Sam's L33t Journal

Refridged

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:42:13 GMT

One thing I forgot to mention that was a significant change in my life from last week: I got a new fridge! Okay, maybe that's not the most significant. But it had been a number of months of low-level annoyance about my fridge working, but not quite as well as it seemed like it should: Milk going sour a bit more quickly, veggies not keeping quite as fresh, jars in the back frosting over a bit more frequently. That sort of thing.

Anyways, I eventually figured out that the magic phrase I wanted was "garage ready" (I wanted something with better temperature control but no fancy frills or plumbing) and arranged for a delivery. The Home Depot crew sure were efficient and organized, got new fridge in and old fridge out in a few minutes even though the process included popping the front door right off its hinges and putting it back in place after. I've been pretty happy with the new fridge, a Frigidaire top-freezer model. It also has a magnetic front (my old fridge didn't and I found that inconvenient, but obviously that's the sort of minor inconvenience it's not worth buying a new fridge for). The only thing worse is that this model lacks a light in the freezer (apparently pretty common in "garage-ready" top-freezer models). That's not too much of a problem so far, though. I suppose if it's a pain I can try to stick a rechargeable light with a motion sensor in there, if I can find something that performs okay at those temperatures.

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Back to the Storms

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 21:24:58 GMT

Workation in Baltimore was extended due to weather and it was great. Really, really great. Very nice to get extra time with Melissa and Elliott and Simon, wound up taking the slow trip home by train all day on Tuesday so Erica could be back for school on Wednesday (Monday and Tuesday were snow days anyways). Erica wasn't thrilled about the prospect of such a long train ride but then it was fine, she did some craft projects and watched Lu Over the Wall again (we watched it together for the first time on that trip in Cleveland) and the time passed pretty quick. I even managed to get in a productive day of work from the train, despite the flaky wifi.

The storm wasn't as snowy in Boston as the last, but slightly south of Boston got whacked. Providence got more snow than in the Blizzard of '78.

Since then, I continued to spend the rest of the week wringing out concurrency bugs and the US government managed to start another war. And the government is sanctioning AI chatbot company Anthropic for saying its contract doesn't permit the self-described "Department of War" to use the tech for mass surveillance and unsupervised killbots. (With OpenAI stepping into that vacuum, guess it's time to rewatch Slaughterbots and have nightmares.) Just the usual.

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Workation

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 03:32:52 GMT

It's been an interval.

This week, I've been traveling to visit family and work from elsewhere during Erica's school vacation, giving Julie a startup focus week. I got a lot done. Enjoyed some time at home in Cleveland, and a lovely visit with Melissa and family in Baltimore. This time we're staying at Melissa's place (since my parents aren't also staying over) and it is very nice and cozy. Baltimore is really a lot of fun. The weather is lovely today, but the whole east coast is getting more snow at the end of the weekend.

On an unrelated note, here are links to a few interesting things that have been swirling around my mind:

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me - In which an AI agent responds with hostility to having it's open source software contribution rejected.

Will Artificial Superintelligence Kill Us? - This is from a few years ago, but seemed like a really good summation of the core topics and questions about the risks posed by very capable AI systems.

Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking - Interesting essay on the SF AI milieu, which among other things pivots around Scott Alexander's prescient short story, The Whispering Earring.

They Hate to See You Happy - Walking monologue video essay that I think is a really interesting meditation on misery and happiness.

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Human in the Loop

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 15:06:14 GMT

I've been thinking about AI a lot this week, in particular this hilarious take on OpenAI's approach to AI development, "If OpenAI Made Black Holes" and the AI 2027 scenario (including this very good video summary).

Still trying to make more of AI coding tools in my job. Those can be a real boost to productivity. These models aren't the best software engineers, a bit stumble-y, but they're very, very versatile, and they can write fast. It's impressive, and unsettling. As Cory Doctorow notes, It's not about whether AI can do your job per se.

Work's been chaotic, I'm moving on to fifth manager since 2022 since ours is changing teams. This was my first time reporting to someone less senior than myself in terms of span on company, team, and career, but two of my previous three managers have been less senior in some of those metrics. I'm a little fish in a big pond, struggling, even thinking this means I'm not cut out for it.

I've started playing Patrick's Parabox a mind-bending block-pushing puzzle game. Great so far. Reminds me of Baba is You, in that it's a block-pushing puzzle game with a twist: In Baba is You the rules of the game are also blocks, in Patrick's Parabox the rooms of the puzzle are blocks.

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Disenshittification

Thu, 22 May 2025 02:43:04 GMT

I went to PyCon in Pittsburgh last weekend, once again traveling on my own dime and time, per the new way of things at Google. At least they comped me one of their sponsor passes for reg.

Cory Doctorow did the opening keynote, on his theory of the current malaise in the tech industry. Which was quite an opening to the conference: We'd like to thank our sponsors and now here's Cory Doctorow to rip them a new one. I'm a big fan of Doctorow, and think he has a lot of insight. I really do think tech companies have gotten themselves to a point in consolidation-friendly and competition-unfriendly political environment where not only are things getting shittier for users and other stakeholders, the companies have also really painted themselves into a corner and are suffering from stagnation (even in an environment where there's some really amazing development in technical capabilities). Doctorow highlights Jay Saurik's phrase about how the DMCA (and similar laws promulgated by treaty agreements and free-trade deals) prohibiting the circumvention of digital locks makes a de facto crime of "Felony Contempt of Business Model". Doctorow's suggestion that countries should retaliate against tariffs with IP liberalization instead of retaliatory tariffs (i.e. making it possible for their entrepreneurs and firms to compete with US big tech instead of just revenge-taxing their own consumers) is certainly an intriguing possibility!

