically shared between my wife and I, and we have a couple of AppleCare warranty plans. We currently subscribe to the Apple TV streaming service, and I use a few subscription-based third-party apps which are of course billed through the App Store. Even without money being a factor, we have shared folders of household documents in iCloud, shared notes for shopping lists and such, shared passwords for relevant sites and services, shared calendars and reminders, and we all use Messages and FaceTime extensively. I look at it all with despair.

Matt and I are in the same boat.

The Dangers of “Vibe Reporting” About AI - Cal Newport

The Dangers of “Vibe Reporting” About AI - Cal Newport:

Both of these articles cover the same announcement, but they produce two very different impressions. The Quartz article strongly implies that Amazon is firing people because it can now offload their work to AI. (I mean: look at the Andy Jassey quote they included in the sub-head, they clearly wanted readers to believe AI caused these job losses.)

The CNBC article, by contrast, makes it clear that the connection between AI and these layoffs is more coincident than causal.

It's increasingly important to understand if the article you're reading is trying to convince you of something, trying to anger you, or actually trying to inform you.

Why Linux wound up with system package managers

Chris Siebenmann wrote a nice article explaining some of the early reasoning behind Linux package managers:

The abstract way to describe why is to say that Linux distributions had to assemble a whole thing from separate pieces; the kernel came from one place, libc from another, coreutils from a third, and so on. The concrete version is to think about what problems you’d have without a package manager. Suppose that you assembled a directory tree of all of the source code of the kernel, libc, coreutils, GCC, and so on. Now you need to build all of these things (or rebuild, let’s ignore bootstrapping for the moment).

Building everything is complicated partly because everything goes about it differently. The kernel has its own configuration and build system, a variety of things use autoconf but not necessarily with the same set of options to control things like features, GCC has a multi-stage build process, Perl has its own configuration and bootstrapping process, X is frankly weird and vaguely terrifying, and so on. Then not everyone uses ‘make install’ to actually install their software, so you have another set of variations for all of this.

This is good, but it does miss the biggest reason package managers exist: dependency hell. In short, imagine you’re installing a Linux system in the late 90’s or early 2000’s. You’d like to play music from your CD player, so you download a package and try to compile it, but realize that it’s missing a library. So you download the missing library and realize that to compile the library, you’ll have to upgrade an existing library in your system, so you upgrade, compile the library, and compile the music player application. Great, now you’ve got your music playing in the background, but now your web browser won’t launch because it depended on a specific version of the library you upgraded.

I’ve had this happen, and it was maddening. Having a centralized place that manages all the dependencies of a system was a godsend.

On another note, Chris' blog is excellent, I’ve been following it for a while. But the styling is so minimal it almost looks like there’s no css at all. In fact, I had to right-click and view source to verify. Turns out, Chris is using his own publishing system he calls “Dinky Wiki”, which I quite like.