s06e06: Change your organization, or change your organization
0.0 Station Ident
Melanonychia. That’s what the dermatologist says it is. Or, rather, it’s melanonychia right now and let’s have another look in three months. We took a baseline photograph with an iPhone 8. It was either that or have a biopsy done which (content warning: uh, invasive cutting - they’d cut open my thumb around the areas where the vertical lines on the nail are to see what they can find, cut out sections of my thumbnail around the cuticle and dig around a bit, and then cover the whole thing up. Time to recovery? Around a year. Because, you know, bits of your nail were cut out at the cuticle end - you have to wait for the whole thing to grow back). The good news - my thumbnail doesn’t look anything like those terrifying pictures of terrifying nails! Even better news - my dermatologist showed me *their* melanonychia and said they’d had it for *years*. So… yay, come back in 3 months and see if anything’s changed. But for now, no cutting things out, and that was from someone who said they really, really like to cut things out. Which, I suppose, is a good thing when you’re talking about potential skin cancer.
This episode title comes from Martin Fowler, which I got in a roundabout way that had something to do with reading Barry Hawkins’ blog post about why they left Riot Games (do not read the comments).
1.0 Things that caught, etc…
* Okay, so remember that time people figured out that fax machines are probably horribly insecure (spoilers: they are)? Well it turns out that Android smartphones are also probably really insecure because of how they handle AT commands. Those of you of a certain age will remember that AT commands are what you use to talk to modems. Now I’m very excited because in the stereotypical Skynet scenario, we can now easily imagine defeating Skynet because it is very likely that such a Skynet will either a) have a modem somewhere that can be backdoored, or b) if not a physical modem, then is emulating one somewhere, and the emulated one can backdoored too.
Related: how long will it take for a majority of people to have no idea what you’re going when you make a Skynet reference?
* So on the one hand, it’s not exactly news that certain parts of the universe are now unobservable to us (light only goes so fast, the universe is expanding, so the places that are far away from us are getting further away from us not just because they’re moving further away from us but also because there’s *more space*, er, coming into existence, between us and that place). My only thought here is that: hey, this might be a bit like garbage collection. If you’ve got, say, a program running somewhere and then there’s a bunch of data that you really don’t need access to then sure, throw it away, and hey, what better way of throwing that data away than, uh, making it literally physically inaccessible.
* I saw Abi Jones tweet about Amazon’s horrendous Kindle device management where they “didn’t buy a book because I couldn’t remember which phone is my current phone” and I don’t need to describe the drop-down to you because you all have seen the Kindle Device dropdown that says Dan’s Phone Dan’s 2nd iPhone Dan’s 3rd iPhone Dan’s 4th iPhone etc. I mention this because we should remember it every time Bezos says that Amazon relentlessly focuses on the customer and there are definitely pieces of the Amazon experience that are… not that.
* Brian Enigma (yes, that is a cool name) started a toot…storm? about wizard paintings: “If wizard paintings are able to jump from portrait frame to portrait frame, listening to private conversations, and reporting them elsewhere, why — for the love of Merlin — would anyone have one in their home or office?” which I have to admit was not *that* interesting to me, at least it wasn’t until he got to the second toot of the, er, storm: “Do people shout at portraits as a convenience? “Dumbledore, what's 1 quart converted to cups?” “Snape, set the living room lights to 50%.” “Phineas, reorder trash bags.”
This is amazing because I am not a Harry Potter person - I think I was *just* a bit older when they started coming out to have missed them as Culturally Significant At My Age - and my set of references are not technology-as-Harry-Potter and instead technology-as-Aliens-and-Terminator-2-and-so-on. Anyway, the idea that people in the Potterverse would yell at portraits in the same way that we yell at Alexa and Siri and, uh, OK Google, was fantastic to me.
* Venkatesh Rao wrote at Ribbonfarm on the wildfare haze that has enveloped Seattle (we got some of this down in Portland too; last year it was especially terrible in Portland) with the wonderfully sticky phrase “flying blind into the anthropocene”. It’s a nice image - flying without the instrumentation and knowledge that we need to operate - live, really - safely and securely in a dangerous environment. I would make a throwaway reference here - a not particularly helpful or insightful one, I’d admit - to that OODA loop thing of observing, orienting, deciding and acting and say that it’s fine for us to want to act in an OODA-ish way, but it’s quite hard to do that when… you don’t have any reasonable instrumentation with which to do your Observing.
There is some good news, though. The regular narrative is that the Trump Administration is systematically dismantling both our existing earth science observation infrastructure and… well, that’s not entirely wrong. The good news part is that the infrastructure isn’t being *completely* dismantled? Earlier this year, in February, the story was that the Trump administration’s budget request was going to call for cancelling five Earth-science missions. But then if you didn’t pay attention (and I hope to god I got my research right on this otherwise I’m clearly wrong and contributing to the problem), you wouldn’t know that what *actually* happened in the budget was that only one (phew?) of the earth science missions was cancelled and the other four had their funding restored, so we still get, for now, PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem), OCO-3 (Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3), DSCOVR’s earth-viewing instruments (Deep Space Climate Observatory) and CLARREO (Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory). But, you know, NASA’s education budget runs out on September 30th so it’s a toss-up as to whether NASA will get to help the rest of us figure out what any of the instrumentation means or whether we should do the urgent equivalent of PULL UP PULL UP.
* I have meant for a while to write about Clay Shirky’s ETech talk, A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, and I am afraid that what I was originally intending to write about has been surpassed by what now feel like daily if not hourly events. And not even on the birdsite, either, but on the tootsite. I am tired and worn out so instead what I am going to do is to just tell you to read it and assume that there will be a relevant lesson in it for whatever horrible thing just happened on that horrible mess of what we call “social media” today, or in the last thirty minutes.
* I wrote a think piece and you should read it.
* I re-read (not really, I just searched for occurences of the word “computer”) Jurassic Park recently and took a screenshot of the Jurassic Park Common User Interface Crichton designed for the book.
* Back to Mastodon, JP (http://vectorpoem.com) wrote an amazing videogame prompt: “Nobody knows why these specific GeoCities web pages - 237 total - all vanished on the same day in 1999. But when they suddenly reappeared exactly 20 years later, they were... clearly not under the control of their original creators. As the world's foremost Paranormal Webmistress, it's your job to find out who - or what - is behind this.” which reminded of a game concept I had the privilege of working on (counts…) about 16 years ago for a haunted internet ARG and OH MY GOD is the time right for this. again.
* I saw a rumour on the Hacker News Place that the AESA radar on the new F22/F35s is so good it can identify planes based on the blades of their compressors and spent about half an hour trying to find a reasonable cite or source for this and could not.
* via Robin Sloan, The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States: A Speculative Novel which I bought *on sight* just because of the title and you probably will, too.
2.0 And finally…
Expired: founding a startup to IPO
Tired: founding a startup to be acquihired by AFGAM
Wired: founding a startup so Apple will acquire billion-dollar rights to the Sorkin-scripted story of your failure as content for the as-yet non-existant Apple TV service.
—
I am tired and I have had a long week away from home - my partner pointed out that I have spent more time away from home than at home in August - and I’ve been feeling (stupidly) guilty that I wrote a bunch of newsletters last week and didn’t write one during the week this week, apart from this one, which I started on Saturday night. It is Thursday now. But, I have written one. And I did write a think piece instead (which, again, you should read and share).
How was your week?
Best,
Dan