I think the world Doctorow envisions would be so much better for a lot of people, including software engineers specifically. For those at startups, sure, you could actually get your "compete with the big players" start-up funded, for one thing. But also for those at big companies, which could actually compete with their rivals, instead of just carving out separate fiefdoms and taking occasional all-in/all-out-double-time shots at someone else's crown.

I got to spend a lot of time with my colleagues, especially meeting members of the new Python Team and catching up with members of the former one, many of whom seem to have settled into some really cool Python work at Meta (working on Instagram's high-performance CPython fork or the Rust implementation of their Python type-checker). It's so heartening to see people who enjoyed working with you and are happy to see you and would enjoy to work with you again. (Not that I don't get that on my current team, it's just very reduced.) And I ran into Itamar, a colleague back from my ITA days, and Allen Downey, my CS professor from Olin. Spent most of my time at the convention center, but got to take in a bit of local color. Ate some big sandwiches at Primanti's anyways.

I spent Friday morning in conversation with Cory Doctorow at the PSF lounge in the expo hall, wandered the expo floor, caught talks on new Python features that I hadn't read up on before (e.g. template strings, the effort to escape once and for all from the Global Interpreter Lock), heard about people's fascinating projects. All the talks will be posted to their YouTube channel over the next week or two. The Python community really is a pointedly liberal and activist one, too, there's a real insistence on "Python is for everyone". Python really did carve out a unique niche in its balance of usability and "batteries included" power.

After getting back: This week has been pretty busy with a lot of city and school events. This evening was Somerville's Slice of the City pizza-party get-together for our neighborhood. Tomorrow morning, Erica's class is participating in the Argenziano Wax Museum, an event where the third graders portray people from history (this year focusing on figures from the American Revolution). Tomorrow evening is Argenziano Heritage Night, a big cultural festival at the school that Erica looks forward to every year.

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Back in the Kitchen with the Kid

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 19:34:03 GMT

It's been a week of very busy work. I've been digging some of the new AI coding tools, and man the stuff is pretty mind-blowing. My work this week involved grinding through a lot of complex refactoring, and it sure helped with the boilerplate.

What else: My trip with Erica back to Boston last weekend was very uneventful, compared to the way out. Perfectly smooth.

I tried to get in some cookbook cooking during the week. Last Sunday, I cooked Ana Sortun's recipe for tuna and fennel sarikopites (a phyllo-wrapped stuffed pastry, wound into a spiral shape) from her cookbook, Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean. Sortun describes first cooking this in the kitchen of Sari Abul-Jubein's restaurant, Casablanca. The owner was tickled to have a dish on the menu corresponding to his name. (I was curious what Abul-Jubein has been up to since Casablanca closed in 2012. Apparently he only managed a few years of retirement before going back to work as a real estate agent for another decade. Some people are bad at retiring.) Anyways, the sarikopites turned out great, and Erica really enjoyed working on it.

This weekend, Erica's selection of cooking project was challah, a recipe from Melissa Clark's Kid in the Kitchen.

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Task Acquired, Task Completed

Sun, 27 Oct 2024 02:15:06 GMT

The Halloween events continue. Friday, there was the Character Day parade at Erica's school (a K-3 event, so her last time participating). This evening, Julie took Erica to a haunted house at Harvard, which apparently Erica found more than a bit scary.

This afternoon, we all went to see The Wild Robot, which was pretty fun.

Work has been pretty busy, as my team has been ramping up on phase two of a big project. Speaking of which (belatedly, I missed mentioning this here earlier), the end of the first phase of that means a good chunk of our work has been publicly released, it's out in alpha on Android Jetpack (announcement blog post), the cross-platform C++ core is on GitHub here. I'm doing a lot more web graphics studying at work, spent some of my time last week on the WebGPU codelab here, which was pretty interesting, it's a powerful API.

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Chaos Convention

Sat, 20 Jul 2024 00:45:41 GMT

It's been a quiet two weeks without Erica away with grandparents, and now I have the place to myself a bit while Julie goes to pick Erica up and spend a long weekend hanging out with her family. So I have a moment to write and too much to note.

The news is all bad news, it seems.

Some crazy person took a shot at Trump (apparently a right-wing kid with the seeming motive of "wants to assassinate someone and it might not matter much who"), which is the sort of thing that inevitably makes a bad situation worse. I mean, it could have been even worse; little comfort for the loved ones of the bystander murdered in cold blood for absolutely no reason.

Judge Aileen Cannon took Justice Thomas's unsolicited advisory ruling in the Trump immunity case and ran with it, tossing the whole "Trump walked off with boxes and boxes of top secret documents and refused to return them" case on the basis of "special prosecutor, what's that, clearly not a thing". That will get overturned on appeal, but it's more delay.

