25+ years in Cyber Security as CTO, Founder, Investor, Product Manager, Consultant, Engineer & advisor to corporations, law enforcement, government, & NGOs.
@nickdothutton
https://blog.eutopian.io/about/
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/nickhutton; my proof: https://keybase.io/nickhutton/sigs/JB-cxTwTL2fMNAt2gqnoh3QwGjI1MeabYKMvuAwP6yc ]
I don't know how to make this come across as anything other than cruel, but I'll give it a go. Large organisations accumulate large numbers of unproductive people. Sometimes they are unproductive because that is their individual nature, often it is because they are poorly managed by poor managers. Sometimes they are unproductive because entire divisions or product centres are somehow misguided or ill-advised, perhaps even from day 1 of their existence. The larger the org and the better the margins, the more non-productively (in some cases anti-productivity) they tend to accumulate. This was supposed to be the reason for corporate excellences programmes of the sort run by Olson at DEC. I suspect that MS and the rest of the gang are carrying a lot of people they do not need to carry, with or without the promises made about AI.
Humans run on HumanOS 1.0, which has been appropriate for the last 50000 years, give or take. Recently, in the last five hundred years quite a lot has changed. The size of our settlements, our relatedness (or not) to people walking around them, our mode of life, communications, and a lot more. You can't expect HumanOS 1.0 to be patched or uninstalled for something else so quickly.
Sounds very interesting, I've occasionally wondered what it would be like to have a profiler "in the loop" which could direct improvements. Not everything can be known at compile-time, and even one run can differ greatly from another (ETL vs normal interactive use, or day-to-day load).
I occasionally wonder... who is the von Neumann of today. Where are they? What are they working on? Are they being given everything they might need to focus on their work? How can we find them? What signal are we looking for?
It is my current view that this BBC article and the recent announcement by national security advisor Powell are conditioning the public mind not for an actual hot war, but for a "tough winter" of eye-watering price rises, possible shortages, and maybe even utility supply problems if we are particularly unlucky. While talk of war increases, a glance at the state of the military suggests to me this is unlikely. What we have is rather limited, and even that is only about 1% deployable within 6 months. Much of Europe the same (Poland being an exception).
That said, I also believe that there is fairly widespread, low intensity, grey-zone action across Europe at the moment. Not every random fire or infrastructure failure is "The Russians", but I'd be surprised if none of them were. Indeed some of them have already been formally attributed.
If you follow a constant compass heading you will spiral toward the poles in a helix, not travel in a circle around the globe. To travel along a great circle, your compass bearing must constantly change as you move.
I thought everyone learned the Mercator use case in school? It is for marine navigation. A line of constant bearing will always appear straight on it. If you want to see the relative size of continents that's a different use case and you need a different projection.
I've begun and abandoned a "modern take on finger" a couple of times. Sits in the pile (folder) of unfinished projects and at the back of my mind cluttering up the synapses. The reason I began thinking about this... my dissatisfaction/annoyance with all the dark patterns, mode of participation, and ensh*ttification in social networks. I began using UNIX in the early 90s when finger was still quite useful, and yes we did connect it to a named pipe for all sorts of fun (like a finger to SMS gateway).
Once had a lengthy battle with a marketing person. They attempted to change "uninterruptible" (as in Uninterruptible Power Supply) into non-interruptible, and then finally into interruptible. Took the best part of a week to get it fixed.
I found it essential for the same reasons, in those early Internet days... PAD, -> UNIX host (x.25), -> VMS "mainframe" (dual stack), on to Internet (TCP/IP).
Selective newsgroups vs the firehose/feed/timeline of modern platforms who generally do not want you to tightly discriminate according to your tastes/interest.
I think it was the rate of change. Previous waves were small by comparison and had been absorbed/integrated after a period, with a degree of gradual change. Nothing is forever, but Eternal September was abrupt. To a degree there was an echo of it (not on USENET, but on forums and other places) with the advent of the smartphone in 2007, and another with the mass take-up of Internet services in 2016 on the Indian subcontinent by a huge population.
As someone whose first “social media” was USENET of the early 90s, and I suppose FidoNet before then, I don’t really consider the bulk of mainstream Internet users today to be in any way “my people”. The herd is endlessly mindless, shallow, bought with bread, and hungry for the circus.
While TCP/IP was open source and not controlled by any 1 vendor, quite a few companies made good money from selling TCP/IP stacks and won themselves billion dollar valuations in the process[1][2]. Of course this was during a time when Microsoft saw no point in including an IP stack with their OS, or indeed much point in connecting to the Internet at all! Some of the younger readers may find these things hard to believe.
At some point many years ago I read that the family, not the individual, is the building block of society. It might have been Chesterton or Friedman as I read a lot of both when I was young. It certainly is a lot easier to hold the line when you have a squad of half a dozen to a dozen with you (wife/husband/children/brothers/sisters/uncles etc). If the state is there, then you are fortunate, but I wouldn't want to count on it myself.