Bits & Bobs for the Week of 29 May 2023
Bits & Bobs for the Week of 29 May 2023
Below is a collection of the interesting things I've been reading over the last week or so.
Programming Note: Next week, I'll be writing an article on coffee, featuring snippets from James Hoffman's How to Make the Best Coffee at Home by James Hoffman with a little slice-of-life from a recent trip to Estonia.
Long Reads (> 20 minutes)
Inside Snopes: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an Internet Icon (Chantel Tattoli): Chantel's piece on the history of fact-checking site snopes.com is an eye-opening one. She tracks its rise in prominence since it was first launched as a website in 1994 (a baby version existed on Usenet -- remember Usenet?), as well as its precipitous downfall as a combination of ego, drama, a messy divorce, and poor choices interfered with the site's core mission. There’s even a bit of a redemption story here: especially the part where the new owners of Snopes reversed some rather misogynistic pettiness perpetrated by the original owner, David Mikkelson.
Are Woo Non-Responders Defective? - by Scott Alexander: Scott over at Astral Codex Ten can be a divisive read for many, but I did find this piece, which assesses why some people more than others benefit from "woo", aka, alternative wellness and spirituality practices, like bodywork, tai chi, yoga, reiki, etc. Alexander posits a few theories, but I thought that the most plausible one was Possibility 2 -- woo comes more naturally to people who are more likely to process emotions in their bodies versus their minds. I am very much a mind-processing-emotions kind of gal, so most of these techniques are lost on me, bar yoga, which I use as a low-impact form of exercise.
Medium Reads (5-20 minutes)
Fake Signals and American Insurance: How a Dark Fleet Moves Russian Oil - The New York Times (David Botti): Husbot sent me this piece a few days ago. It's an extremely-well researched piece by the NYT investigative reporting team, on how American insurers are unwittingly (but probably actually quite wittingly) violating sanctions laws by insuring Russian tankers that sell oil to China. The issue isn't the sale of oil itself (neither Russia nor China recognize the sanctions), but the fact that US insurers are covering them. The team rely on a lot of nifty open-source tools to confirm that at least one American insurer is covering these ships and that the ships were intentionally obscuring their locations.
You Should Not Open a Door and See Someone Pooping (Adam Mastroianni): Why are we as humans still so bad at designing things we use everyday? Y'know, like bathroom stalls and doors. Mastroianni argues that beyond the fixable technical engineering challenges, bad design largely persists because of psychological engineering failures. Unlike technical engineering, psychological engineering problems like 'intuitiveness' or designing for differing levels of experience, aptitude, and accessibility are hard to identify, costly to fix, and don't usually translate into an obviously measurable goal. To fix this, we should be noticing, buying, and promoting well-designed products more often, as well as educating people about good design principles and hearing from more stakeholders during the design process.
Where does my computer get the time from? – Tony Finch: This is an annotated paste of Finch's slideshow presentation at a recent RIPE conference, but I include it because it's REALLY detailed and fascinating. I knew some of this from my PCI-DSS QSA days, but It turns out, verifying time is not a simple thing it's ... fractally complex and requires a lot of validation, collaboration, measurement techniques and math.
Short Reads (<5 minutes)
More Fractal Complexity comes from Mikey Dickerson, the former first administrator of the US Digital Service and a main technical force behind healthcare.gov. In a recent follower-only post on LinkedIn, Mikey discusses how ten years after its launch, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services finally decommissioned the Exchange Operations Center (XOC), which was ground zero for getting healthcare.gov off the ground and running. The XOC thing is interesting, but his discussion on some of his post XOC-work was worth sharing:
"Software allows us to preserve the processes and institutional knowledge of generations of government bureaucrats long dead. The other side of the coin is that systems that power civilization are understood by no living person today. We can barely operate them, let alone modify them. I roll my eyes at delusional 'AI extinction threats' because we have already written ourselves enough extinction threats with FORTRAN and COBOL."
I share this sentiment. It's tough to treat some of the new hand-wringing and AI doomerism seriously when we've already got about half a dozen other things that are far more likely to take us out as a species. Add to that the fact that a shockingly high number of legacy critical systems still use 60-year old languages like Assembler and COBOL with a diminishing number of engineers and developers knowledgeable on how to maintain those languages.
Also, here’s that link again to adopt adorable kittens and cats.