The media has been fawning all over the Party of Trump's presentation of "unity" at their convention (the first in-person after Trump's utter takeover of the party was complete), without any context of how they're unifying: e.g. Haley utterly falling in line as a Trump loyalist, nothing material having changed about her view of Trump's utter unfitness for office and general moral turpitude, nothing motivating the change of heart except the exigencies of defeat. Trump picking J. "Trump is America's Hitler" D. Vance as his running mate. Vance once called out Trump as a con man, now he wants in on the con. (I called the Vance nom before it was official, the rest of the short list was too normal. "Normal" being very relative in this case. Trump doesn't mind taking someone who formerly had harsh words for him in that way, he likes to be magnanimous. He likes them debased.)

(Vance is a dangerous guy, too. He explicitly said he would have, if in Pence's shoes, which he's attempting to step into (why does this Trump guy need a new VP again?), just gone ahead and thrown out the votes of for starters everyone in Pennsylvania, plunging the US into (no exaggeration) the worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War. He also advised Trump during his first term to fire vast swaths of civil servants and replace them with toadies, and to defy SCOTUS when it told him that was unlawful. Of course, that's now officially on the Trump "Project 2025" agenda and the "defying SCOTUS" part is a bit of a moot point because they've now explicitly said they're okay with it.)

Or what they're unifying behind: Literally holding up "Mass Deportation Now" signs, among other things. These are unimaginative people, but it's terrifying to imagine with any accuracy what the implementation of that plan would actually be like, or what would likely follow.

(Well, it was all fawning until Trump's speech, lol. Though he still got glowing reviews from some media outlets who apparently fell asleep for the second half. Like much of the audience.)

Meanwhile, the punditry is still salivating for a trip back to '68 on the Democrat side, which I maintain is still an insane reaction to "President is old and like 2% behind in the polls". Okay, maybe Biden will step down, and never bet against Pelosi, and Biden got COVID again (which I don't think is like "oh he got sick he's going to drop out" but it certainly could turn into something). Still, as the incumbent President and the person who won the primary, who can force Biden out? Will it really be a Party coup against the incumbent President by his own delegates? Sounds insane. Some of this is my anti-contrarian streak, "nothing ever happens", all this "who will be the nominee?" hand-wringing seems very late after the primary election. "How can Biden stay on after this, it's logically impossible!" The "Biden is nominee" betting market odds have bounced back up to 30% from a low of sub 20% as of now but that still seems insanely low to me. (Of course, maybe he'll drop tomorrow and I'll have to eat so much crow I'll be shitting feathers for weeks!)

That was all this week!

And then today like every Windows computer in the world crashed, bringing all the airlines etc. to their knees. That was also a thing.

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Too Hot to Write

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 22:22:58 GMT

Summer isn't done with us yet.

I've got this Nest thermostat, and if you're not familiar with that sort of "smart" thermostat, it does two things re AC in the summer:

1. Try to learn what temperature you like it.

2. Set it to much warmer than that temperature to save you money.

The feature that sets it warmer when you're actually not in the house is fine, but the "rush hour" feature that sets it a little warmer at "peak" times (i.e. when you, too, most want your air well conditioned) is a bit more aggravating. This year especially. It seems to me like in past years it would set things a few degrees higher, but when my schedule says 73 and the thermostat is like "how about 79?" that seems a bit much.

Actually, there are a lot of ways I wish Nest was a bit smarter. There's no way for it to look at my calendar and pre-cool/warm the house when I get back from a vacation. Or even have me tell it when I'm getting back manually and have it take that into account. It doesn't adjust the schedule to my preferences that well. It supports multiple temperature sensors, but only supports looking at one at a time and only can switch between on a fixed schedule. It can't do anything based on the difference in temperatures (in particular, I'd like it to run the fan if only some of the sensors are as cool as I want). The fan can be run automatically if it wouldn't otherwise be on, but only on a fixed schedule.

All right, enough rambling on that topic. Summer is coming to an end one way or another. My mom brought Erica back to town, had a wonderful time doing stuff together, she got to go to school dropoff for Erica's first day of second grade. Then she got COVID after returning home. At least she's feeling better after a prompt course of Paxlovid. We haven't gotten sick yet, but school year's started and stuff is going around.

Had a good long weekend with some extra climbing and a trip to the Science Museum. Also took Erica to the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum (touristy, but educational, hadn't been in ages). Erica -acted very closed-off and shy, but then said she enjoyed it.

This week, some of the computer systems are down at kid's school after some sort of security issue (a ransomware attack, maybe, they haven't been real forthcoming with the details).

I had one of Erica's friends over on Tuesday and Erica's at his house today. Nice to have a break, but sometimes I get stressed out when I have a break. So much to do, so little time. (And yet I manage to get to some things, like hammering some words onto the virtual page here. It's good.)

I'm enjoying the new Magic set, though I feel like I haven't figured out a deck to do well in new Standard. Want to play some limited of the new set, haven't had the time.

Also been really enjoying the Netflix One Piece. I'm not real familiar with the anime or manga, but people more familiar seem to think it's a good adaptation in addition to being generally good. Amazing how well you can do with that sort of thing when the people doing the adapting clearly like the source material and understand why it's good.

I was up a bit late with Erica last night after Julie ducked out for early bed, and Erica was very upset about something about a game; big feelings about little problems. But eventually she helped me finish cooking a batch of beans (which I enjoy because I'm finally figuring out how to get those really good in the Instant Pot). I appreciate her help on that, she's the #1 fan of beans in this household, so I really want to be able to make them up to her standards. We had some good conversation about all sorts of things, including how to describe different kinds of spices and computer security.

