Thought Bricks

Elon Musk’s takeover at Twitter has been interesting. He fired a bunch of people and many more resigned. Many of these people were responsible for stuff that Mr. Musk doesn’t think Twitter needs (e.g., content moderation) but others who got the axe did the critical development and infrastructure work. Twitter hasn’t had a catastrophic technical failure yet. That has raised some eyebrows about staffing levels at other Big Tech companies. It’s too early to tell.

The ability to detect earthquakes on fiber optic cables in really interesting. I’m impressed with how accurate and flexible this seems to be. The concrete use cases for early detection of earthquakes and tsunamis is great. That the accuracy allows for detection of more subtle things like traffic is really interesting. This seems like an excellent way to monitor things like bridges and dams for signs of damage and wear. Given the state of the infrastructure in the US, this could be a very good thing.

Esquire had a piece about stoicism recently. The author does a nice job of relating how this philosophy focused on paying attention to the present has helped him. I don’t call it that, but I try to live my life along similar lines. I was very inspired by a quote I read in college by James FitzJames: Act for the best, hope for the best and take what comes. If death ends all…we cannot meet death better.

I’ve had a Patagonia Headway MLC for a number of years now. It’s a great bag and I’ve taken it all over the world as my single travel bag. It’s been very durable with only one real problem in the decade that I have had it. When I got home from my last trip, the big external zipper got caught on something and I yanked it too hard and it came off of the track.

My old 2015 MacBook Pro has finally been retired. The battery was looking suspiciously bloated and I’d rather not start a fire on my desk (or worse, on an airplane). The replacement is a 2020 MacBook Air M1. I debated whether or not it was worth going to a higher end model, but I don’t do much beyond Office apps. My calculation might have been different if I did video editing or something but the most I’ll do is compile a project in XCode and that’s pretty quick.

From the weather outside, it seems another winter is upon us. In the crypto markets, that certainly seems to be the case. The spectacular blowup of FTX has shaken things up a bunch. It turns out that the whole thing was smoke and mirrors. I kicked the tires hard on some crypto investments over the past few years, but really couldn’t get past the fact that so many things about it just didn’t make sense.

Back in the day, I wanted to be an economics professor. The subject is interesting and varied. One thing that economics has at it’s core is the study of what people do in the face of scarcity. What decisions do they make? How do they react when something they need suddenly becomes more scarce? What are universities going to do in the face of a scarcity of college-age students in the next few years?

I took the Linux Foundation’s Fundamentals of Professional Open Source Management to get some ideas about how to professionalize the way we incorporate open source into our products at work. Since we sell software to customers, we need to make sure that we understand the ins and outs of the various licenses and are doing all the right things. I’m pretty sure we are but having a bit of a policy around how open source is selected and used would be a good idea.

Since I just completed Developing Secure Software and got my certificate, I’ve been paying more attention to the security aspects of the process of developing software. This article about npm and PyPi security caught my eye. The article describes a paper that evaluates the security practices for these widely used software repositories and finds them lacking. They do follow many of the best practices but fall short on some others. The number of packages that were found to have vulnerable patterns is less than 1%, but that doesn’t help you if you use one and get attacked.

The Lindy Effect is the idea that something lasts about as long as it has already. I first heard about it in a blog post by Matt Rickard and it makes a lot of sense to me. Things that reach an equilibrium state tend to stay in that state. Plenty of physical things follow this sort of pattern and it makes sense that it applies to things that humans construct as well.