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Wake Up, Sleeper

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 01:57:22 GMT

I haven't posted in so long. I've been tired. Julie's been very busy. What else is new.

A concrete wall around my condo complex is crumbling, and it's gotten to the point where one of the fences on top of the wall has collapsed. So some of my time has been spent embarking on the organization of another major renovation project.

Generative AI stuff has me feeling the most like I'm not keeping up with technological developments that I've felt in my career. Feel like I'm in the wrong subfield. So often feel like I don't have the energy to learn things. At least I am excited to use the stuff. A whole lot of UI stuff is going to get real interesting over the next five years. And as a maintenance coder, I'm sure there will be a lot of incomprehensible stuff for me to debug for at least a few years.

This week, I'm visiting my parents and working from Cleveland over Erica's school break, while she gets some grandparent time.

I have had a little time to play some games. Did a playthrough of Omori, a little indie RPG that might be described as "Earthbound-esque surrealism crossed with devastating childhood trauma". It is quite a game, despite some flaws, and one where any spoilers really do mar the experience. I also played One Shot, a top-down puzzle game with some clever puzzles, a pretty fun bite-sized game. Most recently, started playing Citizen Sleeper, a text-heavy cyberpunk RPG that's really drawn me in.

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Four Flight February

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 03:51:10 GMT

Erica has the week off, so we're visiting family.

For the first weekend, Julie arranged a last minute to visit her parents and sister's family in Dallas while her brother Sean was also visiting with his oldest, Owen. It was great to see everybody, we hadn't seen Sean and Owen in person in a long interval. Travel went reasonably well. Erica was a pretty good traveler, and I've managed to get together a reasonable setup where we can watch movies together on my phone on the plane. We watched Arietty on the way there (Ghibli's adaptation of The Borrowers is as charming as anything can be) and Belle on the way back (the pacing is inconsistent, and it probably could've been edited as short as the Disney adaptation it frequently references, but there's a lot that's compelling about it, so I see why Erica wanted to see it again).

On Saturday, we went out to brunch, then went to an all-you-can-play retro arcade in the afternoon. Was pretty fun, but definitely I enjoyed the DDR most of all (which, I guess, stood out as one of the less retro titles). Was glad that I hadn't totally lost my ability to read the charts. I really miss the MIT Arcade days.

Julie's dad was also showing off his new car, a Tesla Model Y, which was pretty cool, and a bit of a surreal experience. Seems like the beta version of some technology from the future. Very sleek and cutting-edge, but also rough around the edges in some surprising ways and suffused with Musk-esque humor.

I played some cribbage with Julie's dad, losing three close games in a row. And got in a little time to read and to play Magic on Arena, too, during the trip.

(Speaking of Magic, and something I should've mentioned in my last post, now that Erica's achieved enough sophistication about games to start getting interested in playing that for real, we've been playing some games together with decks from a Magic Game Night set I picked up a long while back with the thought of eventually using it for that purpose.)

We got home on Monday, and I had one day to look after Erica, get a bunch of laundry and household stuff done, and repack, before we head off tomorrow to visit Melissa and family in Baltimore. Should be fun. (The weather for that trip will range between 30 and 78 degrees. What a month.)

I'm writing this post on my new computer, a System 76 (again) Lemur Pro light-weight. My last laptop was seven years old at this point, and I'd basically stopped using it since I was more often on my work laptop. But figured my personal one was due for an update.

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Dark Spring

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 01:03:41 GMT

After the short week where we got back from vacation, had a week where Julie was away for conference travel, MIT Mystery Hunt, and another week another conference for Julie. So I've been busy and not getting to write.

Mystery Hunt was pretty fun, though it ran long. But there were a lot of innovative twists and overall the structure was interesting. More detail later when the solutions are published, if I remember.

Julie's birthday was mid-Hunt, so we (all of us, including Erica this time) went out for dinner afterwards to celebrate, Monday evening at Puritan & Company in Inman. The restaurant was basically empty on that drizzly Monday evening, but the meal was amazing. Erica split the steak with me (I love it when she's willing to try something from the full menu instead of getting a plain pasta or similar upscale kid's meal fare), we had apple Paris-Brest for dessert. As a dessert drink, I got the bar to make me a Coffee's for Closers, a Fred Yarm creation which I'd been really wanting to try but hadn't gotten to previously. (Seemed a bit unusual to order off-menu just anywhere, though it is three-equal-parts-ish, where the -ish is an additional egg.) Was as amazing as I'd hoped, and my hopes were very high.

I've done a ton of organizational work in the house with Erica's assistance over the past few weeks. Installed more storage closets in the garage, replaced the pressed-into-service-as-toy-bins Pack 'n Play crib and playpen with more compact toy-bin shelves. Sent off several boxes of hand-me-down baby toys and books to my baby nephew, Simon. The Pack 'n Plays were gifted to our new-ish (new, but we got even newer neighbors on the other side just recently) neighbors who have an even newer baby (born shortly after the turn of the year). I recall from Erica's tiny years that having a few extra good places to put the kid down was really convenient, pretty sure at some points we were running three crib equivalents in a two-bedroom condo. So I'm happy to see those put to good use.

The weather this week has been mild. Last evening I was loosening my jacket. Felt like the wrong season except for the bit where it was pitch black at five. Overnight things cooled a bit and we got a scattering of precipitation (various types) and the morning was several flavors of damp. Large fluffy flurries descended leisurely later in the day, without much sticking.

Google announced (and implemented) layoffs today. Not great. I'm still employed, at least.

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LastPast

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 23:20:17 GMT

Due to a recent security breach at LastPass, I've migrated to Bitwarden and rotated passwords (at least the most important ones).

I don't think my passwords were compromised by the breach, the attacker would need to break my master password to decrypt them. And I still thinking using a cloud password manager is a good tradeoff for the convenience of generating and recalling strong unique passwords. If you use the same password everywhere, there are lots of weak points that will compromise all your passwords. If you use a password manager, there's one hopefully strong point, plus the (also strong and unique) master password protecting access to that. But I am belatedly noticing that LastPass no longer looks like a strong point. This thread by former LastPass proponent Jeremi Gosney goes into detail, suggesting that cloud password managers are still a good tradeoff, but recommending Bitwarden or 1Password.

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Stepping Into the End of the Year

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 19:19:54 GMT

I celebrated Hanukkah at home for the first time in my adult life this week, since Erica (ever interested in any holiday she can get her hands on) was real insistent.

Heading off to visit the in-laws for Christmas break this weekend. Erica had a half-day yesterday, so I got a little time to myself. Wrote a post on ChatGPT and AI safety for my essay blog. (I also got the syndicated feed for that (complexmeme_feed) updated so that's working again, it had been broken by the site migration.)

Last evening, went out with Julie to see a production of Life of Pi at ART. First time I've been to a play for quite a number of years. Was a great adaptation, the staging was amazing, really great acting and in-plain-sight puppetry and several dramatic uses of practical effects that were really emotionally striking. Magical.

Julie is looking after Erica today, so I'll try to get a jump on tidying and packing. I also got a long-overdue haircut.

Also, still following the Elon Musk / Twitter / Tesla saga, which continues to be absolutely insane. Tesla stock is down 30% in that last month, 65% in the last year. With plenty of room to go: its P/E still runs way ahead of other companies in its industry, whether you construe that as automotive or tech. Using something so optimistically priced as collateral on a leveraged buyout has its hazards, and acting like a maniac immediately after seems unwise. This thread (via solarbird) describing an investor call is absolutely insane.

Looking forward to break. Hopefully travel will not be too impacted by the crazy weather.

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An Obscure Flicker

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 02:25:24 GMT

Thanksgiving holiday was beautiful if brief. Was great seeing my family, especially my baby nephew, Simon, who turned one on Thanksgiving day. There were flight delays in both directions, but nothing too painful. I got a date night out with Julie, which was nice.

DeepMind released a Stratego AI that does extremely well on games of partially hidden information. OpenAI released a large language model trained to do natural language response and creative writing tasks that would have seemed completely unbelievable for computers to manage a decade (maybe even just a few years) ago.

This week was very busy and next week looks to be tiring, too. I hurt my shoulder out of the blue last Thursday (literally tweaked a muscle just raising my arm without any load, like my shoulder just freaked out and decided to injure itself for no reason). It's not so bad now and getting gradually better, but it's the sort of injury that's always most aggravating when I'm trying to sleep.

Erica went to a friend's birthday yesterday. Today, Julie went out with Erica, and I went to the movies to see The Menu (plus the usual laundry etc.).

Still playing a lot of Arena with the latest new set, The Brother's War. Mostly been playing this deck, which unlike most of my decks is brewed from scratch instead of flagrantly net-decked. It's fun.

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How Much is Enough?

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 02:10:57 GMT

I'm tired. Tomorrow we're going to Cleveland before Thanksgiving, assuming nothing last-minute derails our plan.

Last weekend I took kid to the ICA, which was fun. They have a youth membership now, where one adult gets in free.

It's been a quiet week at work with many people out. And I took off today because Erica has a half-day before Thanksgiving break.

I've joined the Better Boston Mastodon. Will see if that turns out to be fun. I don't know if more or less of a focus on a specific community-of-interest makes for a better Mastodon server (for me in particular or in general).

Twitter chaos continues. Not that the site will necessarily fall over immediately, but it sounds like the company is very much in trouble revenue-wise and it's hard for me to imagine just how bad the effect of ~75% attrition would be at a company doing large-scale software infrastructure. And this is with the context of just how bad much smaller levels of churn can be for complex software projects. It's possible that Musk is a good front-man (or maybe "con-"), but the sort of rocket-engine-like CEO where there needs to be a layer of middle-management bureaucracy very focused on directing that energy and shielding the rest of the company. And, in some cases, misdirecting the CEO into thinking that's not what's going on. Musk's Twitter doesn't have that, obviously.

Much other news remains terrible. I'm sure I had some coherent thoughts at some point.

The essays in the first edition of Asterisk are very interesting. Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten (and formerly Slate Star Codex) fame did one on the science and psychology of wine expertise. But I was most interested by this article on the history of nuclear (de)escalation.

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toot.suite

Sun, 13 Nov 2022 22:09:25 GMT

What a wild week.

I was pretty worried about the midterms, but this seems like quite a good showing for the Dems. Really quite remarkable for any party to hold their own against many US voters' tendency to behave like an inane pendulum as long as there are visible problems in the world (voters who are not likely to take lower inflation or long-term investment as a positive, or to look at the spectacular inflation-fighting results achieved by populist conservatives in places like the UK before deciding to support those who would try the same plan here). Dems held the Senate! Probably still not holding the House, but amazing it's even in question, and it will at least be entertaining to see the Republicans try to hold together a majority that requires the cooperation of the House GOP's most unhinged. (Hunter Biden still might want to clear his schedule. He can ask Fmr. Sec. Clinton for tips.)

Also, the Elon "The Muskrat" Musk era has begun at Twitter with characteristic (of both) hilarity and chaos. As befitting their branding, the business plan seems very... winged. The Verge's Welcom to hell, Elon is a pretty good take on the subject. Also Noah Smith's summary of Twitter's problems. Twitter is a jumper-cable of a site, a weird nexus whose unique popularity and whose extreme facilitation of the social interaction of the pile-on makes it a high-voltage connection between the most mainstream and the most online. (As uniquely epitomized by actual internet troll and actual President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, at least before he got perma-banned from Twitter and at least temp-banned from the Presidency.) Probably Twitter the service will continue to stumble on much as before for a good while. But who knows! Social media sites don't go anywhere until they do, and you definitely can create problems with enough "move fast and break" plus suddenly cutting half your staff. So Musk does seem to be making a go at the tech bankruptcy speedrun. Find me on Mastodon at some point probably.

* Unfortunately, .suite is not actually one of the zillion new vanity TLDs, depriving the world of the perfect Mastondon server name. :-(

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Several Posts at Once

Sat, 28 Dec 2019 20:34:46 GMT

NeruIPS: Three weeks ago, I went with my whole family to the NeurIPS conference in Vancouver. We got to see some of Julie's Toronto cousins on the way, and met up with the family of one of Julie's close friends who I don't think we'd seen since the wedding. So that was very nice.

The conference itself was interesting, though I didn't have enough background to understand a lot of it. I'm also not used to academic conferences. There are a lot more short talks (basically lightning talks / abstracts / intros for the poster sessions), there's a lot more focus on the poster session. The talks tended to be a lot of math very fast which went over my head, the poster sessions were more interesting because I could get the presenters to tailor their explanations to my (lack of) theoretical background. Pretty cool, like a top journal digest with live author Q&A.

The conference definitely painted a very vibrant field. There are interesting strategic and tactical things going on in terms of methods for developing better expert systems, fundamental breakthroughs and detailed optimizations in the underlying algorithms. There are interesting developments in the implementing software and hardware as well, though this conference focused way more on the math as opposed to the hardware and software frameworks. It was still very applied computer science, there was a lot of empirical results and not much in the way of theorems and proofs. Wasn't exactly machine learning as the study of black-box systems, but the boxes were only slightly translucent. The implementing software (and hardware) frameworks/tools/methodologies were basically elided over. Unfortunately for me, that's the bit I'm the most interested in.

I do think that there are going to be some real big developments coming out of the area relatively soon. For one thing, I expect automated driving will be very good (i.e. quite substantial improvements in safety over human drivers while equivalent or better in other relevant ways) relatively soon. I don't know if we'll see wide-scale deployments of that technology within five years or 2-3 decades, and I don't know how incremental the change will be if it's the latter, but I'd be pretty confident on "within my lifetime".

I also found discussions of AI safety very interesting. Both "safety" in the sense of practical applications (e.g. how do you train a model to do well under conditions under uncertainty, to predict the behavior of other agents, to behave in such a way that its own behavior is predictable and to take that predictability into account when modeling how others will react; not doing this sort of thing) and in the sense of alignment (i.e. how do you know that your expert system is "pointed" in a good direction, and that it will continue to be as it improves ("capability amplification")). I don't know that I'm worried about the "strong" version of AI safety risks (e.g. AI gains a "decisive advantage over humanity" and makes a "treacherous turn", or becomes so smart and totalizing that it's a hazard to anything nearby that's made out of stuff). But the weak version (people are going to become quite good at capability amplification, if they're not good at AI alignment by that point, there will be a lot of quite-capable expert systems pursuing goals that no one would want them to pursue) seems worth concern. And of course there's the usual concern with technology, that effective tools can be intentionally turned to evil purposes which it would be good to be able to defend against.

Erica seemed to enjoy her time in "conference camp". Was a long day running around at the daycare, and she seemed to have a good time playing with the other kids. Made for Erica going "early" to bed after a late post-conference dinner. ("Early" as in still 10PM, but the journey to slumber was nice and prompt.)

Christmas: Last week, we went to visit Julie's sister's family, along with her parents, in Rockwall (near Dallas, Texas), where they moved recently in (just now realized) anticipation of the birth of two (!!) new family members. Was nice to see people, and the twins didn't arrive unexpectedly early, so we were able to see everyone before things got unreasonably hectic. Their new house / neighborhood seem really lovely.

Too Much About Cats: We went to see the movie Cats, since the cousins are big fans of the musical. Sure is something. It's... worth seeing? If you like the musical, anyways? Might be a bit much if you're not already familiar with the musical, which is quite bizarre to begin with.

I wouldn't say it's a good adaptation of the musical. Well, I don't think Cats (2019) is as good as Cats (1998), and the latter a film adaptation only trivially; it's a recording of a stage performance of the musical with some minor adjustments. But Cats (2019)'s failures as an adaptation are interesting, and there's so much talent and effort crammed into the thing and then it's still somewhat of a complete mess.

It's a setting where cats are people (obviously, given the source material), but people are also cats. (Maybe??? Or maybe it's just aspects of the "human" environment are interpreted by cats as being "for cats" in ways that are just a visual metaphor. "It's not clear what's a visual metaphor and what's part of the actually-seen environment" is a pervasive problem for the film, in part because the level of visual metaphor expected in theater is way higher than what you expect from film, where things depicted are usually things that are actually visually there, at least seen from some perspective.)

The whole thing is in the uncanny valley in so many different ways. In many instances, it seemed to have great ideas for a high-budget theatrical run and great ideas for a film adaptation, but ideas which often don't work well together. In several scenes, it would have benefited from more reserved transitions, where frenetic camera work makes apparently really-well-choreographed song-and-dance numbers hard to follow. (Unless that's all papering over those bits taking a million takes and/or being actually terrible.)

I don't know if it will be forgotten or somehow become a cult classic, but maybe you want to get in on the ground floor of the global phenomenon or whatever. Also, everyone should go see it so that it makes a bajillion dollars and inspires a big-budget Hollywood treatment for Starlight Express.

Also, the President Was Impeached? I haven't been talking politics here because it's hard to keep up with President Gallop and it's generally exhausting communicating across a partisan perception gap that's way bigger than it ever was with Clinton. But President Trump has been impeached, and I'm not going to let something that significant pass by without comment. Trump's been impeached for withholding congressionally-authorized funding to a ally, a portion of whose territory is currently under military occupation, on the condition that they announce a criminal investigation of the son of his leading political opponent (with concern only about this particular investigation and concern only for the announcement).

He's also been impeached for stonewalling all congressional oversight, not on the basis of executive privilege, but a theory of absolute immunity of the entire executive branch to compulsory process. Instead of the legislature as a co-equal branch of government, the Trump administration at best thinks it would take both the legislative and judicial branches together to compel the executive branch to cooperate to any degree with any sort of oversight. Of course, as soon as impeachment happened, the switch from "no testimony, no documents for the House" switched immediately to, "How can you possibly ask for testimony in the Senate, wasn't that supposed to be done in the House?" was immediate.

The Senate Majority Leader announcing in advance, "I'm not impartial about this at all," seems crazy by historical standards. Am I just wrong about this? Did Senate leaders say similar things about Clinton? Nixon? Do they intend to amend the usual oath sworn before an impeachment trial, or swear an oath they've publicly vowed to violate? Given that, it does make sense to delay the appointment of managers and the delivery of the articles of impeachment. What's the advantage of appointing someone to prosecute a sham non-trial followed by a sham quickie acquittal? Remember the witnesses Democrats want to testify are Republican appointees, members of the administration. But the Senate Republicans seem to realize that "Team Trump" doesn't equate to "team maybe go to jail for the guy" even for supporters (e.g. Sondland), and it seems like the sorts of things people might say while diligently trying to avoid perjury (e.g. the truth) might sound pretty bad.

(Side note: Is Pence really so bad from their perspective? But of course, it's not that, it's that while Republicans aren't going to find winning with Trump that easy, they've run themselves into a corner where winning without Trump (or similar?) is going to be really hard.)

It's amazing how relatively bad a position Republicans are in on this, given their Senate majority and the unity of their caucus behind Trump's whatever. It seems that normally "just calmly wait" would be a pretty good counter-strategy. Does stalling a pre-determined non-trial accomplish much? Of course, the wrinkle here is that Trump is not calm, ever. Voting out those first two articles of impeachment doesn't really limit the scope of the House oversight inquiries much, if at all. The courts still will weigh in on those subpoenas eventually. There are lots of other potentially impeachable things Trump has overtly done. There's him running the Presidency as a money-making scheme, for one. There are also things like the obstruction of justice documented in the Muller Report. And even if conduct of the executive doesn't merit impeachment or removal from office, the executive's regulatory powers are a legitimate subject of legislation. Congress therefore has a legitimate reason to access some of the Special Council's grand jury testimony, among many other things. And some of the Harm to Ongoing Matter redactions will merit unredaction once the matter (i.e. Stone) is no longer ongoing (i.e. not in jail).

(Another digression, with only a hair of descent into madness: It's weird to deal with the framing of impeachment where "cheated on his wife and formed a shell corporation to launder hush-money payments during the campaign", "already has several members of his campaign facing felony convictions for actions during and related to the campaign", "has an attitude toward celebrity of 'they let you' get away with whatever", "doesn't seem to take any aspect of the job at all deliberately", "vastly outspends the previous administration on leisure activities, in ways that line his own pockets", "runs businesses that provide an obvious way for corporate executives and foreign diplomats to get cash directly into his (or his family's) hands", "gives his children White House staff positions", and "fired the FBI director and immediately told Russian diplomats that the 'pressure' he personally faced due to the FBI investigation into Russian interference into his election, among others, is now 'taken off'", to name some examples, is just part of the deal. The sort of thing they voted for. Yes, some Democrats wanted Trump impeached immediately, but the sort of conduct that would be universally viewed as impeachable if done by a Democrat was obvious immediately. If the Republicans have become "the party of Trump" to the extent that opposition to this conduct is framed as a partisan matter and used to justify the sort of tit-for-tat where if a Republican gets impeached for any conduct, Democrats also get impeached for any conduct, Trump may well end up being the last not impeached President for a while. I've said it before, it may get crazier before it gets less crazy. Probably will. Happy new year!)

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Backed-Up Backlog

Sat, 10 Feb 2018 17:38:48 GMT

I keep failing to find the energy to write. Life has been pretty exhausting.

The headphone port on my phone broke, which really disrupted my routine, especially since I had to attempt fixes like "factory reset the phone" before they'd offer a repair under warranty. In the interim, I've switched back to my old phone, which is working fine after a round of updates.

Our condo complex had some drain trouble which required some high-powered plumbing equipment to fix. That was on Superbowl Sunday, so about the least convenient timing. Fortunately, it got resolved same-day, or that would have been even more of a headache.

What else... Julie took two day-trips for business, leaving in the early morning. That went fine. We went to some friends' birthday parties. We did get out to see a movie (the new Star Wars) for the first time in a long time, that was fun.

Work is busy. Overall it's going okay. A few of my older colleagues retired in the past few weeks, early employees at ITA Software. Always a bittersweet farewell; things are changing.

I keep meaning to write about politics, too, but if I can't keep up with my own life, how could I possibly manage to stay on top of the news? It's Gish Gallop: The Presidency. President Trump is the sort of guy where allegations that he cheated on his pregnant wife, then paid his mistress hush money during the campaign (with campaign funds?) is barely a scandal, not because it's widely disbelieved but because nobody's particularly surprised. Meanwhile, the GOP seems to be on their usual plan of "blow up the budget and economy, then somehow blame it on the Democrats". Not going to get into the latest round of the Nunes / Muller / whatever stuff except to say that this really is "stupid Watergate". I wouldn't be surprised if the result of that investigation is more bizarre than I could possibly speculate.

The Winter Olympics have started in Korea, and the presence of a joint Korean delegation at the games actually seems pretty significant, given historical context. At the last Olympics in Korea, North Korea tried to prevent the event with a campaign of terrorism and held a counter-exhibition so lavish that it drove the government to financial ruin just before the fall of the Soviet Union brought an end to food subsidies and the subsequent famine killed 2-3 million North Koreans.

I was saddened by the news of the death of John Perry Barlow earlier this week. He's the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, among other things, so I've been very much influenced by his work. Though a document like the A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace really seem quite different during the administration of the first internet troll President than when I first read it.

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The End of the Rabbit-Ears

Tue, 30 May 2017 19:01:58 GMT

Almost as long as I've been carrying an audio-player everywhere, I've been equipping myself with a pair of Sony MDR-J10 earbuds. I first bought those because they were some of the cheapest earbuds I could pick up at (soon-to-be the late) Radio Shack. But I've kept buying them because they're some of the most comfortable earbuds I've tried.

Most of the earbuds I've encountered have an earplug-like cylindrical or hemispherical design which places the speaker on a circular face covering the opening of the ear canal. The MDR-J10s, on the other hand, has a "half-moon" speaker design: The hemispherical earbud sits with its flat face perpendicular to the opening of the ear, and the speaker is on the half of that face that sits within the ear canal. While this is obviously worse in terms of sound isolation, I like earbuds that interfere less with my ability to hear ambient audio, in particular because this allows me to better pursue my favorite hobby: Not getting run over.

The over-ear clips are also great. They conveniently hook to a shirt collar or pocket when not in use, and I find the curved, flexible design more comfortable than alternate designs that feature elastics or hinged joints.

The only downside is the low durability. And given relative ease of breaking (or losing) even more-durable earbuds, I'd rather have a bunch of cheap earbuds than fewer more-durable ones.

The problem is, these were evidently never a commercial success. Sony no longer makes them or anything with that form-factor. The very length of time I was able to purchase these earbuds deadstock (still packed in tiny ziplocks, never made it to retail packaging) after they were no longer available at retail attests to that. But the last time I went to purchase more, my previous supplier was out, and I had to resort to buying a bunch from some eBay-er shipping from China. Eventually, I just won't be able to find these at a reasonable price.

So I guess I'm keeping an ear out for alternative headphone suggestions. If there's in fact a clone of that design I've missed, that's ideal, but I'm on the lookout for anything that's comfortable to wear basically all the time, has reasonable sound quality, and keeps exterior audio unobstructed enough that I can hear an oncoming bus.

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The Breadth of Hope

Mon, 10 Apr 2017 17:30:33 GMT

In response to recent news of the transfer of control of LiveJournal operations to SUP Media and Terms of Service changes that clarify LiveJournal users are expected to comply with Russian censorship laws, I've migrated my journal to Dreamwidth. I plan to cross-post to LiveJournal for now. I've cancelled automatic payments for my LiveJournal pro account.

I've long been reluctant to leave LJ over one management decision or the other, and I'd still guess that these changes most likely won't have much effect on English-language LJ users. But I really don't want to lose access to my old posts, so better to be proactive about it. And I think my internet presence is already too split, so I may say farewell to LJ before too long. We'll see.

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